There are few factors that will have as heavy an impact to the success or failure of a staffing firm as an Applicant Tracking System, which makes choosing the right one a critical decision. When one software website alone lists a whopping 260 different ATS programs, making this important choice can quickly become overwhelming. As you discern which needle-in-the-haystack staffing software will work best for you, it’s important to ask a number of questions.

What are Your Current Needs and Limitations?

Like taking a road trip without a GPS or map, a staffing firm can’t just hop into the ATS fray blindly. First and foremost, you’ll need to look internally at why you are seeking a new staffing software. What are the limitations of the program you’re currently using? What capabilities are lacking that do not meet your needs, and what you require out of an ATS?

The answers to these questions will drive you toward the best staffing software for you and help narrow down the field. If you have lost candidates due to a lengthy interview process, then you’ll want to be looking for software that can help expedite each step. If your current ATS has caused inconsistencies in communicating with talent, then seeking out a new program that focuses on efficient and effective communication patterns will become a priority. Understanding underlying motivations such as these will direct your path forward to an ultimate selection.

Is It Keeping Up with Technological Advancements?

An outdated ATS will hold you back, and that may be the reason you’re here in the first place. There are many options that can maintain the status quo, but you’re not in business to merely keep up. If you’re not a staffing leader, you’ll soon be left behind the back. Settling for an ATS that is “good enough” due to its low cost or ease of use is not a good enough strategy for remaining competitive. This is a case of evolving or dying.

The cutting-edge is where you can differentiate yourself from your peers. As you begin to look at various ATS options, investigate which ones are utilizing the latest staffing technology and integrations. Things are rapidly evolving, with Artificial Intelligence revolutionizing many programs through unrivaled resume screening, data analysis, and improved pre-qualifications and outreach. IBM’s Watson and Google’s latest venture are both entering the recruiting arena, seeking to transform the industry. Additionally, video interviewing and chatbot technology has evolved to the point they are feasible options in your next ATS. Needless to say, there are a number of technological advancements to consider in your choice.

Can It Keep You Organized?

Just because the word “tracking” implies keeping things in order does not mean that every Applicant Tracking System is primed to keep you and your recruiters organized. Does one quick glance at a dashboard or home screen give a recruiter enough information to start their day, or does it require lots of clicks and digging to find what they want? What sort of alerts does it provide when something changes with a candidate? Is it able to sync with your Outlook or Gmail calendar? And does it produce reports with the metrics and documentation that you need?

Many of these items may be difficult to determine up front, but utilizing a free trial or asking an ATS vendor can give a strong indication of the answers. Organization is important because it is the backbone of a recruiter’s work. Keeping track of candidates throughout every step of the process from sourcing to onboarding is imperative, and you need an ATS that lines up with your procedures.

Is It Customizable?

The best staffing software for one firm may be terribly unproductive for another. What makes an ATS effective is its ability to be tailored to your specific business needs. Most of the time, a program will not achieve this out of the box. It will likely meet 80% of what you need it to do, with the other 20% requiring customization. Do you utilize social media heavily in recruiting? Then the ATS should integrate with LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. It’s the same story with job postings, and a number of other factors that may be unique to your business.

Understanding how adaptable an ATS is and how much you can customize on your own are imperative topics to consider. Imagine that a competitor is using a system that is completely customized to their strengths and strategy. Would you want to go up against them for the same in-demand candidate with just a stock ATS? Customization allows for more effective targeting of potential candidates and helps in attracting them every step of the way.

Does It Enhance the Candidate Experience?

Regardless of industry, your staffing firm relies on a consistent flow of skilled talent to be successful. When selecting an ATS, it’s easy to fall into the trap of solely considering internal needs and requirements. Just as important is the candidate experience and life cycle management. When filling out a job application through an ATS, is the process streamlined and easy to use, or is it glitchy and confusing? Are mobile interactions from candidates smooth as well? Can the ATS be agile enough to adapt to changing talent needs and communication patterns? Think from the perspective of the candidate and many more questions will rise to the surface.

A survey of 45,000 job applicants found that 61% of those who had a positive interview experience would actively encourage colleagues to apply to the organization. Even if a candidate does not ultimately join your team, this sort of positive feedback is necessary for continued success in recruiting new talent. Whether it’s personalizing and humanizing interactions or increasing the quality of messaging, an ATS must enhance the candidate experience.

What Is the Cost?

Asking for the price tag is an age-old question for every business decision. Those who expect this to be cut and dry with one pretty number at the end of a one-page contract are likely in for a surprise. Given the changing landscape of ATS options, some operating through the cloud and providing an increasing array of related services, pricing is often much more fluid. Instead of spending a fixed fee once for the use of a software in perpetuity, you’re more likely to incur a regular bill that may depend on the number of users and other factors. This is one area to know every detail about up front directly from the vendor. But when push comes to shove, cost should not be the top priority. Find the ATS that satisfies all the above questions first, and it will pay for itself in a matter of months or even weeks.

How to Choose the Best Staffing Software

The above six questions are only a starting point for what should be asked when looking for the best staffing software for your organization. Considerations for vendor customer support, frequency of updates, legal compliance measures, security, and many other areas must be taken into account. Once this due diligence is performed, you can rest easy knowing the perfect ATS is powering your organization forward.

Want more questions to ask when searching for your next ATS? We’ve got you covered.

Business can be brutal because… well, that’s business!

For every success you have in growing your market share, another business or other businesses will inevitably lose ground.

Here are 10 quick and easy business tips to gain a competitive advantage over your rivals and insulate yourself from the threat of new entrants in the market.

1. Don’t sell products, provide solutions

Like it or not, folks out there aren’t searching for your brand, they’re just looking to solve a problem or find a particular type of product (unless you run Starbucks or Adidas!)

Don’t list all the benefits your product brings. Focus on the solutions. Explain to the customer in simple, straightforward terms how or why your product can help them or assist in the attainment of their goals.

Consider FedEx’s iconic slogan: When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight. This was a clear example of addressing widely-spread anxiety about the reliability of delivery services.

Run through some market research to profile your target customer. How does your product or service – and your delivery and price point – solve other people’s problems and make their lives easier or more pleasurable?

2. Always optimize your pricing

Dropping prices doesn’t necessarily raise sales, for instance (though it will definitely squeeze margins). If you position yourself as a premium brand, then your customers aren’t necessarily value-driven in the first place, and cutting prices could even tarnish your brand.

Consider this case study from Robert Cialdini’s seminal book ‘Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion’: a jeweler sold out of turquoise jewelry after accidentally doubling, instead of halving, the price. The inflated price tag lent the product an unwarranted cachet!

If you are a premium brand, there are ways to optimize your pricing without lowering prices. For example, offer the quality-conscious customer an ‘exclusive’ benefit that your rivals do not or cannot provide.

If you are at the value-driven end of the market, on the other hand, don’t assume slashing prices means incurring a loss. Low pricing can help you rapidly onboard a heap of new customers who may also buy other items in your shop and return again.

Context also counts for a lot with pricing. The best way to sell a $5,000 watch, for instance, could be by putting it next to a $10,000 watch. Think strategically when it comes to deciding any price point.

3. Hire friendly customer-facing staff

Yes, it sounds obvious, but it’s so very important! Whether consciously or not, people are more likely to buy a product if they like the sales assistant who’s attending to them.

While the employee’s personality obviously has no bearing on the price or your product’s ability to serve their needs is irrelevant. Friendly customer-facing staff will always attract more sales.

Be rigorous in hiring people who are genuinely cheerful, friendly and outgoing. Make sure your training program teaches them to adopt a consistently friendly approach that puts customers at ease and feel like a priority.

4. Stay open even longer

Say you’re a bricks-and-mortar store and you’re getting a rush of customers as closing time approaches… why not close up an hour later?

While this may cause disgruntlement among staff, solve this issue by getting creative with rosters. Monitor customer footfall throughout the day and week to identify your busiest periods, and staff people accordingly.

You can also reduce headcount during quieter periods to offset the higher costs and longer working hours created by your extended opening hours.

It’s a win-win!

5. Don’t make customers dig deep for a phone number

Even in the digital age, some customers will always prefer to contact you by phone rather than email or Facebook. While many online companies with tight margins eschew manned phone lines altogether, it’s worth giving customers the option of having a voice-to-voice conversation with your brand.

By all means, slash the time and cost spent responding to queries by funneling customers to standardized, pre-existing responses on your webpage (i.e., FAQs).

But if their query isn’t listed in the drop-down menu of FAQs, then don’t make them click more than once more to find your phone number.

Put it front and center on your web page, particularly if you’re a retail offering.

‘Live chat’ bots are an inexpensive way of offering real-time communication, too.

6. Give something for nothing (or very little)

Why not give your happy customers a voucher with their purchase to redeem on your products and services? If they love what you do already, they’re only going to love you more for this.

It’s good for you because:

• It guarantees they will return to your store again. People hate to waste freebies!
• When they return to your store to redeem their voucher, they may buy other items, too. If your business operates online, then the freebie could be strategically timed to coincide with a special sale.

Oh, and guess what? Chances are customers who have received vouchers or freebies won’t stay quiet about it either, so you could enjoy some positive buzz on social media.

7. Support your local community

Local businesses can arguably connect with their unique communities with much greater authority than any global chain.

A local retailer, hair salon or gardening company can sponsor a kid’s sports team and offer deep discounts for OAPs at the same time.

Some cinemas feature special ‘sensory’ screenings where parents can bring kids with autism (who would normally be overwhelmed by busy, noisy environments) to enjoy a movie in a relaxed, stress-free atmosphere. This reflects well on them and also guarantees them a loyal customer niche.

Whatever you choose to do to support your community, make sure it authentically fits with your brand offering and business journey to date.

8. Use social media smartly

Social media is a great medium through which to build a solid relationship with customers – just don’t forget what ‘social’ actually means! Soul-less corporate shop-talk won’t work on Twitter.

Try to give your brand some ‘personality’ when you write updates or posts. This can bring its own risks, of course. But if you get it right, the benefits can be immense.

Develop a tone of voice that aligns well with your brand identity. Seek to inform, help, entertain or amuse.

And most importantly – given the dire PR consequences – don’t patronize, try too hard to be funny, or tweet after a few alcoholic drinks!

9. Own your niche

Sometimes it’s better to be a master of one discipline than a jack of all trades. Admittedly, multiple revenue streams do spread your risk: if one falters, others can take up the slack.

Nevertheless, consumers often associate ‘specialists’ with higher quality products or services than generalists. And with good reason, too: specialists typically invest all their resources into perfecting a single product or service.

So what should you specialize in? To state the obvious, it should be something in which you excel.

You could also pick something with rising or recession-proof demand which is resilient to technological change in which you possess a competitive advantage over your rivals or where there’s an obvious gap in your local market.

Own it, whatever you do.

10. Be humble

Don’t ever get too satisfied with your business. You can always improve – and improve you must!

Don’t get me wrong: without the odd moment of smug satisfaction, what’s the point? Do relish in the successful launch of a game-changing product or take pleasure in positive customer feedback. But don’t let your customers hear you banging on about it time after time!

Be alert to the common element that has led to the downfall of countless hitherto thriving brands: complacency. Imaginative, nimble and innovative start-ups often do better than big market leaders that just got lazy.

You may be the disruptive innovator today, but tomorrow you could be the complacent market leader with a tired business model.

So try to be humble and always strive to improve. Seek inspiration from other entrepreneurs, from books and from seminars. The moment you think ‘mission accomplished’ is the same moment you become vulnerable to being usurped.

Wrapping up

There are lots of ways in which you can improve your business, and not all of them are complicated!

Try out the above business tips or integrate them with your existing strategies, and let me know how you go in the comments below.

Image courtesy of ExasolAG

Customer analytics come from a variety of sources:

• Google Analytics – which becomes more robust every year
• Primary research
• Internal sales databases
• Login databases
• Customer service
• Potentially other sources specific to a particular company

Harvesting this data and successfully utilizing it relies on doing 4 things really well:

1. Understanding concepts of consumer (customer) behavior
2. Gathering data across functional silos and disparate sources
3. Gleaning insights from a blending of data and relevant concepts from consumer behavior
4. Implementing change based on your insights

And, based on a survey of marketing managers, alteryx finds more than half feel these challenges keep them from optimizing long-run ROI. So, let’s take a look at each of these challenges and ways to overcome them. See the infographic they produced based on this survey at the bottom of this post.

Customer analytics problem 1: consumer behavior

I’ve been a marketing professor for over 20 years. Most of the schools that I know of require marketing students take a consumer behavior course or, at least, strongly suggests they take one. So, marketing students come out knowing a lot about the decision-making process that ended with consumers either buying or not buying their products. They understand how peers and other influencers, memory and learned behaviors, and cultural beliefs impact this decision-making process. Thus, they know what variables likely impact purchase decisions, so they know which data is important and which has little to no impact on buying decisions.

Even price is a poor predictor of purchase behavior. For instance, Apple sells a ton of PCs, tablets, and other devices despite pricing their products substantially higher than competitors. And, the decisions have little to do with other factors we commonly think of as driving customer purchase, such as quality, availability, etc. And, Apple isn’t the only case where consumers make decisions that don’t fit with our economic notions of what drives behavior.

The problem occurs that these same marketing students who have such a clear grasp of the consumer behavior process as it relates to purchase decisions have poor analytical skills and lack skills in related aspects necessary to derive meaning from data, such as SQL, which we’ll discuss in a few minutes.

The same is true for folks trained in analytics, only in reverse. They’re trained in deriving business intelligence (BI) from data, but, because they have no clue about consumer behavior, they have little clue about what to look for, beyond superficial types of data like demographics, which often explain little of why consumers made specific decisions. Without this information to guide their queries, they’re ill-prepared to develop actionable insights that improve ROI, even in the short-run.

Solution

The obvious and most practical solution is to train marketing students more thoroughly in customer analytics. We could think about integrating customer analytics into existing marketing courses but, there are a couple of problems with that solution. First, students self-select marketing, at least in large part, because it’s not reliant on math. A related problem is that most BI courses don’t include enough on customer analytics, instead focusing on finance or operations. A second problem is that there’s already a lot of material in these courses, which we already have problems covering in sufficient depth.

We may have to think about adding an additional required course that teaches marketing students how to derive insights from customer data, including issues of how to manage the data, itself.

Customer analytics problem #2: Gathering data

Here again, we have 2 related problems; 1) generating the right data and 2) gathering data across different functional areas.

Generating the right data: solution

If you don’t have the data in the first place, it’s impossible to generate consumer insights. That means you have to work backward from the insights you hope to generate the data necessary to garner those insights. That might mean using tracking codes across different campaigns and channels so you know which translate most effectively into sales. Tracking codes must record actions within a page, not just page views, which is standard in Google Analytics. Other tools may also be necessary to generate the right data.

Gathering data across functional areas: solution

This is actually a two-fold process. First, analysts must know what data exists across the organization and have access to that data. This is challenging in hierarchical organizations where someone else “owns” the data. For instance, I worked with a glass maker to help improve their ROI. Within a few days, it was obvious that a major problem interfered with optimizing profitability, the marketing people had no idea how much it cost to make any product on their product line. That’s because the acquisition information belonged to the accounting department and the production department controlled information about how much material and labor was used to make a particular piece of glass. Thus, pricing was a guess rather than being based on ABC (activity based costing). The company found it was selling some pieces for very little more than it cost to make them.

The solution is to flatten organizations and transfer data ownership to the organization rather than holding it within a particular functional area.

Customer analytics problem #3: Generating insights

True customer insights come when you blend data and consumer behavior knowledge. You need to know what to look for (not all data is equally valuable). Conversely, you need to understand what the data means by comparing it to what you know about consumer behavior. We already talked about this earlier.

But, often, databases have different formats and a key is required to link databases together. This may mean using SQL to link data from different databases together before running customer analytics to gather insights. Again, most marketing students don’t have this skill set and programs must develop to teach this skill.

Customer analytics problem #4: Implementing change

Implementing change may be the most difficult, time-consuming, and expensive task related to customer analytics. It’s also where improved efficiencies and ROI emerge. Without effective implementation, the data is a meaningless exercise. Again, this is 2 related problems; 1) knowing what the data tells you to do and 2) implementation.

Again, this is 2 related problems; 1) knowing what the data tells you to do and 2) implementation.

Some changes are obvious. If one type of offer works best or one channel seriously outperforms others, the solution to implement change is clear. In most cases, the data don’t tell you exactly what to do. For instance, an increase or an already high level of returns and/ or service calls tells you something is wrong, but a deeper investigation is needed to figure out what change is required. Similarly, finding unmet customer needs suggests introducing new or improved products, but finding these unmet needs is partly data, but more critically, being able to find and interpret statements reflecting unmet needs.

Even once you find opportunities in your metrics, it isn’t always easy to implement change. Sometimes there’s internal resistance to change. For instance, I visited a company who recently implemented a computerized order system (EDI), yet observing operations it was clear that employees didn’t trust the system. Thus, they were still doing manual order entry and processing, using the computerized system to record what they did rather than to optimize order processing as it was intended.

Implementing change may also require some hard choices. Sometimes, it may mean firing long-time employees in favor of new ones with skills that map better to the skill set required after the change.

Not everyone is a natural negotiator.

In fact, the prospect of asking for stuff at work — whether it's a higher starting salary, a bonus, or extra perks — can be downright terrifying for some people.

Rachel Bitte, chief people officer at recruiting software company Jobvite, has over 20 years of experience in the HR, having previously worked at Apple and Intuit.

She broke down three things we should all ask ourselves before beginning a negotiation.

These three questions could seriously boost your chances of getting what you want:

1. 'What am I worth?'

Not knowing your market value is a major career hurdle, especially when it comes to negotiating a salary. If you go into the wage negotiation blind, you risk bungling the whole process.

That's why Bitte says it's important to "go get the data" straight away. Sites like Glassdoor, Salary.com, PayScale, and Indeed all feature salary calculators and wage data.

And you can even try digging deeper than an internet search.

"In the world that we live in now, there's lots of data that's out there to get a good idea," Bitte tells Business Insider. "You can also get the data just by interviewing. See what companies are willing to offer you."

2. 'Why am I nervous?'

If you're feeling anxious about an upcoming negotiation, don't brush those feelings aside.

"Find out what it is that makes you personally uncomfortable with negotiating," Bitte says.

She says that many people struggle with feeling like they're not "good enough" to ask for a raise or a higher salary. It's a problem that especially affects women, because "advocating for higher pay would present a socially difficult situation for them," according to the Harvard Business Review.

"Ask yourself, 'Why am I hesitant?'" she says. "What is your barrier? If you can figure out the 'why' on that then you can start to adjust."

You can combat self-doubt by keeping records on your workplace achievements and praise from bosses. You should also strive to get a pep talk from your supporters before your negotiation session.

"This is when you've got to surround yourself with people who do really think you're the best and can tell you why and boost your self-esteem to a healthy spot," Bitte says. "Go talk to people who think you're great."

3. 'What do I really want?'

Lastly, before you ask for something, it helps to determine whether or not you really want it. And, remember, your big requests don't necessarily have to be related to your salary.

"It may be time off," Bitte says. "It may be flexibility in your work schedule because you've got an aging parent you're taking care of or you're going to be a new parent."

It's important to be honest with yourself about what you really want. And that way, if a pay bump just isn't in the cards, you'll automatically have some other requests to fall back on.

SEE ALSO: 4 things you should say when you get a 'no' during a salary negotiation

DON'T MISS: A horrible side job where I found myself waist-deep in a dumpster taught me valuable lessons about negotiating salary

DON'T FORGET: 16 surprising negotiating tricks to help boost your salary

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Skinnygirl founder Bethenny Frankel shares her best advice for negotiating

I’ve been an editor for many years (don’t make me admit how many) and a writer for even longer. After even a few years in the game, every editor develops their own list of bugbears (translation: pet peeves) – the mistakes or missteps that really stick in one’s craw (translation: annoy the pants off one).

I work with many different writers, and since I share these tips privately all the time, I figured it was time to pull them from the shadows of Track Changes comments and make them a matter of public record.

Most of the people who read this blog are marketers and business owners, so I’ve written this post with you in mind. These self-editing tips will be particularly helpful for copywriters doing business writing (i.e. writing for corporate blogs and websites, lead generation magnets like white papers, etc.) – but truly, this advice can improve almost any type of writing.

So if you’re looking to up your writing game and get better at self-editing, read on. I’ll start with some common style problems I run into again and again.

7 Lazy Writing Crutches & Bad Habits to Avoid

Inexperienced writers often make the mistake of thinking that “good writing” is fancy writing. They mistake clarity for dullness. If this is your attitude, what you usually end up with is overwriting. It can come off as show-offy, and it’s uncomfortable to read.

These seven bad habits muck up your writing, slow your reader down, and obscure what you’re trying to communicate. Relentlessly search these out and destroy them.

The so-called elegant variation

“The elegant variation” is an old term (coined by usage expert Henry Watson Fowler) that refers to an overuse of rare or poetic synonyms for more common words. The term is meant to be ironic – the effect is not actually elegant. Instead, elegant variations usually feel overwrought (or as the kids say, “try-hard”).

Coco Chanel said that – but she didn’t refuse to hobnob with Nazis

Here’s Fowler, in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (first published in 1926):

It is the second-rate writers, those intent rather on expressing themselves prettily than on conveying their meaning clearly, & still more those whose notions of style are based on a few misleading rules of thumb, that are chiefly open to the allurements of elegant variation…. There are few literary faults so widely prevalent, & this book will not have been written in vain if the present article should heal any sufferer of his infirmity.

Ouch, Fowler.

The elegant variation is common in journalistic writing, where writers often try to avoid repeating a noun – so you’ll see Google referred to as “the search giant” on second mention. But it crops up all over the place – when people say an author “penned a volume” versus writing a book, say. It’s cute to a point, but really easy to overdo.

A related bad habit is “said-bookism,” when writers feel the need to avoid the word “said,” so people are always “exclaiming” and “proclaiming” and “retorting” instead. There actually was a “said book” at one point, a kind of thesaurus of terms for speaking that writers could use to vary their dialogue tags. But as it turns out, most of the time, plain old “said” works better, and the repetition calls less attention to itself than the endless variations do.

$10 words

Ten-dollar words, AKA SAT words, tend to go hand in hand with elegant-variationism.

Any excuse to look at Hamilton’s noble brow

These are fancy-sounding words that crop up on vocabulary tests and in spelling bees and are rarely uttered in everyday speech. Two of my particular least favorites are “plethora” and “myriad” (protip: if you ever apply for a job at WordStream, don’t use these in your cover letter).

A lot of writers have a favorite go-to ten-dollar word. My husband loves “proleptic” for some reason. When self-editing, look for words that you tend to overuse, especially if they’re above a high-school reading level. (We found that top-performing ads, like most bestsellers, are written at a ninth-grade reading level!)

Latinate words

There’s nothing wrong with Latinate words and you can’t avoid them entirely – but there are a lot of cases where choosing Latinate words over Anglo-Saxon or Germanic words can make your writing sound academic or clinical and therefore less friendly.

Here are some examples of Latinate words vs. their Germanic counterparts:

But truly, you don’t need to worry too much about the etymological roots or origins or your words; just try to write in everyday speech. For example, I rarely hear people say “utilize” but I see it in writing all the time. “Use” and “utilize” both ultimately come from French but “use” sounds much more natural and friendly.

Commonly misused words

Words that are misused all the time always sound kind of wrong – even when used correctly!

For example, people are constantly writing “hone in on,” as in “hone in on the problem.” The correct expression is “home in on” – like a homing pigeon or homing device. A lot of editors will correct this use of “hone” (which means to sharpen, as in honing your skills or honing a knife) to “home,” but I prefer to just rephrase. After all, both “home in on” and “hone your skills” are clichés.

Other frequently misused words and terms include comprise, nonplussed, bemused, and beg the question. If you use them incorrectly, you’re going to tick off persnickety types, and if you use them correctly, all the people who don’t know what the word means are going to think you’re in the wrong. Accordingly, I think it’s best to avoid them entirely.

Needless exaggeration

This tic is especially common in business and marketing writing, where writers naturally want to sell the value of whatever product or service they’re talking about, but you run the risk of sounding like a phony or a snake oil salesman.

“The strongest and best linament known for pain and lameness”

An example would be saying something “couldn’t be easier” instead of just saying that it’s easy. Theoretically, it could always be marginally easier…

Baseless assumptions & received wisdom

There’s a weird rumor that floats around the WordStream office – it’s that seltzer is bad for you. Specifically, people seem to think bubbly water somehow leeches calcium from your bones (??). I don’t know where the myth came from, but there’s no evidence that it does this.

An example from the world of marketing is the received idea that consumers hate remarketing ads, so you need to set strict frequency caps on your retargeted ads. But we’ve found that conversion rates on remarketing ads actually increase with more exposure, not the other way around. It’s always good to question a “rule” and make sure it’s not just an old wives’ tale.

When reading over your writing, be on the lookout for claims that you can’t prove or back up with evidence. Just because you’ve heard something over and over doesn’t make it true.

Belabored metaphors

I don’t know any other way to say this: metaphors only make your writing better if they’re good. Clichéd metaphors add nothing (how many 80s rock songs use the simile “cuts like a knife”?). But even worse is the forced, overly belabored metaphor that doesn’t even really make sense. Like this example from a Harvard Business Review article called “The Dark Side of Efficient Markets”:

Those are indeed positive features. But every good thing is like a face caressed by the sun. The rays that light and warm the face automatically cast a dark shadow behind it.

Hmmm. Nope.

Related issue: the mixed metaphor, which is usually also a mixed cliché.

You can dive into a project or get experience in the trenches, but try not to do both at once. (What is it about trenches that confuses bad writers? Dan Brown once described a character as “learning the ropes in the trenches.”)

3 Ways to Make a First Draft Stronger

OK, we’ve talked about things to avoid and cut out of your writing. Now let’s talk about what you can add to make it better. First draft a little lackluster? Try one of these tactics when revising.

Add data, stats, authority

Remember when I said not to make baseless assertions? Here’s how you fix that – go looking for research and data to back them up. Stats are also great in an introduction to remind people why they should care about whatever you’re writing about.

For example, this post about how to write a welcome email begins with some stats on welcome email performance: Since they have on average 4x the open rate and 5x the click-through rate of a standard email marketing campaign, of course, you want to get them right.

However, if you can’t find recent and authoritative research, skip it. And be wary of confirmation bias – the tendency to seek out sources that confirm what we already believe. It’s good to challenge your own assumptions, so if you find evidence that contradicts your argument, consider revising your argument.

Add INTERESTING details

Details add texture to your writing. But don’t let yourself off the hook too easy with boring, obvious details, or details that have no relevance to what’s happening.

The classic example of a lazy, pointless detail in fiction is “A dog barked in the distance.” A dog is always barking in the distance. Who cares? And sorry to drag Dan Brown again, but check out this passage from Angels and Demons:

Vittoria closed her eyes and breathed. Then she breathed again. And again. And again …

You don’t say.

Details matter in nonfiction too. For example, if you’re writing a profile of a woman, don’t describe what she’s wearing just because she’s a woman. We also don’t need to know what she ordered for lunch.

So how do you add interesting details? Work on your powers of observation. Look for what is unusual, then filter for what is relevant. That’s the Sherlock Holmes way: Notice first, then analyze. Holmes doesn’t tell people everything he notices, just the details that illuminate the case.

Teach people something

It seems so simple. The whole point of nonfiction is to teach people something, right? And yet – so much writing fails to do this, and therefore isn’t interesting.

If you want to be a great writer, make sure you are always learning yourself, so you have something to teach people. Read widely, try new things, and share what you learn. This can take the form of:

• Including interesting facts – I have an insatiable appetite for lists of mind-blowing facts. Start collecting fascinating knowledge and then you can drop it in as it comes up.

• Pointing people to more comprehensive resources – If you’re only able to touch on something that you have in-depth knowledge of, recommend your favorite articles, books, or films on the topic so people who are interested can learn more. (Want to get better at learning?! I love this book called How We Learn.)
• Sharing life wisdom – Obviously, you need to have some life wisdom before you can share it – but this doesn’t always come from age. I love when people teach me something only they could know. What have you learned from your unusual or difficult experiences? What’s it like to found a successful startup – and then watch it fail? What’s it like to play competitive Scrabble?

If you’re teaching people stuff, your writing becomes 10 times more interesting. Great ideas trump big words every time.

This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Insider Intelligence, click here.

Credit card rewards have become so popular in the US that issuers capture headlines just by launching a new rewards card. And with consumers now caring more about the type of rewards being offered than any other card feature, competition to offer the most lucrative and attractive rewards has intensified dramatically. 

For consumers, the emphasis card issuers place on these cards has resulted in rewards becoming much more worthwhile and widespread, ranging from big sign-on bonuses to free travel. And with offers continuing to get better, consumers will continue seeking out the best rewards cards.

The value added from these cards is undeniable for issuers — in addition to increasing adoption of credit card products, the opportunity to earn rewards encourages cardholders to spend more money. This not only helps to drive up revenue, but also provides issuers an opportunity to mitigate any losses they may be feeling from the Durbin Amendment, which reduced how much fees issuers could charge on debt card transactions starting in 2011. 

But it’s also important to note that offering such high-valued rewards comes at a price — Chase’s Sapphire Reserve card ended up reducing the bank’s profits by $200 million to $300 million in Q4 2016, according to Bloomberg. And as costs continue to rise, issuers will have to adjust to this new landscape by leveraging technology and partnerships to keep consumers engaged without sacrificing profits.

In a new in-depth report from Business Insider Intelligence, we walk through the new credit card rewards landscape, which now includes rising consumer demand for rewards, increased opportunity for issuers to drive up usage of their credit card products, and increasing costs. After discussing the evolution that has led to this current landscape, we analyze how issuers will have to adjust in order to continue reaping the benefits of offering rewards without sacrificing significant profits.

Here are some key takeaways from the report: 

• Consumers put tremendous value on credit card rewards, which makes these them a major user acquisition channel for card issuers — almost 60% of consumers rank rewards as a major reason for adopting a credit card
• By offering high-valued and attractive rewards, card issuers are able to drive up card adoption and usage — JPMorgan Chase reported a 35% increase in new card accounts in Q3 2016, after launching the Sapphire Reserve card.
• Offering high-valued credit card rewards does come at a high cost to card issuers — the costs associated with offering credit card rewards have more than doubled since 2010 for the six largest card issuers in the US
• However, major players in the space are already beginning to find ways to cut costs, including rolling back rewards on their most premium products and partnering with well-known brands to develop less expensive, more creative rewards offerings.  

In full, the report: 

• Identifies the costs associated with offering rewards for issuers and how they have increased over time.
• Details why credit card issuers continue offering high-valued rewards.
• Analyzes how the industry has evolved since 2011
• Explores how credit card issuers will advance in order to continue reaping the benefits of offering rewards without assuming increased costs. 

 

Join the conversation about this story »

I recently worked with SPASIGMA and their proven negotiation training system. Not only did I love the experience and spending time with the SPASIGMA team, but I also learned a ton! Believe it or not, I had never taken a negotiation course. I want to share what I learned, so here is SPASIGMA’s “Ultimate Negotiation Strategy Checklist.”

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Negotiation is like any sport. The best negotiators, like the best athletes, never stop training. They learn new skills and work to develop them. They welcome the coaching and equipment that can improve performance.

We’ve trained thousands of master negotiators over the years, and if there’s one common trait among those who become expert negotiators, it’s that they start to see negotiation as a game. It’s not uncommon for people who want to learn “just enough to get by” get wrapped up in it, suddenly amazed by all the new opportunities made visible through the lens of negotiation.

When you start to see the art, the strategy and the techniques of professional negotiation as a game, what you have is a challenging, rewarding skill that boosts your professional worth, the demand for your talents, and consequently, your income. Heck, even practicing negotiation can be an enjoyable endeavor.

Ready to up your game? Get started with our ultimate negotiation strategy checklist.

❒ Brainstorm “The Golden Question”

With a name like “the Golden Question,” you know it’s juicy. So I won’t keep you waiting: here it is: If there are pressures on me, what are the pressures on the other side?

We tend to dwell on our own pressures, and that puts us at a disadvantage. It’s easy to forget that the other party has pressures too. Brainstorming the Golden Question isn’t just a great strategic exercise that can put you on equal if not firmer footing than the other party. It also promotes a productive mindset that allows you to approach each deal with confidence.

❒ Employ a Discovery Process

Now that you’ve brainstormed a list of pressures the other party may be facing, it’s time to uncover which ones the other party is actually experiencing. Here are a few tactics you can use:

• The Detective: Strategically probe the other party for beneficial information. Think through the “5 W’s” and ask open-ended questions. Write your questions down and review them before the meeting because it helps you ask each question at the most opportune time.
• The Schmoozer: Use casual conversation to uncover the other party’s pressures. You’d be surprised what you can learn by simply showing a genuine interest in the other party’s business.
• The Snooper: This is about using the internet to gather beneficial information about the other party. Dig beyond their website to unearth third-party data and marketing or sales presentations that reveal concerns, motivations, and values.

❒ Set Appropriate Targets

If you enter a negotiation expecting very little, very little is probably what you’ll end up getting. By setting appropriate targets, you give yourself benchmarks for success and improvement.

Three tips on target setting:

1. Aim high: Those who aim higher do better. Prioritize your must haves issues and ask for all of them so long as they are within reason. Establish a firm walking away point and honor it.
2. Leave room to negotiate: By aiming high, you are automatically leaving room to negotiate. Your prioritized list of must-have issues will help you make concessions strategically, starting with the bottom of your list.
3. Use the Expectation Index: The Expectation Index is your best-case scenario (your opening offer) plus your worst-case scenario (your walkaway point) divided by two. The Expectation Index can prevent you from making concessions too quickly and is an excellent way to gamify the negotiation and improve your results over time.

❒ Ask the Value Question

The value question is this: What is preventing the other party from using my competition?

Most negotiators pretend only to be concerned about price, which is why it’s important to strategically steer the conversation away from price and toward the other factors they value. Discovering these factors can strengthen your value proposition while simultaneously weakening a competitor’s. Now you’ve increased your leverage by de-commoditizing the negotiation.

❒Determine How You Will Test Assumptions to Gather Evidence

The Golden Question and the value question will help you come up with several assumptions that may significantly boost your leverage. But you shouldn’t trust these assumptions. Not yet.

Your discovery process (checklist item #2) will help you vet out some of your assumptions, but until you’re sure, you should strategically test the other party to validate whether your assumptions are true. You can accomplish this with Trial Balloons and “What If” questions. Both tactics involve tactically sending information to the other party to observe their reaction, thereby uncovering what they truly desire.

❒ Is Your Money Fuzzy?

By making money fuzzy, you are being strategically vague when discussing price. It’s important to plan a strategy for discussing price and to talk about money on your terms.

It works the other way, too, as a preventative measure. For example, when the other party tells you, “It’s a measly penny,” you should be prepared to respond with, “That measly penny per unit means a $20k profit reduction.”

❒ How Will You Prove Credibility?

Successful negotiation requires persuasion causing the other party to do something through reasoning or argument. Aristotle’s three pillars of persuasion—ethos, logos, and pathos (loosely translated as credibility, legitimacy, and emotion)—have stood the test of time. These three pillars are the foundation of not just any successful negotiation strategy, but also any buying or selling methodology. Let’s start with credibility.

Credibility refers to how trustworthy the other party thinks you are. Trustworthiness refers to either your willingness or your ability to follow through on your word. Subject matter expertise can satisfy the ability portion. References and testimonials can speak to your dependability.

To determine whether the other party sees you as credible, ask yourself:

• Does the other party respect me?
• Does the other party believe I am of good character?
• Does the other party believe I am generally trustworthy?

❒ How Will You Prove Legitimacy?

No matter how sterling your reputation, your claim still needs to make logical sense for the other party to proceed.

To determine whether the other party views your claim as legitimate, ask yourself:

• Does my message make sense?
• Is my message based on facts, statistics or evidence?
• Will my promise lead to the desired results the other party wants?

❒ How Will You Evoke an Emotional Reaction?

The other party experiences emotions just like everyone else. They have motivations and imagination. By using empathy skills to experience the transaction from their side of the table, you can tap into the underlying emotional factors that influence decisions.

To determine whether your claim is appealing on an emotional level, ask yourself:

• Do my words and visuals evoke an emotional reaction?
• Does my tactful characterization of the competition evoke feelings of fear or uncertainty?

❒ What Messages Will You Send When Making a Concession?

Every concession you make sends a message to the other party. Before conceding anything, it’s important to ask yourself: By making this concession, what message am I sending?

While a strong negotiation strategy can help you mitigate major concessions, it’s usually unreasonable to expect that you can avoid them altogether. Concessions should only be made for the following reasons:

1. To move your opponent closer to a settlement.
2. To protect your margin.
3. To increase the satisfaction level of the other party, which brings us to…

❒ How Will You Increase the Satisfaction of the Other Party?

If there’s one thing that separates master negotiators, it’s not that they get what they want, it’s how they get what they want by strategically increasing the other party’s satisfaction level with the outcome. Assuming you’ve done your due diligence to uncover pressures and motivations, here are a few additional tactics that can help you increase the satisfaction of the other party:

• Anchoring: It’s important to be the first one out of the gate with a price or position. For example, maybe the other party wants $40 per unit. But by “anchoring” your starting offer at $60, you reset expectations. The other party is now more likely to be satisfied with $54 per unit.
• The “If You” Rule: Have you ever heard the phrase, “Give with the getting in mind?” This allows you to satisfy the other party by giving them what they want, but you also win because you get something valuable in return.
• No Before Yes: Strategically saying “no” before a settlement as a means to increase the other party’s satisfaction in the eventual agreement.
• The Flinch: The Flinch applies the same rationale as “no before yes.” It’s a tactically delivered negative reaction to the other party’s position to increase their satisfaction in an eventual agreement.
• The Calculator: Strategically considering a response before vocalizing it. It increases the other party’s satisfaction because their offer required careful consideration, so it must be reasonable.

❒ What Will I Do (and Not Do) to Strengthen the Relationship?

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: people buy from people. OK, you’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating. It’s easy to get so caught up in the win/loss aspect of buying or selling that we turn it into a zero-sum game. We continually forget that we all make decisions largely based on emotion, and then rationalize our decisions with logic. Why do you think emotion has lasted for centuries as one of the three pillars of persuasion?

Have you ever been dumbfounded when a decision didn’t go your way, muttering to yourself, “What just happened?” or, “That decision just doesn’t make sense?”

Well, then there’s a really good chance that you overlooked the emotional element, overestimated the strength of the relationship, or both. This final checklist item is your eternal reminder to keep relationships at the forefront of your negotiation strategy.

How to strengthen a relationship:

• Climate of agreement: Strategically focusing on common ground areas to prevent conflict or negative emotions from entering the negotiation.
• Avoid irritators: Irritators are certain words or phrases that make the other party want to withdraw from the relationship bank. Obvious examples include phrases like, “to be honest,” or “trust me.” The key is to find the non-obvious irritators that hinder you. This is where recording your interactions and getting trusted third-party feedback can be extremely valuable.
• Breaking bread: The act of eating with the other party during a negotiation. Eating together can increase familiarity and strengthen the relationship, but it also works because people tend to be more agreeable when they know they’ll be together for a while. It’s the same reason why so many deals get done on the golf course.

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You can learn more about SPASIGMA and meet up with their team at the Sales 3.0 conference in Las Vegas on Sept. 18-19. If you haven’t bought your tickets yet, click here for a 50% discount and use the code: AH50Vegas.

The post This Checklist Will Make You A Better Negotiator appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

Account-based marketing doesn’t have to be expensive.

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t necessarily need to increase your marketing budget to succeed with account-based marketing (ABM). Whether you’re pivoting to an entirely account-based approach or you’re layering ABM on top of your current inbound strategy, chances are you’ll find that your budget actually goes further when you hone in on a list of target accounts.

On top of that, 84% of marketers have found that ABM yields a higher ROI than lead-based marketing (ITSMA).

For the most part, ABM spend goes toward four main categories: technology, media spend, events and experiences, and direct mail. Let’s take a closer look at each of these buckets.

Technology

If you want your ABM program to be scalable (in other words, to focus on more than a few dozen target accounts), there’s no way around it. Account-based marketing requires investing in new tools and technology.

As we discussed in our post explaining How to Build an Account-Based Marketing Technology Stack, you most likely already have most of the basic ABM tools at your disposal, such as a CRM, a marketing automation platform, and a CMS.

On top of these fundamental tools, you should consider adding technology from the five stages of the #FlipMyFunnel model for ABM (left): identify, expand, engage, advocate, and measure.

That being said, you don’t immediately need to purchase ABM software for each stage — especially if you’re doing 1:1 account-based marketing (versus Programmatic). Start with the basics — including at least one account-based engagement tool — and build from there. As your account-based marketing program grows and matures, you can build out your technology stack with additional tools.

Advertising/Media Spend

Thanks to its targeted nature, account-based advertising is much more effective than “spray and pray” tactics. By focusing solely on target accounts, your ad dollars will go a lot further with ABM than with a lead-based program. That being said, many teams that do ABM also use retargeting and paid search ads to complement their account-based advertising campaigns.

How much money you’ll spend on account-based advertising depends on your audience and your goals. There are three major factors that will impact your media budget:

• Target Account Size – How many employees work at your target accounts? You’ll need to allocate more ad dollars to large accounts to ensure you’re getting optimal reach within each company.
• Number of Target Accounts & Buyer Personas – As with any advertising campaign, the more companies and individuals you want your account-based ads to reach, the more you’ll need to increase your advertising budget.
• Level of Desired Impact – Lower impact campaigns (such as brand awareness/”air cover” campaigns that are intended to run for a long period of time) generally require lower budgets per day than high impact campaigns (such as pipeline acceleration campaigns).

Tip: When you’re selecting an account-based advertising vendor, make sure to choose one that doesn’t charge a markup on media spend, which will drain your budget much more quickly than necessary.

Of course, there’s no magic formula for deciding exactly how much money to spend on account-based advertising, and there are many additional factors to consider that are unique to your business.

Events & Experiences

You’re probably already hosting or sponsoring events, webinars, and dinners for high-value prospects. ABM simply puts more focus on getting the right people to those events, effectively improving your ROI.

You may consider traveling to meet with your Tier 1 (highest value) accounts to provide engaging, memorable, and educational experiences. This goes for both hot opportunities and current customers. After all, ABM is about more than just bringing on new clients. You should also focus on reducing churn (if you’re a SaaS business), getting the greatest possible lifetime value from your clients, and creating partnerships with them.

While traditional experiences like fancy dinners can certainly be impactful, consider tailoring the experiences to each individual account and providing value beyond a delicious meal. Events like conferences, workshops, and even virtual webinars (which cost next to nothing!) can educate your clients, improve their success with your solution, and build stronger relationships with key stakeholder at your target accounts.

At Terminus, we use the tool MapAnything to visualize where our high-value clients, opportunities, and target accounts are located. That way, we can get more bang for our buck and engage with as many companies as possible every time we travel.

Direct Mail

This classic marketing channel is making a comeback in a big way. Whether you choose to send handwritten notes from your executive team to your customers around the holidays or high-value gifts to your hottest prospects, chances are direct mail will play some part in your ABM program.

The amount you spend on direct mail is entirely up to you. At Terminus, we use PFL’s Salesforce integration to automatically send a copy of Account-Based Marketing for Dummies to our target accounts when they become opportunities. Our sales and marketing teams also regularly send out handwritten notes, company swag, and other goodies to prospects and customers.

Allocating Budget Based on Your Approach to ABM

The amount you spend on each category depends on your audience, the type of ABM you’re doing, and your level of commitment to ABM.

If you’re just starting out with an ABM Lite pilot program targeting 50 handpicked accounts, you may choose to invest in account-based advertising, a few in-person events, and inexpensive but highly personalized direct mail.

If you’re doing Programmatic ABM, your organizational changes may be mostly structural with some additional investments in marketing technology. If you’re currently buying lead lists or spending money on programmatic advertising for lead generation, you should funnel that money into your ABM efforts instead.

Finally, some marketing teams choose to reallocate budget previously spent on an agency to new ABM technology that allows them to accomplish the same tasks with an account-based approach. If you currently work with an agency on your digital advertising strategy, for example, you may find that it’s cheaper (and even simpler) to leverage ad tech like Terminus and run campaigns in-house with strategic support from our Customer Success Managers and behind-the-scenes ad optimization done by our Advertising Operations team.

Build Out Your Account-Based Marketing Program

Budgeting for account-based marketing is just one of many components of an ABM program. To get more tactical advice and worksheets that will help you succeed with ABM, download the Blueprint to Account-Based Marketing Campaigns.

It’s easy enough to read article after article of performance review tips, tricks and advice, but the truth is every company and situation requires a different approach. Even if a new technique for better performance management is needed, the same tactic doesn’t work for everyone. That’s why it’s beneficial to discuss not only what companies SHOULD do, but what they actually ARE doing to enhance processes and make reviews better for all parties involved.

Gallup’s recent research that shows only 2 in 10 employees strongly agree their performance is managed in a way that motivates them to do outstanding work. To ensure you better manage your employee’s performance, let’s take a look at some examples of how real companies are changing their process. Maybe you’ll find details you can implement within your own organization.

Performance Review Example #1: GE

Many companies are beginning to see the merit in losing year-end or annual performance reviews. One major company taking notice of this much needed change is General Electric. Over the past year, they have transferred their once cut and dry review process into a motivating way to guide employees rather than just critique them. GE Managers and employees still meet once a year, but it is now a meeting with true purpose: employee’s future goals. In addition, to help with regular feedback, the innovation giant is launching its own in-house performance app to help facilitate everyday, regular feedback. The app is now used by more than 80,000 people.

“It existed in more or less the same form since I started at the company in 1979. But we think over many years it had become more a ritual than moving the company upwards and forwards.” –Susan Peters, Head of Human Resources, GE

Motivate Employees Like GE:

Building motivation into your performance management strategy can happen in roundabout ways. For example, after releasing a policy change or strategy pivot, make sure everyone affected receives notice and let them specifically know how they can share feedback with you. Employees will be more motivated to tackle the changes if they feel like how those changes affect them is heard by higher ups. Lose the dictatorial leadership style, and remind employees their feedback is welcome through your performance review system. Soliciting upwards feedback can take motivation a step further by empowering your employees and making them feel heard.

“ 97% of employees believe communication impacts tasks daily. Plus, approaching employees creates a checks and balances. A manager might believe his or her idea is the best approach to a problem or situation, but those who are most affected may bring up a point that for which hasn’t been accounted.” – Maren Hogan, CEO of Red Branch Media

Performance Review Example #2: Cargill

It’s no wonder they have struggled to fully engage and motivate their workforce as a company with thousands of employees worldwide. However, with the help of their new system, they are finding it to be easier than ever. Starting in 2012, Cargill introduced a strategic process for everyday performance management. This system was specifically designed to incorporate encouragement, feedback and motivation into everyday conversations while on the job. Instead of focusing on the past, they have since been able to focus on the future of their employees and the company as a whole to better work towards goals and set milestones while giving accurate and helpful constructive feedback.

Give Constructive Feedback Like Cargill:

43% of leaders find it stressful to give corrective feedback. Whether you feel the same or not, the truth is, every employee needs it. Liane Davey (@LianeDavey), VP at Knightsbridge Human Capital warns against approaching critiques when still feeling the stress.

“Unfortunately, if you’re stressed and anxious when delivering feedback, it will translate into poor communication (often abruptness or rambling), which will make it hard for the recipient to hear, understand, and apply the value of the information you’re delivering. Worse, your discomfort will be mirrored by the recipient and the interaction might actually erode his or her trust in you instead of enhancing it.”

TIP: Schedule a time to discuss and deliver the constructive feedback to the employee at a later date so you’ve had time to get your emotions in check. Delivering negative feedback to a worker in an emotionally charged session won’t be effective and can leave your employee feeling disengaged and unmotivated.

TIP: Remember constructive feedback is used to help the employee identify what went wrong and how the can handle the situation better in the future. Place your findings and suggested process in writing so the employee has clear, written directions on how this situation was assessed and the proposed solution. This way, there are no miscommunications and the “he said, she said” or “I thought you said to do this” game can be avoided.

TIP: Tailor your communication to suit the employee’s work style and unique motivators. An employee who is adamant about career progression might respond better to constructive feedback if you explain how their future role in the company is affected by their action or perhaps if they take a different route next time, they’ll be making progress towards a specific goal. Knowing what drives the employee will help you tie constructive feedback to their actual ambitions within your company, propelling their engagement and productivity even more.

Performance Review Example #3: Eli Lilly

Eli Lilly is one of the top pharmaceutical companies in the world. And, their performance management process is equally as amazing. Having always been big on the concept of HR best practices, Eli Lilly stuck to their mission of implementing progressive benefits and perks by encompassing the theme of trust among their employees. This process is meant to empower employees to take initiative while letting their voices and ideas be heard. As a result, bonds between supervisors and subordinates strengthened. Considering that employees who can work with their leadership to develop goals are nearly 4x as likely to be engaged as other employees, it’s safe to say that their company and brand will continue to grow because of this decision.

Build Trust With Your Employees Like Eli Lilly:

One in three employees have stated they feel that their employer is not always honest and truthful with them. This could result from a number of things; micromanaging, empty promises to employees or even lack of feedback. About that feedback… 89% of employees want managers to be more direct! Being direct correlates to being honest, which in turn builds trust. Employees need to trust their employers for a healthy work environment to be possible.

“The emphasis in recent years on employee wellness is a step in the right direction, but the psychological factors are often overlooked,” says David W. Ballard , head of APA’s Center for Organizational Excellence . “It’s clear that an organizational culture that promotes and supports openness, honesty, transparency and trust is key to a healthy, high-performing workplace.”

Performance Review Example #4: Adobe

This design technology software company doesn’t just talk the talk when it comes to performance reviews. Since 2012, Adobe has been using a process that focuses on developing ongoing conversations between managers and employees, all with the focus of engaging and empowering. Their approach includes elements of setting priorities, understanding the role of HR and providing resources.

As a result, Adobe has seen a 10% increase in the number of employees who say they receive ongoing feedback that helps their performance. Moreso, their voluntary turnover rate has dropped by 30% and they have been able to save more than 100,000 manager hours each year.

Provide Ongoing Feedback Like Adobe:

Ongoing feedback produces amazing performance results because it’s timely and mistakes can be quickly fixed! When managers are able to nip problems in the bud immediately, they spare the mistake being made again and again or to the point where the damage is too large to mend. Ongoing feedback is also great in on-the-job training for new and experienced employees. Did you know employees are thought to have a 12% increase in productivity from ongoing feedback?

Performance review systems with notifications and reminders are a must for busy managers on the go! Remembering to deliver ongoing feedback is much easier when you’re being held accountable. It’s why many turn to iRevü!

“If you take the time to communicate and offer feedback on a continuous basis, there will be less surprises. For instance, you will know which employees are struggling with particular projects, while also being more aware of which employees understand the concepts of the project and are interested in mentoring peers. The chances of miscommunication between leadership and subordinates diminishes and the lines of better communication replace it. Better understanding on all those fronts will mean better, possibly faster, work.” – Michael Heller on Business 2 Community HR

Performance Review Example #5: Accenture

Accenture wants to rid itself of the annual review and completely overhaul its entire performance management process. What was their solution? Make it more accurate. This company began measuring and tracking interactions between managers and employees to better focus on immediate development. No more “annual” reviews and no more “ranking.” Like others on this list, they are using application technology to their advantage, helping the internal organization efficiently relay feedback.

How To Get Accurate Like Accenture:

Part of having an accurate performance management process is being able to glean insight from your existing workforce to make better decisions regarding the total workforce… and future workforce. Employee performance data can be used to assess the performance of your team in comparison to overall business goals giving you the insight needed to make accurate performance assessments and predictions.

Problems with employee productivity or revenue loss can be cause for major concerns in an organization. How are you supposed to fix these problems if you don’t know they exist in the first place? Focus on accurate performance issues with the help of performance data from your system. Access historical performance data and compare and contrast how that data relates to business performance. What you find may shock you, but it will definitely help you hone in on areas that have been neglected!

Performance Review Example #6: Google

As a famous innovator, it’s no surprise that Google’s performance review process is nontraditional compared to other companies. Ranking and sticking to an annual timeline have never been a part of their technique. Instead, they focus on goal-setting and motivating employees to meet those goals, all while looking at specific objectives and key results (OKRs). All these elements along with the addition of measuring performance, peer-to-peer feedback and working to remove bias make the perfect combination for the great review system.

“We need people to know how they’re doing, and we’ve evolved what might at first seem like a zanily complex system that shows them where they stand. Along the way, we learned some startling stuff. We’re still working on it, as you’ll see, but I feel pretty confident we’re headed in the right direction. And with any luck I can save you some of the headaches and missteps we had along the way.”– Laszlo Bock, SVP, People Operations, Google

Setting Performance Objectives Like Google:

Ongoing performance review conversations are the perfect opportunity to set goals, define how the goals will be met and share goal progress and completion. 60% of employees state they need to interact with at least 10 other employees on any given day, so making sure these goals don’t get their wires crossed is crucial. Consider investing in tech tools to help your employees accomplish their goals. Check out the top most used tools Business News Daily highlights:

• Tablets for work
• Project management tools
• Productivity apps

These can be used in conjunction with performance review software to help your employees reach their performance goals in between reviews.

TIP: Better yet! Find a system that has an app or is mobile responsive so employees can stay motivated and on top of their performance on the go. We know of just the one!

If you’ve been paying attention, all of these companies focus on one key element: feedback. No matter how you go about doing it, delivering feedback is essential when reworking your performance review process. Some of these tactics may not be the best for you and your company, but that shouldn’t stop you from trying to provide the best process and resources to all your employees.

People want to believe they are good at making their own decisions. From what they buy to who they vote for. It’s easy to see other people being influenced, but we have difficulty seeing it in ourselves.

We tend to hold a curmudgeonly attitude when it comes to being influenced or manipulated. And yet, everyone wants more influence. We hear a lot of people talking about how to become an influencer, and how to engage with influencers.

It’s seems like the “Age of the Influencer.”

Our guest this week on The Portfolio Life, has a counterintuitive approach to what actually influences us, and how to use it to our advantage.

Listen in as Jonah Berger, a Wharton professor and bestselling author, and I talk about why it’s easier to observe other people being influenced, why doing the opposite is still being influenced, and why writing down your goal improves your performance.

Listen to the podcast

To listen to the show, click the player below (If you’re reading this via email, please click here).

Show highlights

In this episode, Jonah and I discuss:

• Unpacking the concept of social influence
• How we are passively influenced by observing others
• The sweet spot of optimal distinctiveness
• How to positively influence others and be more positively influenced
• Trying to avoid influence during the creative process
• The danger of creating in a vacuum
• How to write something accessible, but a little bit different
• Illustrating complicated concepts in a way that’s accessible to your readers
• A simple trick to improve rapport and get better tips
• Finding motivation to write
• Appealing to peer pressure and social comparisons
• The hidden value of a “designated dissenter”

Quotes and takeaways

• Recognize influence in the world around you to live a happier, healthier life.
• Use the tools of influence to be more influential yourself.
• Optimal distinctiveness communicates added value that people can relate to.
• Answer the question: What’s an interesting way to tell a familiar story?
• “When someone is like us, we feel like we’re part of the same tribe.” –Jonah Berger

Resources

• Jonah’s blog and Twitter
• Invisible Influence by Jonah Berger
• Contagious by Jonah Berger
• Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath
• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
• Powers of Two by Joshua Wolf Shenk
• The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

When was the last time you noticed being influenced? Who are you trying to influence? Share in the comments.

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on the Get Control blog here.

Customer acquisition is the cornerstone of any viable business. But are you spending too much time and money trying to lure new customers?

It’s important that operators understand how much their business is spending on acquiring customers. Calculating customer acquisition costs (CAC) will not only give you a terrific insight into your marketing team’s performance but also show investors whether your business has the ability to scale or not.

How to Calculate Customer Acquisition Costs

Customer acquisition costs are calculated using the following formula:

Total Cost of Marketing / Total Number of Customers

Let’s say you own Get Shirty, a subscription commerce business that sells men’s shirts. You spent $500 on customer acquisition (marketing) throughout the month of July. You acquired 50 new customers in that month. Therefore your customer acquisition cost is $10.

Business owners need to balance both the cost of acquiring a customer with their ability to monetize the customer – also known as customer lifetime value. If a business is spending $1,000 to acquire a customer and the customer’s lifetime value with the business is only $500, you won’t stay trading for very long.

Customer acquisition cost has even been called the “startup killer” because “the cost of acquiring customers often turns out to be higher than expected and exceeds the ability to monetize those customers”. It’s important to understand the balance between CAC and CLV.

How Can I Improve Customer Acquisition Costs?

Startups and young businesses have got to be smart when it comes to CAC. Spend too much and your business won’t trade for more than a matter of minutes; spend too little and your business won’t acquire the customer base it needs to generate revenue. Get the balance right with these tips.

1. Improve Your Website Conversions

You might be able to generate a ton of traffic to your ecommerce or SaaS website, but how much of it actually converts? Monitoring, testing, and improving your conversion rates is a sure-fire way to decrease customer acquisition costs. Why? The more customers you’re able to push further down the funnel from your marketing spend and convert into customers, the lower your CAC will be.

A great way to measure your conversion rates is through implementing A/B testing on your website. For example your sub-com shirt business has the call to action (CTA) of “sign up for shirts”. You track in Q1 how many customers convert through this link. In Q2, you change the CTA to “get monthly tailor shirts delivered today”. You immediately see an increase in conversions. In Q3 you change the wording slightly to “get monthly bespoke shirts delivered today”, and your conversion rates go through the roof.

Get Shirty has been lucky. Your A/B testing has ensured that your conversion rates have increased. Other businesses may need to trial and test a whole bunch of methods – not just CTA buttons but on-page copy, layout, emails etc – in order to increase your conversion rate and lower your CAC.

2. Be Aware of Your Revenue Spending

It’s a given that a business will need to market their product in order to attract and acquire customers. The amount of revenue that’s specifically spent on marketing and therefore directly impacts your CAC cost depends on the type of business operation. Salesforce – a well-known SaaS business – invested over 53% of its 2014 revenue in marketing. The result? The business grew by 33% compared to the previous year. For other businesses, the average amount of revenue spent on marketing was 10%.

Spending more than 10%? Readdress your marketing strategy and analyze what channels aren’t working for your business.

3. Implement Buyer Profiles

Operators shouldn’t be shooting into the dark when it comes to marketing their product. Business operators need to be explicitly clear about who specifically they’re targeting their product toward. For Get Shirty, their target buyer could be: “Gavin, 34, senior management role, lives alone, doesn’t have time for shopping, needs to look smart for executive meetings”.

By developing buyer personas, operators will have a clear idea of who they’re aiming their acquisition efforts at and be able to market their product to that specific group. This in turn will improve acquisition efforts and improve CAC.

4. Reduce Churn

If a business is serious about improving CAC, you need to think long and hard about reducing churn. How can your business improve its acquisition costs if a high percentage of customers are actively churning each month?

5. Focus on 80/20

Originally a wealth distribution estimation in Italy, the 80/20 rule – also known as the Pareto principle – theorizes that 20% of your efforts produce 80% of your results. This can be applicable to businesses in many ways, for example 20% of your customers amount to 80% of your revenue.

Think about your input and output levels for customer acquisition. Where is the 20% of your customers who drive the most revenue coming from? It could be organic search or native advertising, for example. Find this statistic and concentrate solely on acquiring a similar type of customer.

Invest in Customer Retention

While focusing on acquiring new customers, it’s also important to retain your current customers. Keep your customers happy and excited. This will also help spread word of mouth marketing.

Business is all about balance and the overall aim for any operation that wants to last in the market is to decrease customer acquisition costs while actively increasing customer lifetime value. This magic formula will drive business success, ensure longevity, and appeal to investors.

The post 5 Ways to Reduce Your Customer Acquisition Costs appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Sure, peg me as “old school”. But I want to point out that robots and AI have not yet taken over selling… it’s still mostly human-to-human. And it’s going to stay that way for a while. So why is everyone so down on relationship selling?

As automation has risen, relationship selling has taken a back seat.

However, I strongly believe we’ve swung the pendulum a bit too far and have virtually forgotten about the importance of human relationships in selling.

In the last ~10 years, we’ve focused too much on the sales process, the automation, the metrics, and the mechanics of selling.

And we’ve been losing the softer side of sales – the “relationship” with our buyers, deeply understanding their needs, and providing customer value. 

The Impact Of Our Automation Obsession Is Real

Sales leaders are struggling with some of the basics of helping their teams build relationships in selling.

I did a survey of 50 VPs Sales/CROs in Tech:

87% of respondents said that their teams are missing key occasions to reach out to prospects, and touch points are falling through the cracks. This is even with all the email automation tools out there! If you don’t have a relationship with a prospect, it’s easy to miss out on the best opportunities to reach out.

66% of respondents said that an account being single-threaded (only having one contact) has a huge negative impacting on performance. If teams don’t have multiple threads in an account, it’s possible they can lose the account entirely when a champion moves on. It’s in a sales team’s best interest to build relationships across an account to both acquire and retain it.

Over 55% of respondents said their teams only maintain relationships with prospects that are going to immediately close. This means that lots of relationship building opportunities for future pipeline are simply not happening.

What’s most disappointing is with all of the tools out there to measure activity, make virtual connections, and find interesting insights, sales teams aren’t comfortable playing the long-term relationship game.

We are still looking for the immediate fix to close deals NOW.

The State of Sales Survey done by LinkedIn in 2017 says that the #1 contributing factor in making a purchase decision is if a buyer has TRUST in the salesperson.

Doesn’t a relationship have to start with trust?

And isn’t a relationship built on more than just a 7-touch email cadence?

CEB confirms that 53% of C-Levels buy because of the experience they have with the salesperson.

Trust me… “experience” is more than the emails you’ve sent them or following them on Twitter.  

Why Is It So Hard? Why Are We Not Focusing On Building Relationships? 

When I asked 50 sales leaders, here were some of their responses:  

One sales leader in the survey cited constantly shifting territories as the reason they struggle to create and maintain lasting relationships.  

Others said that we have introduced too many tools and too many steps that reps don’t have time to nurture relationships.

Many said that all the hand-offs in the buying process make it hard to build relationships: from SDR to AE to CSM… who’s managing the customer relationship?

Many shared not being able to train for this type of behavior – so it all came down to hiring reps who know how to build connections intrinsically.

Here’s The Most Alarming Part (This May Shock You)

The most alarming to me was the number of respondents who don’t believe it matters.

They believe that as long as they follow a consistent sales process and hit key activity metrics, they’ll be successful.

Perhaps an approach that doesn’t focus on relationships works with a transactional product or service (where trust in the seller is not a critical part of the buying process) because the risk of getting it wrong is low.

But I know that companies that have complex products and/or long buying cycles are having (or will have) challenges with churn or customer satisfaction if they aren’t focused on their relationships with their customers.

Resources To Help You Get Back To Basics

The good news is that the pendulum is swinging back. I’m seeing more and more sales solutions, sales books, and thought leadership to help bring back the softer side of selling.

Below is a list of resources to help you think about how you can get the human-to-human back into your sales repertoire.

Although, keep in mind that no single tool or book will help you create better relationships.  

Ultimately, we have limits – as humans, we can only effectively nurture a finite number of true relationships. But these resources can inspire you to think differently, and they can help take some of the heavy lifting off your plate.  

The rest is really up to you.

Here are some resources that help you focus on relationship building.

Comment on this post with others!

• Book: Daniel Pink: To Sell is Human
• Book: Daniel Pink: Drive
• Book: Jeb Blount: Sales EQ
• Solution: Call coaching such as: Chorus, Gong, Jiminny
• Solution: Actionable insights: Datafox, DiscoverOrg, Mattermark and more…
• Solution: Connect and grow your network: LinkedIn, Nudge.ai
• Thought Leaders who are all about the Human-to-Human selling to follow: Brian Burns, Jill Rowley, Koka Sexton, Tiffani Bova, Bryan Kramer, Trish Bertuzzi, Jim Keenan, Nancy Nardin, Lori Richardson, Ken Krogue, Neal Schaffer, Shane Gibson, Andy Paul, Matt Heinz, Mark Roberge, Kyle Porter, and John Barrows.

The post What Happened to Relationship Selling? appeared first on Sales Hacker.

So much advice for business websites involves generating leads and securing loyal followers. Having a horde of raving fans is wonderful. It keeps you motivated, gives you consistent feedback and lets you know that you’re on the right track.

But, visitors alone don’t make your website profitable. You’ve already worked hard to generate traffic to your website, but that shouldn’t be the final goal. To become a profitable website, you need to turn those visitors into buyers.

According to HubSpot, only about 22 percent of businesses are satisfied with their conversion rates. Get your audience to click and pay for your products or services by nurturing your leads, optimizing your calls-to-action, using landing pages, enhancing your customer service and showing social proof.

Here are 5 secrets to optimizing your site for conversions.

Use Landing Pages

When you drive traffic to your website using advertisements, where do those leads end up? Have you noticed that they’re landing on your homepage but not converting?

Sending targeted leads to a generic web page is like hooking a fish without the equipment to reel it in.

Use landing pages to convert traffic into customers. These should include:

• A clear and catchy headline relevant to the marketing materials that you used to bring in your audience.
• Innovative and effective content
• CTAs (calls-to-action) through which the visitors can be converted into buyers.

A sense of urgency can also help people make quick decisions. Build a little pressure by telling visitors that there are only a few spots left or using a countdown timer. You could also tell people that this is the last time that you’ll be offering a particular item or service.

Make it loud and clear for visitors that this offer is available for a limited time only. The only way out for them to grab it will be now!

Optimize Your Opt-In Forms

When you want a website visitor to take a certain action, keep your call-to-action simple. Although some email marketers recommend using a single call-to-action for each piece of content you create, others say that multiple CTAs can also drive conversions.

Whatever option you choose, ensure that your CTA is clear. Use concise language, bold colors and large fonts. The Shopify Buy Button is one example of a clear CTA that can be added to any website.

Keep the primary call to action above the fold so that viewers don’t have to scroll to see it.

Also, don’t let your leads get distracted by offering too much on one page. If you have five links on which visitors can click to leave your web page, they’re less likely to convert than if you have one link to a primary CTA and one link to a secondary CTA.

Optimize email campaigns

Leads are important. However, you need to cultivate those leads to turn them into buyers.

Email campaigns are valuable for getting visitors to buy. And one form of email in particular.

Let’s talk about the difference between marketing emails and transactional emails.

Marketing emails are sent to everyone on your recipient list. Transactional emails are sent to people who take specific actions on your website. As a result, Campaign Monitor says that transactional emails can generate six times more revenue than regular marketing emails.

Transactional emails include the following:

• Thank-you emails
• Password resets
• Purchase receipts
• Abandoned cart emails
• Regular invoices

Because the prospect has taken a specific action, they’re more likely to open your email and take further steps. This makes these emails incredibly valuable.

You might also get your leads to convert into paying customers by creating upsell options for your cheap or free offerings. The following are examples of upselling:

• Offer engraving or printing on a product for $5 more.
• Sell an optional workbook to go along with an educational product.
• Suggest that customers sign up for a paid membership site to be able to access your service regularly and without interruption.

Get customers hooked by giving them something valuable for free. When they see the worth of your products or services, they’ll be more likely to pay to get others.

Transactional emails show care and thus abandoned cart emails, thank you emails, invoice emails, and others gives a sense of satisfaction to the customers.

This builds loyalty and may lead the prospect to revisit the website for purchase.

Fine-Tune Your Customer Service

People often talk themselves out of making purchases when they have questions or concerns. To prevent your potential buyers from throwing in the towel because they’re hesitant, you need to build their confidence.

You can do this by adding a list of frequently asked questions, or FAQs, to your landing page. These should address any worries that you know can block your visitors’ ability to say yes.

Some themes to address in your FAQs are:

• Price
• Why your product is better than others
• Why you have the authority to offer your service
• How easy your item is to use
• How to return or cancel a purchase

Make yourself even more helpful by incorporating a live chat feature into your website. Your live chat representatives should be able to answer frequently asked questions in a way that gives visitors the confidence to buy. Think of these representatives as part of your sales team.

Live chat could be the turning point for your website. By helping the prospect before they abandon their purchase, you increase the chances of them converting into a customer.

You can further boost customers’ confidence by offering a money-back guarantee. This gives people a chance to try out your product or service.

Doubt can kill a sale. A guarantee removes doubt, increasing conversions.

Get Social

People are more likely to jump on the bandwagon when they see their peers taking a particular action. This is called social proof.

For example, most consumers check reviews before they make an online purchase. They want to hear others’ opinions to validate their own actions.

Encouraging your current customers to leave reviews can help you convert future clients.

Source: Web Ascender

Adding testimonials to your website puts social proof front and center.

You can also generate social proof by encouraging your audience to share your content, sales messages and landing pages. Share buttons on thank you pages and holding contests are two ways to inspire people to share your brand.

Reviews are easy for the prospect to understand, and are hard to miss. Highlight social proof like testimonials and reviews on your site. Plus, you can brag about the purchases if they’re good enough to show.

Connecting the dots

When you’re competing against thousands in the online marketplace, connecting with customers and getting them to your website isn’t enough. You need to foster a relationship that inspires visitors to take action.

Above are 5 proven and effective ways to improve your conversion rates and boost your sales.

Over the course of 18 months, Rachel Schickowski and Stan Miller implemented a content marketing platform – a hub for all the marketing content of Rockwell Automation – for a team of 600 marketers around the world.

Most of us wouldn’t have a clue how to accomplish such a feat. Luckily for us, Rachel and Stan shared their story at Content Marketing World, Implementing a CMS in Global B2B Organization.

(Note: While they used the term “CMS” in the title, they later clarified that the term “content marketing platform” better fits what they’re talking about.)

Why they did it

Rockwell Automation – a 100-year-old company with over 22,000 employees, the largest in the world dedicated to automation technology – generates a lot of marketing content. That content (white papers, videos, case studies, brochures, advertising, magazines, blog posts, and more) used to be scattered among servers and hard drives all over the world, and the content processes used to be disconnected and uncoordinated.

Editorial calendars, too, were all over the place, as Stan describes:

Our customer magazine’s editorial calendar sat on an intranet site. Our blog calendar sat on a shared drive in our U.K. office. Our case-study program was being managed on a SharePoint site run by our agency. Content calendars were managed by various business units on various shared drives and desktops.

When tools and processes are that fragmented, no one can get a strategic view of the enterprise marketing content, and the enterprise can’t fully realize the value of that content.

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When tools & processes are fragmented, no one can get a strategic view of content. @stanmiller #CMWorld
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Rachel and Stan wanted a tool to manage all the content and processes for all the marketing teams, from idea to creation to distribution to governance to analytics. They wanted to know what content their marketing teams were creating, how well it was working, and whether they had enough of the right thing. They needed a digital way to hold all that content and all that information about the content.

They needed an enterprise content marketing platform.

A content marketing platform is a hub for planning, producing, distributing, and analyzing content. It works with all content formats, including video, HTML, PDF, and zipped source files.

Rachel and Stan describe it as “a huge filing cabinet in the cloud, giving everyone access with a real-time view of the latest content revision or workflow update.”

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A #contentmarketing platform is like a huge filing cabinet in the cloud, says @legisnotbroken @stanmiller.
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How they did it

Rachel, who has played various content-related roles at Rockwell Automation, oversaw the platform’s implementation, developing the infrastructure and leading the effort. Stan, editorial lead for the company’s Global Customer Communications group, provided the content and developed the processes.

Here’s their approach to researching and implementing a new platform.

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You need leadership support when you roll out a new #contentmarketing platform. @legisnotbroken @stanmiller
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Form a steering committee

“Find some friends,” they advise, and form a steering committee. Include stakeholders who bring a variety of content perspectives. Examples:

• People from various regions
• People who own budgets
• People responsible for content strategy
• Content creators
• Lawyers
• Translation coordinators

Choose people who can poke holes and show what they would need in the tool, what gaps they see so that they can help you assess tools as you go through product demonstrations.

Get support from leadership early

Keep your company’s leadership apprised. You need their advocacy when you roll out the new platform.

Clarify your requirements

Find out what each team needs from a content management platform. “After you understand your requirements, you can be on a demo call for five minutes and know right away, ‘Nope, not the right one for us,’ and move on,” Rachel says.

If you aren’t clear on your requirements, you can waste a lot of time in the vetting process.

Compare platforms

Determine how each platform would manage your campaigns, fit with your workflows (which vary from group to group), and integrate with your tech stack. How easy is it to use? “Find a platform that people will embrace,” Rachel says.

Decide which content to migrate

You can’t bring your whole content repository into a new platform. Consider using the platform, at least at first, for new content only. If you bring in legacy content, focus on your best content.

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You can’t bring whole repository into a new platform. Focus on your best content. @legisnotbroken @stanmiller
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Learn from pilot projects

From the beginning – in tandem with your other activities – create pilot projects where the need is greatest in your organization.

For example, Rockwell teams in Asia Pacific and Latin America managed emails in Eloqua and wanted help. They created a pilot using the B2B content marketing platform Kapost, which supported them in dealing with translations, time zones, and their own vendors.

Since Kapost integrates with Eloqua, they could connect the process of creating content and the process of building email assets. (In this case, Eloqua emails were the content, and Kapost was the platform that managed that content.) Content owners also had access to analytics.

Stan suggests stress-testing a platform in multiple ways. His team followed on the heels of their colleagues in Latin America, doing a pilot project with the Rockwell Automation blog. “Integrating our processes and content development into the platform helped us refine our processes, find ways to save time, speed up reviews, and activate our content more quickly and efficiently,” he says.

Stan also did a pilot with Rockwell Automation’s long-running case-study program, which followed strict processes for internal review, customer review, and legal review. Bringing those processes into the platform helped the team confront its overly long workflow and revealed places where the user interface needed new fields (for example, one to capture reviewers’ feedback).

“Our pilot projects taught us a lot,” Stan says. “We fed back to Rachel what we learned so that she could engage the platform vendor and move us forward in refining the tool.”

During the pilots, Rachel and Stan figured out how to configure the platform, how to conduct training, and what kind of strategy they needed. “Some pilots overlapped with the start of training,” Rachel explains. “The pilots gave us about three months to get a deeper understanding of the platform and anticipate the questions content creators would ask.”

Configure the platform

Several factors go into configuring a content marketing platform:

• Personas
• Buyer’s journey
• Content types
• Metatags (taxonomy)
• Workflows
• Custom fields
• Integrations

If you don’t have documented personas and buyer’s journey stages for your company, start there – possibly with the help of your steering committee.

Consider your content types and taxonomy. If you’ll be integrating multiple repositories, you need to align your tagging and file naming, for example.

Consider your teams’ workflows. “Everyone has an opinion,” Rachel warns. “You may feel pressured to add steps, which can lead to overlong workflows that are hard on people using the platform.”

She says, “You don’t want to spend a lot of admin time checking off boxes and not doing the things that you enjoy doing. Limit the workflow to the hand-off points. If I’m creating a brochure, and someone’s reviewing it, those would be my two steps. You don’t need all of the details in between; otherwise, it becomes clunky.”

Work with your vendor to adapt the user interface, adding custom fields as needed.

Consider how existing technologies need to be integrated with your platform.

Lean on a reliable third party

Stakeholders often hold opposing points of view, which can take your research or your implementation, as Stan says, “off the rails or down a rat hole.” Bring in a third party – a rep from a vendor or an independent consultant – who can say, “Look guys, we hear everything you’re saying. We’ve been down this road before. Here are some best practices that may help you along your way.”

Plan for governance

As part of governance, create policy: Here’s how long content lives in the platform. Here’s the point at which we delete it.

Also determine your access policies (which will, among other things, enable you to estimate the number of licenses you need when you create a contract with your vendor):

• Who gets an account?
• What rights does each person or role have?
• When do we add and delete people?
• Which partnering agencies get access?

Finally, create policies for content development. Make it clear who submits ideas for a content type and who does not. You don’t want to create an environment for collaboration and then invite chaos.

Stan suggests setting up the platform so anyone who requests the creation of new content must include a strategy for the content, an audience for the content, a location for that content, and a call to action. Then, rather than seeing someone in an elevator and saying, “Hey, I want a brochure,” people must go into the platform and answer these questions before anyone creates that content. “Processes like that force us to be more strategic,” Stan says.

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Any content request must include a strategy, audience, location, & call to action. @stanmiller #CMWorld
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Train people with care

Customize your training sessions according to the ways each group or role will use the platform. “Customization makes the information more ‘sticky’ and gets people into the tool faster,” Rachel says.

Train people in the functionality they will find valuable. For example, Stan says, “I can’t tell you the glory of centralized calendars. You can bring up your blog calendar for the entire year and overlay it with your magazine’s calendar for the entire year and your six e-newsletters that may be going out over the course of the year.”

Prepare training in a way that has people walking away excited about the things the platform enables them to do.

To reinforce your training, find internal champions – super-users – throughout the organization who can help answer people’s questions.

Consider setting up a series of lunch-and-learns, as Rachel did, inviting platform users to meet in person or call in, providing feedback on their experiences, and asking questions.

Collect and prioritize feedback

Be prepared for positive feedback as platform users see their productivity increase. For example, when all reviewers’ comments are centralized in the platform instead of lost in countless email chains, people save time on review cycles. Stan gives his own example of positive feedback when he says of Rachel, “I can’t heap enough praise upon this fabulous person next to me for how she made my job easier.”

And be prepared for criticism. No content marketing platform is perfect. Document and prioritize people’s criticisms. Have frank conversations with your vendor about how the system needs to evolve. Stan says, “You’re always going to have a wish list as you get more sophisticated in your content management.”

Here are some examples of criticisms people may have about a content marketing platform. Devise a system for documenting and prioritizing feedback like this:

Have top executives make it clear: Using the platform is not optional

When it was time to invite all marketers to use the new platform, Rachel and Stan had corporate leaders behind them, ready to explain why this platform was important to the business and that using it was not optional.

“We needed everyone in,” Rachel says. “If anyone’s not using the tool, it doesn’t work. You can’t have a global hub if only half of the people use it.”

Rachel underscores the importance of support from the top:

Our directive came from the VP of marketing. Her team was accountable to foster the change management. If it had been left to my (content operations) manager and me to drive the change, we would have failed.

Allow time

Be realistic in the time you allow for this kind of project.

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Be realistic in the time you allow for implementing a #contentmarketing platform. @legisnotbroken @stanmiller
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It took Rachel, Stan, and their team 18 months to research and implement a platform for Rockwell Automation’s global marketing teams. The timeline looked like this:

Rachel credits the content-ops and demand-gen teams with doing great research. They had to understand the need and the integration expectations. They had to get buy-in from stakeholders in all the regions. “We had heard that the average company takes three to six months to choose, so our timing might seem sleepy. But rolling out a tool to 22,000 people is a lot to ask,” Rachel says.

Conclusion

If your content marketing platform fits your company’s needs, “it’s worth all the work,” Stan says. “It’s a huge win. Your colleagues love you. You get a raise. A bonus. A promotion. Hands across the company.”

How about it? Have you seen your career take off after putting a platform in place? Or do you have stories with not-so-happy endings? Either way, please share your experience in a comment.

Here’s an excerpt from Rachel and Stan’s talk:

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

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 How to Implement a Content Marketing Platform in a Global B2B Organization appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Listen to people and offer advice. Don’t just talk about yourself.

Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But there will come a day when you’ll have to step away from your keyboard, iron a shirt/blouse and go speak to living, breathing business owners.

I know it’s not what you signed up for when you shelled out for that expensive copywriting course, promising you could work from home in your PJs and never have to do real businessy things like “networking” ever again.

But trawling through Facebook groups, battling over poverty level rates on Upwork or email bombing lists you’ve harvested on LinkedIn will only get you so far.

If you want to work with serious players and high ballers (who’ll pay you $10k+ per project) you need to make some moves in the real world, making eye contact and greasing palms.

Live events are where ballers hang out

Unfortunately, most of us in this madcap copywriting world are committed introverts.

That’s nothing to be ashamed of.

It’s why we’re so good at getting into people’s heads, emphasizing with the pain they feel in their gut and conjuring up the emotional triggers that helps us sell stuff.

However, at a live networking event, hiding in the corner pretending to read your emails ain’t going to win you many new clients. So what can you do?

Thankfully, over the years of relentless marching into networking events, bold as brass, I’ve developed a few tactics for connecting with the right people and sparking new business opportunities, before kicking open the nearest fire escape to scurry home and recharge.

Today, I’d like to share them with you:

1. Dress smart

I know we’re all complicated and ‘multifaceted’ types. But people make opinions based on first impressions. So we just have to accept it and dress like professionals.

However, getting the iron out does offer an added bonus…

Along with presenting yourself as a reliable wordsmith, who pens high converting copy as surely as lightning strikes the tree, dressing smart is like putting on a suit of armour. It puts you in the right frame of mind and to feel like you have a serious service people need to know about.

Wearing an ironed shirt (or a smart T-shirt under a blazer) will give you the confidence that you have a look that reassures prospects. Turning up in your slacks and “witty” T-shirt (“we dress like this because we’re creative”) will have the reverse effect.

2. Walk up to people and say “Hello”

If you’ve attended a networking event before, the idea of entering a room of people you don’t know and walking up to introduce yourself can feel so far outside your comfort zone that you’re convinced your body will shut down in protest before you’ve even opened the door.

When, in fact, there’s nothing much to it.

I’ve done it so many times now that I don’t even think about it. I just look for the nearest group of people that looks interesting, walk up and introduce myself with hand outstretched.

Here’s the truth: Nearly everybody HATES networking. But if you want to make connections outside of the interwebs and step up in your career, it’s a necessary evil.

Attendees get this and will always be open to welcoming you into their conversation.

3. Ask questions. Don’t just talk about yourself

Any door-to-door salesmen worth their salt knows that the most powerful way to sell is to LISTEN. Find out about people’s business. Ask them what their marketing challenges are. What tactics have they tried and which have been a black hole for spending money (i.e. SEO).

Then give them advice on what to do. Help them to solve a marketing challenges that’s been bugging them or give them tips on why to try instead.

But…hold back a little.

Give them some chickens but don’t hand over the farm.

Give advice freely. But hold back on giving them an entire marketing strategy in one sitting. Just give them enough advice to get them interested and then tell them how to contact you to book a consultation.

4. Take PRINTED case studies

Reassuringly stiff business cards are good and all. But if you really want to impress people, proudly handing out printed, attractively designed case studies is a powerful way to do it.

You could do a case study about:

• How you built a funnel for a client with a clear ROI
• A breakdown of a sales page you did that converts well
• How to write a soap opera sequence instead of pure promotional emails
• How to use toll free numbers to generate leads
• A traffic source that isn’t yet swamped and offers cheap, targeted clicks (more on this to follow).

Then present your case study like you’re giving them a gift. Explain how you are giving them a strategy that can ramp up their response rates and sales in a matter of days.

Remember to follow-up to see how they’re getting on. If they haven’t had time to implement it or are struggling to action it, propose you do it for them for a very reasonable fee.

If you’re a digital marketer or a sales professional, creating an inbound strategy for the first time is a daunting and challenging task, to say the least. While there is a wealth of knowledge, free and purchasable online, only a few know where and what to search, and use their newly-found wealth of information to create an inbound lead generation strategy that works.

If you do know the factors to search for about inbound strategy, how do you know what is considered as good practice and where will you be led off track? What do successful digital marketers do to attract high-quality leads into their business? What are things that you should consider in order to get in the right direction?

If these are the questions you are finding yourself faced with, we hope this infographic can help you out. In this infographic, we’ve put together a list of pointers that will allow you to develop a reliable and effective inbound lead generation strategy. These are the tools, tactics, and methods that many successful digital marketers and business owners use to communicate with their prospective leads, turn them into qualified leads, and ultimately, turn them into loyal customers of their business.

Getting to know and mastering these essential tools and methods of inbound lead generation takes time and practice. But when done correctly, all these techniques can help you convert website visitors into qualified leads. From setting the right goals to developing the right online channels and chasing lost leads, here are the key takeaways from the visual guide below from Digital Marketing Philippines which discuss the fundamental elements to ensure a successful inbound lead generation strategy.

1. Goals and objectives.
2. Landing page.
3. Hook or lead magnet.
4. Email funnel.
5. Traffic channels.
6. Ad Messages.
7. Remarketing.
8. Email Nurturing.

Check out the infographic checklist below to learn more.

Embedded from Digital Marketing Philippines.

Chart of the Day: Looking to increase sales? Abandon Cart programs could be just what you need

The opportunities Marketing Automation provides your business is immense. I've always found that it is more difficult to decide which sequences to launch first as there are so many. I went back and counted the number of automation's ideas, in our 'for prioritization' queue and found we had over 30, which is crazy.

If you just starting out on your journey to automate your marketing comms, you should build an Abandon Cart sequence.

MailChimp, the email marketing provider, studied the results of 150,000 of its own users and found that Abandon Cart Series provide the greatest increase in orders per recipient.

• Source: MailChimp - Identifying the Most Profitable Automation for E-Commerce Businesses
• Sample Size: Automation data—collected from 150,000 businesses that use MailChimp
• Recommended Resource: Essential Marketing Tools 2017

By Mohamed A. El-Erian

Having waited patiently for the “any-minute-now” moment, gold investors are taking comfort from the recent rise in price in response to geopolitical tensions. Yet the responsiveness of gold, as well as the overall price, appears weaker than would have been expected from historically based models — and for understandable reasons. The precious metal’s status as a haven has been eroded by the influence of unconventional monetary policy and the growth of markets for cryptocurrencies.

Gold prices rose almost 1 per cent on Tuesday morning as part of the risk aversion triggered by yet another brazen North Korean missile launch over Japan, together with uncertainty as to how the U.S. may respond. But trading below US$1,330, the overall response of gold prices to the last few months of heightened geopolitical risks has been relatively muted, particularly as the 10-year Treasury bond, another traditional haven, saw its yield trade down to below 2.10 percent that same morning.

• 2 million ounces of gold trades in one minute, shocking the market — and no one knows why
• Gold sinks like a stone after 1.8 million ounces traded in one minute

Two immediate reasons come to mind, one related to several assets and the other more specifically to gold.

First, and as I have discussed in several Bloomberg View articles, the prolonged pursuit of unconventional measures by central banks has helped meaningfully decouple asset prices from underlying fundamentals. In such circumstances, historically based models will tend to overestimate the reaction of asset prices to heightened geopolitical tensions — including the fall in risk assets such as equities, or the rise in gold.

Second, a portion of the traditional buyer interest in gold has been diverted to the growing markets for cryptocurrencies, which are also benefiting from a general increase in demand. As such, the returns to investors there have been significantly greater, sucking in even more funds.

The message for investors in both gold and multi-asset-class portfolios is clear.

While continuing to play a role in diversified market exposures, gold is less of a risk mitigator and asset-class diversifier, for now. Luckily for investors, the need has also been less pronounced, given that ample market liquidity has boosted returns, repressed volatility, and distorted correlations in their favor. But this is not to say that gold’s traditional role will not be re-established down the road. After all, central banks are in the later stages of reliance on unconventional monetary measures and, given this year’s spectacular price appreciation, cryptocurrencies are more vulnerable to unsettling air pockets.

 

A core component of successful rankings in online search is trust. If you want Google’s trust and boost your online marketing efforts, you need to show that you are legit.

When you focus on the items that encourage Google’s trust, you are likely to rank better in online search. Here’s what you need to know:

1. Start with Content Quality

When I first started as an online freelancer, it was pretty easy to rank. Google was kind of new, online marketing was kind of new. If you wrote 350 words and made it mostly about the keyword, you were probably going to rank.

Things are different now.

Technology has advanced. There are chatbots and A.I. Google knows when your 500-word puff piece is just an attempt to stuff more keywords on your site. Instead, you need to focus on truly quality content if you want to do better in online search.

Your content to be relevant to your readers. It should also be as free as possible from grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes. And it should be meaty. While it’s not going to kill you to have posts of 500 to 600 words, you will get even better results if you can write posts that are at least 1,000 words long.

Focus on quality content that offers good, relevant information, and you might be surprised at the trust Google shows you.

2. Website Authority

Google also wants to know that your website has authority. This relates to your link profile. Do you link out to reputable sources to bolster your case? Do others link to you?

The more quality, trusted sites that link to you, the higher your website’s authority in Google’s eyes. And that means trust and better placement in online search. Be careful, though. You won’t build authority with a lot of unnatural links. You want more natural links.

Hopefully, if you are consistent in creating high-quality content, and you can get the word out to already-trusted sites, your authority will increase over time.

3. Indexed Age

Finally, Google is going to look at how much time has passed since you were first indexed, as well as what’s been going on during that time. There’s no faking your indexed age (or your website authority). If you can remain consistent over time, your online search rankings are likely to rise. Start with quality content and website authority and be consistent in updating your site to keep in line with ever-evolving best practices.

Avoid Shady Online Search Practices

There really aren’t shortcuts. Yes, you can see short-term results with some online search hacks. However, it doesn’t take Google long to catch on. And when it does catch on to what you’re doing, it could mean serious consequences.

Stay away from people who promise the moon in a short amount of time. Instead, focus on what is likely to help you build trust with Google. Start with your content, and go from there.

Once you have that under control, you can work on other online search optimization strategies that include site speed, user experience, engagement, multimedia, and social presence.

Create a plan, and stick to it. Stay away from shady practices, and over time your website will earn Google’s trust and find success in online search.

Warren Buffett turns 87 on Wednesday.

In honor of his birthday, we decided to look back at one of his brilliant past insights: why a good business is one "your idiot nephew" can run.

Nowadays, high profile CEOs sometimes become synonymous with their companies.

Steve Jobs and Apple; Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook; Jeff Bezos and Amazon. It's hard to separate the man from the operation.

However, investing in a company simply based on its leadership might not be the best strategy, according to Buffett. Rather, as he said in an interview with the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) in May 2010, one should instead in invest in a business that any fool can run.

The following interview comes from a document dump from the National Archives, which released transcripts, meeting agendas, and confidentiality agreements from the FCIC. The group was set up by Congress in the aftermath of the to look into the causes of the event.

When asked by the FCIC what attracted him to the management of Moody's — the credit ratings agency that was at the center of the mortgage-backed securities debacle — when he made his initial investment, Buffett responded:

"I knew nothing about the management of Moody's. The — I've also said many times in reports and elsewhere that when a management with reputation for brilliance gets hooked up with a business with a reputation for bad economics, it's the reputation of the business that remains intact.

"If you've got a good enough business, if you have a monopoly newspaper, if you have a network television station — I'm talking of the past — you know, your idiot nephew could run it. And if you've got a really good business, it doesn't make any difference."

Of course, management does matter — anyone who's had a bad boss can tell you that. However, as Buffett says in the interview, a monopoly, like the only newspaper in a town, holds all the pricing power, and that's a good business that can likely take care of itself no matter who's at the helm.

He made a similar argument in the case of Moody's, noting that very few businesses had the competitive position that rating agencies like Moody's and Standard and Poor's had. And he even went as far as calling them a "natural duopoly to some extent," since both basically became the standard for regulators.

Tellingly, when asked whether he had ever pressed for the election of any board member, Buffett responded: "If I thought they needed me, I wouldn't have bought the stock."

SEE ALSO: Warren Buffett's brilliant explanation of how bubbles are formed

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: GARY SHILLING: The Fed is wrong about wage inflation

When marketers talk about understanding the target audience, most think about demographics. Yet in today’s competitive world, marketers require a much deeper, richer understanding of their target audience in order to reach and influence these individuals.

Enter psychographics.

While demographics explain who your buyer is, psychographics explain why they buy. Demographics focus on dry facts such as job title, location, age, income, industry, and more—areas that give you a sense of your target audience. In contrast, psychographic information captures more complex variables, such as values, behavioural patterns and spending habits, which can affect how and when that individual will make a buying decision.

Why use psychographics?

For example, let’s say that you are marketing a software solution. You know that your target audience is likely to be senior executives in financial roles within mid-sized companies in the mining industry, located in Canada. This is a great start—but, even knowing who your target is, do you know how to reach or influence them? Creating a strong communication strategy and effective messaging is as reliant on psychographic information as it is on demographics.

Psychographics also allows you to better position your messaging, such as through smarter keyword targeting. For example, you could target one message about your software system to CFOs who are parents searching for “kids programming” and another to for searches on “kids videogames fun.”

Psychographics in action

Many marketers will tell you that they intuitively know the psychographics of their audience—but just knowing this information isn’t enough. To be successful, you need to document your psychographic knowledge, communicate it within your organization, and regularly re-visit the information to ensure you remain on track.

While gathering psychographic data is important, the true value is achieved through using the data to create an effective marketing strategy. The best way to do this is through the creation of buyer personas. You can only effectively reach your target audience when you understand both their demographics and psychographics, and combine this information to create a detailed picture of your target buyer. This persona should draw from what you know of your current customers, while also painting a picture of the people you would like to work with in the future.

By creating a buyer persona, everyone within your company will better understand the true target audience and how to reach that target, whether through sales interactions, marketing, customer service, or more. A buyer persona also provides a “true North” for your communications that you can consult to make sure that your key messages appeal to your target buyer.

Fact is, these days it’s harder than ever for marketers to cut through the background noise. With keywords, targeted advertising and more, the internet has changed the relative importance of demographics and psychographics. It’s no longer enough just to know who you are targeting—you also need to know how to influence that target. Robust psychographic information, built into a detailed buyer persona, is the key to success.

Many employers are paying more and more attention to the well-being of their employees and to how they perceive their current jobs, especially because employee satisfaction is associated with important work-related outcomes such as organizational commitment and job performance, as well as with lower levels of turnover and absenteeism. But what role do unions, historically advocates for the well-being of workers, play in promoting employee happiness? The relationship between union membership and job satisfaction is still disputed vigorously among scholars. Many of the early studies suggest that union members are less satisfied than nonunion workers but are also less inclined to quit their jobs. This surprising finding has been considered an anomaly by many researchers, as unions should achieve better working conditions, which common sense suggests should lead to higher job satisfaction.

My research helps answer this puzzle. In a recent meta-study, I found that unions don’t seem to make workers less satisfied. Rather, workers who are likely to be dissatisfied — even after controlling for various aspects of their work — are more likely to join unions.

In his seminal 1978 work, Richard B. Freeman suggested that this apparent paradox could reflect the role of unions as a way for employees to voice critical attitudes toward the workplace. In order for the worker’s voice to be heard effectively, the union’s role included drawing workers’ attention to what was wrong with their jobs. (Freeman also noted that this could benefit companies: By providing employees a voice, unions gave workers the option to complain about problems rather than leave their jobs.)

According to this way of thinking, the dissatisfaction of union members makes some strategic sense — dissatisfaction may actually increase the bargaining power of the union and motivate both sides to view workplace problems as more serious.

Although this theory is interesting, an alternative view to the “voice hypothesis” is the “sorting hypothesis.” For example, workers who experience poor working conditions are more likely to complain and to join a union. Similarly, workers can be more or less irritable and fussy and so are more or less inclined to join a union to express their dissatisfaction. Thus, the sorting hypothesis postulates that the characteristics of individuals who join a union or the features of the workplace are likely to influence the discontent of union members and the fact that individuals tend to unionize. In this view, it’s not that being unionized makes employees less satisfied; it’s that being the type of person who’s often dissatisfied or working in a place where there’s lots to be dissatisfied about makes you more likely to join a union.

Which theory is right? Ultimately, it’s an empirical question.

The purpose of my study was to provide a systematic and quantitative review of the existing empirical evidence on the effects of unionization on overall job satisfaction. I conducted a meta-analysis with results from a pool of 235 estimates from 59 studies published in academic journals from 1978 to 2015. Meta-analysis is particularly useful for identifying and quantifying patterns, for drawing inferences from a diversity of results, and for generalizing from results derived from numerous single studies. I employed a meta-regression analysis to quantify the effect of unionization on job satisfaction and to identify the main factors underlying the diversity in the results reported in existing empirical studies.

Overall, I confirmed that unionization is negatively related to job satisfaction. Furthermore, the results suggest that the difference in job satisfaction between union members and nonunion members can be explained by a selection effect rather than a causal effect.

The meta-analysis controlled for differences across individuals, jobs characteristics (such as monthly pay, monthly hours, and so on), and workplace characteristics (industry, workplace size, workforce composition, whether the establishment is publicly owned), and revealed that individual attributes have a more important effect than workplace attributes on the feeling that workers have toward their jobs.

That is, some individuals seem to be characterized by higher aspirations toward their work environment, which leads them to join a union. Evidence also indicates that some other individual dispositions can influence job satisfaction. For example, ideological sympathy toward unions is an important factor that can lead an individual to join one, especially when there is freedom of choice about union membership, as is the case in some European countries.

Unfortunately, many of the studies in this literature don’t pay sufficient attention to these sorts of individual attributes. And the literature on this topic peaked in the early 2000s. As we academics like to say: More research is needed.

My results dispute the idea that unions cause their employees to be dissatisfied; the dissatisfaction of union members is real, but it’s due to the working conditions and the types of workers that tend to be unionized. That puts the onus for workplace satisfaction squarely on companies. The results suggest that dissatisfaction can’t be blamed on the union, which means HR managers should address workers’ expectations, in particular their need to express their discontent with certain elements of their jobs. It may be advisable to implement systems of employee representation and expression, especially when there is no union representative in the workplace. Workplace practices such as suggestion boxes or working groups aim to encourage employee participation and involvement in the attainment of workplace objectives. By providing information to management about employees’ collective preferences, these workplace practices can enable HR departments to choose a better mix of working conditions, workplace rules, and employee remuneration. This can produce a more satisfied, cooperative, and productive workforce.

Somehow it’s already 3pm yet you’re still working on the same small task you started first thing this morning. Your to-do list is piling up, you’re way behind schedule, and now it’s time for two hours of back-to-back Zoom calls. Yikes.

Most of us have been in this kind of situation—and many of us find ourselves there just about every day. Despite our best efforts to efficiently organize our time, stay on top of our schedule, and complete all of our tasks, we still find it hard to keep things under control.

Related read: How the Busiest People in SaaS Manage Their Email

So instead of creating endless to-do lists, take some time to identify the root of your time management problem. What are you doing wrong and where is your time slipping away?

To help, let’s take a look at 10 common mistakes that disturb your workflow and prevent you from staying within timelines.

1. Failing to prioritize

Identifying your top priority tasks can be overwhelming if most of your tasks require the same level of dedication. For example, maybe you’ve just started working on a high-priority task and you’re in the middle of brainstorming some brilliant ideas with your team when one of your colleagues suddenly steals your attention by pointing out that you need to refocus on an urgent issue that has just come up.

This kind of situation is unavoidable, but the key is learning how to prioritize—and figuring out how to do that is a process that takes time. Tools like Action Priority Matrix or Google Keep can help you prioritize and maintain a stable productivity level. If you’re into pen and paper, a new favorite is the Full Focus Planner.

2. Starting your day late

Your efforts to complete your daily tasks will fall flat if you don’t start your day early or at least on time. The most influential leaders share one thing in common: They get up early. Starting your day late almost guarantees you’ll feel rushed throughout the day. “Early” is different for everyone, so take a look at your daily schedule and figure out when your day should begin and end.

3. Ineffectively scheduling tasks

Our productivity level not only changes from day to day, but it also varies from person to person. While some people are at the peak of their productivity the moment they wake up, others tend to show their maximum potential once the sun sets. The easiest way to balance your time is to find out what your peak time is and allocate that time for doing top-priority work instead of spreading it on completing some less important, repetitive tasks.

4. Procrastinating

Procrastination is probably your worst enemy. There is nothing more detrimental to your concentration and true potential than going around in circles and making excuses about not getting down to real work. Not only does it create a huge backlog but it also makes you feel guilty about not having started your work, especially if it is urgent.

The best way to avoid this scenario is to devote a specific amount of your time to just starting. This will trigger your imagination, draw your attention, and soon you will be entirely involved in the project. If that doesn’t work, try breaking the task into several manageable pieces.

5. Failing to manage distractions

While a variety of communication channels and social media platforms allow us to communicate more easily, they’re also majorly distracting. Hands up if you’ve ever meant to “quickly” scroll through your Twitter or Instagram feed and actually wound up spending, like, an hour or more.

Whether it’s the phone that keeps ringing or notifications that you keep getting from either chat or social media groups, they interrupt our workflow and break our creative process. Turn off all the notifications and close Slack, schedule time free from interruptions, and minimize the time you spend on things that don’t have much impact on your work.

6. Undervaluing the time something will take to finish

One of the most common pitfalls most ambitious people tend to make is to miscalculate the time and energy they will need to complete a particular task. This behavior is typical of A-type overachievers who think they can keep everything under control and never turn down an opportunity no matter how demanding it is.

If you’re suffering from the same ailment, productivity coach Kimberly Medlock has a solution: Write down the amount of time you’ll need to complete each one of the tasks on your to-do list. She also recommends doubling that time. For example, if one task takes 20 minutes, block off 40 minutes. It’s pretty common for people to underestimate the time it takes to do something.

7.  Multitasking

Striving to become proficient at what we do, we usually fall into the trap of multitasking. Theoretically, multitasking is feasible if you have to get on top of your workload. However, doing many things at the same time prevents you from focusing on all of your tasks equally and takes much more of your time than completing your tasks in a sequence. In other words, if you want to be good at multitasking you need to be super organized and maintain a high level of concentration, creativity, and precision.

In the end, multitasking isn’t for everyone so choose your battles carefully. Whenever the circumstances allow it, forget about multitasking and focus on one task at a time. This will help you produce high-quality work and give you a sense of completion.

8. Being busy vs. being effective

As much as we would like to stay focused on high-value work, we sometimes lose track and find ourselves doing a bundle of low-priority things that not only eat our energy and time but also have little or no impact on the final outcome we’re trying to achieve.

To avoid this scenario, ask yourself:

• Is this useful?
• How does this contribute to the ultimate goal?
• Could it be delegated?

If you have some minor tasks to deal with, try bunching them out. For example, instead of doing one task each day, do the three days of minor tasks in one afternoon.

9. Being a perfectionist

Our entire life is a learning process. Every time we dive into a new project, we face a number of hurdles, but we also learn how to jump over them along the way. While you should strive towards excellence, keep in mind that sometimes done is better than perfect.

This goes back to prioritization. Your time is limited and if you don’t want to stay overtime you have to sometimes be satisfied with good—don’t let perfect be the enemy of good as they say.

10. Skipping breaks

Whether you’re working on an urgent task or a bunch of low-priority ones, set aside time for breaks. According to a study by Draugiem Group, our brains simply weren’t built to focus for eight hours. The only reasonable solution is to step away and do something not related to your job—eat, go for a quick walk, exercise, or simply do nothing and relax. This should help you clear your thoughts and gain more psychological energy for the work to come.

Take time to make time

Really, a lot of productivity comes down to spending time planning. When you’re feeling crushed by a ton of work, spending time writing out a to-do list, blocking off your schedule, or prioritizing tasks can feel like a waste of time—but stopping to plan will wind up saving you time and stress in the end.

Editor’s note: This post was first published in August 2017 and updated in March 2021.

The post 10 Common Time Management Mistakes That Are Slowing You Down appeared first on OpenView.

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Amazon launched its Prime membership program in China last October, but it has not found much success in the country since then, The Wall Street Journal reports.

The Seattle-based e-commerce titan had only 1.3% of the Chinese online retail market in 2016, down from the approximately 2% it had in 2011.

Amazon has struggled to gain traction in China, as its Prime subscription offerings and mobile app don’t appeal to consumers, and it faces fierce competition from incumbent titans:

• The benefits of a Prime subscription aren’t a differentiator in China. Prime’s fast and free delivery, and its discounts, don’t stand out in China because local companies can match or surpass Amazon’s offerings, Shirley Lu, an analyst for Euromonitor International, told the WSJ. Prime is also without Prime Video in China due government censorship, further weakening the program's value. Moreover, Chinese consumers are wary of membership programs due to previous scandals, according to Deborah Weinswig, managing director at Fung Global Retail & Technology. That's problematic for Amazon as it relies heavily on Prime, and other Chinese competitors offer free shipping without a subscription.
• Amazon’s mobile app design falls behind its Chinese competitors’ apps, which is a barrier to success in the country. Mobile is hugely important in China — 66% of digital purchases were made through mobile phones in 2016, amounting to $450.3 billion in sales, and that is expected to grow going forward. Amazon’s app, however, seems to be missing the mark in China as it is bland and bare, while competitors’ apps are more colorful and festive, which may appeal more to Chinese consumers, Lu said.
• Amazon faces stiff competition in China. Domestic e-tailers Alibaba and JD.com control 47% and 20% of China’s online retail market share, respectively, dwarfing Amazon’s current position. The companies are extremely entrenched in the Chinese market and have spent enormously on promotions as they compete with each other, which has weakened Amazon's ability to compete on pricing and win over consumers.

Amazon may shift its focus in China to providing Western goods, but it might not find solace in that either. One of the major weaknesses of Alibaba and Chinese e-commerce in general is a reputation for counterfeit goods, a problem Amazon could try to exploit by positioning itself as a destination for authentic Western products. In fact, Colin Sebastian, Amazon analyst at Robert W. Baird & Co., told the WSJ that Amazon will likely continue to focus on its global store, moving away from attempts to compete in the country as a mainstream retailer. However, JD.com and Alibaba have been making concerted efforts to shed that reputation and build out their luxury offerings, potentially hurting one of Amazon’s remaining advantages.

They also boast their own dedicated marketplaces for foreign brands. If Amazon wishes to grow its presence in China, it should tailor its mobile app and Prime subscription benefits to better appeal to Chinese consumers, as providing Western goods is unlikely to be an a successful niche for it as things currently stand.

BI Intelligence estimates that, with current policies in place, global cross-border e-commerce will generate more than $1 trillion in sales for retailers by 2021.

However, over the past year, two key global events — the presidential election in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK — have cast uncertainty over the cross-border e-commerce market in the form of protectionist trade policies that could restrict the flow of goods between different countries. Growing economic nationalism in Western democracies — a phenomenon brought on by negative perceptions of the trade liberalization and globalization that these countries have experienced since the end of the Cold War — fueled both of these political upheavals.

Jonathan Camhi, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on Trump, Brexit, and cross-border e-commerce that:

• Forecasts the growth of cross-border e-commerce globally, as well as growth in the specific corridors that could be impacted by Brexit, NAFTA renegotiations, and US-China trade relations.
• Examines trends and challenges in cross-border e-commerce between the UK and EU, as well as between the US and Canada, Mexico, and China.
• Analyzes the impact that different scenarios — including a "hard" vs. "soft" Brexit, or targeted tariffs imposed on US-China trade — could have on cross-border e-commerce between the countries involved.
• Provides insight into the likelihood of these scenarios, helping online retailers adjust their plans for international expansion and sales.  

To get the full report, subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND more than 250 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> Learn More Now

You can also purchase and download the report from our research store.

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A high-speed mobile network beats out unlimited data as a “must-have” feature for consumers, according to BI Intelligence’s exclusive Digital Telecom Consumer Survey. 

Overall, 84% of consumers said that a high-speed mobile network is a need-to-have offering when selecting a wireless provider — well above the 68% who said unlimited data. The results are surprising considering that unlimited data is the focus of most carriers' mobile offerings. 

Here's why consumers now value network speed over unlimited data: 

• Consumers are viewing more and more video content on mobile, and that means they need more data. And this trend is set to compound — mobile video is expected to reach nearly 75% of global mobile data traffic by 2021, up from 50% in 2016, according to Ericsson.
• To meet consumer demand, carriers are bringing back unlimited data packages. Verizon, for example, reintroduced an unlimited plan after suffering substantial customer losses in Q1 2017. The telecom lost a net 289,000 postpaid phone customers, but said it was on pace to lose nearly 400,000 users prior to its unlimited plan launch. The new offering successfully curbed the flow of departures.
• Mobile video consumption relies on data and network speed — since consumers have access to unlimited data, network speed has come to forefront of demand. Consumers now consider a high-speed network the must-have feature.
• So although consumers value unlimited data, network speed may be  more important. While consumers may have switched carriers for unlimited data in the past, more now rank network speed as a must-have, and this could present an opportunity for carriers.

Additionally, telecoms' unlimited data plans actually do have limits — to offer these plans, telecoms throttle network speeds. Carriers are struggling to maintain network quality while meeting the growing demands of their unlimited data subscribers, according to a report by Open Signal. Some telecoms, like Verizon and AT&T, have opted to offer unlimited data plans that deliver high-bandwidth mobile content, like mobile video, at reduced speeds, to stave off the strain caused by growing mobile video consumption. Throttling likely exacerbates consumers' existing demand for faster network speeds.

While 5G, the next generation of mobile networking technology, will support the boom in streaming mobile video, it's still a long ways off. 5G technology is expected to increase mobile network capacity by 1,000 in 10 years compared with today’s 4G networks, according to estimates from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. In the meantime, carriers will continue to find ways to accommodate growing demand for mobile video to win subscribers.

BI Intelligence’s Digital Telecom Consumer survey examines consumers’ preferences and ratings of the major US telecoms and the features they provide. It rates Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, Sprint, and other mobile carriers on loyalty and user experience, and it looks at consumers' real must-haves. The full report is NOW available to BI Intelligence enterprise clients. To get access to this report, please email Matt Jackson (mjackson@businessinsider.com).

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The questions you're asking buyers may be good. But you can ask better questions simply by thinking through the purpose of each and every question you ask.

Contrast these three question pairs to distinguish between the before and after versions of questions.

It’s quite difficult to decide what to charge, especially when you’re first starting out. If you under charge you run the risk of being overloaded with work and not making enough profit. Overcharge and you might not get any work. If you charge the same as your competitors then you wonder why buyers should choose you. And if you aren’t that unique then why should they buy from you? It’s like a never ending circle of questions and choices.

PROFESSIONAL OR HOBBY

Back in the day, many, many moons ago, when I was a market stall holder and making my own smelly soaps and bath bombs, pricing was always an issue. Take a 100g bar of soap. To the average buyer, it’s just a bar of soap. It smells nice. It might also be a pretty colour or novelty design. Added bonus that it’s handmade. Another bonus that it was handmade by a local. But not many people would ask about the ingredients and what went into making it. The quality of handmade soap, and bath bomb ingredients can vary. A lot! As does the price of such ingredients. Using the nice little extras such as an SLS free base, perhaps a bit of shea butter or aloe vera all added to the production costs.

I used to attend various craft fairs and farmers markets events and it was an endless battle of being undercut. Anyone who has ever dabbled in the craft fair market will know this only too well. If you’re doing things right then your product will be priced accordingly. And then you would have the hobbyist. Not that I’m knocking anyone side hustling because you know how much I love a good side hustle. But still, for something like soap, you need a cosmetics license and insurance to be able to make and sell such items. Many of the hobbyists I encountered didn’t have such things, thus didn’t have the costs either. Often they would forget about tax, NI and paying the electric bill all has to be factored into your pricing. They would sell their products, often similar to mine at £1 cheaper. Naturally, the unsuspecting buyer would always go for the cheaper product.

THE STRUGGLE IS REAL

It’s much the same in my business today. There is always someone willing to do the job cheaper. I see so many adverts for people willing to sell social media management for £50 a month! And there will be a never ending supply of people happy to pay that. Which makes my job harder when I have to tell these people that £50 per month is an unrealistic figure for me to work for. At Socially Famous PR we also have to deal with the willing volunteers that will do it for nothing. Managing a celebrities social media is very different to a business account and requires a different approach. There will always be a super fan or random admin person in the agent’s office who is willing to do the job for free.

As I’ve talked about before, cheap or free is not professional. It’s not what a professional business or public figure should be looking for.

Business costs are real. Overheads don’t go away simply because you drop your price. You may well miss out on some business because you won’t drop your price to below a reasonable profit level. But you’re not a charity. Or at least not for now anyway. You will be if you keep on cutting your prices though!

So with all that in mind I’ve put together a list of 5 things you need to consider when setting your prices. And undercutting your competitors isn’t one of them!

5 TIPS TO ENSURE YOU’RE CHARGING ENOUGH

TIME INVOLVED

In my soap making days I did not sleep in December. Christmas was my pay day and every day was busy. That meant after a full day on the stall it was back home to make more stock for the following day. In retail, having well-stocked shelves in a must. So, every day my stocks needed replenishing. And since it was December I never had a day off. With soap and bath bombs you can’t just throw all the ingredients in and they are ready. They need time to cool and set. Every night this meant making several batches and leaving them to cool over night to then have to be up super early the next day to package them.

If I had factored in my hourly rate for doing this, my bars of soap would have been selling at £10 each. There is no way they would sell for that. No amount of sales patter and pretty packaging would make up for it. So, my time had to take the hit. The craft makers amongst you will understand this pain.

Now, because what I do requires very little in the way of physical stock, then essentially I am charging for my time. For some work, I do charge an hourly rate and for others, it’s a set price. But that set price is made up of a good estimate of the time it will take me to do something. I monitor my time very closely to ensure that I’m not spending too much time on things that have no value to me. And I allow myself a set amount of time to work on the things that will grow my brand, be it this blog or active promotions. They are, hopefully, the pay days of the future.

SKILL INVOLVED

It stands to reason that the longer you do something the better you get at it. My prices now reflect that I am a lot more experienced than when I first started out. There’s also no standard hourly fee regardless of the work. SEO prices tend to be higher than social media management because SEO requires a broader understanding and skill set. Likewise, if a client also wants specific content creation then that is charged higher than standard social media management. Again, it’s all down to the skills required to do the job. I value my skills and know the time and effort that has gone into acquiring them. Therefore my pricing reflects that. If I was to undercharge for my work then that would be under valuing my own experience and skills.

When people tell me they can do it better or cheaper themselves, I just tell them to go ahead. Chances are they can’t and won’t.

TAXES

Such a dreaded word. But sure enough, taxes are a burden we all have to carry. And so does your customer. Don’t drop your price to incorporate your tax. Add it on. Once you’ve accounted for tax, national insurance and maybe even VAT that’s a fair chunk of your profits gone. Not only that there are your insurance costs too. Your insurance should always be covered in your costs. After all, it’s your customer who is most likely to sue you!

Whilst I’ve just mentioned VAT there is one point that many miss. In the UK and Ireland, we have VAT turnover thresholds that you can hit before you have to register for VAT. You can voluntarily do this before you are anywhere near the threshold. Whether you do this will probably depend on how much VAT you could potentially be claiming back off your purchases if your sales aren’t that high. Best to speak to an accountant on that one. But one VAT you can’t dodge is the VAT MOSS payable within the EU for the sale of digital goods. This is not voluntary. It’s mandatory and even if you only sell a £1 ebook to someone in France, you have to pay. Sorry. I know it sucks.

There are plenty of shopping cart plugins that can do all the calculations for you and make sure that your customer is paying the correct rate. Don’t leave it to chance and don’t absorb the cost.

BANK AND CARD FEES

Have you ever been in a shop and seen the sign where they say there is a minimum spend for card payments or they add a 50p charge? That’s because it can be quite expensive to process card payments when you are just a small business. Similarly, PayPal has different charges for different things if you are using them for online transactions. Keep an eye on the small print.

Likewise, banks love to lure you in with their free banking periods when you first start but after the initial 12 months, you’ll soon realise how banks are making their money. When you can be charged for just depositing money into your account it’s worth keeping an eye on ways you can keep these costs down.

These are just another forgotten costs that many small business owners forget about so make sure you are incorporating them. You don’t want a surprise bill for bank or card fees taking away your hard-earned profits.

COVERING ALL THE COSTS

It’s the little things we tend to forget. Do you work from home? Are you factoring in your home offices fair share of the gas and electric? Or even the council tax? You can claim business rates against your home office if that is all you specifically use that room for. For many though it’s not really a suitable option and the council will want to come out and inspect your premises.

If you use your car for your business are you taking all the costs into account? Or are you offsetting the depreciation at year end if you own the car outright and it’s a business asset? It’s not just the fuel you put in. What about the oil? The headlight bulbs? The valeting? It all mounts up.

Computers can be costly little items when you add in all the software, apps, subscription services. Are you accounting for them all?

It’s important that you know every single cost for running your business and keep track of them. Not just for accounting purposes but for pricing. When you do a costing exercise like this you may find there are many things you’ve been absorbing rather than adding on to your price.

And don’t forget inflation is real not just a news headline. Keep an eye on your costs as the years go by. I’ve noticed the past year that the cost of many of the subscription services I use have gone up quite a lot. This is due to the poor exchange rates we now have to suffer in the UK. Granted we don’t have a crystal ball so we don’t know what the future holds, but as Brexit looms, I suspect these rates will change a lot. Keep an eye on anything you pay in dollars or euros.

WHAT DID I MISS? HAVE YOU BEEN CHARGING ENOUGH?

What hidden costs have you found in the running of your business? What have you suddenly realised you haven’t incorporated into your pricing structure? Let me know in the comments below.

There is a sales technique that, while often used by larger sales teams, isn't often used by individuals or small teams — a sales cadence.

Having a sales cadence can yield great results for you. It can help build business relationships and structure your approach to sales.

Here is a quick course on what a sales cadence is, the benefits of using one, and how to create a sales cadence, with winning examples.

Keep reading, or use the links below to jump to the section you're looking for:

• What is a sales cadence?
• Advantages of a Sales Cadence
• Sales Cadence Examples
• How to Build a Sales Cadence
• Sales Cadence Best Practices

Advantages of a Sales Cadence

Whether you’re a team of one or 50, implementing a well-defined sales cadence can make your client prospecting process far more efficient and effective.

Focused Effort

Chickens with their heads cut off run fast, but they don’t run far. For many of us, this all too closely resembles our haphazard approach to networking and sales efforts: lots of unstructured effort.

Sometimes sales teams call a prospect, then send them a follow-up email at once. Other times, they wait a day between the two. Sometimes they wait a day and then forget to send an email at all.

Or, in the most embarrassing cases, they lose track of where they are in the sales process and send the same email or make the same call, twice. It can be a total mess.

Sales cadences make it easier to track where you are in the sales or networking process. You always send a follow-up email or contact prospects every two days. With clearly defined rules for your sales strategy, you never risk sending the same email twice or missing steps in the sales process.

Easy Tracking = Easy Refinement

Once you start using a clearly defined sales cadence, it's much easier to track and refine your sales process. Imagine you have a five-step process you can view in your CRM. With a quick glance, you can clearly see where you are with each client and where you tend to lose contact with your prospects.

You can begin refining your approach with this information. If you can see outreach calls tend to be more effective later in the process, you can adjust your approach to call prospects only once you have established a relationship through email or on LinkedIn.

This data lets you continually optimize your sales approach and improve your results.

Scalability

You may be able to get away with using the "headless chicken" sales approach when you have one or two clients, but when you begin working with five, eight, or 10 clients at a time — or you start hiring salespeople — scalability becomes an issue.

It just isn’t possible to track where each client is in your sales process in your head or keep your sales strategy aligned across a small team without structure.

Having a clearly defined sales cadence solves that scalability issue. Not only is it easier for you to organize and track where your different prospects are in your sales funnel, but it also becomes easier to enlist others to work with you.

A simple one-page flowchart is enough to illustrate to any new sales reps you hire the exact sales strategy you use, and they can begin making calls and interacting with clients at once.

Sales Cadence Examples

Sales cadences vary greatly between individuals, teams, and organizations. However, the frequency, method of contact, and time of contact are always structured and consistent.

Consistency and structure are what make sales cadences so effective.

These examples will show how anyone can benefit from using a sales cadence to define their sales process.

Check out this AMA session with Sales Hacker CEO Max Altschuler. The following is an example of one of the sales cadences he’s used to connect with prospects:

• Day 1: Email/InMail
• Day 3: Email in the morning, call in the afternoon
• Day 5: Call in the morning, call with a voicemail in the afternoon
• Day 7: Email in the morning, call in the afternoon with a voicemail
• Day 10: Email and call in the morning

How I Used a Sales Cadence to Land Meetings with 11 of the Largest Ecommerce Players in the World

A client once asked me to help them increase their sales and industry presence in the U.K. market, specifically with the top 200 fashion and apparel brands and retailers in the region.

Unlike in my home country of Brazil, I had only five business connections in the U.K. To succeed in this market, I would need to essentially grow my network from scratch.

Despite my lack of contacts, I grew my network to over 300 connections, many of which were major players in ecommerce and apparel in the U.K., Dubai, Turkey, and Romania.

These contacts led to 11 meetings with some of the largest ecommerce players in the world -- and a grand total of $2.13 million in new business opportunities in my client’s pipeline.

I want to share some practical advice about developing your own sales cadence — from developing your target lead list to actually landing a client. To do that, I will share the process that resulted in my meetings with some of the world's biggest players in ecommerce — Farfetch, Debenhams, and Ted Baker, to name a few.

1. Preparation

People often go down the wrong path from the beginning. They don’t have a clear sense of their target clients, so they go after any and every prospect they can think of. This strategy isn’t efficient. Why spend time chasing prospects you're not well-equipped to serve?

Before doing anything else, you need to make sure you understand who your prospects are. Here are a few questions you can answer for yourself to narrow down who you want to target:

• What industry is my product the best fit for?
• How mature are my ideal clients? Are they startups? Funded companies? Multi-national?
• Which regions do I want to focus on?

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it should help you start to define whom you want to focus your efforts on.

Once you have an idea of whom you want to target, it's critical to know some basic characteristics about the prospect. To do this, you should know at least the following about your targets:

• Company name
• Number of employees
• Company location
• Dream internal contact (who would you most want to talk to given the chance?)
• Realistic contact (who do you think you can realistically talk to?)
• How many people you want to target for the account (the sum of #4 and #5)
• What social media sites do the company and your contacts from #4 and #5 use?

The answers to these questions will help you spend less time chasing bad leads.

When you contact prospects, show that you're writing specifically to them and have something unique to offer. To do that, you have to understand everything you can about them and their business. Before your first outreach, know the following about your prospect (if not more):

• Their pain points
• What they might be afraid of
• The changes taking place in their market
• Their competitors

The answers to the questions from the previous three sections will help you stand out from the crowd when you contact your prospective client.

You will be able to show you understand their business, cite specific challenges they may be facing, and contact prospects through the channels that give you the highest likelihood for success.

I believe marketing and sales should always be in full alignment. Building a persona can be a daunting task. If you’re hitting any blockers, I'd suggest you use HubSpot's free tool for making personas.

2. Developing Sales Cadences

Now that I know who my targets are, what their industry is like, and the best ways to reach them, it’s time to start the conversation. Below is the general sales cadence I use, which involves both old-school methods (calling) and new ones (social media).

• Total Companies Contacted: 90
• Total Responses: 21
• Positive Responses — agreed to a meeting or demo): 11
• Negative: 10
• In-Progress: 11
• No Response: 58
• 2-3 contact points/professionals per company
• On average, I needed 46 touches per contact

That is an average as some companies like Debenhams (70-plus touches) or Farfetch (300-plus touches) required more effort to get a meeting.

Here’s the day-by-day breakdown:

This sales cadence lets me contact many contacts and multiple accounts in a repeatable, efficient, and varied way. If you want great results, put one in place as soon as possible using the example above or the steps below.

1. Set a Goal for Your Sales Cadence

An effective sales cadence is relevant to your prospect, business goals, and resources. To create a cadence that hits on every point, start with goal-setting.

Many sales objectives are broad, like increasing qualified lead numbers. But to create a great sales cadence you need something more specific. Think about the smaller steps that lead up to the point your prospect becomes a qualified lead.

For example, do you want more form completions on a product landing page? Do you want to schedule more demos?

Starting with a specific goal also makes it easier to see from your audience's perspective. This helps you make educated guesses to create the best experience for each prospect.

2. Figure Out the Target Audiences for Your Goal

Once your goal is set, choose a target audience. Factors to group your audience might include:

• Industry
• Company size
• Sales territory
• Job title
• Psychographic factors
• Behavioral data

You can collect insights from your team, review market research, or analyze your analytics to decide on your target audience.

At this stage, it's also a good idea to figure out who you want to avoid attracting for this goal. This process can help you figure out which prospects are a right fit for a goal, and which prospects could slow down progress.

3. Segment Leads Based on Personas

Once you've separated your audience based on other factors, you may want to further segment your list. At this stage, it's a good idea to segment by buyer persona.

It's ideal to refine your segments as much as you can because it helps you personalize your sales cadences. You can use persona cues to refine design choices, timing, CTAs, and more.

4. Decide on Communication Channels for Each Segment

Once you have your segments complete, it's time to choose their ideal channels for sales outreach. A cadence is usually multichannel. The more engaged your segment is with each channel, the more likely it is to be effective as a whole.

For example, a sales cadence that includes messaging on TikTok is great for selling to B2C bakers and chefs. But B2B baking suppliers may be more active on LinkedIn.

Start with the channel that supports your ultimate business goal best. Then work backward to choose supporting channels that can help guide prospects to that final step.

5. Build a Sales Cadence for Each Segment

Once your research is complete, you can begin creating your sales cadences. Your cadence can be as formal or informal as you like. That said, you want to make sure that each step of your cadence is clear enough that every person on your team can follow it consistently.

Each step in your sales cadence should connect with the right prospect at the right time with the right content. A quick outline for each step in your cadence should include:

• Communication channel
• Number of contact attempts
• The time between each attempt
• Messaging
• Notes for design and images
• Timing for the next step

6. Automate Where It Makes Sense

Once you have an outline of your sales cadence, look for chances for automation. This approach can help sales teams manage larger pipelines, increasing sales overall.

A sales automation tool can help you maintain sequences for prospects at all stages of a cadence. They can also help you create workflows to:

• Remind sales reps about calls and timing
• Send emails
• Update data for audience segments

HubSpot customers: Action-based notifications can also help you stay on time with every step in your sales cadence.

7. Add Value With Each Outreach

According to 2022 PwC research, 31% of customers say that businesses can build trust with high-quality products or services.

So, salespeople don't need to shy away from talking about products and services when reaching out to prospects. But they do need to offer resources and information that offer value.

Other ways to add value with each contact include:

• Active listening
• Asking useful questions
• Sharing expertise
• Focusing on how you can help

1. Create Buyer Personas

A buyer persona is a fictional character that combines the qualities of your ideal customer. You can create personas for each niche, product, and service your business offers. A single product can have multiple buyer personas, and you can use that to your advantage.

This data can help your business understand what inspires your users. It lets you know why they remember, purchase, and recommend your products. You can conduct surveys, take note of anecdotes, or pay professionals to compile this research. This persona-building tool can also simplify the process.

2. Narrow Communication Channels

It can be tempting to use every communication channel available to connect with your prospects. Email, video chat, QR codes — the list of choices is exciting and seemingly endless.

At the same time, just because you can find your prospects anywhere doesn't mean that you should. Prospects will be more open and welcoming of outreach that feels friendly, useful, and natural.

Limiting communication channels in your sales cadence can help set expectations. Limitations also can boost creativity. Choosing a set number of channels can help you be more strategic with your messaging and other decisions.

Other factors to think about when selecting cadence channels include:

• Administrative and financial needs
• Audience trends
• Scalability

3. Figure Out the Right Number of Times to Contact Prospects

Some say it takes five calls to connect with a prospect, while others say eight. Some say two follow-up emails are the minimum, while others send five or more. Consistency is key to building successful sales relationships. But that consistency isn't necessarily about the number of times you connect.

Instead, think about each prospect as a new friend. Whether you met them at a softball game at the park or a local event, if you want to build a relationship, you may need to connect more than once.

The right number of times to connect will come down to a few questions:

• What expectations did you set when you first connected?
• Was there a mutual connection before you met?
• What is their schedule like?

While not every prospect in your sales cadence is a new friend, you can use these questions as a guide to make a best guess about cadence timing. These tips about prospecting touchpoints can also help.

4. Refine Your Value Proposition

You might already have a broad value proposition that you use when you're talking about your business. But to make your sales cadence more powerful, get specific.

Draft a few concise sentences that tie your competitive advantage and brand to the action you want your prospect to take. Write a few different versions. This way your message will be consistent, but not identical, at each step of your cadence.

Featured resource: Value proposition templates

5. Find a Logical Rhythm for Your Outreach

Great conversations have a rhythm, and so do the best sales cadences. This rhythm isn't just about timing or how often you connect.

Instead, it's about forming a connection. To create the right flow, there are a few important points to remember.

First, keep it simple. The more complex your sales cadence is, the more likely you are to get off-beat or confuse your prospect.

Next, respond and adapt. You built your cadence timing with average response times in mind. If your prospect is responding more or less than the expected average, adjust timing accordingly.

Finally, pause and feel the timing from your prospects' point of view. Too much time between contacts and your product won't be top of mind. But too little connection and you'll fade from their interest.

6. Test and Optimize

Even a top-performing sales cadence could have room for improvement. To figure out where you can tweak your cadence for better results, test and optimize your cadence regularly.

Select KPIs for your sales cadence before you begin reaching out to prospects. Then, figure out which KPIs can track automatically and which will need manual tracking. This way you won't miss any useful early data.

KPIs for testing your sales cadences might include:

• Email opens
• Email clicks
• Return calls
• Form completions

They might also include anecdotal data like product questions, connecting with decision-makers, or comments from prospects.

Then, compare collected data across your full cadence for a set number of prospects or amount of time. This can help you find which steps are more or less effective in reaching your goals.

7. Set a Deadline

Some sales teams operate with an endless and consistent process. While that can sometimes be effective, a sales cadence should have a set duration from the first to the last touchpoint.

Depending on your cadence, it could take a month to complete. Others are shorter campaigns. Either way, you should outline the right amount of time to complete your full sales cadence.

Then, measure results over that period of time. This can help you understand the performance of your cadence as a whole. It can also spark ideas for different goals, segments, and outreach for new cadences.

Great Sales Cadences Can Give You a Professional Advantage

Building relationships that close sales isn't easy. You need to be consistent, have empathy and patience, and use every tool in your toolbox to reach your end goals.

A sales cadence creates a structure that gives your relationships room to grow. It creates a positive and professional path to connect with new prospects. And it helps your prospects get what they need to make the best decisions for their needs. So try these examples and tips for your sales cadences. Then, watch your qualified leads, sales, and influence grow.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in July 2017 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

My hypothesis? Sales is not about the close, it's about the open. Too many salespeople focus their energy on closing and ignore the steps you take to get there. But if you focus on what your prospect actually needs, and are respectful of their time, the close comes naturally.

For me, it’s critical to have the right process -- a process that’s all about the prospect’s best interest. If your process is 100% in tune to your prospect’s needs -- even if it means letting them go -- you’ll close more deals, and waste less time with prospects who won’t/shouldn’t buy. Here are the three steps I take when talking with prospects.

My 3-Step Process

Step 1 (Connect)

I find out what brought them to us and gauge whether HubSpot can -- or should -- help. I ask questions like, “Why did you download that specific ebook on SEO? Are you trying to generate leads?” If that answer is “Yes,” I say, “I can show you how to generate leads in 20 minutes.”

I want to teach my prospects while I’m learning more about if and how HubSpot can help. That way, even if we’re not a good fit, they’ve learned something valuable from the conversation. And they’ll be more likely to buy from us in the future, because they appreciate the help.

Step 2 (Discovery)

Next, we define their business growth goals and determine if one of our products can help them hit those goals. If they can, I show them how our software works and how it can accelerate growth.

For example, if a prospect is focused on website traffic, I encourage them to think about what they want those visitors to do once they land on their site. Or, if they’re focused on closing deals, I help them think through how to judge cold, warm, and hot leads.

Finally, I review how HubSpot’s software can fill those areas of opportunity, and we discuss whether it’s worth their time to evaluate it.

Step 3 (Demo)

Evaluation is the last step. I help stakeholders understand the gaps in their sales or marketing strategy, and I outline how our software can fill those gaps. I also answer any lingering questions about our offering, so the prospect can make an educated decision. In one hour or less, they’ll understand how our tools help them grow.

That’s it. With this process, I don’t have to close. If, at any point, I feel the prospect can’t benefit from HubSpot, or if they don’t have the necessary resources, I tell them it’s not a good fit. This might feel contrary to everything you’ve learned in sales, but it’s in everyone’s best interest.

By saving the prospect time throughout the sales process, the close comes automatically. We reiterate the gaps that are preventing them from growing. We recap why it’s important to fix those gaps. And we agree that HubSpot’s software will help them achieve their business goals. I wrap up with one simple question: “What else do you need from me to earn your business?”

Try it Yourself

I’ve shared how I use this three-step process at HubSpot. Here’s how to use it in any sales scenario.

Step 1

If you’re working with an inbound lead, frame your initial questions around the pages they visited on your site and/or the content they downloaded.

If you’re calling a prospect who hasn’t interacted with your company before, ask questions to qualify whether your product/ service can help. Be curious and honest. If you can’t help them, tell them. Trying to close someone who doesn’t need your help is what makes the close difficult.

For example, if you’re selling management consulting services, you might ask, “Is your company having trouble with employee churn?” or “Do you have several first-time managers on your team?” Your prospect’s answers will tell you if there’s a gap that your service can fill.

Step 2

Once you know your prospect’s needs and challenges, ask about their business goals. If your prospect is facing a challenge that doesn’t meaningfully impact their business, it’s probably not worth their time to evaluate a solution right now.

In our management consulting example, you might ask, “Is employee onboarding and ramp up a business priority for you right now?” If they answer, “Yes, it’s crucial that we get new hires up to speed to meet the rest of our business goals this quarter” you know they have an immediate problem you can provide an immediate solution for.

If the prospect shows minor interest, but you can see their problem has serious business implications, this is where you apply pressure. Educate them on the negative impact the problem will have on their organization’s growth.

Making the business case for your product or service is more helpful than bullying your prospect into giving you their credit card number. I’ve argued with prospects about how important their problems are, and received a big “Thank you” afterward.

Step 3

Help your prospect’s team understand everything they need to know about your solution. Don’t just tell them how your solution functions. Help them understand how your product or service helps them reach their goals.

If you’ve identified that their business has a problem, and you’ve been clear about how your product or service can fix it, they’ll make the right decision and buy.

That way, you don’t have to wait for a closing meeting to make your final pitch. You’ve given them all the information they need to make an informed decision.

Care More About Your Prospect

This approach requires you to care more about your prospect than you care about yourself. During the discovery call, if a prospect is enamored with HubSpot, but doesn’t have the necessary budget, or the business impact doesn’t outweigh the costs, we'll have an honest conversation.

I'll tell them, “Listen, I can demo this for you, but you’re going to fall in love with something that either doesn’t make sense for your business or you can’t afford. I want to be respectful of your time. What if you come back in six months when you have the resources, and we’ll demo then so all of this will be fresh and you can make an informed decision.”

This saves me from demoing to prospects who will inevitably go dark. If I’m honest with them, I increase the chance they’ll come back when they’re ready or send referrals my way.

People are used to getting hounded by bad salespeople. You need to be different. Care about your prospects. Care about their goals. And put those goals above your own. This is what makes a great salesperson -- and one who’s never worried about closing. When you care about helping prospects accomplish something important, you’ll naturally work with those who need help.

“SHOULD I COLD EMAIL MY PROSPECTS BEFORE CALLING?”

I get this question a lot. I understand it. Most sales reps are tired of getting rejected when selling over the phone. It’s natural to look for a solution that minimizes our own pain.

Unfortunately, cold emailing a prospect before calling them only lessens the pain of rejection but it does nothing to lessen the pain of missing quota.

So here’s my take:

If you make the same mistakes in a cold email that you do on a cold call, the results are going to be the same.

COLD SALES EMAIL FAILURE: CASE IN POINT

Below is an unsolicited cold email I received. After a few seconds of reading it, I was about to hit the delete button when I realized that I myself have sent emails like this in the past (and probably much worse) before I learned the error of my ways and so I thought I’d break this down for you, and show you why these types of cold emails get low results and what changes could be made in order to improve results.

FAILED COLD EMAIL EXAMPLE:

Paragraph 1: Hi Michael… Are you looking to target a specific market for your products or services?

This is a dumb question. Why? Because the answer is obviously: “yes”. Every business owner / marketing director etc wants to target their message to the appropriate audience. Asking this type of question marks you as a “typical” salesperson using old tactics that prospects see right through; and that creates distrust from the word “go”.

Paragraph 2: If yes, our (company name hidden) can provide the best (what they were offering) which will definitely yield positive leads for you.

Really? You’re the best? And it will definitely yield positive leads for me? You know this without asking me any questions about my business, or what I’m using now or how I’m using it and why?

Making guaranteed statements like this to your prospect before having a conversation (diagnosing a problem / qualifying) with them tends to invoke skepticism.

You’re creating doubt on their part before ever speaking with them. It’s hard to make a living selling that way.

Paragraph 3: We provide ___________ (and they gave a laundry list of things they provided and in what verticals etc – and I mean a laundry list!)

In the sales world, this is called “spraying and praying”. It rarely works.

Besides, each business will have their own decision making and purchasing process… you don’t even know yet if the person you are sending this to is involved in the decision-making process or to what degree.

Some CEO’s are heavily involved with the decision making and others pay someone else to handle certain type of decisions… so which one are you emailing? The fact is, you won’t know until you speak with them. And if you try calling them after they’ve read this email, they most likely will avoid you at all costs. Why? Because you gave them enough information to make an ill-informed decision and it’s usually; “No, thanks!”.

Most prospects won’t know they have a problem until you engage with them and ask the right questions!

Paragraph 4: Our Key Variables are ______________ (and they went on and on again about their offerings)

By now I had already reached for the delete button because they failed to do what they needed to do in the first 5 seconds: Pique my interest and spark a positive reaction.

Paragraph 5: Maximize your direct mail and telemarketing efforts by using our quality email lists. All emails addresses are ______________ (and one more time, a laundry list about them and why they are the best)

It was a long email. One most prospects wouldn’t take the time to read.

So, what could have been done instead that would produce a more positive response?

Here are a couple key factors to remember when creating your email message:

1. It’s too early to present / pitch your solutions… you haven’t even confirmed a problem yet.
2. Just because their title says they are the CEO (or whomever you normally speak with) doesn’t mean that they all have the same decision-making and purchasing process. You’ll want to discover that before offering a solution… and we can’t do that through email.
3. Create an email that will do two things very quickly: Pique Interest and Spark a Reaction (either a call back, or an email reply)

BETTER COLD SALES EMAIL EXAMPLE:

What could have been sent with a more positive outcome?

How about something like this:

“Hi (Prospects Name):

This is (Your Name) with (Your Company) and I just left you a voicemail regarding how we help (name the vertical of your prospect) generate pre-qualified prospect lists that typically produce about a 20% increase in sales for our clients.

One of our last clients gave us a testimonial saying how we help them generate an additional 22% in revenue in less than 90-days and I wanted to see if it would make sense for us to have a quick conversation in order to determine if what we have to offer may make some sense for you to consider as well.

If interested, you can schedule a call with me here (hyperlink). We should only need about 15 minutes to determine if this is something we should discuss further.”

Now, you don’t have to use this word for word and I’m not saying this is the only way to go. But my experience shows that this last example gets far better results.

So in short, I would call first, and if I got voicemail, I’d leave a message and then follow it up with the cold email that reinforces the voicemail message I left.

Hope this was helpful.