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When I learned to drive, cars were pretty easy to understand: they ran on gas, which was fairly cheap, and they had radios.

Other transportation options were limited to boats, buses, trains, planes, and motorcycles. If you lived in a big city, you got around using mass transit and your feet.

Fast forward a few decades and the types of transportation are essentially the same, but the automobile has been radically remade by technology and the auto industry is being roiled by everything from electric vehicles and self-driving cars to ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft.

The biggest change to air travel has been the cost, which has come way down since I was 16.

Obviously, I cover transportation and have had a front-row seat for the last decade as a deluge of change has arrived. You might think that if I were to look back, I'd say that the electric car is the biggest change I've seen. Tesla is a $50-billion-market-cap company after all — larger by that measure that Ford and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles!

But you'd be wrong.

Nor is Uber the biggest change I've seen. Nor the advent of high-end luxury air travel, low-cost carriers, or even a rising number of private jets.

High-speed rail? Not so much in the US. Flying cars? Nope.

By far the biggest transportation change I've seen is the explosion in bicycle riding. I lived away from the New York area over a decade ago, and while I rode a bike when I lived in NYC, I was unprepared for the proliferation of bikes on my return.

Now that the summer months have arrived in force, I see more bikes than ever.

Bikes, bikes, everywhere

Bike-sharing schemes like CitiBike have two-wheeled conveyances scattered throughout Manhattan. And although everybody in the 1990s got used to dodging bike messengers, nowadays we dodge commuters — or folks who just want to ride across the Brooklyn Bridge. There are bike lanes everywhere — and bike-oriented traffic signals. People ride their bikes year round, rain, shine, sleet, or snow.

I feel as if there are now as many bike shops as there once were Greek coffee shops and dive bars (both endangered species these days). 

This change isn't limited to New York. Cycling has boomed in many other American cities. Whole new genres of bicycles have arrived: bikes with electric-assist motors, bikes with extra carrying capacity (the SUVs of bikes), sleek fixies, fat-tired cruisers, throwback hybrid bikes.

This has quietly become a big deal. Whereas 20 years ago, you took your life into your own hands if you tried to ride from New York's Upper East Side to Midtown, these days a vast flotilla of bikes has been integrated into the city's transportation ecosystem.

"More than three-quarters of a million New Yorkers ride a bike regularly—250,000 more than just five years ago." the NYC Department of Transportation said in its "Cycling in the City" report.

"It is estimated that over 450,000 cycling trips are made each day in New York City—triple the amount taken 15 years ago."

Honestly, I didn't see this coming, but I'm glad it did. Some changes on transportation are disorienting. But this one is welcome. It almost makes me want to ride a bike in the city again. Almost.

SEE ALSO: The coolest high and low tech at the Tour de France

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NOW WATCH: This light-up bike helmet has built-in turn signals

• Russia stands accused of bold intrusions into vital US infrastructure (elections, nuclear power plants).
• The US has the ability to fight back.
• Empowering ordinary Russians with cyber tools against Vladimir Putin's regime would be "kick them" where it hurts, according to one cyber security expert.

It's been nearly a year since US intelligence agencies accused top Russian officials authorized hacks on voting systems in the US's 2016 presidential election, and mounting evidence suggests that the US has not fought back against the hacks as strongly as possible.

But attributing and responding to cyber crimes can be difficult, as it can take "months, if not years" before even discovering the attack according Ken Geers, a cybersecurity expert for Comodo with experience in the NSA.

Even after finding and attributing an attack, experts may disagree over how best to deter Russia from conducting more attacks.

But should President Donald Trump "make that call" that Russia is to blame and must be retaliated against, Geers told Business Insider an out-of-the-box idea for how to retaliate.

"It's been suggested that we could give Russia strong encryption or pro-democracy tools that the FSB [the Federal Security Service, Russia's equivalent of the FBI] can’t read or can’t break," said Geers.

In Russia, Putin's autocratic government strictly controls access to the internet and monitors the communications of its citizens, allowing it suppress negative stories and flood media with pro-regime propaganda. If the US provided Russians with tools to communicate secretly and effectively, new, unmonitored information could flow freely and Russians wouldn't have to fear speaking honestly about their government. 

The move would be attractive because it is "asymmetric," meaning that Russia could not retaliate in turn, according to Geers. In the US, the government does not control communications, and Americans are already free to say whatever they want about the government.  

"What if we flooded the Russian market with unbreakable encryption tools for free downloads?," Geers continued. "That would really make them angry and annoy them. It would put the question back to them, 'what are you going to do about it?'"

To accomplish this, the NSA could spend time "fingerprinting" or studying RUNET, the Russian version of the internet, according to Geers. The NSA would study the challenges Russia has with censorship, how it polices and monitor communications, and then develop a "fool-proof" tool with user manuals in Russian and drop it into the Russian market with free downloads as a "big surprise," he added. 

"You’re just trying to figure out how to kick them in the balls," Geers said of the possible tactic. "But they’d probably figure out how to defeat it in time."

Geers acknowledged that such a move could elicit a dangerous response from Russia, but, without killing or even hurting anyone, it's unclear how Russia could escalate the conflict.

As it stands, it appears that Russian hacking attempts have continued even after former president Barack Obama expelled Russian diplomats from the US in retaliation last year. Cybersecurity experts attribute a series of recent intrusions into US nuclear power plants to Russia.

Taking bold action, as Geers suggests, would leave Russia scrambling to attribute the attack to the US without clear evidence, while putting out fires from a newly empowered public inquiry into its dealings. 

The ball would be in Russia's court, so to speak, and they might think twice about hacking the US election next time.

SEE ALSO: A key American defense has failed, and now Russia fears no reprisal for hacking the US

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NOW WATCH: Watch Russia’s newest fighter jet in action — the MiG-35

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These blog mistakes can turn your audience away and cost you business.

Blogging can be a great tool that expands your audience and creates additional business for you. Whether you are in the B2B or B2C industries, it can be an immense help in finding new business for you.

Success with your blog can lead to additional clients, and help fuel your business for time to come. But if you routinely make these blog mistakes, they can dampen your efforts and turn your audience off.

6 Blog Mistakes You Should Stop Making

Lack of value – People read a blog when they have questions, or they are looking to improve. With the internet, there’s no shortage of valuable information online. If you are holding your most valuable content back for pay, or recycling the same trite talking points as everyone else in your industry, it could spell trouble.

The solution is to find new ways to convey value within your industry. Put your stamp of originality on it. It can be counterintuitive at times, but make sure you are putting your best information out there. When it feels like you should be charging for that information, what you’re really doing is establishing yourself as an expert and building trust.

Your writing is like a stiff suit – There is a difference between formal and professional. You can be professional, and be casual as well. Feel free to ditch the corporate speak and the 5-syllable Ivy League words.

A lot of great brands have capitalized on a more casual approach. So don’t set out writing to prove how smart you are. Write so that you can start a conversation with your audience. The solution to this blog problem is to simply write how you would talk with a client in person. (Psssst….You’d be friendly and you’d explain things to them. At least I hope.)

Your blog disregards your business or marketing goals – Have you spent the last three weeks talking about the sale of widget X? Why then, would you be blogging about widget Y? Your blog should reinforce your marketing and sales work. What products, services or issues are the most pressing for your business or industry right now? This is what you should be talking about. Make sure you are working to align your entire marketing strategy.

Lack of storytelling –Don’t just write blog posts because they’re the same you’re your competition is publishing. Don’t just copy bullets verbatim from the largest industry sites on the market.

Data and numbers are good for reinforcing a larger point, but they’re not the main factor in sales. People buy products based on emotion. They’re buying the improved version of themselves. So make sure that you are pulling at emotions and telling a good story as you write.

• How will your product improve their lives?
• How did your business start?
• What is the unique angle that you bring to your business?
• What are some of your interests, and how do they relate?

Keeping all these questions in mind as you publish blog posts will help you tell better stories.

One long, dry block of text – It’s true that people will read longer blog posts about the right subjects. But those posts should be made friendly for the visual learners. No one wants to read huge, long paragraphs. Subheads and lists can also break things up. More than one quality image in a post can help keep your audience engaged.

You’re done when it’s published – Blogging is not a set it and forget it phenomenon. A lot of bloggers want to hit publish and walk away. This is a tough way to attract eyeballs – especially in a crowded market.

Instead, you can focus on improving the SEO for your post. WordPress Plugins like Yoast can help you take the steps needed to optimize your post. Taking the time to publish your post on platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, Google Plus and Facebook can also help. All these places can help you attract more eyeballs and give your post additional life. It can also help to find other industry sites to aggregate your posts.

Conclusion…

Are you making any of these blog mistakes? Most have some relatively simple fixes that can be implemented to grow your audience and improve your business. Blogging produces excellent results, but it can take consistent effort. Make sure you are doing everything you can to see results.

5G is supposed to be the next big thing to hit the cell phone market, but what if it's just too expensive?

That's the theory analysts at UBS proposed in a recent note to investors. Richard Dineen, an analyst at UBS, says the range and strength of 5G technology just don't make financial sense. Here's Dineen:

"We modelled how many 5G sites would be required to cover the NY-NJ-PA Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), an area of ~8,300sq/mi with >20m population (6% of US total). Using FCC tower data, terrain, street and vertical elevation models, our analysis suggests over 600,000 5G cells (each at 100m radius) would be required for contiguous 5G coverage – more than a 500-fold increase from today's 3G/4G cell footprint. Clearly this would not make economic sense for operators, adding conviction to our view that 5G at mmW frequencies could only be deployed as a WiFi-like "hotzone" service in densely-populated, wealthy areas." 

To break it down into simple English, Dineen is saying the hype around 5G coverage is overblown. The technology uses millimeter waves that simply don't travel far enough, and are too easily disrupted, to make sense for a large-scale cell phone network.

The 5G technology does work. It promises speeds that are much faster than the current 4G systems allow, but only if you can get that signal to reach between a cell tower and a phone. Dineen says providers would need to build nearly 500 times as many towers as are currently in use for 4G technology in order to make 5G work.

There are some upsides to 5G. Faster speeds, of course, but also more space in the spectrum. Because the waves are smaller, in a sense, they take up less of the allocated spectrum, meaning more users are able to use 5G at one time than current 4G technology.

One use case for the new technology might be fixed wireless internet. Imagine beaming high-speed internet from a central tower to a fixed antenna on a rural household. You wouldn't have to run wires underground to the home, and because the tower and home antenna wouldn't move, the 5G signal could be pointed and focused between the two points.

While this could be one use case for 5G, Dineen says it is a small market that doesn't justify the hype around the new technology.

Rumors that the new iPhone won't have the next generation of 5G antennas aren't as important if Dineen is right. Cell phone providers have said they will start rolling out 5G service later this year, but it might not matter if the technology takes years to reach the mass market or is throttled to 4G speeds to make it practical across longer distances.

"If 5G coverage at [millimeter wavelengths] is patchy we remain skeptical of its ability to generate returns given that users will continue to value 4G's ubiquity (on-demand, time-sensitive), location-awareness and mobility support over a 5G raw speed advantage that is only sporadically available (i.e. same as why we all pay for cellular 4G, but few pay for public WiFi)," Dineen concludes.

SEE ALSO: Apple is falling after a report the new iPhone won't be as fast as rivals

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NOW WATCH: Wells Fargo Funds equity chief: Companies were being rendered obsolete long before Amazon emerged

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Leaders who want to see their organizations leap far ahead of their competition are usually deeply involved in any number of employee activities and programs.

That’s understandable, but a high level of involvement can often become counterproductive.

However tempting it can be to have a finger in as many pies as possible, leaders of organizations that truly excel are keenly aware of the importance of authority and thoughtful direction—and, just as important, the value of also allowing others sufficient freedom to try new things and do their jobs as only they know best.

Admittedly, that can be easier said than done.

Challenging Times? Greater Control!

As I mentioned at the outset of this blog, a high level of control may well be many leaders’ default setting. That can be particularly true when an organization faces a specific challenge or is trying to cope with difficult market conditions. The thinking goes, when the going gets tough, a leader needs to take charge more than ever.

Unfortunately, that can often prove to be the least effective strategy. As a telling example, several years ago CSC Germany, a division of the $17 billion international IT consulting and services firm, responded to poor financial performance by boosting control and levels of oversight. The company only continued to struggle. However, when leadership did the opposite—less control and greater employee autonomy—the outcome was a resounding success. The company later implemented the strategy in other areas of the firm, using peer group supervision and in-house coaches instead of a heavy-handed top/down structure. Employee performance and company results blossomed.

A Sense of Ownership

If you peel the onion a little bit, it’s not difficult to understand why CSC—and other organizations that have effectively loosened hierarchical grips—have enjoyed vastly superior performance when employees have greater individual freedom. One obvious benefit is a sense of ownership that derives from autonomy. Employees who are, in effect, trusted to do the right thing naturally feel a greater stake in an organization’s success and respond accordingly.

(Note that that differs from a sense of empowerment—a key distinction. Empowerment implies granting of freedom, like a king generously offering his subjects greater rights. By contrast, autonomy isn’t a “gift”—it’s policy that’s built into an organization’s working philosophy.)

The success that autonomy can bring can be all the more dramatic when coupled with several of the central components of my Anticipatory Organization Model. For instance, one key principle is the essential value of organization-wide everyday innovation. As technology continues to accelerate change in every level of our personal and professional lives, innovation—both in terms of industry-shifting blockbusters as well as everyday innovation—is an organizational imperative.

Consider: Which sort of environment better encourages pursuit of innovation—one where only a few leaders come up with the innovative ideas or another where people have the individual freedom to implement inventive solutions to everyday problems and have a process where they can share their process, product, or service innovation and know their ideas will be considered?

Another component of an anticipatory organization is yet another form of freedom—freedom to fail, and all the better if that failure occurs quickly. A commitment to innovation naturally implies a comfort level with failure—and, if people have the freedom to fail and learn quickly from their missteps, innovation can only benefit.

Somewhat ironically, an organization that affords its employees significant autonomy also builds stronger ties with those employees. Think about it: If you’re an employee who sees the freedom to innovate as a means to further yourself both professionally as well as personally, why would you look elsewhere for long-term employment opportunities?

Every leader on the planet loves success and a competitive advantage. Creating a culture that values continuous innovation and has the freedom to implement inventive solutions to everyday problems, as well as look for and share any game-changers they can see, can accelerate innovation, improve results, and turn rapid change into a competitive advantage.

What is the size of your total addressable market? What percentage of that market is actively considering buying whatever it is that you sell? What percentage of those that are actively looking are considering buying from you?

Statistics on the percentage of prospects actively looking for what you sell are commonly cited as something close to 10 percent of the market. If you have a monopoly, then maybe inbound marketing efforts are enough to meet your growth targets. Why would you ignore 90 percent of the people and companies that would benefit from what you are selling? By not addressing the 90 percent of the market, you are leaving them to develop relationships with your competitors.

Let’s say you are brilliant at inbound marketing. Why still would you require your prospects to search and find you, rather than making it your responsibility to identify and pursue the very people and companies that your company was built to serve? Is the fear of interrupting someone so great that you can’t imagine doing so? Is the value you create so insignificant that you don’t believe it is worth your prospective client’s time? Is your belief so small that you don’t believe that you need to act with urgency to help your prospective clients produce the better results you produce?

While you are passively waiting for clients to beat a path to your door, your competitors are not. They’re willing to do what you are not. When they make more money and capture market share, they create a competitive advantage, one that isn’t going to be reclaimed by principles that suggest you can only help people who come to you for help, when they come to you for help, and one that requires that they bump into your content marketing.

All prospecting methods have value, but none are as effective as a well-balanced approach that includes different methods of prospecting, most of which are likely to be outbound. Competition is part of markets, and there is no reason to compete with one hand tied behind your back.

The post What’s Wrong with an Inbound Only Strategy appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Content is everywhere, most of it free and most of it utterly buried by other content. As content marketers, we struggle and fight to be heard.

Meanwhile, author James Patterson earned $95 million in 2016.

Let that sink in. James Patterson is getting paid $95 million a year to produce content. People are paying to read his content. Content that right inside the cover notes, “This is a work of fiction.”

If you haven’t thought about that concept before – that people will pay a lot of money for great storytelling – then I hope you do now.

Best-selling fiction authors know something. It’s something you ought to know too if you want to be heard.

We talk a lot about storytelling in this industry. But how much do we really know about it?

You probably have heard “human brains are hardwired” to remember stories; storytelling is an “ancient art;” and “brand narratives” resonate with audiences.

And that’s all true. But is it enough?

If you’ve studied this, you probably learned something a bit more fundamental about stories – they convey meaning through change.

And you know what? That understanding is still not enough.

Humans may be hardwired to tell, pass on, and remember stories. But we’re not all hardwired to tell the kinds of stories that people can’t put down.

We’re not all hardwired to tell the kinds of stories that people can’t put down, says @DholakiyaPratik
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That’s why I think every content marketer needs to learn how authors structure their stories. People pay money to spend hours to read their books. Let’s find out why.

The 3-act structure

Stories have a beginning, a middle, and an end. This is basic stuff. It’s not the secret sauce, which I’ll talk about later. Still, it’s not just any beginning, middle, and end that will hold somebody’s interest or make an impact. And, to understand the secret sauce, you need to understand the main course.

Let’s pick apart this three-part structure.

Beginning

Do you know where many content marketers fail in their storytelling? Right at the beginning. To be blunt, most content marketers hardly write a beginning.

Of course, I don’t mean their stories don’t start. What I mean is the stories don’t start with a complete beginning – a beginning that lays the groundwork for the story.

In the beginning of a fiction work, readers expect the author to:

• Establish the way things are
• Establish what the character wants
• Establish what the character needs

If you don’t establish the way things are, you are not able to see how things change.

Now for the piece everybody misses. What the character wants and what the character needs are two different things.

If characters don’t want anything, nothing will pull them to the end of the story. They will walk away at the first sign of conflict. Want is what drives the plot.

Need is what the character requires to make it to the end. Need is what drives the theme.

A content marketer’s story is broken from the start if the writer doesn’t understand that what the customer wants is not what the customer needs. The customers don’t want your product. They need your product to get what they want.

Customers don’t want your products. They need your product to get what they want, says @DholakiyaPratik
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Don’t waste time trying to make readers want your product.

Show them their beginning. Show them how things are for them now. Show them you understand what they want, and lay the groundwork to show them what they will need.

Middle

The marketer’s story seems to break down at this stage even more often than with a poor beginning.

While most marketers don’t develop a strong beginning, they at least start. When it comes to the middle, many marketers fail to include one at all.

In the middle of a work of fiction, readers expect that the character will:

• Develop a reasonable plan to get what he or she wants
• Try to execute the plan (but the problem is more complex than expected and fails)
• Rinse and repeat the try-and-fail process

This process must happen at least once for anybody to feel like a story is being told. Thematically, the middle of the story serves a clear, essential purpose. It illustrates what happens when characters try to get what they want without having what they need.

Without a strong middle, readers do not believe the theme of the story. They are not sold on what the character needs. They have no reason to believe that the character can’t get what he or she wants without it.

The middle is where readers learn the true scope of the problem. It seemed small in the beginning. As readers learn more about it, they learn it is not so simple. It becomes increasingly complicated. The more the characters try to get what they want, the more insurmountable readers realize the problem is.

Without a strong middle, readers aren’t sold on what the character needs, says @DholakiyaPratik
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A weak middle revolves around a weak problem. Develop your problem and you will have a strong middle and a strong story.

Finally, it’s important that the character really gives it their all here. The plan is the best the character could reasonably put together. It should seem foolproof. Otherwise the writers have an idiot plot, where the problem could have been solved by a smarter character, which makes it difficult to identify with the character.

If you don’t know what I mean, think of “as seen on TV” product ads featuring solutions to non-problems or idiot-only problems. These stories identify the wrong problem or a weak problem, and they have weak protagonists because of it.

End

Since the end is where the most important things happen, a lot of marketers just skip to the end in their storytelling. But, a strong ending isn’t strong without a good beginning and middle.

At the end of a fiction work, readers expect that:

• The problem has grown to the point where another misstep would be a complete failure
• The characters overcome the barriers that kept them from understanding what they needed
• The characters now understand their needs, which allows them to solve the problem and get what they want
• A new world is created because the change has occurred

Some caveats

Now, I can’t in good conscience move forward without some qualifiers. A story can make the same point by making it clear what the character needs, then allowing the character to fail to get what’s needed and to fail to solve the problem, and to not get what he or she wants. This storytelling is a tragedy genre.

Likewise, there are powerful stories where the characters learn that what they’ve been wanting has been preventing them from getting what they need, and it turns out that the want wasn’t that important after all. These alternative story structures can have a strong emotional impact, but in the context of marketing they might be harder to pull off.

Now, I won’t elaborate much on how the characters overcome barriers or demonstrate how they solve their problem once they get what they need. Marketers understand these things well. Instead, I focus on two things.

First, is the finality of the problem – a ticking clock, a point of no return, an unavoidable sense of urgency. I’m not talking about imposing a limited time offer on the customer. I’m talking about the point at which the problem has grown out of control. I’m talking about establishing the dread of actual and complete failure.

Second, it is crucial to explore how things have changed now that the problem is solved. The writer should contrast where things ended up with where things started. The resolution should clarify what was missing and offer closure. If the writer doesn’t have a strong contrast between the beginning and the end, there isn’t a story.

That’s all there is to great storytelling, right?

No.

I still haven’t talked about the secret sauce, the stuff that keeps readers hungry for more pages as they turn through a book, the stuff that makes people pay for content.

Secret sauce

Ready for it?

The secret sauce is suspense.

Suspense makes the reader wonder what is going to happen next.

Suspense makes the reader wonder what is going to happen next, says @DholakiyaPratik
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It seems almost tautological to say that what keeps somebody reading is wondering what they’re going to read next. And yet, did you know the secret sauce before I said it?

If the value of suspense was obvious, more people would use it.

Of course, understanding that suspense is what you need doesn’t necessarily help you know how to build it.

Predictability is the enemy of suspense. But unpredictability alone isn’t nearly enough. For suspense to work, you need both uncertainty and anticipation.

The first way to build suspense is to do it directly. You blatantly state that something is coming, but you are vague about what it is. I did it in this very blog post.

How do you best implement suspense in the context of content marketing?

Well, for one, suspense should not be the only thing you use to keep somebody reading. Imagine if the section on three-act structure above was mere filler. My promise of a secret sauce wouldn’t have kept you reading, would it?

Second, turn your format on its head. You’re used to thinking that you should state the problem and solution in the beginning, then list your supporting arguments. That’s not always the way to go.

People read fiction in large part because they quickly learn the problem, but don’t know what the solution will be until the end. That’s why we have spoiler alerts.

An alternative structure is to state the problem, present the supporting arguments as answers to smaller related questions, then piece them together at the end in a massive climax where it suddenly all makes sense.

Is this always the best way to do it? No. But it clearly keeps people engaged on a different level. And this is essentially the logic of the page turner.

There is a second form of suspense. This is how famed filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock described it:

“There is a distinct difference between ‘suspense’ and ‘surprise,’ and yet many pictures continually confuse the two. I’ll explain what I mean.

“We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence.

“Now, let us take a suspense situation. The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at 1 o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to 1. In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: ‘You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!’”

This form of suspense is based on “superior position.” The audience knows something that the characters don’t.

At first, this seems like it contradicts my definition of suspense. Why would the audience be wondering what is going to happen next if they’ve been told something the characters haven’t, like the fact that a bomb is going to go off?

If you reflect on this a little, though, it becomes clear. The audience may know a bomb is going to go off, are shouting, hoping the characters get up and walk away, but they don’t know if the characters will escape.

With that understanding of suspense, I’ll leave you with a final question.

How would you feel if you could tell a story that had your audience shouting at your character, hoping he or she will use your product before it’s too late?

CMI will keep you in suspense with the daily topic of our e-newsletter, but we’ll also assure you that whatever it is, it will help your content marketing program. Subscribe today for free.

Cover image by Viktor Hanacek, picjumbo

The post The Content Marketer’s Guide to Story Structure appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts by Ryan Holiday, Portfolio, 256 pages, Hardcover, July 2017, ISBN 9780143109013

Ryan Holiday is a voracious reader (if you’re following us, you really should be following his reading list, as well), so it’s no surprise that his new book, Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts, draws its inspiration from a 1938 book written by a British literary critic you’ve probably never heard of. That book, Enemies of Promise by Cyril Connolly, has gained something of a cult following in the 80 years since it first appeared—even meriting a new printing in 2008 from the University of Chicago Press. The topic of Connolly’s book is how to create just such a lasting success—“an inquiry into the problem of how to write a book that lasts ten years”—of which Holiday asks:

Is that not the kind of lasting success that every creative person strives for? To produce something that is consumed (and sells) for years and years, and enters the “canon” of our industry or field, that becomes seminal, that makes money (and has impact) while we sleep, even after we’ve moved on to other projects?

(Moving onto other projects may be a part of creating such a success, but more on that later.)

Holiday’s book expands upon that mission and broadens it to all creative pursuits—whether it’s writing a book or founding a startup. Not content to simply pull back the curtain of currently in vogue advice out there, he tears it down and sets it on fire. Discussing how most creators don’t have much of a shot at creating something of lasting value, he writes:

It’s hard to see how it could be otherwise when the top “thought leaders” and business “experts” deceive us with shortcuts and tricks that optimize for quick and obvious success. Creators resort to hacking bestseller lists, counting social media shares, or raising huge amounts of investor capital far before they have a business model. People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don’t, and track their progress not in years but in microseconds. They want to make something timeless, but they focus instead on immediate payoffs and instant gratification.

Holiday’s first book, Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator, was his opening salvo against this world, a world he excelled in. He still has the tools he used there, and he’s not shy in using them in the service of great work, but he stresses that the creative process, the act of bringing something new into the world where there was nothing, must take precedence. You must focus on making something worthwhile and potentially lasting first, and whether you’re writing a book, making a movie, or building a business, that work is hard enough.

It is a point Holiday uses some of the world’s greatest creative successes in those fields to help him illustrate. “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle,” said George Orwell, “like a long bout with a painful illness.” “Being an entrepreneur,” Elon Musk tells us, “is like eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.” And, speaking of filmmaking, Warren Beatty often tells people: “I always say making movies is like vomiting. I don't like vomiting. But there is a time when you say, ‘I'll feel better if I finally throw up.’”

Still interested? It can seem daunting to set out to create a classic work or a company that lasts, “but classics,” Holiday insists, “are built by thousands of small acts. And thinking about them in that way allows you to make progress.” It also disabuses us of the notion that great work is produced by a flash of inspiration, genius, or a singular idea. Creativity is not a spontaneous event, but a process, and the product of a lot of hard, deliberate work. And, to do that work, it helps to give yourself creative space from what’s going on around you:

Ignore what other people are doing. Ignore what’s going on around you. There is no competition. There is no objective benchmark to hit. There is simply the best that you can do—that’s all that matters.

So, Perennial Seller is, first, a book about digging down and making meaningful, truly creative work. Everything that comes after must be grounded in it. And yet, while it is paramount, the creative process is but the beginning of the overall process. At this juncture, Holiday says, you are just “halfway to the halfway point.” Before you even consider how to put your work out into the world, you have to figure out how to position it. And that is the second part of just the first half of the book. The first part of the book, on the creative process, is by turns admonishment, encouragement, and inspiration, and it makes for some great reading. It is full of wisdom, but not a lot of actionable, real world business advice. It is in part two, on positioning, where the book begins to offer much more tangible advice and instruction.

For instance, his “One Sentence, One Paragraph, One Page” writing exercise will help bring internal clarity to what your project is all about, or what your company does, and more importantly who it’s for, so you can clearly explain it to others. Hopefully, you had an audience or target market in mind while you were in the midst of creation. But even if you did, that’s no guarantee you won’t have to blow the whole thing up when you start testing it out and sharing it with others. He tells us how his last book, Ego is the Enemy, was originally going to be a book in defense of humility rather than against ego. The Pixar movie Up , the charming tale of a senior citizen and his boy scout sidekick piloting a house held aloft by balloons toward adventure, was originally conceived as a story about “two princes who lived in a floating city on an alien planet.”

It is this section that helps you deal with the often uncomfortable dilemma of commercializing your art and making a business out of it, if you have such personal hangups. But the key lesson of positioning is determining your audience. “Many creators want to be for everyone,” he tells us, “and as a result end up being for no one.” It is for that reason that:

Picking a lane isn’t limiting. It’s the first act of empowerment we take as a creator.

All of this hard, necessary work just to get to the point where so many want to start: marketing and platform building, which make up parts three and four of the book. Here, Holiday pulls out the old tricks that aim to garner some immediate attention when it first hits the world, along with a longer-term vision to turns the project into a perennial moneymaker. He’ll talk about the importance of a proper launch, and teach you how to execute one—including how to price it initially (or not)—how to find champions of your work, and how to gain real momentum and “trade up the chain” to reach larger media outlets once you have started to build momentum. 

And here’s the exciting part. Once we have done that work, and put in the hustle, we get to return to the work, which brings us to part four of the book: “Platform.”

Becoming a perennial seller requires more than just releasing a project into the world. It requires the development of a career.

And so it’s on to the next project. That is true of artists like Holiday's favorite band, Iron Maiden (whose top five songs have around 50 more million streams than Madonna’s top five on Spotify, and still regularly sells out shows of up to 60,000 seats, despite getting almost no radio play), and successful companies like Apple. If you stay focused on continuously producing great work, perhaps you’ll stand the test of time like Zildjian, the company that produces the cymbals many of the drummers in your favorite bands play, which was founded in Constantinople in 1623, or Fiskars, who makes everything from scissors to axes to lawn mowers, which was founded in Finland in 1649. 

In our quest to create something classic, Holiday reminds us that “We are fighting not just our contemporaries for recognition, but against centuries of great art for an audience.”

We all know that instant success doesn’t guarantee lasting success, and that some works we now consider a part of the canon were initially met with lukewarm reception. Shakespeare was considered just one of many talented playwrights in his day, and it was decidedly low-brow fare at the time. Some consider The Shawshank Redemption one of the best films of all time, and while not a flop, it barely recouped its production cost in initial ticket sales. It grossed only $727,327 the weekend it was released. The big winner that weekend? Timecop, starring Jean Claude Van Damme. Sure, Timecop made a quick buck, but Shawshank is a perennial seller, and there are now “even minor actors in that movie who receive $800-plus checks every month in residuals.” It is a classic. 

That’s the dream. To matter, to reach, to last.

It is all about immersing yourself in the creative process, and being able to make a living in the process. It gives you a shot at creating something that endures, a classic, a perennial seller.

goranmx / Pixabay

You have about 60-seconds from the start of a presentation to catch an audience’s attention and prove your credibility, before losing the entire group. Nothing is worse than spending hours prepping, planning, and practicing for a presentation, only to find your audience disengaged just moments after you began.

In today’s world, humans only have about an eight-second attention span. Just six years prior, that number was 12-seconds. People’s attention spans are decreasing by the year, and if you are not keeping your audience engaged, they will look elsewhere – whether that is down at their phone, or worse, towards a competitor with a more captivating message. If you have a prospective client, employee, or manager on the other end of the table, your presentation needs to be effortless for them. Being engaging only takes your presentation so far – you need to deliver unparalleled value to the listener.

Here are 6 ways to make a memorable presentation that people will want to pay attention to.

Images – they do say more

You know the proverb, and it’s true – high impact images are the backbone of a presentation design. You don’t need to be a design wizard to pick a beautiful image, but that image will immediately make your presentation look striking.

Illustrate the key parts of your presentation with high-resolution images that fill the whole slide. Yes, the whole slide. You will need to find an image that is a close match to what you want to say.

Personally, I favor photography over artwork, simply because the artwork found on stock image websites is often overused and, much like clip art, will give your presentation a cheap look that you will want to avoid.

Here’s a simple example from a past presentation – the topic was website redesign and this slide started a section of consecutive iterations of a/b tests.

Images are visual aids that help jolt your memory. The unexpected benefits of using images this way is that they give a visual cue if you lose your train of thought while presenting, the image can help get you back on track.

Keep the slides clean

Make a conscious decision to avoid clutter. Go out of your way to keep your slides clean. Less is more in that regard and the clean look will help keep your speech focused.

But what if you need more copy on the slide? Images can still help illustrate your point and make an otherwise boring slide pop. Compare the identical content in our standard corporate template with the slide we actually used in our webinar.

Yawn!

Ah – much better!

Icons are your friends in creating the look above. The styles that work well to make your slides look fresh in 2017 are flat design icons like the ones shown above and simple black & white icons like you would find them in a web app. See a snippet to the right that I took from another deck for an example of a simpler icon style.

My favorite source for flat icons is Iconfinder. Good sources for black and white icons are icon packs designed to work with web frameworks. Ionicons, Cascade and FontAwesome are good examples.

People read faster than you can present

Only having one word per slide will not cut it in certain situations, but overcrowding a slide with text can lead to distractions. If you absolutely have to include more text, try to use the bare minimum to get your point across. Disregard this advice at your own risk, or rather the risk of Death by PowerPoint. Check out this video by Don McMillan for a good laugh and to see what that’s all about.

If you keep too much text on your slides, nobody in the room will hear a word you say. They’ll all be busy reading. They’ll also be finished reading the content long before you have finished presenting it. Time they will happily use to do something else, like check email, Twitter, Facebook, etc. and that will make engaging your audience that much harder.

Use large font

This says it all. If you follow the tips about the use of big images and minimal text, you will find yourself with a lot of white space on your slides.

The best way to make use of that space is to make the little text you have large enough so that everyone in the room will be able to easily read it – experts like Guy Kawasaki and Garr Reynolds recommend 30-point or larger.

Another aspect to pay attention to when designing your slides is the font type. It’s important to use a clean, modern font that is easy to read on your slides. Using fonts that are difficult to read will only distract the audience more. Canva even offers a tutorial for deciding which fonts to pair.

Get an eagle’s eye view

Once you have your content structured and slides laid out, take a moment to look at the big picture. Use the slide sorter view in PowerPoint to get an overview of the flow of your slide deck and ask yourself:

• Does the structure still make sense to you?
• Does every slide have a point?
• Get someone else to review your presentation. Do they understand the structure? What do they remember after having seen the slides once?

Share the presentation

Once satisfied with both content and design there is still one thing left to do. Encourage the audience to share your presentation with these three useful tips:

• Make sure you include your email address and Twitter handle in your slides
• Prepare a final slide that summarizes the key takeaways – ideally in 140 characters for instant retweets
• Put together a more text-heavy version of the slide deck and post it to your blog or a service like Slideshare

Keep these tips in mind during presentation design and you’ll have a much better chance of keeping your audience engaged. So, now that you know the steps to building that “wow” presentation, go and put some slides together and let’s discuss in the comments below.

Music streaming is winning because of convenience. To put the shift into perspective: Americans logged 284.7 billion on-demand music streams (be it audio or video) in the first six months of 2017, according to recent Nielsen data. If you assume, as Nielsen does, that 1,500 streams is the equivalent of 1 album, then streaming is selling far more "albums" than traditional music sales channels.

As this chart from Statista shows, streaming makes up more than 60% of music consumption by this metric; this time last year, it accounted for 50%.

All of this reinforces a couple of points: 1. Streaming services like Spotify are an incredibly appealing bundle for consumers, and 2. The music industry can theoretically extract more revenue out of streaming subscribers than traditional album buyers, because streaming services are so killer that they lead to people (legally) engaging with music more often. (Killer for record labels, at least — big artists who’d likely sell millions of albums anyway tend to get dragged down by the way Spotify and the like treat most music as if it were of equal value.)

But there is a wrinkle here. Of those 284.7 billion streams, just over 100 billion came from video services. When you think of music streaming on video services, you think of YouTube. And when the music industry thinks of YouTube, it gets angry. Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that streaming is both the future and present for the music industry.

SEE ALSO: It's now been 21 straight quarters of declining revenue for tech giant IBM

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A customer support center, or a contact center, is an official system set up to handle customer communication for an organization. A customer support center is made up of a team of individuals, localized in one facility, who respond promptly to large amounts of customer queries or complaints. If a customer experiences problems with a particular product or has pressing questions about a service, they need look no further than the courteous staff of a company’s support center. Unlike a call center, customer support centers not only field calls from customers but provide them with support through other channels of communication, including emails, letters, faxes, website messages, live chats, social media, and even in-person interaction. As part of a company’s overall customer relationship management (CRM) strategy, the workers of a customer support center use their expertise to route customers to the employees who can best serve their needs. Customer support centers provide service that is complimentary and convenient, suited to fit a customer’s busy schedule. Some support centers are available all hours of the day to help confused customers. Plus, thanks to advancements in technology, customers can connect to a customer support center from around the world.

The Functions Carried Out by Customer Support Representatives

Customer care and support representatives often fulfill a variety of important duties. They may answer questions about payment plans, guide first-time users through the process of setting up a device, help fix an IT issue, offer instructions on how to properly use a product, or teach customers how to take advantage of key features before they buy.

Customer support centers, such as online IT support, are especially useful for tech companies to help customers resolve complex technical issues. However, any company can benefit from a customer support center. For example, customers may look to the support desk of a clothing outlet to learn about the company’s return policy or to find out how the clothes were manufactured. The support center for a business selling cleaning supplies might provide consultation about toxicity if a product is accidentally swallowed. The team members of a cable service or IT customer support help “walk a customer through” the computer installation process or assist users in setting up Wi-Fi in their house. A credit card company’s support center will quickly cancel a stolen credit card for a customer before his or her identity is stolen. Members of a website might turn to support help after forgetting a password and being locked out of an account; customer care support would easily assist a member in changing his/her passcode and granting access to the frozen account again. Most customer support centers also offer specific information that customers are unable to find elsewhere.

Customers Support Centers Help Humanize a Company

A customer support representative brings the vital human touch to company-client interaction. Businesses are dedicated to building a brand, but building relationships with customers is equally crucial. At the end of a quality customer support session, the customer should feel like he or she has made a personal connection to the company. A compassionate support team proves that the company cares about each customer as a person and not as a number. As the “face” of an organization, the members of the support team might constitute the sole human interaction customers have with your company. If a support center works hard to help customers even after sales are finalized, it shows customers mean more to the company than mere money.

Customer Support Promotes Customer Retention

It is far easier to keep old customers than to acquire new ones; some estimates claim customer acquisition costs seven times more. Memories of a personable customer service experience motivate patrons to remain loyal customers, but leaving a negative impression can mean the difference between gaining or losing the priceless worth of a customer’s continued business. The Small Business Administration states that 68% of customers stopped frequenting businesses with the sole explanation of disliking how they were treated. This is a testament to the power of customer support. A simple way to prevent clients from roaming is to provide an excellent customer support structure. Keeping in mind that some customers spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on a brand and may buy from the same company for years to come, customer retention is key.

Customer Support May Make or Break a Company’s Reputation

Recovering from an unpleasant customer support encounter is difficult. A happy customer will likely share their appreciation after being treated appropriately by customer support staff, but a frustrated customer will surely complain about a bad customer care support debacle. Word of mouth, especially in this digital age of social media, is immensely powerful, and it can destroy a company’s reputation. Friends’ opinions and online reviews matter to consumers, so a customer support center that addresses all customer concerns and rarely disappoints is an invaluable asset, serving as a kind of company calling card. One Gartner survey reports that most companies anticipate competing primarily over the customer experience, which is highly driven by the work of customer support and its reputation in the community.

Customer Support Contributes to the Overall Experience

The majority of CEO’s polled believe customer expectations are much higher than in previous years, causing companies to emphasize customer service as part of the overall package. According to a CEI Survey, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a superior customers service experience, revealing how views of a business’ commodities are inextricably tied up with a business’ customer support. A high standard of quality from a customer support center reflects on the integrity of the product or service associated with it. If customers are left in the dark by IT customer support, unaware of how to operate a new technological device or fix its malfunctions, the product is rendered useless, and the entire experience becomes compromised. Focusing on customer support is a worthwhile investment of company resources because it vastly improves the buyer’s journey.

Signs of a Quality Customer Support Center

First, a good center is well-staffed with customer support personnel who are trained to deal tactfully with all kinds of customers. Staffers who listen patiently to complaints and truly seek to understand the perspectives of their customers are bound to be successful. As in any profession, a good representative is dedicated to the job even when faced with difficult problems and difficult customers.

Second, in an era where information is available at everyone’s fingertips and answers to many questions can be found on the Internet, customer support centers should be filled with intelligent and trustworthy individuals who know far more about their line of work than the average user.

Finally, friendliness and making small talk are cornerstones of customer service etiquette, but quality representatives never endeavor to waste a customer’s hard-earned time. Forcing a caller to wait on hold for hours is no way to treat a valued client. Clients come to customer support for the human touch, so it is best not to drive them away with an artificial, robotic system that cannot understand their needs. Ideally, customers should leave a center grateful for the excellent customer service they received and excited to use a business’ services in the future.

Customer support may have the word “support” in its title, but it plays a leading role in the functioning of a company. A quality customer support team allows customers to feel valued, heard, and guided, which in turn makes them more eager to purchase the product/use the service in the future and to encourage others to do the same. Without it, a company’s reputation, its repeat-customer rate, and the quality of its products or services will suffer substantially. A good customer support structure is not just an unnecessary accessory or a luxury, but a place for precious patrons to turn to when they need it most.

• The ad industry is trying to root out fraudulent digital ads.
• Google has quietly been running tests with media companies such as CBS to gauge how bad the problem is.
• Industry leaders are banking on a new technical solution, ads.txt, to tackle the issue.

The digital-advertising industry is looking to stamp out bogus ad inventory, like websites that claim to be premium brands but are actually sites the average person hardly ever visits.

Google, with help from some media giants, is taking the lead. The company is pushing an industry initiative called ads.txt that's aimed at wiping out fraud that's dubbed 'spoofing' by the industry. Spoofing encompasses the variety of ways ad buyers can be tricked into paying for space they're not getting. For example, spoofers can buy cheap ad space, from a low-quality site, on an exchange and then falsely list it as space on a premium site — like, say, CNN.com— at a higher price. The ad in question will never run on CNN.com, though.

It's all enabled by the prevalence of programmatic ads, which are placed by algorithms and purchased on exchanges, rather than through direct negotiation with a publisher.

Yet spoofing is even starting to affect publishers that don't even sell ads via programmatic channels. Several publishers say they've been hearing from ad buyers that their ads are for sale on various ad exchanges, even though these companies didn't work with any ad exchanges to sell advertising.

The Google tests

To get a sense of the scope of this problem, Google has been quietly conducting tests with a handful of major media properties, including NBCU, CBS, and The New York Times, people familiar with the matter told Business Insider.

During these tests, Google and the partners shut off all of their programmatic ad inventory for brief periods, say, 10 to 15 minutes, and then scour the ad exchanges to see what's listed. Google and its partners found thousands if not millions of video and display ad spots still available on multiple ad exchanges, despite no ads actually being for sale at that time, the people said, asking not to be identified because the results haven't been publicly released.

These include Google's own AdEx exchange, as well as AppNexus, Oath's BrightRoll, and PubMatic. Google also discovered fraudsters claiming to be able to sell YouTube ad inventory on various exchanges, one of the people said.

Google's not alone in these findings. An ad-tech executive from a different company went looking for some spoofed ads on exchanges and said they easily found thousands of such misrepresented ads for sale, and below are the results of another search by the Marketing Science Consulting Group, a company that specializes in researching ad fraud.

Business Insider reached out to all the exchanges mentioned and included their comments below, if they responded.

The ad exchanges responded to details of the results by pointing to their efforts to stamp out the kind of fraud Google found.

"We’re unaware of major publishers running such tests and finding problematic selling on our marketplace," a representative for AppNexus said. "We do work proactively to avoid this type of problem. We are strong proponents of ads.txt, which we view as reinforcement of our longstanding policies and practices. We’ve created strong domain detection technology."

"Oath has invested in proprietary technology on our buying platforms, including BrightRoll and ONE by AOL, that aims to enforce supply transparency and prevent domain spoofing across the majority of supply partners," said a representative for Oath, which is owned by Verizon. "In fact, our technology blocks hundreds of millions of spoofed bid requests on a daily basis. Combined with our longtime partnership with the IAB, industry-leading third-party fraud measurement across our platforms and human review safeguards, we're fully committed to a safe, transparent supply chain for our advertiser partners."

"At PubMatic we work directly with our publisher clients to help them manage their digital inventory, and, as such, we are not aware of the issues," said PubMatic's chief marketing officer Jeff Hirsch.

The fake-Rolex problem

Marketers are expected to shell out $83 billion on digital ads in the US in 2017, according to eMarketer. And the more that advertisers spend, the bigger the opportunity for fraudsters. By some estimates, sophisticated ad-fraud perpetrators could cost the ad business over $16 billion globally this year.

There are lots of ways that ad fraud can happen. Often hackers from outside the US sell ads on fake websites using computer programs called "bots" that can mimic human behavior — making it look as though real people are visiting websites or clicking on ads.

Then, there's spoofing, which has been around for years. Companies like ESPN have frequently encountered people claiming to have their right to sell their ads when they don't. But as more big marketers push for better transparency in their digital-ad buying, following a string of recent reports of ads ending up in dicey corners of the web, there's more awareness of how common spoofing is.

"There’s quite a bit of mislabeling of traffic," said Mike Baker, CEO of the ad-tech firm DataXu. "It's become somewhat pervasive over the last few years. It could account for 20 to 30% of the traffic on some secondary and tertiary [ad exchanges]."

Ads.txt solution

Google has also hosted CEOs of several top ad-buying tech companies — "demand-side platforms" that act as major buyers on ad exchanges — including MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki, DataXu's Baker, and Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green. The meetings were said to be constructive as the industry looks to embrace ads.txt as a solution.

Ads.txt was borne out of the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Tech Lab with support from the trade group TAG (Trustworthy Accountability Group). It's a technical solution designed to protect web publishers from any unauthorized companies selling their ads via programmatic ad exchanges.

Here's how it works. By inserting a text file on their sites, web publishers can make it clear who is allowed to sell their ad space and who isn't. Assuming enough publishers implement the ads.txt solution — and enough ad buyers make an effort to purchase ads only from authorized sellers — this could go a long way toward weeding out spoofing.

"There’s always been spoofing in the market, and with video it is [more prevalent]," said Alanna Gombert, managing director and general manager of the IAB Tech Lab. "Now there is more scrutiny in the market. It wasn’t top of mind before. Now, everyone understands it; it's mainstream. And fraudsters are looking for known names that are on 'white lists' for advertisers. So this has opened up a conversation where ad buyers are telling sellers, 'I'm seeing you here,' and they are digging down and saying 'Oh crap.'"

Brands get woke

A number of major developments have combined to dial up the scrutiny on the online-advertising business, causing marketers to scrutinize where their ads run to how they pay for them and who gets a piece of every dollar they spend on the web. First, about a year ago, the Associations on National advertisers released a damning report detailing a glaring lack of transparency in the ad-buying world.

Over the past six months, Facebook has revealed a string of measurement screw-ups, while Google has faced multiple advertisers pulling out of YouTube after ads were found alongside hate videos.

And since the start of this year, Procter and Gamble's chief brand officer, Marc Pritchard, has been on a crusade, delivering a series of speeches in which he clamored for the ad industry to demand more clarity from digital media and the need to clean up the "crappy media supply chain," as CNBC reported.

All of this has brought the issue of ad fraud to the forefront. "Brands are woke," joked one ad-tech executive. "There's suddenly a lot of attention on supply-chain hygiene," he said. And hopefully ads.txt is the soap.

Some see the initiative as part of a larger set of antifraud tactics. Others are more bullish. "This will wipe spoofing out," said Andrew Casale, CEO of the ad-tech firm Index Exchange.

Who's responsible?

When it comes to supply-chain hygiene, there's plenty of blame laid on the ad-tech companies — especially since so many programmatic exchanges have made big public pledges to keep out bad sellers. But as one ad-tech insider said, big media companies often don't even know who is and isn't allowed to sell their ads on the web.

'They should take responsibility," he said. For example, one publisher said it was working with just three exchanges, but they were really running ads on 17.

So it's up to media companies to make the most out of ads.txt.

"Initially, this is putting the first implementation requirements on publishers," said Art Muldoon, co-CEO of the programmatic ad buying firm Amnet. "It's a burden and an opportunity."

Media sellers "are being directly harmed," said Mike Zaneis, president and CEO for TAG, the Trustworthy Accountability Group, an organization that was put together to tackle the ad-fraud problem.

"When there is twice as much inventory being sold out there than actually exists, that leads to deals you never get, bad prices, and the watering down of your brand," Zaneis said. "That has a direct financial impact."

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We’ve all heard the saying “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” But how true is it? Yes, business measurement is critical. A host of precise tools have made it easier than ever to collect metrics and turn those numbers into insights.

Yet some elements fueling business success are tougher to wrap your measuring tape around. We all talk about quality, for instance, but objectively evaluating the quality of your offerings isn’t easy. Another subject that gets plenty of lip service: staffing. We know that hiring, training and retaining the right people are major factors in building a positive and profitable company culture. Innovation is another white whale that everyone chases. Even results themselves may seem empirical at first glance but can end up being somewhat intangible.

Every organization is powered by multiple factors like sales, marketing, product, customer service and other key elements. Measuring their impact helps leaders know where to allocate budget, time and people. Yet when resources are allocated only to the easily measured areas, the more intangible – yet still critical – areas can suffer, impacting the business.

Let’s look at four intangible areas that play a big role in the success of your business.

Quality

Quality is a universal goal, but it can be a challenge to measure. Talk to a prospect and they’ll often want to talk price – specifically how your price compares to competitors. Yet as we all know, it’s really the quality of an offering that drives the true value; its price can only be understood in that context.

Quality boils down to outperforming your market. Can you deliver more value because the quality of your solution outperforms the competition? The common denominator here is how you helped the buyer and their aligned stakeholders. You want to know the results you helped them achieve, the effort or ease of use, the time to market with strong benchmarks against other solutions or organizations.

Innovation

These days everyone wants to offer something unique, compelling and helpful. Deliver the right moonshot and your brand shoots to the top of your field. But while many people can come up with ideas, not all of them are groundbreaking.

One way to get there: know what you’re good at and focus on it. Often the quest for innovation drives control-oriented companies to try to be good at everything. It’s a waste of time and resources because it isn’t possible.

The smarter path is to outsource the things you’re not good at and eliminate those distractions. Rather than spend the money on training a world-class IT team, inside sales group, marketing operations team or HR group, smart leaders hand those areas off to the experts and focus their energy on excelling where their unique competitive talents lie. Invest in what makes you unique. It’s spending money on the right things to make more money. Technology can also be fertile ground for innovation; today’s lower-cost, intuitive tools liberate staff from tedious administrative tasks and free them to create ideas with more impact.

People

Every business knows its workforce is critical to its success. Yet the question of hiring and training the right people persists. It’s not enough to hire a smart and experienced employee; that person must fit in with the company culture, be an asset to the mission and ideally grow with the business.

One tip for building an effective team is training your employees to think in alignment with your clients or buyers. If you study your clients, chances are you’ll see commonality in their mission and values. Your goal is to train your staff to acquire soft skills that cater to your clients’ values. Do that and your client relationships will be built on a foundation of trust?

It’ll also put you ahead of companies that give employees five minutes of training and set them loose. Instead of a team that understands what the buyers care about, the company offers a generic and disconnected client experience. Not only do the clients leave, but the employees do as well. Good training that aligns with client values will make the team feel comfortable and confident; the clients get to work with a company that understands their needs and the staff are empowered to succeed in their positions.

Outcomes

Businesses always come back to the bottom line, which is why leaders tend to feel comfortable with results in black and white numbers. Yet empirical results don’t always tell the full story. For our purpose-driven business we focus on achieving more than revenue and an impressive client roster.

There’s one factor that always tells the true tale of performance: the success of the client. Leaders that measure output are missing the point; it’s the impact that counts. If the buyer feels good about what they have purchased, if the product or service has taken them to a higher level of profit and satisfaction, you know you’ve succeeded.

Tangible measurement isn’t going away anytime soon. But intangible elements should always have a seat at the table when it comes to business strategy. These areas may evade easy measurement but they are powerful drivers for success – and leaders who develop them will see their business benefit.

Marketers have started to realize that most web pages have a major fault: They’re not designed to win customers. Mostly, they’re distracting, they’re overwhelming, and they’re bad at guiding prospects through the marketing funnel. That’s why many marketers count on a relatively new tool (compared to billboards) to generate leads and make sales—the landing page.

Landing Page Technology: Top Marketers’ Favorite New Tool

According to a report from Aberdeen, the single most popular new technology among top marketers in 2016 was a landing page/conversion optimization software. The tool allows businesses to do two things:

1. Create targeted landing pages aimed specifically at turning traffic into leads and customers.
2. Improve the conversion rate of those pages with built-in testing capabilities.

And that’s not that surprising when you consider that marketers face the challenge of turning traffic into leads.And the solution to that problem was uncovered many years ago: more landing pages. Landing pages can act as the solution to that problem because they play a key part in generating traffic and converting it with search ads and they are the leading paid channel for businesses:

Industry leader, Google, highly prioritizes landing page experience, determining whether or not to show your AdWords ads based on the page visitors click through to:

Bing takes landing page experience into account too.

In 2017, to generate traffic through search engines, and to turn that traffic into leads and customers, you have no choice but to offer a high-quality landing page experience.

But, what exactly is a landing page? And how do you offer your prospects and leads a “good experience”?

What Is a Landing Page Really? (Hint: It’s Probably Not What You Think)

Punch this query into Google, and here’s what you’ll see:

But this definition falls short. A landing page isn’t just a “section of a website accessed by clicking a hyperlink on another web page,” and it’s most certainly not a home page.

A landing page is a standalone web page, disconnected from a website’s main navigation, created for the sole purpose of convincing a visitor to take action (to sign up, download, buy, etc.). Here’s an example from Percolate:

Typically, it’s true that many advertisers use their homepage as a landing page. But, not the high-performers.

If you type “marketing automation software” into Google, you’ll likely notice that the paid ads in the coveted first few results don’t direct you to a home page. We found that out of six paid placements on page one, only one sent us to a homepage.

Try it with the query of your choice, and you’ll probably find, as we did, that the majority of paid ads in highly clicked spots direct users to a targeted landing page. And there are two big reasons for that, which I’ll cover in just a minute.

The Difference between Landing Pages and Most Other Web Pages

An “about” page can educate, and a homepage can serve as a launchpad to more information, but that’s rarely enough for the modern consumer.

Now, busy buyers want answers to highly specific questions, and they want them served up on a platter —via their device of choice—immediately.

To grow, a business must be able to appease them. Ads have to entice prospects with solutions to their problems, and landing pages have to offer those solutions with a focused and personalized design.

“Focused and personalized” means:

1. Clear Message Match

Your prospects will have certain expectations after clicking through your ad. On your landing page, you need to meet those expectations; otherwise your visitors will leave in an instant. Let’s look at an example.

This paid ad appeared for the search query “motorcycle accident lawyer”:

Before we show you this ad’s landing page, ask yourself: “What are my expectations for it?”
You’ll probably expect to see content related to a motorcycle accident lawyer since it’s mentioned in the headline of the ad. Right?

Well, you’re directed to this page when you click through:

On it, you’ll see no mention of a motorcycle lawyer. To find out this particular law office represents victims of motorcycle accidents, you’ll have to hunt for the information by clicking the “areas of practice” link at the top of the page.

But today’s internet users won’t do that extra legwork. Instead, they’ll simply hit the back button and click PPC ads until they find something more relevant to their search, like the landing page below, which displays the keywords “motorcycle accident” prominently in the headline:

Here’s a great example from BI Intelligence. First, the ad:

Now, its corresponding landing page:

On it, the BI Intelligence logo is displayed at the top, the headline features the name of the resource, and an image matches the ad creative. This page offers its visitors exactly what they expect. It delivers their resource clearly, without making them hunt for it.

For clear message match, every landing page should:

• Reflect the branding of the advertisement. Your logo and brand colors should be displayed prominently.
• Feature the same images as your ad creative.
• Include the same language as its referrer.

2. A Conversion Ratio Not Exceeding 1:1

When you blog or build a website, internally linking your content is a good practice. It helps SEO, lowers bounce rate, and it improves ease of navigation for your visitors.

What it also does, though, is increase distractions. Every link in your navigation menu, copy, and footer presents visitors with an opportunity to abandon the current page.

Just ask JellyTelly, who boosted conversions by over 100% when they removed links in their navigation menu and footer:

Remember, your landing page has a singular goal: to convert. Distractions like these, or others like competing calls-to-action, offer visitors too many choices of places to click.

Psychological studies have shown that when humans are presented with an abundance of options, we experience a number of negative effects:

• We delay choosing even if doing so will ultimately harm us.
• We make worse choices.
• We achieve less satisfaction from our choice even if it helps us objectively.

Think of the implications as an advertiser. Offering your visitors more than one link to click on your landing page will make them wait to choose, make them choose poorly, and make them less satisfied with their final decision.

Consider the famous study in which researchers set up a display table of jam in a local grocery store. The first day, they offered 24 varieties to shoppers. On the second day, they offered only 6.

By the end of the experiment, the bigger display drew more attention, but it also resulted in 10x fewer sales.

When we apply research like that to our digital marketing, it makes sense that more links to click and more offers to claim can distract visitors to a page. That’s why the “conversion ratio” of your landing page—the ratio of links to conversion goals—should be 1:1.

Provide all the information your visitors need to evaluate your offer and remove distractions to keep them focused on converting.

The only ways off your landing page should be through the link in your CTA button or the “X” in the top corner of the browser window.

Wrapping Up

Traditional web pages, like the homepage or your pricing page, have their purpose. But, that purpose is broader than simply converting visitors.

By directing your prospects to a page full of navigation links and scattered content, you’re bleeding your budget dry. Without a focused landing page featuring message match, your paid campaigns don’t stand a chance at performing to their potential.

It’s a peculiar, and seemingly unique, aspect of the sales industry: the critical role in charge of keeping the sales funnel full of leads and, hopefully, opportunities is almost always given to the most junior person on a given team.

The post Elevating the SDR: Why SnackNation’s Kevin Dorsey Wants To Formalize The Role Of The Prospector appeared first on Predictable Revenue.

Sales is a tedious game of converting leads into paying customers, but, as you know, not all leads end up that way. Data shows that 80% of sales are made after the fifth call, but only 8% of salespeople keep up with leads until then. Regardless of persistent follow-ups, some cold leads never heat up and some leads convert to customers instantly. However, there are times when a lead is developing well, seems interested, and just when you’re about to close the deal they say, “Not now.”

This can be debilitating to hear; almost as much as when in high school you told your crush how you really felt about them and they replied: “I like you as my friend!” As a professional, you are now confused on what the best next steps are. Do you press them to make a decision? Do you persuade them into closing the deal? Do you ghost them… and never contact them again?

First off, there still is hope, so don’t panic and leave them out to dry. Find out what the reasoning is behind their decision to hold off from the sale right now. A common sales qualification term is BRANT, which stands for Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeframe. While BRANT is not a perfect explanation for every industry, it is applicable and helpful in finding out what exactly is stopping the deal from closing at the moment. All the categories of BRANT are broad, so most reasonings will be covered by at least one. If you identify that, you can adjust your approach and plan accordingly.

4 Tips for when your sales leads say ‘not now’…

While the lead is not closed, it does not mean they are cold lead or the prospect of closing is dead. The sale can still happen, but only if you nurture them more. Nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads, and nurtured leads produce an average 20% more in sales opportunities than non-nurtured leads (Demand Gen Report). There are ways to techniques to close a difficult sale, and while they are not 100% fool-proof, they’re effective methods.

1. Consistent Communication. Most sales data points to 8-12 touch points before generating a response. First follow-up via email, secondly via phone call, and thirdly via text. The consistency is key here since, especially if you know no issues from the BRANT model that hinders the deal.
2. Include resources, insights, and articles. Rather than giving a discount, something as rewarding is a resource from your business. Resources can be research that your firm uses to show how impactful your product is or an article from your business’s blog. While some resources can boast your product, some can also be unrelated to your product but still be relevant to the industry. An example of a good resource unrelated to product is our real estate agent recruiting question checklist.
3. Send them a testimonial of an existing customer. People are more likely to buy something or take action if others are as well. Sending a customer’s review of your product or service is a great way to build trust and assure the lead that they are in good hands!
4. Offer to Meet Up in Person. Despite the convenience factor, calls and email are not effective on certain people. Sometimes, all you need to do is meet person face-to-face to close the deal. Therefore offer the lead to meet for coffee to further discuss the opportunity.

Don’t be annoying

Of course, you don’t think what you’re doing is annoying but we chatted with our sales team here at Contactually and they stressed this point…because you may not even realize what you’re doing, even if it’s done with the best intentions. There is a clear line between sending a few check-in/follow-up emails and emailing every other day. Don’t scare them away by over-communicating. If they don’t close within two weeks, place them into long term nurturing campaign, however, timing varies from person-to-person.

In the end of course, if the lead is not going to close, it is okay. You want clarity and not to waste your time, so getting a “no” can be beneficial! If they are set on not closing the deal, you can still keep up with them on a long-term basis and nurture your relationship with them through automated check-in emails for future deals.

Stay top-of-mind

You can use Contactually to do exactly that, specifically to execute email campaigns, reminders, templates, and more. By maintaining contact, you are keeping the door open for when they do want to ultimately close the deal.

Many people would interpret a lead saying “Not now” as a hard “No,” but it is an opportunity to continue with them in the growing process. They are not only a potential customer but also a new relationship in the works – if you nurture it enough, it will blossom.

This may not come as a big surprise to you, but people buy from people. Yes, even though we’ve never been so technologically advanced and inundated with indications that artificial intelligence is taking over, when it’s all said and done, people buy from people.

So why then, do you not leverage the incredibly smart visionaries on your team and create content for your company blog that showcases their thought leadership? This is one of the easiest ways to elevate the quality and frequency of your content strategy and you just might find that it helps your sales team shorten the sales cycle.

See, when your prospects are searching for answers to their questions, who better for them to have access to than experts within your own company? Your digital marketing strategy is begging for the human connection to make your content stand out from all the marketing “noise.” People connect with people.

Making your content real…

What if you approached your next content planning session as if you were your own news center where you identified the “story” that you want to write about that’s aligned with your prospects biggest pain point and then identified whom within your organization was best equipped to answer that question? (So often, companies contain their content creation strategies to the marketing department when there is a wealth of knowledge that exists throughout the entire organization!) We have a saying at StoryTeller, that none of us is smarter than all of us, so seek out your subject matter expert (SME) even if it’s your busy CEO or President.

Here are some ways you can showcase thought leadership throughout the organization by thinking more like a roaming reporter on the hunt for the next best story.

1. Have a Plan: By creating a monthly roadmap, or “editorial calendar,” you won’t be left scrambling and trying to figure out what to write about. Your content calendar should be aligned with your marketing plan, current events, and industry news, and it should consistently be addressing relevant pain points or challenges that your target audience is searching for. (Haven’t created formalized buyer personas yet? Check out this template for inspiration. Don’t create any content until you know who it’s intended for and what they care most about.) Now that you know what and when you are going to write, you can identify your internal experts.
2. Find Your Internal Subject Matter Experts (SMEs): Not sure who to engage in your company blog? This is not always the easiest answer, but chances are that many of your key leaders or stakeholders will be willing to fill this role. But proceed with caution, because top down company speak can be dry and impersonal. Be sure to engage your leadership team in a way that makes them “real” and “accessible” and most of all, authentic. As an influential leader, this is their chance to make a unique connection with the reader.
3. Put Them on Camera: If you have a dynamic thought leader (and I am sure you do) video can be the most efficient way to showcase their thought leadership. If done correctly, you can create the most powerful form of content that can connect with your audience in ways no other form of content can. Remember when you consider your video spokesperson, think about the target audience you are trying to reach. Is this the right person to deliver the message and create the connection. Video is a visual medium and you will want to give this some thought. If you would like some pointers on how to make a memorable video blog click here.
4. Can the “Sales-Speak”: Remember, your blog exists not to “sell” people on your company, but to solve problems, answer questions, educate, and inspire. Take the time to research what your prospects are talking about and searching for. Forums, LinkedIn groups, and customer surveys are all great places to find topic inspiration. Thought leadership is something that should offer direct value to the reader and be a gateway into your organization by being helpful. Helpful has become the new viral. When is the last time you read a blog or watched a video that you shared with someone that was a sales pitch?
5. Content is Meant to be Shared: Just like the television news business promoting an upcoming featured story they want you to tune in for, promoting your blog is an essential and expected part of getting it in the right hands of those you are hoping to connect with. Do you have your executives and sales team share your company blog (not just the one they are featured in) on their LinkedIn pages? Do you have a subscribe button on your company blog? This is the easiest way for your interested readers to automatically receive your updated posts in their email inbox. Don’t forget to post updated content on other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and if you have a company newsletter, this can be a perfect addition. Finally, make sure you include blog subscription CTA’s in other forms of content offers like webinars, ebooks, or other downloads.

Remember, your company blog is a platform that is a reflection on your company and ideally has a point of view. Ideally, your influential featured thought leader should share a point of view in the post that encourages a discussion. If you want some inspiration of some outstanding company blogs, check out this blog post from Impact Branding, or if you want help getting your team on the same page, consider having a content marketing workshop.

The way you speak and act on the phone changes depending on who you are speaking to. If you’re calling your mother versus a friend versus a co-worker, your call tone and demeanor adjust to fit the person on the other end. Which makes sense, right? Tailoring your tone makes each of those people feel comfortable and connected to you.

This exact same methodology needs to be applied in your sales calls.

While product fit and value hold a lot of sway over whether a deal closes, making a prospect feel a sense of comfort and connection can be just as important to your sale. Fortunately, there are a number of tools that can give you the insights you need when connecting with different personality types. Tools like Crystal or our latest ebook shed light on common sales personalities, including their communication style, and how to close a deal with each of them.

Once all of that personality intel is gathered, you can put it into practice and tailor your communication to each buyer personality that will ultimately close more deals. You can start by concentrating on the following three areas for perfect sales calls.

Set the Tone to Build Trust

There’s no question that first impressions are important. When you are making sales calls, that first impression is determined by your tone of voice. Your prospect can pick up whether your voice is energetic, bland, or aggressive. A study by Dr Mehrabian investigated the impact when words and other communication were not consistent. Findings showed that only 7% of the message people received was dependent on the actual words you use. So, as a modern sales rep who wants to initiate a business relationship rather than a monotonous sales pitch, you tone of voice should be friendly and pleasant from the very start.

Alright, so tone is important. What can you do to make sure your tone is as even and calming as possible. There are a few easy fixes:

Breathe Deeply: Many people don’t realize how shallow they breathe, which can make the voice sound harsh or rushed.

Smile: A classic sales tip. You automatically warm up the tone of your voice when you smile, so keep a mirror at your desk to force yourself to smile more.

Record Yourself: It’s painful and uncomfortable, but it’s the best way to hear what your tone really sounds like.

Drink More Water: Yup, it really is the cure to everything. Especially if you’re on the phone all day, you need to keep the vocal cords lubricated.

Once you’ve got your tone nailed down, you can move from how you say it to what you actually say.

Focus on the Prospect

Some sales reps may think that the primary focus for sales calls is to move the sales cycle forward or to make a deal. But I’m going to make this really simple.

The primary focus of every single sales call is your prospect.

The prospect’s needs, wants, and questions regarding your product or service will be the driving point for all conversations. So when you are planning out your sales call, keep the prospect in mind. Prepare the right questions to uncover problems their company is experiencing. Listen more than you speak. According to Gong.io, top performing sales reps have a talk to listen ratio of 46:54. When you allow the prospect to talk for more than half of the call you will better understand their side of the story. Then you can continue to cater your sales process specifically to their needs.

By keeping the focus on the prospect you show that you care about their company and the partnership you develop with them. Again, you are creating that comfortable connection that will, in turn, keep your business relationship growing.

Mirror Formality

When you are on a sales call, some prospects value professionalism above all else. Some may think that friendly beats formal. But if you enter a sales conversation with someone who prefers to keep things formal versus someone who prefers a nonchalant manner, you may disrupt a possible connection before it even starts. So when you are speaking with a different prospect and trying to build a connection, remember to be as formal as they are.

Mimicking your prospect’s formality isn’t just about being polite. Research shows that mirroring a person’s vocal pitch and behaviors actually builds rapport. When you match a prospect’s formal nature you create an additional way of understanding that person’s needs and viewpoints. By connecting with your prospect’s formal behaviors, you can decide how to best tackle additional sales conversations whether that includes casual conversations or direct incentives within your sales cycle.

Making call connections as a sales rep is hard enough. So once you get a hold of a prospect, you want to be sure you are aligned with them from the second they say “hey” (or “hello” if they are more formal). Adapting to the specific person you are reaching out to increases the chances of making call and business connections happen.

It’s time to start winning deals and influencing prospects with a firm understanding of personality-based selling. Download the free ebook today!

The post How to Perfectly Tailor Your Calls to Each Buyer appeared first on SalesLoft.

10 Must Have Tools to Monitor, Analyze and Respond to Brand Mention written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

What are people saying about your brand? I am not speaking about those paid advertisements or reviews on popular blogs that you have been orchestrating. I mean real, organic brand mentions from your user base. Chances are you have no idea, not unless it has been a major complaint that has come directly through your customer service office. Or you may be missing social media interaction under the surface, leaving your reputation vulnerable.

We all know that social reputation management is a critical part of running any business in the digital world of today. So how do we make sure we are really taking advantage of it? By having the right tools in our corner to monitor, analyze and respond to every single relevant brand mention on the web.

The Importance Of Managing Sentiment

It isn’t enough that people are talking about your brand, they have to be saying good things. And if they are saying bad things you have to be able to quickly respond. “Understanding Customers” by Ruby Newell-Legner it takes 12 positive experiences for a customer to feel better about a single negative experience. And an American Express Survey also found that 78% of customers will back out of a purchase because of a bad service experience with a company.

All of this leads us to one conclusion: keeping customers happy is a major part of success and profitability, and part of doing that is making sure you catch problems early. That is what makes sentiment management such a big part of social media interaction and marketing today.

The Ultimate Tool Kit

1. Mention: Best for Facebook Monitoring

Mention is an awesome tool in the way it operates using a four-goal system: sentiment monitoring, crisis management, competitive analysis, and finding influencers. Using these metrics you can cover every side of your social reputation management plan, all from a single dashboard. They also have brand and media tracking, social media monitoring, and more.

All of this is customized for different clients, such as businesses, educational resources, and agencies. In spite of that they have three pricing plans that make it easy to get what you need.

A valuable thing about Mention is that it’s very good at finding Facebook conversations other tools are usually missing

Price: I would recommend their Starter plan, which comes with a dashboard, sentiment analysis, and influencers tracking along with five alerts, 5,000 mentions, and a few other goodies for $99 per month. Anything more than that requires a customized plan and pricing on request.

2. Twitter Advanced Search Tool

It is true that you get what you pay for, so generally speaking you don’t want to rely on free tools for much. But if you are looking for one to help back up more advanced monitoring software you can’t go wrong with Twitter Advanced Search Tool.

Like any search engine, you can get results based on keywords placed anywhere in the tweets, About Me bio, or content. And exactly as Google, you can play with the well-defined boolean operators that are normally supported from search engine to search engine.

With Twitter, the search operators you should be using a lot are:

• ^{[“search phrase”]} to define the exact match
• [“search phrase1” –“search phrase2”] to exclude any word or any phrase from the search results (notice there is no space after -)
• [“search phrase1” OR “search phrase2”] to search for either of the words

You can search by keywords, without certain keywords, by account, by brand mention, and a whole lot more. It has the benefit of being proprietary, and no one is better at creating an in-house search than a social website. It gets past a lot of the blocks and noise that come from third party apps, so at the very least it can help you narrow down your direction to use on the others.

There’s a variety of options and opportunities for Twitter user search:

• ^{[to @username]}: Search for tweets addressing that user
• ^{[from:@username]}: Search for tweets published by the user
• ^[@username]: All of the above (basically, any mention of the username when the user is tagged in a tweet)

Tip: You can mix these options with boolean operators to find lots of missed reputation management opportunities. Example: This is the actual search phrase I am using to monitor my name mentioned on Twitter:

Where:

• “ann smarty” -> mentions of my full name
• seosmarty -> mentions of my moniker whenever it happens to be untagged
• seosmarty.com -> mentions of my personal blog (whether it was shortened in a tweet or not)
• OR -> ANY of the above should be included in the search results
• -from:@seosmarty -> excluding my own tweets
• -@seosmarty -> excluding tweets tagging me because Twitter does a good job notifying me of these already using “Notifications” feature

Price: FREE

Bonus: FREE download! Click here to download my own clickable PDF guide that will help you and your team to find and monitor all kinds of brand mentions.

Fun tip: Track your competitors’ social media sentiment to discover more potential risks. Search Twitter for [competitor name ] and monitor these search results to be alerted when your competitors’ customers are unhappy (and avoid similar issues):

3. Cyfe: Monitor & Archive Brand Mentions on Twitter

Cyfe is not just for brand alerts: It can be set up to monitor almost anything under the sun, including your expenses, sales and customer support teams and more. Cyfe is rather one of those business productivity tools than an exclusively marketing or reputation management solution.

For social media, I am using to monitor and archive Twitter mentions using a separate dashboard.

Simply set up multiple widgets monitoring all kinds of Twitter search results (see the “Advanced Twitter search” options above) and login once in a while to see archives mentions and decide if there are any you missed. The archive is a great option to have because you are able to find your promoters over time and identify most active ones.

Price: Unlimited number of widgets for just $19 per month ($14 per month if paid annually).

4. Tweetdeck: Engage with Brand Mentions on Twitter

Tweetdeck is one of the oldest tools I am still using a lot. The beauty of the tool is that you don’t need to login anywhere daily to see the mentions. It will deliver them as they happen right to your desktop, based on your notification settings.

You can set up multiple columns to monitor all kinds of keyword and domain mentions and only get notified of those updates you choose.

Price: FREE

5. Buzzsumo Alerts: Get Email Digest of in-Content Mentions

Not exactly a reputation management tool, Buzzsumo has a great “Content Alerts” feature that sends you email digests every day notifying you where your brand name has been mentioned. You can use it to monitor your brand name or your company author names.

Price: You can set up 5 alerts for $79 a month. You can monitor multiple things within one alert, for example, I am monitoring at least two names (and different combinations of how you can spell them, including [First Last Name] and [firstlastname] as one word)

6. Serpstat: Dig into Brand Mentions in Search Results

While most of these tools help monitoring and managing social media mentions, search engine sentiment is essential, too. It changes slower than on social media but it still needs your attention.

I have previously talked about monitoring search queries that include your brand name and how you need to make sure that you are ranking for all of those long queries that include your name.

Serpstat is a great tool allowing to research and monitor search queries that contain your brand name. Set up a project, identify those search phrases and add your digital assets to monitor how they rank for those keywords.

Price: Serpstat minimum package is $19 a month and it allows you to monitor 200 keywords which will most likely be enough for your site unless you have a really huge brand to manage (they also offer the most affordable API on the market)

7. Semantria: Visualize and Organize Your Mentions

Surveys, social media accounts, and reviews are all covered under this awesome Excel add-on from Lexalytics. Semantria has an emphasis on getting balanced data for more thorough, helpful reports. Importing is super simple, and the results are clean and easy to read. They even sell in multi-seat packages, so managing multiple projects, accounts or data sources is simple and budget friendly.

Of all of the tools on this list, I would say this is one of the very best. You can try it for free to see for yourself. Be sure to check out some of their other cool toys on their site.

Price: There’s a free trial after which you’ll need to schedule a demo to see how much it will cost for your specific needs

8. Talkwalker: Reputation Management Solution for Large Businesses

Talkwalker is a larger scale social media marketing tool that covers a lot of different corners. But if you want global data (and a lot of it) it is a great option. It has image recognition features that take your mentions to a new level… even if they don’t say your brand in the description you can find mentions via images featuring your logo. That is on top of more traditional social listening and monitoring tools that catch a lot more than most monitoring software does.

Price: They are a pretty steep product, admittedly… prices start at $8,400 per year for small brands, and go up to $36,000 per year for enterprise customers. But on the plus side they are a more thorough product than you are usually going to find, and they allow for customized demos that show you the features that work best for your company.

9. Meltwater: Analyze Long-Term Impact of Social Media Over Time

Meltwater is a simpler tool than those above, but it is still very helpful. It works by filtering through the conversations on social media to find harder to see mentions of your brand. It then creates a report that helps you not just to track what is being said, but actually engage in conversation with those users.

In the meantime you can also see the larger picture and get a good grasp of patterns in mentions, so you can start to put together a more personalized game plan. They help you to put that data into context, rather than just leaving you to trudge through it alone.

You may have come across this tool in the past under its old name, IceRocket. Since then they have made some real improvements that have made this a much more useful, intuitive app.

Price: Meltwater offers service and pricing packages to match your specific needs. You’ll need to request demo to find out your price.

10. Hootsuite: Monitor and Engage

I have always felt Hootsuite was a mixed bag. On one hand it is one of the most celebrated analytics and social tools on the web. On the other, the tools have a very sharp learning curve that is aimed more towards those who are already adept at highly technical tools than average marketers.

But it is hard to argue with results, and Hootsuite always provides them.

Price: $19 per month if you can do with one user. If you need your team there, you’ll need to pay $99

To Sum up:

Download the below comparison as PDF to hand to your reputation manager or CEO.

Do you have a tool to add to the list? Let us know in the comments!

About the Author

Ann Smarty is the Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com as well as the founder of MyBlogU.com. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for 10 years, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable.

It takes people to drive profits. The smarter your employees are, the higher level of profits your company will achieve. This reality pervades any market and triggers fierce competition especially among high-performing businesses to find, develop and retain top talent. Because forward-thinking organizations recognize the importance of employee development, their growth strategies always include ample budgets to fuel their learning and development (L&D) programs.

A mind-opening study by LinkedIn Learning Solutions found this incredible stat:

Nearly 70% of L&D professionals believe talent is the number one priority in their organizations, with 27% expecting employee development budgets to increase in 2017.

How Much Are Companies Really Spending On Employee Development Training?

On average, large companies (10,000+ employees) spend $13 million per year on employee training while mid-size (1000-9999) and small (under 1000) businesses allocate respective annual employee development budgets of $3.7 million and $290,000, according to Brandon Hall Group, a human capital management services company.

Any company that wishes to remain profitable needs to keep its resources relevant to its customers. Because the people behind an organization represent its most valuable resource, the global spend for employee development and training ballooned to nearly $360 billion in 2016.

And because sales receipts help pay the bills and keep companies running, organizations spend an average of $954,070 on sales training every year, according to ATD research.

Employee development programs help keep sales professionals sharp and adequately skilled to solve emerging challenges and transform opportunities into closed deals faster, more efficiently, and with greater impact.

However, even as businesses set budgets for employee development, training doesn’t always come automatically for everyone. In many cases, employees have to volunteer, request or establish sound justification for inclusion in specific employee learning and development programs.

How Sales Pros Can Convince Their Boss To Get Them Into a Training Program

In his aptly titled article on Forbes, Deloitte’s Josh Bersin explored how the learning curve defines a person’s earning potential.

Quoting the multi-awarded French economist Thomas Picketty, Bersin identified “skills and knowledge” as the only predictable factor that influences how high an individual’s earnings can go.

This factor provides a two-pronged boost. A significant improvement in skills and knowledge not only upgrades an employee’s earning potential. It also delivers a corresponding ROI for the company who stands to benefit from a skilled employee’s higher productivity and better performance.

With sales teams serving as the main profit-generating arm of any business, it’s no wonder employee development programs focusing on sales competencies and sales skills are sprouting like mushrooms everywhere.

Some are training programs developed in-house while others are designed and offered by third-party providers.

Many are run-of-the-mill affairs, but some — such as those offered by Sandler Training and Vantage Point — are excellent career investments, with fees ranging from a few hundred to several thousand dollars.

Meanwhile, newer players like Hubspot and Sales Hacker University also offer valuable but more affordable employee development courses.

Here are some steps to get you closer to the employment development goals you’re aiming for:

1. Demonstrate Your Desire To Learn

Begin by researching your company’s guideline on employee development and training. Inquire if there are internal workshops or other in-house resources available and get involved in relevant offerings. Check if there’s a budget for third-party courses. Identify courses that will generate the best value for you as well as the company. Be informed about the course details, especially those factors (pricing, certification, provider brand, etc.) that will help persuade your boss to let you participate.

2. Prove That You’re An Employee Whose Actually Worthy Of Enhanced Training

There are many people in the team. Why would your boss select you for training instead of another? Provide a definite answer to this question by being the most worthy candidate. In addition to researching about policies and available courses, be ready to confidently answer all questions about your professional development goals and the courses you intend to attend.

3. Articulate The Benefits Of Your Desired Sales Training And It’s Impact On Your Professional Development

Discuss improvements in motivation, productivity, performance and leadership skills. Present scenarios wherein the skills you expect to learn will help solve complex challenges at work.

4. Discuss The Benefits Of The Employee Development Program To Your Colleagues

Provide reasonable figures to simulate your expected ROI, following improvements in productivity and performance. Offer to teach other members of the team whatever you learned from the course so that a multiplier effect applies to the benefits. Whenever possible, explain the cost of lost opportunity if your boss withheld your participation in the training or employee development program.

5. Send A Formal Request Letter

Nothing says you mean business more than expressing it through a formal letter. Make a solid pitch by summarizing applicable points in the foregoing items. In a clear and compelling way, justify the cost of participation vs. the ROI for the company. Make concrete and reasonable forecasts on which metrics will be improved when you complete a specific training program.

Request Letter Template: Convincing Your Boss That Your Employee Development Will Not Be In Vain

Here’s a sample letter you can use as reference to persuade your manager to allow you to join a specific sales training course. You may chose to present it as a memo for formality.

TO: [name of your manager]

FROM: [your name]

DATE: [make sure to make your request well in advance of the course or training date]

SUBJECT: [example: Enrollment in course title]

I sincerely request your approval to join Sales Hacker University’s [course title] course. I am certain this course will help me learn new skills and improve my performance in the following areas:

1. Area A
2. Area B
3. Area C

I seek to take advantage of this opportunity not only to upgrade my professional credentials but also to directly benefit the company by delivering

1) significant improvements on [specific metrics] and

2) sharing whatever I’ve learned with the team via presentations and one-to-one mentorship. I believe this will have a multiplier effect on the benefits slated for the company.

The course covers emerging fields and strategies such as

[example: data-driven selling techniques, etc] that will likely help us achieve new targets, increase efficiencies and revitalize our pipeline.

The course series costs [$ cost] which is a pittance considering the value it can generate for the company. Moreover, most of the offerings at {DESIRED TRAINING COURSE} can be taken on the go and at any time, which allows me to learn (during my free time) without pulling back on any of my current responsibilities.

Based on reviews, brand recognition, and demonstrable outcomes, I am certain that enrolling in the course will be a wise investment for the team.

The course also aligns well with the roadmap HR follows for its employee development goals. More importantly, it presents an opportunity for me to act on your fervent advice regarding continuous self-improvement.

Looking forward to your reply. 

Sincerely, 

Employee who wants to learn. 

The post How to Unlock Your Company’s Employee Development Budget appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Have you ever stopped to ponder the true complexities involved with trying to create a viable, safe, autonomous vehicle? The innovation alone is a herculean task, but imagine being that upstart pioneer trying to develop the technology, while at the same time going up against entrenched, powerful competitors with deep industry knowledge, assets, and channels who’ve been around for a hundred years or more.

This is the challenge for all kinds of disruptors, whether in the auto industry, pharmaceuticals, service industries, or healthcare. The fact is, going it alone, we believe, is simply not the way to go at all. Collaboration is the essential new secret sauce for startups and industry leaders alike. For true disruption to take hold, old and new must work together, playing to each other’s strengths.

This is an incredible moment for innovation. Previously unthinkable opportunities to reinvent complex, established industries are now being made possible by the convergence of cloud computing, new analytical tools, and the data flowing from a host of new sensors in the physical world. Improbable advances are now real possibilities.

Yet the requirements for innovation today are entirely different from those of the last 30 years. The technology-driven disruption model that brought us computing, the internet, and mobile apps is no longer sufficient. Transforming our oldest industries calls for more than new technology; sophisticated knowledge of regulations, testing protocols, and traditional physical assets are now essential.

Insight Center

The inadequacies of the old approach are evident in recent startup stumbles, even when the technology is sound. DNA genetic testing company 23andMe fell behind on its communications with the FDA, resulting in a temporary ban on marketing the company’s personal genetic screening services to the public. It took more than two years for 23andMe to secure a green light from the FDA to screen for 10 diseases, the first such approval for a direct-to-consumer test.

A123 Systems promised to be a clean tech success with a soaring IPO in 2009. The company developed lithium ion batteries that helped convince automakers of their value for hybrid vehicles. But the startup could not keep pace with the development and scale of established battery makers, and production defects led to a $55 million recall in 2012 and contributed to the company’s bankruptcy later that year. Acquired out of bankruptcy by a Chinese company to focus on the burgeoning domestic market, A123 recently announced it will close its Michigan plant as it winds down production of lithium-ion batteries in the U.S. and shifts its local focus to engineering and testing.

Even an innovation pioneer like Tesla took a harder path — the company’s reinvention of the automobile meant a massive investment in non-core parts. While Tesla has been rightfully lauded for a sleek exterior and technology breakthroughs in automation, it has faced complaints that the fit and finish of its interiors don’t meet luxury standards and lack features that consumers have come to expect. The company recently hired Volvo’s head of interiors to help it compete.

Innovation by industry leaders is not faring much better. Executives of the “old economy” are certainly aware of their own vulnerability, as they witness the impact of Uber on the taxi industry, Airbnb on hospitality, and automated asset management on financial services. They are not sitting idly by — in 2016, corporate venture arms spent approximately $25 billion globally on more than 1,350 startup investments (excluding direct, strategic investments), a compound annual growth rate of 25% from 2012, according to CB Insights. Unfortunately, these investments are unlikely to yield meaningful benefits.

Much of corporate venturing today is fragmented and ad hoc. We often observe a wide-ranging set of initiatives and investments operating independently, and in some cases, even competitively. Pilot projects with startups and corporate leaders are known to move so slowly that they drain the resources of the startups that they were meant to scale. We suspect that many CEOs would be shocked if they understood the hundreds of millions — even billions — of dollars they are investing in uncoordinated, external innovation projects, often with minimal returns.

We believe that there’s a better way that can yield radical results — not just the short-term, quarter-to-quarter kind. Based on our work with CEOs from large companies, startup founders and venture capitalists (VCs) around the world, we find that collaboration now trumps acquisitions or build-it-from-scratch startups — not just an exchange of money, or the traditional “equity investment,” but a real exchange of ideas and means, and the vision to achieve distinct goals. To revolutionize old industries, small and big companies alike must get past competitive angst and embrace their strengths and weaknesses. Such collaboration can take many shapes. These are new, unique partnership models in which corporations bring assets, the ability to rapidly test and scale, and a deep understanding of the regulatory landscape. Startups inject new technical expertise, and venture capitalists offer funding and access to new talent.

We hear about these issues often. We have hosted more than 65 C-suite boot camps to bring some of the world’s largest companies to Silicon Valley to see how companies big and small can transform industries more rapidly together, shaping a new generation of industry leaders.

How do we get there? Startups must change their mindset. The grow-at-all-costs, move-fast-and-break-things mentality lauded in Silicon Valley can put lives at stake in the healthcare or automotive industries. It means being wise enough to recognize your core strengths, that you can’t be the best at everything, and that there is wisdom and experience outside your company that can get you to an answer far faster than if you were to go it alone.

For corporate giants, a strategic vision for corporate venture investing is critical, not just for innovation, but for a new, better way of doing business. Innovation is inherently risky and unpredictable, but companies can improve their odds by reimagining the entire approach — one with a clear strategy, a dedicated team, a diverse portfolio of unique partnership models, and a strong capability to scale new technologies and business models into the core business. A portfolio approach can take many forms. For each of their growth priorities and business model disruptions, large corporations ought to consider investing in startups across multiple horizons and through a variety of vehicles, such as equity investments, licenses, alliances, and acquisitions.

Instead of solely funding and incubating startups just to disrupt existing players, in this new model, VCs become crucial bridge-builders between new technologies and talent, and the CEOs of incumbent industry leaders.

We are seeing early hints of the possibilities among automotive OEMs. Take Ford’s recent investment in Argo, which leaves the startup to operate mostly independently and with the latitude to license its self-driving software and sensor suite to others, Last year, Ford invested in Velodyne’s LiDAR technology alongside Baidu, offering capital and access to Ford’s test tracks to lower the cost and improve efficiency of this crucial self-driving car technology.

Scotiabank is also a leader in adopting this type of new model. It is embracing a portfolio approach to innovation and placing multiple bets across big data, artificial intelligence, and new business models, and its new digital factories are designed to scale innovations within its core business.

Leading VCs like Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures are shifting their focus to help connect startups with innovative CEOs. Marc Andreessen has long been calling for greater collaboration and now has a small army of people focused on helping startups engage with the corporate community.

These innovators suggest a path forward, but they remain the rare exception. To seize the opportunity before us, collaboration across the economy must become universal. Yesterday’s model of innovation is no longer adequate — instead, the entire ecosystem must work together. Smart companies, founders, and investors that recognize this have a far better shot at making history, rather than running the risk of becoming a footnote to it.

Concentrate on Visitor Experience to Increase your Sales Pipeline written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Keeping your sales pipeline healthy reduces the worry for businesses that they are not receiving enough income. There are trends throughout the year that can affect the pipeline so how do you keep it topped up at a satisfactory level the whole year?

Focus on the Visitor Experience

Your company has put effort into marketing to get your visitors to your site, perhaps through pay per click advertising, sending out email campaigns or having a successful social media presence. Whichever route bought the individual to your website it is now your site that has to wow the visitor.

US companies are now 6% ahead of UK brands in terms of customer experience, compared to 2% ahead last year. The visitor experience is vital for companies to gain custom, loyalty and repeat business, all aspects that help fill the sales pipeline.

How to Improve the Visitor Experience

Your website has many different aspects that affect visitor experience. This includes:

• Landing pages
• Website design
• Mobile responsive
• Contact channels

Each area is a piece of the overall puzzle; any section that frustrates the visitor can ruin the whole image and prevent them from completing business with your company.

Landing Pages

A Landing page needs to encourage a visitor to undergo an action; this is to inspire the visitor to continue to the website or to capture lead information. There are two types of landing pages:

• Click through
• Lead generation

The purpose of the click-through type of the landing page is to increase the company’s conversion rate. It is common for visitors to only view one page; the landing page can pique the visitor’s interest and help move them along for more in-depth information or towards purchasing.

E-commerce sites mainly use the click-through type with the destination page being the shopping cart or registration page; this increases the chance of gaining more conversions than directing a visitor straight from your marketing routes to the destination page.

A Lead generation landing page if designed well can increase your sales pipeline by collecting the visitor’s contact details, allowing you to market to and nurture the prospect.

Visitors are more willing to give their details to companies if they feel they are getting something of value, this could be:

• Ebook or Whitepaper
• Discount Coupon / Voucher
• Free Trial
• A Physical Gift
• Registering for a webinar, product launch updates, consultation, competition entry etc.

Now you have an idea of the types of a landing page and what should be on there, how do you design the page? Wordstream has put together a useful article on “9 Tips on How to Craft an Effective Landing Page” that covers:

1. Clean Organised Design
2. Be a Minimalist
3. Use Header to Broadcast Offer Value
4. Trust Signals
5. Make your Page Mobile Friendly
6. Keep your Form Short
7. Tailor your Landing Pages for Individual Audiences
8. Match Landing Page with PPC Ads
9. Test!

Design

Once the visitor has clicked through to your website, the design of the site is the next hurdle. Information needs to be presented clearly on the page, and not cluttered to fit everything on. Images of products should be a good definition and if there is more than one angle, these should be captured to give the visitor the most accurate representation.

In the example the company above has taken 3 very similar images on the front angle of the dress, many visitors would want to be able to see the back to judge what it would look like on them and if there’s any additional design (zip showing etc.)

Navigation should be kept simple to help the visitor through their journey. Your most popular pages can be identified within Google Analytics to see where your visitors are browsing. Less popular pages can be amended or removed if they have been dormant for a long period of time.

Mobile Responsive

Part of the design aspect is to ensure whatever device the visitor is using, that their browsing experience is effortless.

Firstly Google will punish you if you don’t have a mobile-friendly site, we are not talking about getting completely penalized by Google, however, you will rank lower as they take the user experience very seriously! Losing rank position can affect a number of visitors you receive to your site organically and therefore a number of visitors you gain into your sales pipeline.

Switching to a mobile responsive site and designing it well can improve the visitor’s experience and help them to achieve their goal for visiting your site. Bradley Nice, Design Consultant at Click Help has put together a guide with a helpful infographic on this year’s Best Practices of Responsive Web Design.

Contact Channels

The last piece of the puzzle! The visitor has come to your site and is satisfied with the experience they have had so far. They are moments away from becoming a lead or making that sale but they have a few questions first.

Your representatives need to be contactable to close them. Everyone expects a phone number and an email address or form to be available in an obvious place; however, it can take the visitors attention away from the website.

They could be waiting hours for a response in which time they have researched your competitor’s products and/or services. If they wait too long to be connected by phone, they can become frustrated and it could ruin their entire experience.

The quickest way for them to get their answers is via a web chat system. They are still present on the website when they are connected instantly to a representative who can help them to purchase or gather details from them.

Web chat has the highest satisfaction levels for any customer service channel, with 73% compared with 61% for email and 44% for phone. Web chat works well when operators are attentive to the visitor’s needs, they should aim to answer a new chat within 20 seconds with a welcome message.

Shorter sentences should be used to answer the visitor’s questions as the information can be digested easily. Visitors are not waiting in silence for a response, at least on the phone you can hear the other person making background noises like breathing to know you are still connected.

Conclusion

If the visitor has an effortless experience of your website from the moment they enter and are not faced with any frustrating issues they are more likely to convert, topping up your sales pipeline. There are many platforms and professional service available to help improve the visitor experience, invest smartly in these and your pipeline will be a healthy one.

What changes have you made to your website, did you find they improved the visitor experience? I’d love to hear your experiences in the comments.

About the Author

Gemma Baker is the Marketing Executive for UK web chat system provider, Click4Assistance, with a range of digital knowledge within PPC advertising, SEO practices, email campaigns and social media

How can marketers identify new customers and audiences through social listening? This was the question we addressed when presenting at GrowCommerce 2017 in the session, “Audience Hacking: Finding a Needle in a Haystack.”

There are four predominant ways to identify audience conversations through social listening. You can definitely remember it as the MABI Method:

Mentions: Mentions of any brand or topic

Affinity: Affinities of the audience engaging in conversations, as expressed through their profile bios or the social graph of who they interact with about that topic

Behavior: The kinds of content shared, the channels used, and other forms of behavior

Imagery: Anything that can be identified through visual search by analyzing images and video, rather than text alone

How does that manifest? During the session, we showed how marketers used one or more examples from the MABI Method for a range of goals: product development, finding an audience, engagement, promotion, and tapping advocates.

Here are examples of each that were covered during the session. All of these are actual examples, though some names are not disclosed to protect confidentiality.

Product development: Golin’s Director of Analytics Brittany McKone described how McDonald’s was inspired by social listening to launch its all-day breakfast menu. This kind of market research, analyzing billions of public social posts, can inspire and inform new revenue streams.

Finding your audience: A government agency looking to adjust its messaging during a disease outbreak downloaded a large swath of conversations and sorted audiences into categories such as healthcare practitioners, parents, students, non-profit organizations, and others. The agency then saved these groups as separate lists to monitor trends in each group’s concerns and conversation themes. Following through, the agency adapted its messaging to address such issues, as parents wondering if it was safe to travel with children had different priorities from physicians wondering how to best prevent the disease from spreading.

Engagement: One brand sponsoring a major music festival looked to analyze all the images shared at the festival. They then were able to engage with people sharing images featuring that brand (whether the products themselves, from people wearing that brand’s logo on clothing, or from people visiting that brand’s experience at the festival) and connect with them to provide some added value while they were still there, thus motivating them to spread the word further. Additionally, the brand could review trends through visual listening to understand reports such as the top types of objects, foods, and scenes featured in the photos, and further assess how much value they got out of their sponsorship.

Promotion: Kingsford Charcoal offered up a classic social media marketing campaign a few years back when they sought to find the nicest person in social media. It inverted the Christmas trope, where coal is typically given to those on Santa’s ‘naughty’ list. Kingsford looked for the most polite, positive person and delivered Clifford Brown of Waukesha, Wisconsin a year’s supply of charcoal and a new grill.

Tapping advocates (and their owners): Another favorite from Golin’s McKone was how PetSmart customers frequently featured the retailer’s blue carts in photos. The retailer then started a content series using #petsmartcart and inviting its pet owner customers to participate as well.

All of these tap elements of the MABI Method, and the approach helps those proverbial needles stand out in the massive social media haystacks.

Ever since reading the classic Competing for the Future, I realized that a business leader must have one eye on the present and the other on the future. Every organization is running two businesses – today’s business and tomorrow’s business! To build capabilities today for tomorrow’s business requires a cultural capability for agility, change and customer centricity. I call this cultural capability: peripheral vision – the extent to which leadership and staff in the business monitor, understand and respond to trends and changes in the larger environment including technological, economic, social, political, legal and the natural environment (such as climate change). This future oriented cultural capability also leads us to build disciplines around customer and competitor foresight – what will customers’ future needs be and who will be future competitors and where will they be coming from.

The need for organizations to build these cultural capabilities today is demonstrated by what I call the Amazon Effect. Amazon just announced the acquisition of Whole Foods, a natural and organic foods supermarket chain with 465 stores in North America and the UK. What are the implications? With its online technology capability, Amazon now has a bricks and mortar chain that can be leveraged with its delivery capabilities, elevating online selection and ordering of Whole Foods private label products. It will also bring change to the current retail format with new technology like no cash registers – all to add to the ease and convenience for consumers. This will have a huge impact on other supermarkets, food and grocery manufacturers and the entire retail industry.

What would be the impact in the car industry if Apple bought Tesla or in wearable technology if Google purchased Samsung? How is VISA dealing with PayPal and Apple Pay and hotel chains coping with Airbnb? Many of these challenges for established companies are yet to happen – but they will……and soon.

I am thinking about what this means for my own business and what cultural capabilities and strategy we need to build now to ensure its future. What is your Amazon Effect – the thing that would require you to totally reinvent your business? Building cultural disciplines in peripheral vision, customer foresight and competitor foresight will enable you to become prepared to face these challenges, make the changes you need to make, take up future opportunities and run a growing and sustainable business. Without them, you will struggle at best, but more likely be consigned to the history books.

Preparing for your future business requires customer-centric leadership that galvanizes all your leaders and staff to build capabilities firmly focused on who your future customers and competitors will be and how the whole organization is geared to adapt and provide ongoing superior value for customers.

“We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” - Ayn Rand

B2B salespeople are a massive cost overhead. In today’s high-velocity, ultra-competitive global markets, natural market forces are shining a bright light on this increasingly unsustainable cost of doing business.

Let me explain: Throughout my 28-year B2B sales career, I have been taught to focus my energy on top-line revenue attainment. Rarely have I ever been encouraged to consider the other side of the P&L, or the cost burden that my employers have had to accept in the name of customer acquisition. Intuitively, most successful salespeople know they a massive cost, but for some strange reason, they have always been excluded from the detailed financial measurements that typically run each and every business.

This is an outdated form of thinking that assumes salespeople don’t need to know about the real workings of the business -- they should just focus on selling.

Sure, narrowing the focus and protecting certain employees from unnecessary noise is often wise, but it’s crucial salespeople understand exactly how they are being assessed and measured from a management accounting perspective, and not just from a revenue attainment perspective.

Any CFO will tell you that running a field sales force is often the most expensive fixed (and variable) cost element on practically every vendor balance sheet, yet in my entire sales career the total cost burden of my individual role has never been discussed or revealed to me. Why?

In Australia’s high-tech industry, the average outside salesperson has a base salary of approximately A$150,000 (or $117,300 USD). If they hit their numbers, they can often earn another A$150,000 in commission and bonus. At a total package of A$300,000, plus expenses like travel and client entertainment, it’s easy to see how sales people become the largest cost component of every sale. Forrester Research’s 2009 report Uncovering the Hidden Cost of Sales Support found that technology vendors are spending, on average, 19% of their selling, general, and administrative costs, or A$177,000 per quota-carrying sales person, on support-related activities. So, when you calculate the fully loaded cost (including superannuation, allowances, and a myriad of other benefits) to recruit, employ, support, train, and retain each salesperson it’s a massive number -- in some cases, well above A$500,000 per year.

The Value Chain

Now consider the extinct vendor-push business models. In these old models (see diagram below) the salesperson effectively acted as the “retailer” or “re-seller” in the value chain. Vendors have nearly always employed this old sales model where the sales person acts as an “autonomous agent” who owns a territory and collects a commission on every sale that they make. Because salespeople had so much more information than buyers, this model worked. But it was based on an incredibly high Cost of Customer Acquisition (CoCA).

Fast forward to 2017, and salespeople are facing a different reality. Information parity is the key difference: Buyers are now more educated and better able to solve their own problems. They can often -- and often do -- deal directly with the vendor. B2B salespeople are experiencing a “pincer” movement where buyers no longer depend on them, and their employers are forced to review their very costly role in the value chain.

Many tech vendors must lower their CoCA simply to remain competitive. In some cases, technology now allows buyers to get a better deal through self-service, and even in high value/high complexity sales models, where full self-service isn’t possible, those vendors are moving toward insides sales and self-serve platforms to reduce the CoCA.

Cost of Customer Acquisition (CoCA) vs. Lifetime Customer Value (LCV)

Take Atlassian, an Australian software company that does not employ salespeople. Atlassian has dramatically reduced its CoCA, meaning it has huge margins to reinvest in product development and customer success and customer advocacy initiatives.

Large incumbent vendors like HP, IBM, and Oracle, which employ thousands of commissioned salespeople, spend well over 50% of their revenue on sales and marketing alone. How can these incumbents compete with the likes of Atlassian when their CoCA is so much higher and their margins are so much lower? They can’t, so they must review their go-to-market approach. Salespeople are simply becoming too costly, particularly in transactional or packaged solution (commodity) selling models. Remember, every product is continuously being forced down the curve towards commodification.

If you are working in a sales role and you are not creating value over and above what you cost (at a reasonable margin) then your employer will soon become uncompetitive -- and incapable of paying your high salary and commissions. It’s only a matter of time.

My advice to sales people is simple: stop and think about how much you (and the entire support infrastructure around you) cost your employer per transaction. Please do not naively assume that just because you brought in more top-line revenue than your salary that you are creating value. Average margin per transaction is now a more important measure of your worth in the current climate than the extent to which you smashed your quota. As Derek Wyszynski wrote recently, “Being let go even when you are the top performer is a cruel reality of the new world that we all operate in.”

Even if Forrester is only half right with their prediction that 23% of B2B salespeople will be gone by 2020, 1.7 million B2B salespeople around the world will be let go.

What Can You Do to Protect Yourself?

1. Specialize. It’s increasingly obvious that sales people must become specialists in their field to be truly valuable to both customers and employers. To find out how to specialize, you should read my new Amazon best-selling book, The Future of the Sales Profession. Register at SalesTribe as well -- there’s strength in numbers.
2. Cultivate a personal brand and become part of an open network that can protect your career.It’s simple to say, yet not simple to do. You must become digitally driven, socially connected, mobile, and specialized. As Lee Bartlett says, “Are you able to build a strong enough network and personal brand to future-proof yourself against decisions that are out of your control?”

Outside salespeople, and the high costs that go into supporting them, are increasingly under the microscope. Despite today’s relatively strong economic conditions in most markets, across most industries, these new self-serve business models are now driving vendors to find more cost-effective means by which to acquire customers and protect margins simply to remain competitive.

The increased focus on the ratio of CoCA versus LCV is becoming the determining factor for your sales career. Buyers no longer need you (the way they once did), and your employer (vendors) can no longer afford you -- unless you are highly effective.

If this post resonates with you, please share it. We sales folks must urgently spread this important message to the 15 million plus B2B salespeople around the world today. This is the new reality that we all face, and putting your head in the sand will not help you.

Today’s insurance sales industry faces growing complexity and competition at every corner. Insurance has become a commodity market by low growth in mature markets. As a result, insurance companies are shifting the way that they go to market and interact with their clients.

With new strategies come new challenges in the preservation of market share. Here’s a look at some of those challenges, with some insights on how to overcome them.

Keeping a Client Focused Approach

For the majority of producers, all sales are conversions. That is, a sale for one company is a loss for another. The insurance sale has become a commodity which underscores the need for a client focus to build relationships and loyalty.

The challenge to make this shift is often a direct result of a ‘system think’ philosophy precipitated by internal processes getting in the way of a customer focus.

As regulations become more complex, customers want an easy way to understand their options and make a choice. As part of this shift, producers are taking a more generalist role to provide expertise around a wider array of products. The challenge is using that new approach to provide better customer-producer relationships that lead to sales.

Ensure that the client experience is exceptional. Engage the client by taking time to ask broader questions to understand their goals, improve the experience, and uncover additional needs. Build trust by integrating client ideas and needs into a meaningful and consultative dialogue. This approach offers future opportunities, especially given the broader generalist focus. For example, discussing retirement plans helps potential clients think about the future and what is at stake. Discussions regarding future goals are different from traditional product discussions, as it requires building trust. Providing insightful needs-based discussions establishes trust.

Using Big Data To Educate – Not Intimidate

Insurance is unique; producers must help customers consider the consequences if they don’t buy the product. For example, actuarial science applies calculus-based probability to assess risk for life insurance premiums which increase with age. Producers can then use that data as a fear factor to entice buyers to act now rather than later.

Although the intent may be to create an emotional connection that drives a quicker sale, it is still a fear-based approach. Customers rarely respond well to this tactic. The challenge is to use this data to effectively educate and engage the customer without creating a feeling of intimidation, which risks the sale.

Incorporating data points into an effective sales dialogue is difficult if the focus is centered around the metrics rather than a meaningful conversation. Although agents are persuasive about the data in a ‘scare the client’ way, buyers are beginning to see through that approach. Providing insights and ideas that engage the client in a deeper dialogue will be more effective. Rather than starting the discussion with price, or other data points, begin the dialogue by asking questions that provoke thought. Then, provide insights that help the client understand the significance of the data. Lead conversations that will educate the customer on the relevant data, bring more credibility to the

Providing insights and ideas that engage the client in a deeper dialogue will be more effective. Rather than starting the discussion with price, or other data points, begin the dialogue by asking questions that provoke thought. Then, provide insights that help the client understand the significance of the data. Lead conversations that will educate the customer on the relevant data, bring more credibility to the Producer, and strengthen the ability to close. Be sure and check in with the customer periodically to ensure relevance and understanding.

Creating a Winning Team

We all know how important a finals presentation is to winning the business, and for a producer it’s a make or break event in most cases. Brokers and other evaluators schedule back to back timeslots for these presentations and are looking for those who stand out. Producers have one shot to make that persuasive and compelling presentation.It is common for producers to call in subject matter experts (SMEs) for these presentations. The challenge is assembling a team that builds credibility, expertise and trust with the customer. If your team isn’t prepared and aligned it can be a disaster for the sale, and in some cases, prevent future opportunities for the company.

It is common for producers to call in subject matter experts (SMEs) for these presentations. The challenge is assembling a team that builds credibility, expertise and trust with the customer. If your team isn’t prepared and aligned it can be a disaster for the sale, and in some cases, prevent future opportunities for the company.

Presenting as a team requires both strategy and preparation. The team must demonstrate a unified front before the prospective customer. An effective team must have an orchestrated approach in which everyone speaks the same language. Before the meeting, define the role of each team member, and clarify who will lead. Do not underestimate the preparation needed to be successful. Practice and rehearse key parts of the meeting including introductions, use of visuals and data, and how you will make the transition between presenters. Brief all participants on updated customer information so that they can tailor all of the responses to the customer’s needs and nuances. Ensure each member of the team is trained properly on how to effectively respond to client objections during the presentation. Also, make sure each team member respects the needs of everyone on the team. Be aligned with the objective of the meeting.

An effective selling team must have an orchestrated approach in which everyone speaks the same language. Before the meeting, define the role of each team member, and clarify who will lead.

Do not underestimate the preparation needed to be successful. Practice and rehearse key parts of the meeting including introductions, use of visuals and data, and how you will make the transition between presenters. Brief all participants on updated customer information so that they can tailor all of the responses to the customer’s needs and nuances. Ensure each member of the team is trained properly on how to effectively respond to client objections during the presentation.

Also, make sure each team member respects the needs of everyone on the team. Be aligned with the objective of the meeting.

Transitioning Technical Resources into Sales

Insurance company leaders are constantly concerned with maintaining a robust pipeline of qualified leaders. Pipeline challenges arise from an intensive certification process and high-performer attrition. Meanwhile, high turnover also contributes stress and can impact the length of time leader’s stay.

The future of insurance companies is in the hands of their leaders. It is critical to build this talent pipeline to sustain long-term growth.

Employee development is high among organizations with healthy talent pipelines. Talent must be nurtured so that they understand their role and have the skills to execute.

Create a development plan for leaders that equips them with the tools and skills they need to be effective leaders. The result is employee engagement and buy-in around company strategy. Provide leaders and managers with the tools to effectively coach employees, in turn providing the ranks with the coaching and skills they need to be successful. Make sure to have a reinforcement component in place so that skills and engagement is continual and embedded in the culture.

Producers need to transition to a client focused approach by providing insightful dialogue and building trust. They also need to be able to use data to spark engaging and thought provoking dialogue with clients, versus using a fear driven approach. To effectively win as a team, Producers need to ensure that team members are prepared and aligned for every presentation. For companies to survive they must nurture and develop leaders enabling them to build a healthy talent pipeline.

Contact us by clicking here or calling 215.940.9255 learn more about our customized sales training programs for insurance sales organizations.

The post Insurance Sales Trends appeared first on Richardson Sales Training & Enablement Blog.

Female executives are a distinct minority, and they can be particularly rare in certain industries like mining, crude oil production, and agriculture. In such environments, they often face daunting obstacles, but could there also be unexpected advantages to being in a minority group? And, if so, what?

To investigate that question, we conducted extensive field research studying grape growers in Champagne, France, a region famous for its sparkling wines. It’s a centuries-old business, in which growers (that is, farmers) sell grapes directly to their buyers (winemakers like Bollinger and Moet & Chandon). In that market, women growers are very much a minority (just 14% of all grape sellers in our sample), and discrimination against them by the majority of male growers is a significant factor. According to one woman in our study, “Among grape growers, you lose a lot of credibility when you’re a woman.”

In our study, we focused on this type of seller-side discrimination. One woman described the environment in this way: “Men, especially in farming communities, seem to think that expertise can only come from or be used by men.” Or, as another female grower put it, “Men have always had a monopoly…. They have their technical conversations; there were no women involved.”

Past research investigating a variety of markets has focused instead on buyer-side discrimination; it notably shows that minority sellers often receive lower prices for the same good. For example, minorities (women, non-whites and older people) are paid less than their majority counterparts when selling cards in baseball card shows, and African Americans are offered lower prices than whites for the same products on eBay. For our study, we wanted to minimize any buyer-side factors in order to isolate and study mechanisms on the seller side. In that respect, the Champagne grape market provided a good environment because of two characteristics. First, grape quality there is recorded by an official scale that was established in the early 1900s and is observable by all market participants. Second, the market is relatively price inelastic because of a limited supply coupled with a booming demand. Together, the two characteristics – quality transparency and price inelasticity – would tend to make it difficult for buyers to discriminate on price against minority growers.

To uncover any gender-based differences in prices, we conducted a detailed quantitative analysis of more than 5,700 individual sales transactions over a 17-year period. The results were surprising. We found that female growers were able to charge systematically higher prices than male growers for grapes of the same quality. The difference might seem small (a premium of just 1% to 2%), but for an average grape seller that would translate to more than 2,500 euros annually. Moreover, most Champagne growers are relatively small operations employing an average of about three employees. Thus an additional 2,500 euros is not trivial.

To investigate the reasons for the difference, we interviewed 67 people: 37 grape growers (22 men and 15 women), 14 CEOs of Champagne houses, and 16 industry experts. From that qualitative research, we found that an underlying reason for the price difference was the relationships developed and maintained by the women growers. Often, minorities who are excluded from the majority will seek solidarity with one another, and this was certainly the case for the female growers, who tended to interact for social support. These informal relationships frequently led to the women exchanging useful knowledge and market information that the men tended to keep secret. Those conversations might include information about who does business with whom, to what extent, for what grapes, and at what price. We should emphasize that we did not observe any price collusion – that is, instances of the women explicitly coordinating their pricing with one another. Instead, their informal relationships helped facilitate the benevolent and legitimate exchange of different types of information, which might include professional advice and information about the prices they were charging buyers.

Moreover, because the women tended to socialize more with each other, their trust in the accuracy of the information obtained through those interactions was relatively high. In contrast, men tended to be more skeptical of what they heard from other male growers, assuming, for example, that competitors were prone to boastfully exaggerate a price that was paid for a certain crop. And that’s only in the rare instances when men would even talk about prices. As one male grower in our study noted, “Price is not something people talk about in Champagne. It’s a private matter. For some reason, it makes people feel uncomfortable.” Consequently, because the female growers were able to obtain more accurate market information, they were able to price their own products more aggressively than the male growers.

Combined with past studies, our research has implications for female leaders and minorities in other industries. When an organization contains just a few “token” minorities, those individuals will tend to compete with one other to distinguish themselves. But when a minority group is somewhat larger, people in that group will be more likely to identify with one another and develop supportive relationships. And, as the female grape growers in Champagne have shown, a network of such relationships can result in tangible benefits, including not just social support but also the sharing of valuable business information such as the prices being charged in a market.

From a broader context, our work highlights an unexpected consequence of discrimination. Specifically, when minority members are slighted by the majority, they might tend to turn to one another for social support, resulting in a network of informal relations that may (ironically) enable them to achieve better outcomes. For example, observers have noted that women are slowly making inroads in male-dominated markets such as technology entrepreneurship and private equity. But some evidence suggests that, as a group, their contributions are undervalued in these settings. As such, it’s possible that the dynamics we document in the Champagne grape market might also be at play in these industries. Note that such dynamics are especially likely when there’s a certain amount of “information friction” in the market, such as incomplete or asymmetric information between exchange partners, and when deviations from established norms of behavior remain relatively discreet.

Interestingly, the male growers in our study were largely unaware that they might be at a price disadvantage. According to one man in our study, “I don’t see any reason why men and women would obtain systematically different prices. I really don’t.” Or, as another man noted, “I would be very surprised to find out women are getting higher prices.” As such, it appears that the male grape growers in Champagne, France have much to learn from their female counterparts about the importance of social networks to increase the competitiveness of their businesses.

Startups, enterprise organizations, creative agencies, freelancers … you are making the same mistakes with your content.

And it’s costing you.

It’s costing you customers.

It’s costing you money.

It’s costing you time.

Most importantly, it’s costing you authority.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is, if you avoid these five mistakes, your content will stop costing you so much and start working for your business.

Mistake #1: Not Understanding AND Serving Your Audience First

In a recent guest post I wrote for Crazy Egg, I used the example of a car salesman trying to sell a two-seater sportscar to an active family of four. That salesman was not just blind to his audience … he was purposefully ignoring the facts.

I hate to say it, but I see this happen all the time. People say they want their content to have “personality” — or worse, they want the content to have their personality — which completely ignores the most important person in the room: the customer.

Now, content should reflect the company culture, or the business owner if the business is really just a single person (speakers and many consultants, for example). But personality should come second to meeting customer needs.

Otherwise the content is just … pretty words.

Every word of your copy or content should do a job. <– Tweet the heck out of that, please.

You must understand your audience and, like the revered guests they are, serve them first.

Only then can you create content that resonates with them, engages them, compels them to share your message, and ultimately moves them to buy.

I’m not going to say you have no place in your content … but you definitely should take second place in it.

Image credit: tookapic on Pixabay

Mistake #2: Not Measuring Your Results

How do you measure the success of your content?

• Increased website traffic?
• Improved position in the SERPs?
• More leads?
• More sales?
• More email subscribers?
• Higher click-through rates?
• More speaker requests?

Okay – better question. Are you measuring the success of your content?

Because a lot of people don’t.

These days I only work with clients who are committed to tracking the results of the content I create for them. There are two important reasons for that:

1. When you track your results, you can discover what works and what doesn’t work, and adjust your strategy and future content accordingly.
2. You see your ROI more clearly. As a content writer who seeks first and foremost to be a valued business partner to my clients, this is critical! If they can’t see how my work benefits them, eventually they’ll start seeing the expenditure as a budget drain rather than a high-ROI investment.

Even if you have a content strategy in place, you’re still throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what stick unless you’re measuring your results.

Mistake #3: Not Promoting Your Content

A single content asset just floats in the sea of content online today. Like an unanchored buoy.

Promoting that content — drawing attention to it through various channels — anchors that buoy. Then it ties boats to the buoy. Then those boats draw other boats that want to see what’s going on. Suddenly, you’ve got a whole population tied to, pointing at, and drawing attention to that content asset. The buoy is no longer floating out at sea alone — it’s creating an entire ecosystem around it.

A single blog post won’t do anything for your business. Neither will a white paper or an e-book or even the world’s greatest email nurture sequence. Unless people hear about it.

And that means: promotion.

Post your content on social media. Add a link to your latest lead-gen landing page in your email footer. Share your white paper with your mastermind group, your business club and your mom.

Make an effort to get the word out about what you’re doing. Because unless you’re an SEO genius (or you hire an SEO genius), the likelihood of someone stumbling across your content is pretty low.

Mistake #4: Not Editing

Need I remind you that proofreading is cuter than a kitten?

Every single thing you publish should be thoroughly edited. Not because I’m the grammar police (though that’s a role I’m quite comfortable in), but because a lot of blatant mistakes in your content destroys your authority. It makes people question your credentials and expertise. Worse, it may make some people question your site or company’s legitimacy.

Considering that blatant mistakes are one of the markers of spam content, phishing schemes and other cyber crimes, I want you to take this very, very seriously.

Most of the time, the first impression is the only impression you get.

If your content is so riddled with errors that it makes the reader wonder if their computer is about to contract malware, you’ve got three options:

1. Refresh your technical knowledge of the language you’re writing in
2. Hire a professional — either a writer to take over your content creation or an editor to polish the content you’re writing yourself
3. Assign one of your well-written colleagues to review what you write before you publish it

That said, a typo here and there is not the end of the world. We’re human, after all. Mostly I just want you to consider editing an important part of your marketing strategy — because it matters more than you might think.

Let’s end this on a happier note, though, shall we? HubSpot found some pretty hilarious mistakes for this blog post — but I love it especially because at the end they poke fun at themselves for one of their own mistakes.

Mistake #5: Not Using Visuals

You want to know what’s one of the top compliments I get about the content I write? I illustrate my points.

Often that means using real-world examples to help put concepts into context.

It also means, however, that whenever possible, I show people what I mean using visuals such as screenshots, images, graphs and charts. Here’s an example.

There are a lot of visuals in there … to the point where I actually got a few trolls complaining about it. But hey — attracting trolls is a sign of success today, right? Right?

The point is, visuals help illustrate concepts for your reader, and that’s a good thing.

Visuals also break up your content so it’s not just blocks of text. We humans can only handle so much text before our eyeballs need a break. Content that uses an image for every 75-100 words gets the most shares, according to this BuzzSumo report.

Finally, visuals add character to your content. You want your personality to come across? Let visuals do some heavy lifting.

It’s easy to say, “I’m a writer, not a designer,” and poo-poo Mistake #5, here … but you’re a smart cookie. You know you don’t have to be a designer to add basic visual elements to your content.

For more advanced visual impact, of course, hire a designer. Take some of that marketing budget and pull in a good designer to help you bring your words to life. It’s a worthwhile investment.

Look at how Showcase Workshop added visual elements to their Guide to Content Planning. It turned what could have been a dry topic into a more engaging read.

Wrapping Up

We’re human. We make mistakes. But you can avoid costly mistakes in your marketing by serving your audience first, measuring your results, promoting your content, editing, and using visuals.

Pexels / Pixabay

Business guru and well-known provocateur Tom Peters once addressed a crowd of over 400 sales and marketing executives saying: “I hate sports analogies. They’re just a bunch of male macho…” Yet, in the world of sales and marketing, sports analogies are de rigueur and tossed around like a basketball during March Madness.

To properly understand the difference between sales and marketing, however, another analogy seems more suitable: that of musical theater. Salespeople are the performers in a Broadway musical, whereas marketing folks are the set designers, producers, and choreographers.

On the surface, the two may present as a ‘selling vs marketing’ schema. Marketing puts the show together without a nod of the head or clap of the hand. Sales then takes the reins and earns the applause. However, this imbalanced view glosses over the meaningful difference between sales & marketing and altogether ignores the fact that the two entities can work together harmoniously with just a wee bit of effort.

The Sales and Marketing Relationship

While the goal of sales and marketing are notably similar (boost company revenue), this fact seems tangential in relation to their means of reaching that goal. Would it be surprising to know that a staggering 76 percent of marketers are overlooking the importance of sales enablement? Put differently, a mere 24 percent of marketing specialists have an agreement with sales on defining lead responsibilities, according to Hubspot’s Fifth Annual Review of Inbound Marketing Trends and Tactics.

In a survey of nearly 1,000 sales and marketing specialists in the United States, roughly two-thirds of salespeople believe marketers are wasting time on fancy events and branding activities when they would be better served focusing on tactics that directly impact the sales pipeline. Similarly, the majority of marketing pros consider salespeople boastful and showmen.

This tangible sort of tension — or, often, blatant disregard for one another — leads to the many sports analogies assigned to the industry. In actuality, it should read more like a creative collaboration than a competition. The marketing and sales departments do everything possible to connect with the prospect’s story, intertwining knowledge of the prospect’s known and unknown needs, and then work collaboratively to resolve them.

In other words, this relationship is long overdue for an overhaul. Companies that manage to strengthen the ties between the two departments reap substantial rewards. Case in point: Companies with strong sales and marketing alignment enjoy a 20 percent annual growth rate. Companies that struggle with this alignment, however, face a 4 percent decline in revenue. In other words, seamless integration means more than mere kumbayah; it means money.

Additionally, studies show that a failure to align sales and marketing departments around the right processes and technologies may cost B2B companies 10 percent or more of revenue annually.

The Sales and Marketing Difference

As mentioned earlier, there is a commonality that binds sales and marketing forces: a shared goal. While that is often lost in the shuffle, perhaps it becomes ever more important to recognize the marketing and selling difference before introducing harmony.

In a nutshell, the difference between sales and marketing boils down to their respective roles in the sales pipeline. While the marketing forces do everything possible to reach and persuade prospective customers, the sales forces do everything possible to close the sale and garner a signed contract or signed check.

To return to the musical theater analogy, marketing involves the behind-the-scenes work, such as viral marketing, branding, relationship marketing, advertising, and direct mail campaigning. They are the stagehands that embody the “Lights! Camera!” phrases, wherein the sales team are the actors that initiate the “Action!” portion of that phrase. Sales involves the direct one-on-one meetings, the cold calls, and networking.

A musical production takes different characters with contrasting viewpoints and intentions, plays their conflicting goals off one another, and throws them together for a giant choreographed conglomeration of singing and dancing. While initially contentious and fragmented, the result is a crescendo of harmonious voices and synchronized spins, a performance worthy of an encore.

To understand the bits that each ‘character’ (aka department) plays in the musical, it helps to examine how each come to the stage. As described in Forbes magazine, “As long as you are selling to homo-sapiens, the fundamental motivations to buy and the skills to obtain purchase commitments will remain the same. People may go about selecting a consultant, a cloud-based storage system or a box of cereal in a different set of steps, but people buy emotionally and justify their decisions intellectually.”

To paraphrase, the tactics that sales teams use to convert leads into sales remain consistent year after year. The tactics that marketing teams use must change and evolve year after year, however.

In 2005, marketing was defined as a one-way communication intended to bring about interest in a product or service, and selling was a two-way communication designed to enable the prospect to do 70 percent of the talking.

In 2017, such a definition seems antiquated. Advancements in technology ensure that marketing is now a two-way street. In striking contrast to years prior, marketing can now be an exchange with the prospect doing the majority of talking for the more tech-savvy marketers out there.

Bridging the Sales and Marketing Wedge

Not to underplay the very real emotions that collide when sales and marketing departments discuss one another, the way to mend such relationships and get them working in harmony can be revealed by many a Kindergarten teacher. Play nice, play together, and engage in routines that promote both. There are thus distinct steps that can be taken to create a more positive synergy between sales and marketing departments. These include:

Recognizing what the other needs:

When surveyed, sales identified the following desires from marketing:

• Better quality leads (54 percent)
• More leads (44 percent)
• Competitive information and intelligence (39 percent)
• Brand awareness (37 percent)

In the same survey, marketing identified the following needs from sales:

• More effective lead follow-up (34 percent)
• Consistent use of systems, such as Customer Relationship Management software (32 percent)
• Feedback on marketing efforts and campaigns (15 percent)
• Consistent use of messaging and tools provided by marketing (13 percent)

Engaging in face time

Note that this isn’t some hidden reference to Apple’s FaceTime. Instead, it refers to that old-fashioned form of dialogue involving people looking at one another and communicating. To clarify, it also doesn’t mean that the VP of marketing sits down with the VP of sales to have a conversation. It means that several people from the marketing team sit down with several people from the sales team and hash it out. It means bringing data to the table to support criticism and encourage celebrations. HubSpot recommends weekly meetings that last anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour.

Sitting together

Those who sit together tend to bond together—and the same principle applies to the workplace. Rather than encouraging a siloed approach to the workplace, mix it up. Place every sales team member next to a marketing person, and vice versa. When they understand what the other person is dealing with, it helps them become more effective at their own jobs.

While sales and marketing each present unique contributions to the musical performance that is the sales funnel, both teams are necessary for a successful production. Though sales approaches tend to remain the same over the years, and marketing tactics frequently change, their commonality rests in a shared desire to increase company revenue.