In business, client retention is one of the biggest factors to whether you stay in business or fade away. I am fortunate in that my client retention rate is in the high 90% range. We provide exceptional service and support, answering client requests the same day.

But, like other companies, I do on occasion lose clients. Sometimes, we have lost clients we have taken wonderful care of over many years. When you lose those clients, it typically hurts a bit. Especially when you had a great relationship, right up until the time they leave. As an example, I had a non-profit that I supported for over 5 years. Like a lot of nonprofits, they had much turnover of staff and I worked with several people. The last person I work with and I had a great relationship, he sent me many difficult tasks that always needed to be done yesterday and I completed everyone on the same day they came in. Now sometimes this meant I had to work nights and weekends in order to get tasks done for them. But as a non-profit, fundraisers are very important to their mission. So I always got their requests done a.s.a.p.

Well, the other day I get a note after five years saying they were going to bring their website in house, and canceled their account. They said what a great job we have done for them and that we gave unbelievable support. Now this is where the title comes into play. I wanted to say if I gave you such great support over the years, they why do you cancel with zero notice. Why would you be building a site behind my back to replace the one we had without even giving me a whiff of your intentions?

BUT, you can’t always say the first thing that comes into your mind. No matter how angry you are, it is best to take a step back, and do the classy thing. Before you send the nasty email response, get up from your computer, or put down the smartphone. Take a deep breath. Then, thank them for their business, and wish them well. In the long run this will ensure your survival as people like this may actually refer you to their friends and colleagues.

In Closing:
The idea of bringing websites in house sounds good and sounds like you’ll save money. But ultimately what typically happens is the websites tend to fail, don’t get updated, and vital things like plug-ins and software are not updated. This of course can lead to hacks and other horrendous outcomes.

So unless you have a staff member with experience maintaining websites and software, think twice before bringing your website in house. We offer different plans to fit any budget, so you can do many tasks yourself but leave some of the heavy lifting to us. That way you can insure continuity and limit problems and downtime. (And in truth, we charge a lot less than having a full or even part time employee maintaining your website)

So as I said, stay classy, thank people for their business and even if you are angry, bite your tongue. Longevity will be your reward!

One of the cardinal rules of engagement on the internet is Don’t Read the Comments. But if, like us, you spend the better part of your day scouring the internet for tips on the best way to eat a sandwich or which organizational tool will help you get your chores done, this sanity-saving tactic could be working against…

Read more...

Transcript of The Power of Little Ideas written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch:  “Innovate or die.” That’s what Peter Drucker said and I think a lot of people took that to mean that you had to create a company that disrupted an entire industry and you should be looking for ways to innovate on your products and services like nobody ever thought about, but I really think it was misunderstood. I think in a lot of ways what Drucker was talking about was a value that said you have to innovate like you have to be trustworthy.

That innovation has to be built into the core of how you serve your customers. It’s like this constant optimization is innovation as opposed to great giant disruption. On this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast I visit with Dave Robertson. He is the author of The Power of Little Ideas, A Low Risk, High Reward Approach to Innovation. Guess what we’re going to talk about on this show?

Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Dave Robertson. He is on the faculty at the MIT Sloan School of Management and also the coauthor of a book we’re going to talk about today, The Power of Little Ideas: A Low Risk, High Reward Approach to Innovation, so Dave, thanks for joining me.

Dave Robertson: Thanks for having me, Rob. John, sorry, John.

John Jantsch: That’s all right. We’ll keep that in there too. We’re not going to edit that out, that was too good. Let me ask you a quick question, and this may sound like a silly question, but bear with me on it. How would you actually describe what innovation is? I think there’s so many people that are told you have to innovate. Innovation is such a great thing. I think a lot of people then kind of go, “Okay, but what is it? How do I do it? It’s hard.”

Dave Robertson: Yeah, so I think that is a really important question. In fact, I start out my class on innovation with exactly that question because I think the way you define innovation affects how you manage, where you look for it, what you ask for, what kind of innovation you get. I think too often we see definitions of innovation that are those insanely great new products that change markets, disrupt the fortunes of companies, revolutionize industries, that kind of thing.

That’s important, right? That kind of innovation matters, but it’s pretty rare and I think an improvement, a new way, the definition I like is a new match between a solution and a need. It doesn’t have to be a new solution and it doesn’t have to be a new need, but if you can somehow bring together things in a different way, combine things in a different way, I think that counts as innovation.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I wonder sometimes if people that are truly innovative are just being strategic as well. You have a case study in the book of Apple and I think everybody thinks of them as the greatest, or at least Steve Jobs’ contribution as the greatest innovator in the world. When I read your case study it just feels like he was being strategic.

Dave Robertson: Well, and I would argue that it’s less strategic than it may appear. Everybody talks about iTunes as this amazing, huge, innovative leap forward, but the fact is iTunes for its first two years was an MP3 management system that he bought from, he purchased an existing company that was competing in a market with other competitors out there to do MP3 management.

John Jantsch: Another element of this idea of innovation, I’m a big Peter Drucker fan and he’s, I think he’s attributed with saying something like innovate or die in one of his books. I think that gets kind of misunderstood a lot of times. I wonder if he was talking about the idea of innovation being of value as opposed to disruption. That it’s like be trustworthy or die. What’s your thinking on that?

Dave Robertson: Yeah, right. If you don’t innovate then you become a commodity. I completely agree.

John Jantsch: You outline in the book another way, what you call the power of little ideas is really a sort of a systematic way of looking at innovation not as being this big disruptive thing or even this incremental thing, but just as almost like a process I guess. You want to kind of map out your I think it’s three stages or three kind of core components and then we can break each of them down a little?

Dave Robertson: Yeah, so the fundamental idea is that we often talk about innovation in terms of using new technologies, right? So everybody uses that example of digital photography is disrupting the industry and putting Kodak out of business. That was of course nothing new in terms of we’ve been taking pictures for a century, but it was a very new way of doing it. Of course that counts as innovation, right?

So you can innovate in that direction. You can also innovate in terms of the finding new needs. Sometimes this is called Blue Ocean Strategy, those latent, unmet needs. I think of the Egg McMuffin as the opposite of the digital camera. The Egg McMuffin was the first fast food breakfast at scale. It was basically making a sandwich, which McDonald’s knows how to do, and wrapping it up and putting it in a warming tray and serving it to people in a fast food environment.

Well, there was nothing new about the technology for that. Every step in the process was something that McDonald’s knew quite well, but fast food breakfast was an unmet need and it turned out to be a very powerful need. Of course, you can get that 24 hours a day now. That’s kind of another way you can innovate, but a third direction to innovate is kind of around your product. So think of it as not just a two by two matrix, but a two by two by two.

Maybe that’s my big contribution to management thinking is going away from the two by two matrix and making something more like a hologram. In my previous book about Lego I talked about how they went away from the brick and tried to do all kinds of disruptive and new play experiences, disruptive technologies and new play experiences, and that almost put them out of business. When they went back to the brick and then started surrounding that with games and stories and events at the Lego Store and other things like that, that people returned to the brick.

When I looked around for other examples like that I started seeing them everywhere, of companies that weren’t so much innovating in the product as innovating around the product and by doing so really helping their customers get more value from the product. That’s the point of the book is thinking about what is the value of your product and more broadly, what is the customer trying to do with your products. Then the third step is how do you actually help that customer get value from your product? What are the other complimentary innovations that will make your product more compelling, more valuable, more useful to your customers? Then bringing them all to market.

John Jantsch: Yeah, so a lot of companies sit around in boardrooms and innovate, right? I think what you’re suggesting is in a lot of ways paying just hyper, hyper attention to the customer is probably where the innovation lives.

Dave Robertson: That’s right, yeah. Yeah, but it’s paying attention to the customer in a different way, right?

John Jantsch: Yeah.

Dave Robertson: It’s not going out and saying … One of the stories I use in the book is GoPro, which I think is a wonderful case study of innovation because of the number of different ways they’ve innovated or not. We can talk about that, but Sony came after GoPro once it started seeing this five years of 90% annual sales growth between 2010 and 2015. Sony came after GoPro and what they did is they talked to the customer very carefully and said, “What do you want from a waterproof action camera?”

They came out with a better camera than GoPro’s, but GoPro was innovating not just in the camera itself, but also around the camera, so they have mounts, they have desktop software, they have a smartphone app, they have a wonderful social media site, all kinds of different things that helped their customers not just shoot raw footage of adventures outside, but also turn those into very compelling music videos and post those for their friends.

Sony listened to the customer. They commissioned a team to develop a better product. They developed a product that had more pixels, it had noise reduction, it had image stabilization and it was a third cheaper than GoPro’s and they got killed in the market because they weren’t innovating around the product. That was the terms of competition in their industry.

John Jantsch: Hey, thanks for listening to the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. If you like this one you might also like my other podcast, The Consulting Spark where I interview independent marketing consultants and agency owners. We talk about how they built their business and the struggles they face and what they love about being in this business, so you can check it out at DuctTapeMarketingConsultant.com.

What about, and I’m not sure if this is what you’re really getting at is those companies that they innovate around their product, but what if you’re in an industry where your product is maybe going away even though it’s a cash cow today? The example I love to use is newspapers. Classified advertising in newspapers was a cash cow and they wouldn’t innovate around it because it meant killing the cash cow.

Dave Robertson: Yeah, and that’s something that I really find disappointing about the innovation literature is that there’s too many authors that say there’s one best way to innovate. There’s the blue ocean people who say everything is about blue ocean and you’ve got to find blue oceans. For your listeners who aren’t familiar with that, the blue ocean metaphor is red oceans are red because there’s so much competition that there’s blood in the water. There’s sharks circling and they’re attacking each other.

What you have to find is that unmet need, that latent need, which only you fill and so you’re sailing in blue oceans. Well, GoPro actually started out as a blue ocean company. It was started out by a surfer who figured out how to waterproof his camera and strap it on the front of his surfboard and so it really was a blue ocean type of innovation.

John Jantsch: Literally, right.

Dave Robertson: Yeah, right. Then later of course he figured out it wasn’t enough to just have a waterproof rugged action camera, that he had to create more mounts, so now you can mount it on your surfboard or your bicycle or your helmet or your chest or my favorite, your dog. They do, they sell a dog mount.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, yeah. There’s some great videos of the dog running around the house and eating and stuff.

Dave Robertson: When you’re not there, yeah.

John Jantsch: It’s strangely entertaining.

Dave Robertson: Yeah. Then also of course the desktop software, the smartphone app, the social media site, all that stuff and that’s how they held off the competition from Sony and other players. Now as smartphones are getting more and more rugged and waterproof, they’re getting disrupted. GoPro is getting disrupted.

You look at since 2015, they had a pricing mistake and they built a drone that tended to fly off or crash and they made some other mistakes, but still, the smartphone’s getting a lot more rugged and waterproof. They have phones you can drop in water and you don’t have to worry about it.

John Jantsch: And the camera’s getting better. Yeah, and the camera’s getting better.

Dave Robertson: And the cameras are getting better and the memory’s getting larger so you can capture more video on your smartphone. So they’re getting disrupted and I think this comes back to you, if you’re going to be an innovation leader you have to have a full tool belt, right? You’ve got to have not just a hammer, like a blue ocean strategy hammer, but you’ve also got to have disruptive innovation. How do you respond to disruption? That’s what GoPro is struggling with now, but also they’ve got a couple more years of 90% growth because they’re really good at this third way innovation that I talk about in the book.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I think the tough thing for a lot of companies, especially when you talk about this disruptive space is that sometimes even if they see the writing on the wall, it means gutting something that is currently making a lot of money. A lot of times, right? That was I think why Kodak was so slow to get into digital, because it meant throwing out the business that was making them billions of dollars.

Dave Robertson: Yeah, and I think Christianson and his colleagues have captured that very well, that what happens with disruptive innovation is that you get those, your best customers aren’t the ones being disrupted. Your highest margin business isn’t suffering.

John Jantsch: That’s right.

Dave Robertson: It’s that low end stuff that you see being disrupted and so you just, you say, “Fine, take it,” but then the technology, it matures very rapidly and before you know it you’re three development cycles behind and they’re taking over the main part of your market and you find yourself late to the party and you’re out of business before you know it.

He’s captured that very well. I don’t think it happens that often though. Give me three examples that don’t include GoPro or Hard Disks or … There’s three or four examples that are used all the time. Outside of those you just don’t hear a lot.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people cite some of the sharing economy stuff as disrupting some industries, rental industries and car industries and taxis and things, but again, I agree, we tend to focus on those ones that are really big and everybody talks about. Let me ask you this. Your kind of third way theory does hinge very much, or at least the first step is what is our key product? Could you apply the same thinking or point of view to a let’s say a consulting company that doesn’t really view what they do as a product?

Dave Robertson:  Oh sure, right. Because I think whether you’re a product company or a service company, sometimes the reason that customers do or don’t hire you has not much to do with the product or service itself, that central thing that you’re selling, but things around it. Maybe you’re just hard to do business with or maybe once you leave it’s difficult to get value from that.

I think you John, you have a podcast that a lot of people listen to and value, but I was checking out your website and you do a lot of things around that to …

John Jantsch: Oh absolutely.

Dave Robertson: … help people get value from the ideas that you talk about in your podcast. You’re kind of a third way guy yourself.

John Jantsch: Well, thank you for saying that because I’ve always felt that that’s what I think most small businesses need to do is they have to have these kind of convergent streams of income that depend on each other. I speak, I write books and those things actually help each other. I think that that in a lot of ways you could look at as a family of products that are kind of serving the same need.

That approach I think is something that pretty much any small business should be looking at. If I sell a $10,000 product, what’s the $100,000 product that maybe 10 or 15% of my customers would buy? I’ve always kind of had that point of view.

Dave Robertson: Right, but so say you or any consultant work with a company. After you leave it’s helpful to have maybe it’s a followup thing, so it’s not an intensive consulting engagement, but it’s maybe a weekly phone call and it’s sending along some articles and it’s, “Hey, have you thought about listening to this podcast that I did a year ago? What this person is saying is directly relevant to the challenges you’re facing right now.”

And, and, and, and, and, right? There’s a lot of things around a core product or service that can really add a lot of value to that and can differentiate you enough that people are willing to pay more for that core product or service versus somebody else’s who’s pretty similar.

John Jantsch: A related question, and again, I don’t know if you have data on this. This may just end up being an opinion, but a lot of times people feel this pressure to change stuff, to innovate and maybe they don’t need to. Maybe what they’ve got going is working, is working well and sort of the drive to innovate is more around being bored than with what they’re doing than anything else. Is there a time when innovation or at least looking for innovations can be harmful?

Dave Robertson: Well, so my whole approach to innovation is the first step should almost be where do you not want to innovate? I think every company that’s grown to any significant size, even small companies, they have a set of customers that want what they’re selling, right? That bought from them yesterday, that are going to buy from them today, that are going to want to buy from them tomorrow.

Of course, if innovation is defined broadly, that continuous improvement of the product, adding a feature here, cutting the cost there, that always should happen, but I think an important first question to ask is where are you not going to innovate? What are those things that you did yesterday that you’re going to do today, that you’re going to do tomorrow that your customers value? Then starting to understand well, what else? What are they trying to do with that product or service?

Then figuring out how to innovate around it. I think that’s always useful, but I did an analysis. One of the things I’ve done, this is a very unscientific study. I assigned to my MBAs and executive MBAs a paper, so I’ve got hundreds of these papers over the past couple of years and I say, “Compare two companies, one of which has won and one of which has lost in a particular industry or market.” It wouldn’t be Sony for example, but it would be action cameras, and a lot of people did the Sony versus GoPro and the action camera market.

I tend to get a lot of the same examples. In fact, I’ve said, “You can’t do Uber. You can’t do Facebook. You can’t do Airbnb, all the ones that you hear about again and again, because you’re not going to learn much. Please don’t put me through reading another one of those case studies.” I ask for interesting examples of one company who has out-innovated another. Then what I try and do is categorize them.

How did the winning company innovate? The most frequent reason for one company winning against another is they just developed a better product consistently over time. I just read a really wonderful one about women’s razors. Bic was the first one to offer a razor for women, and of course shaving your legs and armpits and so forth is a different type of shaving than shaving your face. Bic realized that and came out with a product, but then Gillette just out-innovated them.

They offer complimentary products, but it really is about just one product being consistently better than the other. That’s the most frequent reason why one company wins against another is that they just develop a better product. Then the second most common is blue ocean, that a company finds an unmet need and gets to that market first and wins in that market because they discovered it, they understood the unmet need and they satisfied that need.

Then a pretty close third is this third way that I talk about of innovating around an existing product. It’s not incompatible with making a better … GoPro has been making a better camera consistently over the years, but the reason they beat Sony is because they were innovating around that product, not because their product was better. Then a distant, distant fourth is disruption. There’s just not that many examples of it.

John Jantsch: Tell me where you think this fits in. I know a lot of companies, particularly established companies and heaven forbid, public companies that have to make decisions for reasons other than innovation, how do they address the fact that sometimes what happens is the buyer behavior changes dramatically?

An example I love to use all the time is I’ve been with this what I would call kind of this old, stodgy bank for many, many years and I like them because they’re personal. They know my name. They’re small. My kids wouldn’t bank there if you paid them because they don’t have all the bells and whistles and branches and technology that can deposit your check without actually going to the bank. How does a company that’s established in a market with a certain buyer behavior that is tailored to that market adjust to the fact that the next generation’s buying behavior is different?

Dave Robertson: Good question. Yeah, so I think things like that do change and again, I think you’ve got to innovate to meet the needs of that new market segment. Sometimes, of course sometimes that means making a different product. Other times it just means surrounding that product with compliments.

For banking for example, I think you can still have branches on every street corner and you can have ATMs all over the place and you can have personalized service for old farts like you and me, but then maybe you also need that smartphone app so that your kids can bank the way that they want to bank.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I think that the key there is recognizing that you’re missing out on that opportunity I suppose. That’s probably where some real disruption has happened, where somebody’s come in and said, “Hey, here’s how 30-year-olds want to buy,” and they build a company around that and sort of grab that space where maybe it wasn’t even a new product. It was the way the product was delivered, if you will.

Dave Robertson: Yeah, and I think that that part of disruption is underestimated and completely misdiagnosed in the popular literature. So I have a whole chapter about Apple and Lego, about how they’re very similar in the sense that they’ve ended up being quite disruptive by accident. That Apple, when it came out with iTunes and the iPod in 2001, they were not trying to disrupt the music industry and anybody who doubts that, just go back and read Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs.

What he was trying to do was compliment the Mac. He was trying to sell more Macs and he fought like crazy the push to put iTunes on the IBM platform because again, he wasn’t trying to disrupt the music industry. He was trying to help people use the Mac in a more powerful, useful, compelling way. One of those ways was help you manage your digital life was the way he put it, in particular, digital music. So he meant the iTunes and the iPod as compliments to the Mac for the Mac platform and really resisted sending it out.

But of course, then iPod and iTunes became the iTunes Store and then they put iTunes on a phone and then it became the iPhone and now they get more money from the small screen than they do from the big screen. Similarly, Lego, Lego never meant to be a force in movies, but they’ve got of course two movies coming out this year, the Lego Batman Movie and the Lego Ninjago Movie.

Those are big properties for them. All of a sudden Disney might be looking over its shoulder at Lego as a storytelling company with toys that help kids play out the story and theme parks. I don’t know if you’ve noticed but there’s lots of these little Lego Discovery Centers that are popping up in …

John Jantsch: [crosstalk 00:25:37].

Dave Robertson:  … second tier mall space all over the country.

John Jantsch: Yup, yup. Yeah, we have one in Kansas City, so I am familiar with it. Dave, where can people find out more about you and your work and obviously purchase The Power of Little Ideas?

Dave Robertson: Yeah, so I’m redoing my website right now, but there’s something about the book at Innonavi, that’s I-N-N-O-N-A-V-I.com. Of course the book, The Power of Little Ideas is available at your favorite bookseller online or offline. Then I have my own podcast, Innovation Navigation that they can listen to and I talk about this, but also other things.

I’ve got a disruptive innovator on the podcast, a guy who used technology to design forks and spoons for people with hand tremors. Fascinating story and a great example of disruptive innovation, but again, it’s one of the rare examples I could find.

John Jantsch: You know it’s funny, I bet you could write an entire book, probably somebody has already, just about some of these disruptive innovations that were created because somebody just went, “How come I can’t get a blah, blah, blah, anywhere?”

Dave Robertson: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yup.

John Jantsch: They said, “Well, I’ll just make one by gosh,” and then it became a company. Well Dave, thanks so much for joining us. I appreciate this really fun stuff to talk about. I encourage listeners, go check out The Power of Little Ideas.

Dave Robertson: Thanks John, it’s been a pleasure.

John Jantsch: Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. I wonder if you could do me a favor. Could you leave an honest review on iTunes? Your ratings and reviews really help and I promise, I read each and every one. Thanks.

The Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and its Business Renewables Center (BRC) have developed a platform which “is aimed at helping large-scale buyers and developers of renewable energy, better understand market economics and price trends by location – helping users discover grid-connection locations where wind and solar have competitive value in the wholesale power markets.

The platform is built using publicly-available data from market operators, a levelised cost of energy calculation, and a proprietary algorithm to model hypothetical project revenue. This unique market analysis produces an estimated value calculation for approximately 4,300 nodes – or grid connection points – across all seven US independent system operators covering 39 states.”

Virgin

A 2016 study that claims feeding cows small amounts of seaweed along with their normal diet of grass can reduce methane emissions by up to 99 per cent.

The study, by a team of researchers at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, found in live trials with sheep that recorded methane levels fell between 50 – 70 per cent when they ate a diet including 2 per cent seaweed.

The Australian study was originally based on the experience of a Canadian farmer who realised that his cattle that ate washed up seaweed were healthier and produced “rip roaring heats” with longer mating cycles than those that did not.

Canadian researchers Rob Kinley and Alan Fredeen subsequently proved the findings in 2014, and also suggested the cattle produced significantly less methane.

The research team tested how 20 species of seaweed reacted with bacteria found in cows’ stomachs. They found that one species of red algae called Asparagopsis Taxiformis was particularly effective in reducing cows’ methane emissions and if it made up just 2 per cent of the animal’s diet, it could reduce emissions by 99 per cent.

A single cow releases between 70 and 120 kg of methane a year. The negative effect on the climate of Methane is 23 times higher than the effect of CO2. Therefore the release of about 100 kg Methane per year for each cow is equivalent to about 2’300 kg CO2 per year.

The value of 2’300 kg CO2 is the same amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) is generated by burning 1’000 liters of petrol. With a car using 8 liters of petrol per 100 km, you could drive 12’500 km per year (7’800 miles per year).

World-wide, there are about 1.5 billion cows and bulls. All ruminants (animals which regurgitates food and re-chews it) on the world emit about two billion metric tons of CO2-equivalents per year. In addition, clearing of tropical forests and rain forests to get more grazing land and farm land is responsible for an extra 2.8 billion metric tons of CO2 emission per year.

With increased prosperity, people are consuming more meat and dairy products every year. Global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tonnes in 1999/2001 to 465 million tonnes in 2050, while milk output is set to climb from 580 to 1043 million tonnes.

brennanrooks / Pixabay

It’s personal, intimate, and it closes more deals.

I’m talking about B2B personalization. Much like a store employee greeting a regular customer by name, personalization helps your B2B firm close more deals and deliver remarkable buying experiences.

Every day, thousands of service businesses use this tactic to increase their revenues.

In this post, I’m going to share 3 B2B personalization strategies you can use right away to close more deals.

The Need for Personalization

If you own or run a B2B firm, it’s time to acknowledge that buyers want to be approached with relevant offers at the right moments, not when it’s convenient for a sales rep. They have little to no patience for ill-timed, generic pitches. And in a competitive market, this personalized engagement can often be the key to success.

B2B Buyers seem to agree as well:

• A recent survey found that 80% of buyers don’t believe that the salespeople they deal with understand their business.
• 1/3 of buyers want the opportunity to see a service/product in action very early on. (Hubspot Buyers Research)
• 23% of deals go dark because reps fail to engage buyers through the entirety of the sales process. When sales professionals are unable to provide ongoing value, the buyer feels no obligation to maintain a dialogue.
• 74% of B2B buyers choose the salesperson who was first to add value and insight in their buying process.

Need to say, your business can benefit a lot from personalization.

Let’s take a look at some strategies you can use to create these personalized experiences:

1. Understand Their Business

I believe that any business owner, consultant or sales person that attempts to work with an organization, regardless of size, can greatly increase the value they bring to an engagement by helping a customer or prospect deconstruct their own customer journey. Provide value-added advice and insight by researching every stage of the customer journey an organization uses to interact with and move its prospects to customers.

– What do they do to create awareness?

– How do they educate prospects and customers?

– What do they offer for a prospective client to sample their product or expertise?

– What do they do to convert prospects to paying clients?

– How do they generate referrals?

2. Showcase Early

That’s right! They want a very tangible understanding of what they’re potentially buying, and they want it right away.

Today’s shift in buying now demands a very tangible way prospects can experience your offer.

Essentially a buyer wants the opportunity to see and experience a service/product in action very early on.

How do you properly align your marketing to match this new buying behavior?

The answer is offering prospects a way to sample your expertise, product or service. This can be in the form of free consultations, money-back guarantees, demos, seminars, proof of concept, audits, trail offers, assessments, etc. You could also provide assessment tools or gap analysis reports to help them to see how your solution can best help them achieve their goals. Really this is an audition and it’s where you need to deliver more than anyone could possibly consider doing.

3. Educate Them on Their Reality

Though modern customers can glean a lot of the information online, they still crave the insight of an expert—someone who knows the territory and stays up on the latest industry news.

Here’s a framework that forces you to get the right answers to questions that will educate prospects and clients on their reality.

• What’s going on inside the company?
• What’s happening with notable parties outside the company — competitors, suppliers, etc.?
• Who do the buyers you’re working with report to, and/or who are the influencers in the company?
• How does this company “keep score” metrics-wise, and how do you help them in what they do?

Next Level: Here’s a framework that forces your prospect to face the reality in his or her own company:

• What is the cost of not improving performance?
• Why hasn’t the problem been solved before?
• Who needs to be on the team to ensure our solutions are approved?
• Who might oppose this solution?

So, let me ask you this – how many other business owners and salespeople are approaching companies with this level of value and insight?

Conclusion

Business owners continue to face significant hurdles in the B2B marketplace. This can be a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full scenario. There has never been a better time to adapt, change, and leverage the new selling tools available in today’s digital age. You have unprecedented access to CRM systems, competitive data, social selling tools, web alerts, and real-time analytics. With the right help, business owners can hone their knowledge and skills to help them prepare like never before and truly differentiate themselves to buyers.

Sales prospecting and cold emailing is tough. In an ideal situation, you can build a list of the right ones in seconds. Furthermore, if you can find a place where your prospects are talking s**t about your competitors and offer up a way to contact them, then you’ve struck gold.

Sounds good right?

I’m going to show you exactly how to swipe your competitor’s customers with an advanced sales prospecting technique that you’ve probably never tried before. 

Buckle up and get ready to extract dozens (and maybe even hundreds) of leads in minutes.

You Won’t Get Different Results, By Doing The Same Actions

Like I mentioned earlier, pounding the phones and traditional prospecting can be very challenging and time consuming.

But you’ve heard of G2Crowd right?

If you’re in SaaS or sell to SaaS companies, or even better, you sell to their customers, then you’ll find some good prospects on G2Crowd.

G2Crowd is a fast-growing review site where people write detailed reviews of what they like and dislike about a product.

These people are likely not only their customers, but a key influencer or decision maker in the buying process for it in their company.

If they’re reviewing your competitor, or reviewing a similar or complementary software to yours, they’re a prime prospect for you.

Does it get any easier than that? Get ready for some booked meetings.

Sales Prospecting Science In 9 Steps

In this video, I’ll show you how you can reach out to these people for FREE!

Even better, I’ll show you how you can do it at scale with some simple web scraping.

Step 1 – Install webscraper.io

Step 2 – Find your competitors on G2Crowd.

Step 3 – Click into your competitor’s customer reviews.

Step 4 – You can quit right now and go look these people up on LinkedIn, but that’s a very manual process and not scalable. Continue reading for more juice.

Step 5 – Right click “inspect element” and open the web scraper tab.

Step 6 – Create a new sitemap.

Step 7 – Name & select the elements that you want to scrape.

Step 8 – Enter the scrape code used in video below (copy and paste-ready!)

.slat–user-content.review-list-item

span:eq(0)

a:eq(3)

.formatted-text:eq(1)

Step 9 – Copy data preview and paste it into a Google Drive Spreadsheet.

More Recommended Reads For Sales Prospecting At Scale

• Can Sales Prospecting Be Automated? How To Get More Leads In Less Time
• The Top 30 Sales Automation Tools To Turbocharge Your Sales Process
• How To Find 10,000 Sales Prospects on LinkedIn in 10 Minutes

The post Sales Prospecting Techniques on G2Crowd: How To Vulture Your Competitor’s Customers appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Every business constantly seeks a competitive advantage, that one thing that makes customers choose them over others. Regardless of size, sector or budget, to remain in business, there has to be a unique something that they do ‘better’ than the everyone else. Some use strategic alliances, technology or employees, as sources of competitive advantage, but not all of these can be used in every situation. However, one principle, better speed to market, has been shown to have a consistently positive effect on financial success.

But it wasn’t always the case, as pursuing speed to market was considered optimal for use, only if:

• it was a high performance product
• there were long product life cycles
• high number of sales with low development costs

While this may have been true a few decades, technological advancements have removed such constraints. These days, with better production processes, shorter feedback loops, multiple marketing opportunities, businesses can go from concept to finished product in a matter of days. By shortening the amount of time it takes a business to execute an urgent sales opportunity, a new product design, new marketing campaign, businesses can reap huge rewards.

Apart from a first-mover advantage, improved speed to market leads to:

• better revenue margins
• more efficient managerial practices
• the business becoming more familiar with the market, leading to fewer surprises in the long run

Can these benefits help your business?

If so, here are five ways to improve on speed to market:

Implement a well-defined yet scalable process

Faster speed to market starts with a thorough examination of your business process. Take a few steps back and examine what is working; use this 10,000 foot view to identify bottlenecks in moving from an idea to a finished concept.

When you have identified the processes that work, it’s time to build a scalable process that eliminates downtimes and minimizes handoffs.

By detailing the steps required, valuable resources are also not dissipated across too many projects, which is a major cause of projects stalling. Concentrating limited resources on deserving projects ensures the right tasks get done better and faster.

Automate Essential Processes

A well-defined workflow allows you know what resources (tools and personnel) need to be deployed to achieve desired goals. The pursuit of faster speed to market can benefit from process automation.

By making these essential operations, approval of processes and reporting, as automated as possible, faster management decisions can be made. This ultimately leads to quicker signing off on projects.

Use Outsourcing

Visualizing the process is one thing; but what if you don’t have the resources required to complete said process? Purchasing new equipment and training new staff is possible, but it defeats the pursuit of speed. To counter this, businesses are encouraged to contract or outsource services that are required for business growth, but they lack the in-house capacity for.

Minimum Viable Product First

The concept of increasing speed to market allows businesses test the market and see what it will bear. In creating a product or services that satisfies this, it’s helpful to remember that it doesn’t have to 100% perfect from the beginning.

The point of offering it to consumers quickly is so you can get feedback, just as quickly.

Some analysts call it experimenting, others say it’s ‘failing fast,’ we simply say ‘get the minimum viable product out there, and let your customers choose which features they want.’

Aim to Remain Flexible

In every industry, there seem to be companies that seem to be ‘moving at warp speed.’ However, this is simply a function of being responsive, flexible and constantly innovating.

Being loose enough to react to changes and pivot where needed, while staying rigid enough not to be totally derailed, is what gives companies like Apple their ‘inexhaustible’ staying power.

By continually collecting and analysing market information, teams can remain agile especially when making important decisions. Increase your speed to market this quarter, by implementing these five tips. They will help your business get ready and stay ready.

Picking the right space for your trade show booth is essential for gaining foot traffic, visibility and generating leads. There are many factors that should be considered when picking the perfect spot on the trade show floor. In this post, we cover how to select the best space to help you exhibit better at your next event.

Getting Started:

Before you start the exhibit space selection process, determine how much real estate you need. Referencing your budget and exhibiting goals is a good starting place for planning your space requirements. If using an existing exhibit, base your space requirements on previous shows. If debuting a new exhibit, ask your expert exhibit partner how much square footage you need to get the most out of your exhibit. Review show packets or contact management to find information on registration price, break deadlines, early selection, premium space rates and more to better plan for cost and to avoid late fees and penalties.

Review Floor Plans:

Each trade show has a unique floor plan, so it is important to acquaint yourself with the lay of the land while selecting a booth space. While reviewing a trade show’s floor plan, familiarize yourself with the locations where the most attendee traffic is likely to flow, such as attendee registration areas, entrance and exit points, conference spaces, exhibitor meeting rooms and attendee dining stations.

Larger trade shows often occupy multiple exhibit halls or floors within a venue, so obtain floor plans for all of the areas. Some trade shows have explicit criteria for exhibiting in an area; a section may be reserved for show sponsors or for a specific segment of your industry. If this is the case, make sure to verify with show management beforehand that you are allowed to lease space within a prospective area.

Many venues have obstacles that can be barriers to your on-site success like weight-bearing columns, fire apparatuses or evacuation egress points. These obstacles can interfere with the visibility and accessibility of your, identify these barriers beforehand to avoid headaches later.

Prime Trade Show Real Estate

While there are many prime locations on the trade show floor—each offering its own distinct advantage—the best space for your company is one that best aligns with your show goals and objectives. Below we list three common trade show goals and the locations suit them best.

Goal 1: Exposure and Visibility

If you want to gain maximum exposure at a trade show, being located close to the show floor entrances provides great visibility and foot traffic with attendees entering and exiting a show. However, you should not position your exhibit too close the entrance as attendees tend to pass the first few exhibits in an effort to explore the show. Find the happy-medium close enough to the entrance to get noticed, but far enough away to capture the sustained attention of attendees.

Goal 2: Leads and Sales

To gain leads, you need a consistent flow of traffic into your exhibit. Think of the main aisles of a trade show as busy thoroughfares in a city; they are wider, busier and usually lead to key points of interest. Booths positioned along main aisles are more likely to pull in attendees making their way around the show floor, leading to a steady flow of traffic in and out of a booth. By having your booth positioned along a main aisle, attendees are more likely to make their way directly by your exhibit, increasing the number of prospects your staff are able to engage with.

Goal 3: Meetings and Consultations

Trade shows provide an ideal opportunity for exhibitors to sit down and meet with prospects. However, to get the most out of your meetings, you will need to select a quiet and more intimate space on the show floor. Secondary aisles see less traffic and are quieter, so if you position your booth along one, you will block out the distractions of a busy trade show and allow prospects to better focus on speaking with your staff.

High-Traffic Intersections

High-traffic intersections at trade shows are a great place to position your trade show exhibit. You’ll have opportunities to capture visitors on two different aisles and those that congregate in the intersection itself.

To capitalize on busy intersections, consider designing a booth that is open to both aisles so that prospects can enter your space from multiple points. If you plan on displaying products, or you want to communicate key brand messages, place product display areas and signage near each entrance point. Open booths also make it easier for you to manage booth traffic, as attendees will have an unobstructed path to get from one end of your space to another, reducing bottlenecks inside your booth.

Areas to Avoid

Just as there are prime areas on the trade show floor, there are also spaces that are less desirable. Areas in the rear of an exhibit hall get less foot traffic and are often missed. Also, by the time attendees get to the back of an exhibit hall, they will have engaged with many exhibitors and may be too exhausted to visit your booth.

One way to make the most of a rear space is to incorporate lounge areas and charging stations within your exhibit. Prospects will see your booth as an oasis and will be more likely to stop in for a quick rest, giving your staff the opportunity to engage with them.

You should also avoid contracting space too close to your direct competitors. Having a booth near your competitors will give them the opportunity to see directly into your booth and glean insights into your messaging and trade show strategy.

Your competitors will also have a better opportunity to steal away some of your booth traffic and directly rebut your messaging. You will have enough on your hands while exhibiting, so why make things more complicated by having to battle with your competition during the show?

Pick the Right Space and Start Exhibiting Better Today!

Now that you know how to pick the perfect space on the show floor, it is time to learn more valuable trade show tricks and tips in Nimlok’s Beginner to Winner e-book, designed to help you become a better exhibitor in five concise chapters. Download your free copy today!

Sales has no rules, and you have to know them all. You have to make decisions. You have to decide to act, or not act. You have to choose to pursue one strategy, or attempt a different one, never being 100 percent certain which, if either, leads to success.

• Do you stick with the stakeholder that brought you in and helped you create an opportunity? Or, instead, do you switch your focus to a stakeholder further up the organization hierarchy, believing that you need executive engagement more than you need executive sponsorship.
• Do you increase the size and scope of your solutions to create so much differentiated value so as to block your closest competitor? Or do you limit your initial approach, knowing that increasing the size and investment, believing that your client will be cautious and make a smaller move than what they are capable of? Even though you know what’s right, that doesn’t mean you can necessarily win that way. Do you look at incremental change?

There are no guarantees. You can do something that works perfectly in one opportunity while failing in another with a very similar set of circumstances. You can recognize a pattern that suggests that one course of action is better than another, winning in some cases, and losing in others.

This is why you have to play the game. You have to do what you believe is the right thing to do, even though others will give you advice to the contrary. You have to take your very best shot, and you have to play your game, win or lose. You are responsible for the wins when you are right, and when things turned out the way you suspected they would. You are also responsible for your losses, whether you played the game the way you saw it, or whether you took someone else’s advice.

In the end, you have to play. Do what you believe is right.

[smartads]

The post Do What You Believe Is Right appeared first on The Sales Blog.

For over a decade, WordPress has been the platform of choice for internet marketers: it’s free, customizable, and loved by Google.

WordPress makes it easy for affiliate marketers to craft sales pages, squeeze pages, and capture leads through web forms. Adding these five WordPress-friendly tools to your toolbox will make internet marketing even easier.

1. A code validator

Your website might look good on a couple browsers, but it may not on others. Some browsers let you get away with invalid code and you’d never know it.

According to the W3C, “Different browsers can and do display the same page very differently. This is deliberate, and doesn’t imply any kind of browser bug. A term sometimes used for this is WYSINWOG – What You See Is Not What Others Get (unless by coincidence). It is indeed one of the principal strengths of the web, that (for example) a visually impaired user can select very large print or text-to-speech without a publisher having to go to the trouble and expense of preparing a separate edition.”

Validating a WordPress website takes a little effort. Don’t run WordPress URLs through an HTML validator because WordPress uses PHP, which registers as invalid code. To validate your website, validate the HTML/XHTML and CSS separately before adding it to your site’s files.

HTML isn’t the only validation you need to complete. Your website should also meet Section 508 and WAI accessibility standards.

Here’s a great tool from the W3C for validating multiple aspects of your website including broken links, mobile-friendly status, RSS and Atom feeds, RDF documents, and more.

2. A mobile device suitable for managing tasks

Have you ever tried to edit your blog on an older smartphone because that’s all you could access?

It’s usually the screen size that makes editing difficult. Login areas disappear or rearrange for mobile compatibility and it’s hard to see what you’re doing, but sometimes it has to be done. Managing your marketing tasks requires lots of clicking, logging in, typing, and analyzing. When you’re away from your computer, you need a pocket-sized device with a big screen to make it easy.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 comes with a 5.7” screen, a 32GB hard drive, and 3GB of RAM. Combined with a screen resolution of 1440×2560, these features make it a perfect choice for managing your daily internet marketing tasks.

3. Cross browser compatibility tester

If you attempt customization outside of what your theme has been designed for, you could end up with misaligned graphics, stretched borders, and broken mobile layouts. It’s impossible for one person to access all possible devices and browsers to test customizations, so BrowserStack does it for you.

With BrowserStack, you can enter a URL and generate screen shots for virtually any device, operating system and browser combination (including Amazon’s Kindle).

4. Photoshop is your best friend

If you’ve never used Photoshop, you need to. You can use free programs to accomplish simple tasks, but Photoshop is the ultimate tool, used by top photographers across the world. Even if you aren’t planning on becoming a graphic designer, Photoshop still outperforms free programs on simple tasks like cropping, resizing, and batch resizing because of its intuitive interface.

As an internet marketer, Photoshop will make you independent; you’ll never have to wait for someone else to make quick edits. For example, if you’re looking at a “buy now” button you just uploaded and want to adjust the hue for your split testing campaign, you can do that quickly in Photoshop.

5. Optimizely for split testing

Every part of your website influences visitors either consciously or subconsciously. Everything from the color and size of buttons to the placement of signup forms matters.

You’re probably familiar with split testing – the method that uses randomized experiments to test what aspects of a web page are most effective. For example, during a split testing campaign, you might find that a blue “buy now” button isn’t as effective as a red one, or a signup form in the upper right corner works better than in the left.

Without a program to run the tests for you, you’ll never know which elements of your page are successful and what needs to change. If you’re not split testing yet, Optimizely will do it for you.

While it takes effort to create an empire, internet marketing is made easier with the right tools.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Proactive Prospecting Summer – Part 3

Last week in Proactive Prospecting Summer, we looked at time, and how the way high performers look at and utilize time, gives them an advantage in winning, just as the also-rans are limited by their view of the very same thing. But time is just one of five levers a seller can focus and to continuously deliver more wins, but more importantly as a means of continuous improvement. The challenge for the masses, more than anything else is the need to continuously improve, they see it as a chore, high performers see it as a never ending and highly rewarding journey.

The trick is not focusing on all five at one time, but instead focusing on one at a time, achieve improvement in that area, go back and look at the impact it has had on the other levers, assess, and focus on the next one, which will vary from rep to rep.

The fact that it does vary rep to rep, is a challenge for many managers, because they feel they have to come up with multiple coaching plans for each of their reps. It’s much easier to approach things from a one size fits all lens. The way we help our clients balance the playing field is two-fold. First, we start with accountability, mutual, what the manager brings to the mix, and the specifics the rep is accountable for. Second, is the introduction of our Activity Calculator tool, and the people who say sales is not a numbers game will hate this (and probably fail to hit quota), because it requires you to know your numbers as good or better than you know your favourite athlete’s numbers. But it is the tool that allows us to take a standardized approach to a very individual coach and execution experience.

The five Levers:

• Quota – While you may not be in control of this number, it is a key factor in how you plan your execution, use of time and other resources, and how you pull it all together.
• Deal Size – This is variable you can directly impact and move. Unless you are specifically assigned to certain size accounts, you can choose to pursue accounts that will yield more per cycle. Mentally, it is like taking the cheaper options of the shelf; by not pursuing account under a certain threshold. Even if you are locked into a size of account, there are ways to have an initially larger sale, and to continue to upsell the opportunity.
• Proposal to close – While this one sounds simple, it is not, usually because there are different ways of improving this ratio, and usually people are overwhelmed by choices, and just resort back to what they always do, and end up with the conversion rate they always do. One counterintuitive way to improve this is to reduce the number of proposal you put out there that you know won’t close, you know spaghetti proposals.
• Discovery to Proposal – Probably the place you can have most impact in a number of ways, each leading to more improvement across the cycle.
• Initial meeting to Discovery – this is all about that first meeting, where the ground work for the cycle is laid, a good initial meeting can facilitate all the other variable, a bad one, just leads to more unnecessary work.

As you enter or change any of the above, the tool will not only show you the change in the other levers, but allow you to adjust your execution to play to your strengths. This will all make sense when you download the tool. Some will have less choice than others, but again the tool will help you adjust for that.

Success with the tool is over time, pick a lever, pick a specific element that impacts that lever, set a goal: destination and time to achieve, make an action plan, break it down to bite size pieces, and then execute. Work with your manager (or call me), to keep you honest and on track.

Here’s the deal, whether you want to do this or not, at the start of your next fiscal year your quota will go up, and as that lever is pulled, you need to have a plan for the effect on the other four.

For those asking what all this has to do with prospecting, simple, the better you are at getting that initial meeting, the more choice you retain in how you approach the five levers above. If you struggle in prospecting, never setting aside enough time to master it and just do it, the more difficult all of your levers will be.

Don’t forget, to make full use of the Activity Calculator, and take your overall prospecting to the next level, check out the Proactive Prospecting Program on Sales Gravy University.

The post The Levers Of Sales Success appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

Social media is changing.

It used to be a one-to-many channel. Businesses would publish links, photos, and videos on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, hoping to reach as many people as they can and drive a high number of leads and sales.

When marketers first started using social media as a marketing channel, there was less content, less noise, and people were willing to click on almost everything they saw on their news feed.

Then, we hit content shock.

There is now more content on social platforms than people can consume. If a post doesn’t look interesting or useful, people just scroll past it. As Rank Fishkin observed, “Twitter, Facebook, et al. have become more challenging sources from which to drive traffic. Clicks are just harder to come by.”

Social media is no longer a megaphone.

It is now becoming a one-to-few — and often one-to-one — channel. Businesses and organizations that are succeeding on social media now are the ones providing personalized social experiences to their fans such as KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, NASA, and Airbnb.

Social media is becoming a conversation. Here’s why…

Social media is incredible for some things but not all things

Social media is often seen as a solution to every marketing problem. And, of course, it’s great for certain aspects of marketing including brand awareness. But the truth is, social media probably isn’t going to help you achieve every business or marketing goal you have.

For example, I believe social media is no longer a great traffic driver for most businesses. The strategy of batching and blasting marketing messages across various platforms might have been an effective way to drive clicks in the past, but not anymore. And, in mind at least, that’s not a bad thing because:

Social media is becoming an engagement channel.

And with this shift comes new opportunities, such as incredible customer service and one-on-one conversations, which major social media platforms are embracing more and more with platforms and features like Messenger, Instagram Direct, and Twitter Direct Messages.

Engagement is also about the content you create and share across social platforms. Is it entertaining, useful, or unique? Does it encourage your audience to respond? Or is it just there to drive clicks back to your website?

The future of social media (and some might argue the past and the present of social media) is about deepening your relationships with your fans by engaging them and not simply pushing out marketing messages.

Let’s look at why this shift might be true…

4 reasons why engagement is the future of social media

1. Low organic reach and referral traffic

In recent years, organic reach on social media has fallen so low that social media is becoming a less viable channel for traffic.

Businesses are reaching fewer people on social media and getting less traffic from social media through organic means. Even publishers, businesses that heavily rely on social media for referral traffic, are getting less social referral traffic. Many major publishers have been seeing a fall in Facebook referral traffic — some as much as 50 percent.

As the amount of content on social media increases far beyond what we can consume, each social media post becomes less and less likely to be seen.

Here’s a simplified calculation: if 10 million posts are published per day by users and brands and all social media users collectively consume only one million posts per day, each post has a 10 percent chance of being seen. If the number of posts published per day increases to 100 million and all social media users still consume only one million posts per day, each post now has only a one percent chance of being seen.

The reality is that as more content is published on social media, organic reach will naturally fall.

A study by Social@Ogilvy found that Facebook organic reach has fallen to just six percent in 2014.

The number likely has fallen even further after Facebook made a change to its algorithm to prioritize posts from family and friends over those from Pages.

Social media is losing its potential as a traffic channel as more and more content are posted on social media. As Michael Stelzner, CEO and Founder of Social Media Examiner, said, “Traffic has been going down, down, down and down. For years! That’s the challenge – you’re not getting the reach or visibility and we have to be OK with that reality.”

We have to adapt accordingly.

2. The rise of social messaging (and chatbots)

While social media has been the dominant platform over the last five to 10 years, social messaging apps (messaging apps built around social media platforms) are growing much faster than social media platforms. There are now more people using the top four messaging apps than people using the top four social media apps, as reported by Business Insider.

Activate, a strategy consulting firm, predicted that 1.1 billion more people will use messaging apps by 2018, resulting in 1.5 times more people using messaging apps than people using social media apps.

The rise of social messaging signifies a change in people’s social media behavior and preferences — towards more personal, one-to-one communications. When people view social media, they are no longer just thinking about the posts on their news feed. They are also thinking about reaching your business for customer support through Twitter, receiving timely information or ordering products through your Messenger chatbot.

A company that is at the forefront of this change is KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. Apart from posting interesting content on their one-to-many channels, they have invested a lot in one-to-one channels.

• They have over 200 agents who respond to questions on social media in 14 different languages 24/7.
• They developed a Messenger chatbot that sends boarding pass, flight information, and updates to their passengers. Their passengers can also get customer support and travel directions directly through Messenger 24/7.
• They provide social customer support on WeChat and Kakao Talk, two of the most popular social messaging apps in Asia.

By engaging their social media fans on both one-to-many and one-to-one channels, they were able to gain tremendous business value. For instance, they made €25 million from social media in 2014 (this number is likely to be higher today), and their social media efforts helped to increase their Net Promoter Score from 35 in 2015 to an all-time high of 43 in 2016.

Businesses that only push out marketing content on social media will miss out the opportunity to serve customers in meaningful ways and might be left obsolete on social media.

3. People use social media to reach brands

Social media is the first place most people turn to for customer support, as Sprout Social has found. And more and more people are using social media to get help from brands. The average number of social messages that needed a response from brands had increased by 18% from 2015 to 2016.

People are not only using private social media channels such as Messenger or Twitter Direct Messages to reach businesses for help. Take a look at Airbnb’s Facebook Page and you’ll notice that its users are also commenting on its posts to get help. (And Airbnb does a great job responding and helping them.)

There’re benefits to helping customers on social media. Sprout Social also found that being responsive on social media prompts customers to purchase while ignoring customers causes less brand loyalty.

At the same time, it’s becoming easier to help your customers on social media. To meet this trend, social media platforms are developing more customer service tools to help businesses respond to their customers.

• You can let customers send you a direct message on Twitter without needing you to follow them.
• You can send automated welcome direct messages on Twitter and prompt people with the best ways to reply.
• You can manage all your Facebook, Messenger, and Instagram interactions in a unified inbox.
• You can use Smart Replies to automatically answer frequently asked questions for your Facebook Page.

Businesses have to change their approach towards social media and go beyond just publishing content. You’ll have to be there and help your customers when they ask for help.

4. Algorithms prioritize engagement

Besides engaging customers through customer service and one-on-one conversations, engagement is also about the quality of your content. Is it engaging enough to elicit positive responses from your fans?

To be seen and hear on social media (organically), you need to create content that engages your fans. The number of engagement on your social media posts influences the number of people who would see them.

If many people engage with your post, social media algorithms will take it as a sign that your post is interesting and will more likely show that post to more people. If there are few interactions (or many negative interactions such as “Hide post” on Facebook) on your post, social media algorithms will assume it is uninteresting, irrelevant, or not useful and not show it to as many people. So the more positive interactions on your posts, the more people you will reach on social media.

If your ultimate goal is traffic, leads, or conversions, then the more of such results you can potentially get. Socialbakers studied 30,000 Facebook posts by over 2,700 businesses and found that the more interactions a Page has, the higher the traffic to its website.

What’s the value of engagement?

I believe businesses will no longer join social media because they see it as a strong referral source or direct revenue channel. The primary reason to be on social media will be to build your brand through engagement.

Many businesses are already doing this — strengthening their brand through social media. Some (like KLM, Starbucks, and Nike ) help their customers quickly resolve issues through social media.

Others share content that their fans like and grow their brand through amplification from existing followers, influencers, and social ads. If you look at the social media profiles of brands like Denny’s, Oreo, and GoPro, you’ll notice how they use their content to reinforce their brand image rather than link their fans to their website or directly sell their products.

Social is a way for us to build confidence in the brand by showcasing our personality. Engage with them, inspire them and answer their questions quickly.

Hannah Pilpel, social project manager at MADE.COM

But why brand-building with social media is so important?

A customer’s journey with most businesses is not linear

Most customers rarely go from your Facebook Page to your website to your checkout page. It might look more like this:

➡️ Someone hears about your product through a friend.
➡️ On the same day, the customer sees your Facebook post, enjoys the content, and comments on it.
➡️ The following week, the customer searches on Google for a product that you sell and your website appears on the first page.
➡️ She recognizes your brand and tweeted you a question about your product.
➡️ You promptly replied her, and she decided to order the product from your website.

(Even this is a very simplified version of an actual customer journey.)

A study by Sprout Social found that 85 percent of people have to see something on social media more than once before they would purchase it. But they will also unfollow you if you post too many promotional messages.

By engaging your customers through timely customer support, one-on-one conversations, and interesting or helpful content, you can strengthen your brand image. Then, when these customers are deciding if they should purchase or continue to purchase from you, this brand equity can help win them over.

And it’s proven by research.

Social media interactions increase customer loyalty

A group of U.S. researchers studied consumers’ interactions with their favorite brands and their relationship with the brands. They found that consumers who engage with their favorite brands on social media have stronger relationships with those brands than consumers who don’t engage with their favorite brands.

Consumers who engage with their favorite brands on social media are more likely:

• to have a better evaluation of the brands,
• stay loyal to the brands, and
• recommend the brands to others.

When they trust your brand, they’re more likely to give you their email address, sign up for a webinar, or purchase your product when you ask. That’s the reason why MailChimp does so much brand marketing. Their brand marketing creates a bias for MailChimp so that when someone is choosing an email marketing platform, she will think of MailChimp first.

Branding sounds good but…

What about measurable ROI like leads and sales?

Yes, they are important, too.

Marketers and businesses will always want to justify the time, energy, and resources they spend on social media. 78 percent of social media marketers discuss social media ROI with their boss, and 42 percent have such discussions frequently, according to Simply Measured.

If social media ROI is important to you and your business, you can still keep an eye on results that are more directly measurable as you focus on brand-building on social media through engagement.

There are several ways you can measure these results such as through Google Analytics, Facebook Analytics, or Facebook Ads Manager if you are using Facebook ads. Also, as social media platforms develop more shopping features such as Pinterest’s Buyable Pins and Instagram shopping, there’ll likely be more robust analytics to show the monetary value of social media.

Here’re a few examples of how businesses are measuring their social media ROI, according to Econsultancy:

• KLM looked at sales generated from customers who visited their site directly from social media and found that these customers contributed €25 million of sales in 2014.
• BT calculated a cost saving of £2 million per year from providing social customer support as customer support through social media is cheaper than that through the phone.
• MADE.COM compared the average order value of people who went to their site from social and their site average. Their social media fans spend, on average, 4 percent more per order.
• Incontact trained half of their sales reps on social selling and found that these sales rep had a 160 percent bigger sales pipeline and achieved 215 percent more revenue than those without.

It’s important to remember that when you use social media as an engagement and brand-building channel, you might not generate many leads or sales directly from social media. But you would indirectly.

For instance, someone might discover you on social media and, a week later, find you on Google and purchase from you. We will usually credit Google for the purchase when your social media activities actually helped to influence the purchasing decision. Using tools like Google Analytics’ Multi-Channel Funnels or premium social media analytics tools, you can evaluate how your social media activities indirectly helped with lead generation and sales.

Over to you

People’s behaviors on and expectations of social media are (or have been) changing. Social media platform themselves are also adapting to meet this change.

If you want to succeed on social media, I think your primary goal on social media should be brand-building. You have to focus on the “social” of “social media” and engage your fans.

What do you think?

—

We have built Buffer Reply to help businesses serve and engage with their fans more effectively on social media. If you want to build your brand and give your followers a better experience on social media, we’d love for you to give Buffer Reply a try.

Image credit: Pixabay, (feature image), Econsultancy (quote)

Email marketing has been around for over 45 years and like digital music, which was invented in 1970 by James Russell, it has grown enormously in recent years. But what does the future hold for email marketing? We’ve put together some of our predictions…

Growth in email automation

In recent years there has been a huge increase in email automation. We don’t see this trend changing anytime soon. It is likely that more businesses will join the automation world and have created perfectly executed programs based on every aspect of their customer journeys. As the automation tools become increasingly more intuitive, we will see the barriers eroding and email automation becoming accessible to all businesses.

Interactive emails and eye tracking

The future wouldn’t be bright without some really exciting prospects. We think that interactive emails will be part of that future. Imagine a recipient opening an email and the content changing depending on what they are looking at. Utilizing your webcam, we think that eye tracking will be used to follow what you spend the most time looking at in an email, this will then affect the content of the email you are reading. Similarly, this data will be harnessed and used to improve the content that you receive, ending in more relevant communications.

Additionally, we will see emails that have interactive elements, for example, being able to complete a transaction from within an email, or browse products without having to go to a website. We think that emails will become more than just a one-way communication with the ability to interact with the content all from within the inbox.

Embedded video’s

It is only a matter of time before we see embedded videos in email. Currently, some of the major email clients, like Gmail and Yahoo do not support it. Instead of seeing a screenshot of the video and being redirected to a YouTube channel or your website, we think that videos will be able to be embedded directly into the email.

Brain implanted email?

Well, it wouldn’t be a future prediction without something more suited to a sci-fi movie, but it could happen. We are already in the age of wearable tech, how long before we all get an implant into our brains so we can access, emails, the internet, make calls etc. I suppose we will just have to wait and see…

geralt / Pixabay

In the rapidly evolving global marketplace, there are more opportunities to connect products with consumers. In fact, the number of methods can be overwhelming. Choosing the most appropriate connection methods is the foundation of marketing channel management. While each company has different products and possible methods of distribution, there are many ways to optimize the delivery of products to customers. Companies, however, must first understand the marketing channels they use.

Direct Channel Marketing

In this type of distribution, the company or seller directly provides the product to the buyer. This marketing channel is often the most appropriate for companies that sell services. For example, a hairdresser or an electrical contractor will use direct channel marketing. The service is provided straight to the customer with no middleman. In this simpler type of marketing, the company has authority over the whole channel from origin to customer. However, this is not the most common type of marketing distribution channel.

In short form, direct channel marketing is a clear line from company to customer.
Company → Customer

Indirect Channel Marketing

More commonly, products are sold through a number of intermediaries. The channel for a beverage manufacturer provides a great example. The manufacturer does not often sell directly to the customer. Instead, the manufacturer provides the product to a distributor. The distributor then delivers this to a supermarket. Finally, the supermarket sells the beverage to the end customer. The original manufacturing company is only indirectly associated with the buying process.

Indirect channel marketing can be complicated with multiple intermediaries. The example described above can be shown like this in short form:
Company → Distributor → Supermarket → Customer

Indirect channel marketing strategy can be more difficult to determine than direct marketing because every intermediary receives a portion of the profit for their services. Managing indirect marketing channels can prove to be a challenge for many companies because small changes to the product affect every part of the distribution channel.

The Need for Strategic Channels in Marketing

Adjusting product channels and pricing can have unexpected impact on an indirect marketing distribution channel.

An example in Mission in a Bottle offers a glimpse into the impact of a simple price increase. If Honest Tea raised the price by 1 cent, it could actually lower the total profits of the company. The company’s increase of 1 cent would be a 2 cent increase to the supermarket, the final intermediary. However, if a 2 cent increase doesn’t fit the marketing plan of the supermarket (such as a price of $1.41 versus $1.39), the supermarket may increase the price further. If the growth of sales falls as a result of this larger increase, the manufacturer, Honest Tea, would lose profits. In complex marketing channels, a price increase may thus lower profits if a proper strategy is not employed.

Adjusting the distribution channel can also have negative consequences if the strategy has not been adequately prepared. Mission in a Bottle explains that Quaker Oats bought Snapple with the intention of improving its distribution. They cut out the distributors and sold directly to stores. While this saved the company money in distribution costs, sales immediately plummeted. Without the distributors to save high-value shelf space for the product, Snapple products were pushed to the back and purchased less frequently. Quaker had to sell Snapple. In large part, this was due to a poor strategy for the marketing channel of the supermarkets.

To maximize profits, companies need to develop a marketing channel management strategy. Here are three recommendations for a successful strategy.

Devote Resources to Marketing Channel Management

Maintaining marketing channels often falls within the ambit of a sales manager. While this person may have the proper interpersonal skills and product knowledge for the job, channel management can be a laborious and time-consuming process. Developing a relationship with all the intermediaries in the distribution channel is essential for success. An article in Industrial Marketing Management notes that channel management leaders must develop not only new channels but also maintain existing channels. While expenditure can be substantial, it is valuable. If one intermediary does not agree to a proposed change, it can affect the whole channel. An underperforming channel is likely to lead to underperforming profits.

As an example, maintaining a relationship with the distributors is essential for beverage companies. In many cases, companies incentivize distributors with discounts that lead to better profit margins for the distributor. Some companies also work with distributors to develop an exclusive contract with a single distributor. There are many options for a successful partnership. However, a sales manager needs to monitor the situation to prevent a breakdown in the channel. With a good relationship, distributors can report issues and work with the sale manager to resolve them. For example, waste due to broken glass bottles could be reported by the distributors. The sales manager could then work with the product manager to switch to plastic bottles to reduce wastage.

A dedicated sales manager that carefully monitors the marketing channel is vital to its success.

Sell Direct when Possible

Companies that sell directly to consumers often have more control over when and how their product is delivered. Using the same beverage example, a direct marketing strategy could be to sell the product at a farmer’s market. The company controls the look of the booth, the style of the sellers and the placement of the product. In contrast, if the same company drops off the beverage at a store, the store controls where it is placed and how it looks. More of the channel is out of the control of the company when indirect marketing channels are utilized. Therefore, making changes can be difficult. All the intermediaries have to buy off on the changes.

Amazon is a great example of a company that moves to direct marketing whenever possible. For years, Amazon had to sell its products through the intermediary of various postal services. Therefore, the company had little control over the time of delivery or the look of the product delivered. To address customers needs for faster delivery, Amazon developed alternative channels that are more direct. For example, in some cities, Amazon customers can pick up items left in lockers by Amazon employees. Amazon couriers also deliver products in many major cities. By eliminating intermediaries where possible, Amazon was able to exert more control over delivery times and address customer concerns.

This was in line with their mission to dazzle customers, so developing these marketing distribution channels had a positive impact on both their branding and image.

Align with Strategic Priorities

Like Amazon, companies should seek to align their channels with their business priorities and missions. Speed and customer satisfaction are important to Amazon, so the company invested in channels that optimized the delivery speed and quality. Their customers were satisfied with these new channels. Other companies may need to optimize in different ways. For example, a company that sells a very fragile product may prefer distribution channels that are slower and less likely to cause damage to the product. This approach may seem like common sense; aligning the channels with the product. However, many companies fail to change their marketing distribution channels as the company strategy evolves.

An MIT Sloan Management Review article warns that distribution channels are often created without a strategy in mind. They are simply ‘reactive, one-by-one’ decisions. Marketing channels often require a more solid foundation and strategy.

Keeping to established distribution methods can bankrupt a company. Kodak provided customers with pictures through the intermediary of a photo processor for nearly 100 years. Then digital photography technology allowed users to bypass the photo processor. Kodak did not adjust to this new technology and announced bankruptcy in 2012.

Even tried-and-true distribution channels should be periodically reviewed to confirm that the channels are in line with company strategy and market trends.

Successful marketing distribution channel management enables companies to deliver their products to customers efficiently. In some cases, these channels are a simple exchange of services between the business and the customer. However, more often, the channel also includes intermediaries. Changes to the product can have a negative or positive ripple effect through the channel due to the intermediaries’ response. Therefore, companies need to put a careful channel management strategy in place. Devoting resources to channel management, selling directly when possible, and aligning the channels with the company’s strategy are key to overall profitability.

The big mistakes that content marketers need to avoid when planning their campaigns While many are aware of the benefits and importance of content marketing in the interaction-driven online universe, some of us still forget the countless dangers that can …..

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 I recently had one of the most fast-paced, fun and provocative conversations I had in a while. It wasn’t something that happened in IRL. Instead, this real-time conversation took place on Twitter.  Organized by Cognizant and Pega prior to #Pegaworld, I joined Ben Pring, author of What To Do When Machines do Everything as well as Cogizant and Pega executives and AI/FoW experts on Twitter, to discuss the unfolding reality of  AI and its role in the future of work. And, more importantly, we also explored the overall impact on the future of business.

Seriously. This was an action-packed event. While there were only 8 questions, the answers from Ben, me, along with those from Cognizant, Pega and all who participated, were as fast and furious as they were deep and meaningful.

I wanted to share at least my stream of answers with you. I also included the full Twitter Moments below. I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject. Together, we can shape the future of AI, machine learning and the future of business.

#ChatFOW

1: This is a hot topic now. @BrianSolis how are you thinking about #FutureofWork in relation to business?

I can’t emphasize the importance of #FutureofWork. Much of my work centers on #AI #Millennials #Culture #DigitalTransformation.

I see all too often that #futureofwork planning is disconnected with disparate groups plotting their own courses focused on tech.

My work bridges the gap between real world trends inside/outside organizations to humanize trends for execs to appreciate change.

2: What problems are businesses trying to solve for today?  

I don’t want to give you the usual answers. I’d like to talk about what they’re not solving. #1 They miss the #humanquotient.

We miss the #humanquotient in #FoW as execs make decisions respective to depts (HR/IT/MKTG/etc). We need to understand people+behavior 1st.

In my research (6 Stages of #DigitalTransformation) I found that initially, executives solve for short-term issues to survive.

Many solve for cloud, #CX #EX #AI #ChatBots #MachineLearning #Automation, but without orchestration, #futureofwork is limited.

3: How should organizations be preparing for the Future of Work?

We’re passed preparation. We are in #uhoh territory and need to make up for lost time. To move forward, we need #unity + #vision.

#digitalliteracy where organizations must prepare. This also needs to be at an individual level…this is where stuff gets real.

Most executives don’t live their company the way that new employees and customers do. There’s an emotional and physical gap.

What we’re talking about is a mindset shift from #legacy to that of #innovation & to get there requires a shift in perspective.

4: What technologies should companies be adopting now, to sustain for the future?  How can #automation #AI help with higher value work, improved decision making, and improved CX?

#AI #machinelearning #automation is designed to replace & displace jobs. That’s the story of technology. Expect now it’s faster.

This isn’t a death sentence. #AI #machinelearning #automation like everything, require vision and architecture+new jobs flourish.

Tech is only part of the solution. #digitaltransformation implies digital only. The future of digital requires humans/humanity.

In a world of #AI #machines & #robots, #humanity will be the killer app!  #futureofwork.

5: How can #automation #AI help with higher value work, improved decision making, and improved CX? #ChatFOW

#ArtificialIntelligence can help strategists answer qs typically blinded by cognitive biases. People can’t see change w/o help.

The challenges facing #DigitalTransformation #CX #decisionmaking are mostly human. I call it the #HumanQuotient. #AI can help.

#HumanQuotient is a problem & solution. Politics, egos, doubt, self-preservation stand in the way of progress. #AI has no agenda.

#ArtificialIntelligence can assist executives + employees to challenge their own beliefs & values to learn/unlearn how to evolve.

#AI #Automation can help execs optimize experiences, automate decision making + assume new/existing tasks to free up brain power.

6: What skills are workers going to need in the future?

The 1st skill is a mindset shift to see #FOW is limited by our beliefs/experience.  Machines + new experiences are coming anyway.

HR+management must analyze the future of #AI #Automation + digital trends & audit internal expertise to uncover missing talents.

#artificialintelligence is coming for white collar jobs. Mgmt/#HR must assess workforce to learn who’ll be displaced/replaced.

Upon completing an #AI #Automation #talent horizon audit, execs can strategically plan for training/retraining/hiring roadmaps.

7: Which companies have used robots #automation #AI effectively?

#AI #Robots #Automation aren’t new. They’re evolving, becoming more capable. #Chatbots #bots are the media darlings but…#yawn.

#AI #machinelearning is advancing in the #Autonomous world. @Intel @Nvidia @Waymo @Tesla & many more –> Read this report on “The State and Future of Autonomous Vehicles.”

#AI is everywhere! There are everyday services, i.e. Alexa, Siri, Cortana, Nest to behind-the-scenes i.e., Netflix, Pandora, etc.

I recently finished a paper with @kahuna exploring #ArtificialIntelligence in #moderncommerce #retail to proactively enhance #CX.

We cant forget to mention the @IBM Watson @Softbank #Pepper robot & the work that’s already underway in #retail #hospitality #CX.

8: What’s the most urgent thing businesses need to do to kickstart their #DigitalTransformation?

Without purpose & human-centered design, #AI + #DigitalTransformation efforts will radically hamper #futureofwork + #innovation.

If you ask people if future #AI will take jobs, they’ll say yes! If you ask them if #AI will take their job, crickets #Denial.

The reality is that #AI + #Automation will make many jobs obsolete. This is as much a #FutureofWork challenge as it is personal.

What we know as execs/employees/humans is based on legacy foundations that are eroding. We all have to learn/unlearn to compete.

Education + empowerment is critical right now & that must come from the top. We must update what/how we learn & measure success.

The #HumanQuotient must take center stage in tech/talent/expertise audits + SWOT to prioritize education/innovation investments.

As businesses unlearn/learn/grow, education must never stop. Orgs must also give back to schools to train tomorrow’s workforce.

Iterate AND innovate now…and, quickly…again and again.

Future of Work Twitter Chat

About Brian

Brian Solis is principal analyst and futurist at Altimeter, the digital analyst group at Prophet, Brian is world renowned keynote speaker and 7x best-selling author. His latest book, X: Where Business Meets Design, explores the future of brand and customer engagement through experience design. Invite him to speak at your event or bring him in to inspire and change executive mindsets.

Connect with Brian!

Twitter: @briansolis
Facebook: TheBrianSolis
LinkedIn: BrianSolis
Instagram: BrianSolis
Youtube: BrianSolisTV
Snapchat: BrianSolis

The post A Real-Time Conversation About AI and the Future of Work appeared first on Brian Solis.

When thinking about practical applications for artificial intelligence in your business, it’s easy to assume that you need vast amounts of data to get started. AI is fueled by data, and so it only makes sense that the more data you have, the smarter your AI gets, right? Not exactly.

When it comes to extracting intelligence by applying AI to data, context matters. In other words, you can build the biggest data lake imaginable, but if you don’t know what you’re trying to find and you don’t have the right data to do it, then you’re not going to get where you want to go.

That’s because AI is not some magical black box that can ingest mountains of data and then just spit out results. AI is a huge set of technologies, each with a specific, fine-tuned purpose. Companies that can zero-in on the impact they want to see and focus on curating the right datasets mapping to those goals have the best opportunity for generating really impactful results from AI.

Consider how the United States Postal Service (USPS) automates mail sorting. With the help of machines and advanced optical character recognition (OCR) technology, the USPS can now read and process 98% of all hand-addressed mail and 99.5% of machine-printed mail without human assistance. By linking this technology with a relatively small and finite data set of U.S. zip codes and cities, the USPS can now process upwards of 36,000 pieces of mail per hour. With the USPS facing harsh financial challenges in recent years, the impact of this automation is immeasurable.

Another interesting example of small, high precision data being used to make big gains with AI can be found in the airline industry. In 2015, Boeing launched the Aerospace Data Analytics Lab in partnership with Carnegie Mellon University to develop AI technology for airlines. One such project aims to dramatically reduce maintenance costs with AI by standardizing maintenance logs.

Insight Center

Every aircraft is required to keep highly-detailed maintenance logs. However, when planes travel around the world, communication starts to breaks down. Basic language barriers are the first stumbling block. From there, it only gets worse. Some logs are captured digitally; others are hand-written. Some maintenance workers stay in the lines, others jot notes and abbreviations in the margins. For the average maintenance worker, translating these variations on the fly can be next to impossible. But with AI and a narrow data set of common aircraft maintenance terminology, it becomes possible to capture and dynamically translate these logs in real time. By leveraging AI to improve the speed and accuracy of the airline maintenance workflow, airlines stand to save billions.

These are but two examples of how AI powered by precise data can lead to outsized impact. How can you put these ideas to work for your company? There are three main steps:

Set goals that tie back to business objectives. Setting goals with a cross-functional team that tie back to business objectives is a critical step to any undertaking, and AI is no exception. AI is prescriptive by nature; the more narrowly you can define the business objective, and the more contextually precise your data set, the more likely you are to get some meaningful results.

What’s often overlooked is the importance of establishing a cross-functional team with visibility across the organization. This is essential to determine where in the organization impact is most needed. If you build a team that brings in operations, sales, finance, and the executive suite, you are more likely to figure out where the real bottlenecks and opportunities are, and you are more likely to come up with practical solutions that actually start solving them.

Tame data chaos. Every company has a data set with unique value to their business. Often, however, there’s a disconnect between the data and the value. You’ve captured data, but it’s not clean, precise or actionable. A useful framework for taming data chaos and extracting small high precision data is focusing on the lifecycles of customers, partners, and suppliers. Following the lifecycle shows you all of the steps, systems, and stakeholders involved. As you examine these lifecycles, you will find gaps where you are leaking value. These are your opportunities to make a clear and measurable impact. Focus on the key data surrounding these gaps and you will have more precise and actionable data.

Select the right technology for the job. There’s a lot of buzz right now about machine learning and AI — and it’s justified buzz. These are amazing technologies with great promise for any level of executive in any B2C or B2B company. They are also now available at a fraction of the cost compared to even five years ago. Don’t hire a team of a hundred data scientists; look to the growing ecosystem and pick the right tool for the job.

In the world of digital business, companies are always looking for big bang solutions — some breakthrough that can give them an edge. But the reality is that when you get practical, you can start racking up lots of smaller wins — and you can do it quickly. Over time, this accumulation can drive massive outcomes.

This is the right way to think about AI. It’s not a magical black box — it’s a highly-specialized set of tools. It’s not about shooting for the moon — it’s about winning the ground wars. And it’s not about mountains of data — it’s about small, high-precision data.

Ryan Holiday, stop writing books that are just for me!

With “Perennial Seller” you just answered an obsessive question I’ve had for years: What makes something, someone, some product, some art, withstand the test of time?

What is the magic sauce? The secret formula?

What makes something sell a million copies a year (music, art, books, products, etc)… forever?

I want to know.

I’ll try my best to summarize our conversation and your book but people should buy the book for your 1000s of examples:

BE COUNTERINTUITIVE

If you write what everyone else is already thinking, then nobody needs to read your work, or use your product.

They already have it.

It doesn’t matter if you are 50% better than anyone else.

Nobody understands how to judge that except the experts in your field. And those experts don’t care about you. They might even hate you.

Create your own field. And be 1000% the best in that field.

DON’T TRY TO COMPETE

The 100th person who writes a “50 Shades of Grey” style book, or a disco pop EMD album can…MAYBE…get 1% of the audience.

If you find an underserved audience, you can get 100% of it.

There’s an important side effect of this: IF YOU ARE DOING SOMETHING FOR THE MONEY…YOU LOSE.

Because the rest of the world is competing for that dollar.

Money is a side effect of creativity, quality art, creating something unique, and building your marketing into that art.

VALIDATE THE IDEA

Test out sample chapters. Release songs on YouTube. Keep iterating. Keep digging for your authentic voice.

In comedy, it took Louis CK 20 years of telling jokes before he found his voice when talking about dating and parenting.

Don’t look for LOTs of fans at first. Look for the hard-core fans. The ones who will stick with you while you go on this crazy ride. The ones who will share.

What my prior podcast guest, Kevin Kelly, calls “The One Thousand True Fans”.

DON’T GIVE UP IF YOU DON’T WIN ON DAY ONE

Ryan told me that “Smokey and the Bandit” beat “Star Wars” at the box office the same weekend they both opened.

I did not know that! It almost seems like blasphemy to me.

John Grisham only sold a few thousand copies when he first published “A Time To Kill”. Only much later did it sell millions.

Catcher in the Rye had a slow start. Now sells a million copies a year.

The best works of art and the best products have to fight the masses to find their right audience. But when they do, the audience will reward them.

Write or create what is unique to you, find the 1000 true fans. The ones who are hard-core and love the value you bring. And serve that market over and over.

That divides the winners from the non-winners.

TELL A STORY THAT IS PERSONAL TO YOU

“Choose Yourself” could have been another ranty personal development business book (“Blah!”).

Instead I wove in a personal story of struggle and loss and pain. Pain that changed me and still does every single day to (hopefully) lesser extent.

This is what makes a story both unique (it’s my story) and universal (everyone experiences pain, everyone wants to solve it).

Too many people play a persona (“my life is perfect so let me teach it to you”) and that’s inauthentic.

TELL A STORY THAT RESONATES WITH EVERYONE

Star Wars is a perfect example. It’s the ‘arc of the hero’. A boy who struggles, encounters problems, faces them, lives forever. I.e. Jesus. Krishna. Buddha.

Star Wars is a sci-fi western (great example of “idea sex”) where he innovated on the graphics but used a story that was basically “Focus grouped” for thousands of years. Thousands!

So he stuck within the rules of a genre (actually several that he combined) but also made it uniquely his own.

This is the key to successful art.

Telling a story that is personal to you AND resonates with everyone is very difficult. It takes practice. It takes marketing. It takes listening. That’s why these are the items that become perennial sellers.

It’s worth it to build that skill. How do you do it:

• Understand the history of what you love
• Learn from the best
• Practice over and over
• Build marketing into your art.
• Experiment, learn, repeat
• Follow the rest of the advice in this article.

ASK THE ESSENTIAL QUESTIONS

Ask yourself, “Who is this actually for?” Who is your fan?”

“A lot of creators struggle with this,” Ryan said. “You make this great work and then you think the world is eagerly anticipating it, but they’re not.”

You have to have a sense of honesty internally to know who your stuff is for. So you need to ask the right questions from the beginning.

You have to connect strongly with those initial hard core fans.

Combine your creative idea with the heart of another human being.

The people who struggle with your struggle. The people who will be better off when they read your writing or use your invention.

BE OK WITH PEOPLE HATING YOU

If you do something new, people will not like you. SOMEONE will hate you.

“When the moon landing happened,” Ryan told me, “It had 93% market share. That’s incredible.

“But think about it. That means 7% of the audience turned on the TV, saw Neil Armstrong stepping on the moon and said, ‘oh, this is boring. I’m going to change the channel.”

Be ok with that.

Iron Maiden had a lot of people hating them. And yet they focused on their core audience and became one of the most popular rock bands ever despite playing music that would NEVER make it on the radio.

The TV show, “Seinfeld” was on the verge of cancellation it’s first few years.

But Jerry Seinfeld already had a hard-core following not only among fans but even among network executives.

Having network executives as hard-core fans guaranteed him the runway he needed to succeed with the wider audience.

The Beatles had a hard core following from 1957 on that, even when their label rejected them in 1962 (“Guitar bands are going out of style”), their hard core fans kept them afloat and a year later they were catapulted to success.

Your hard core fans buys you “marketing capital” that you “spend” on expanding to a wider base.

If you go for just the wider base, you face the competition too early and end up as an also-ran.

And remember, the moment you first start – NOBODY at all cares about you.

THE BEST ART DIVIDES THE AUDIENCE.

I don’t hit publish unless I’m actually feeling physical fear about doing it.

If you don’t want to divide the audience, don’t hit publish.

MARKET YOUR IDEA

Nobody really cares about you. Every industry is turning upside down. Everyone is worried about their own jobs and agendas.

You can’t just be better than everyone else. There’s “infinite shelf space” as Ryan puts it.

You’re competing against “Breaking Bad”, Google, Trump’s tweets, old episodes of Seinfeld, Harry Potter, etc.

If you want to be out there and noticed. If you want your vision to succeed. If you want your product used…you need to talk about it. You need to represent it. You need to write about it. You need to be about it.

The marketing has to be part of your art. Even the Beatles made entire movies (art and marketing at the same time) to support their true creativity (the music).

Marketing is no longer about ad space. It’s another important outlet of your creativity.

And if it doesn’t work. Move on. You don’t have one idea in you. You have 1000s.

VALIDATE, REPEAT

Most things fail. The ones who succeed, pick up from their failure, figure out what went wrong, figure out how to validate an idea better with an audience, and then go back and try again.

They try over and over until they find that hardcore audience that will listen.

Validation is a cure for stupidity.

They go back again and again until their skills are refined. John Lennon and Paul McCartney met in 1958. They played and played and played and refined.

In 1962 their label rejected them (“Guitar bands are on their way out”).

The rest is history.

Now you can create history.

And Ryan, one final note. Please keep writing all-star books so you can keep coming back on the podcast.

And keeping writing books that will make my life better.

And then letting me ask you any question I want about them. Because the’s the way I roll.

You’re a good guy and, of course, welcome any time but I’m really mostly interested in reading things that make my life better. So keep at it.

photo credit: Pamela Sisson 

Links and Resources:

• Read Ryan’s books:
  • His newest book, “Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts“
  • Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and international bestseller, “Ego Is the Enemy“
  • Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestseller, “The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living“
  • “The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph“
  • “Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator“
  • “Growth Hacker Marketing: A Primer on the Future of PR, Marketing, and Advertising“
• See Ryan’s reading list newsletter + subscribe to his email “The Daily Stoic”
• Follow Ryan on Facebook + Twitter

Also Mentioned:

• My interview with Naval Ravikant  (coming soon! You can subscribe here to be the first to hear it)
• “How to Be a Stoic: Using Ancient Philosophy to Live a Modern Life” by Massimo Pigliucci
• “The 48 Laws of Power” by Robert Green,
• “Man with the Golden Typewriter” by Ian Flemming (he wrote all the James Bond books)
• “The Legend of Bagger Vance” by Steven Pressfield
• “The Baggivata Gata”
• “To Sell is Human” by Dan Pink
• Noah Kagan (he has the best tips to grow email list. Read his article “How to get your first 100 email subscribers” 
• My interview with Ramit Sethi, author of The New York Times bestseller “I Will Teach You to Be Rich” and his latest book Your Move: The Underdog’s Guide to Building Your Business
• My interview with Brian Koppelman
• My interview with Peter Thiel, founder of PayPal and author of The New York Times bestseller “Zero to One”

The post Ep. 238: Ryan Holiday – How To Create Something That Will Sell Forever appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

The Power of Little Ideas written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with David Robertson
Podcast Transcript

“Innovate or die.” That’s what Peter Drucker said, and I think a lot of people took that to mean that you have to create a company that disrupts an entire industry and that you should be looking for ways to innovate on your products and services like nobody has in the past, but I personally think that line was misunderstood.

I believe, in a lot of ways, what Drucker was talking about was a value that implies that you have to innovate like you have to be trustworthy. It has to be built into the core of how you serve your customers. Innovation should be looked at as optimization as opposed to disruption.

My guest for this week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is David Robertson. He is on the faculty of the MIT Sloan School of Management, host of the Innovation Navigation podcast, and co-author of The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation. He and I discuss why innovation must be at the core of how you serve your customers.

Robertson has been a student, teacher, and practitioner of the art of innovation for his entire career. He intends to bring brilliant minds worldwide to share their knowledge with him, and you, as they explore what companies can do to boost innovation.

Robertson is a frequent public speaker and serves as a consultant to companies on innovation and technology management issues. Among other journals, Robertson has been published in Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review.

Questions I ask David Robertson:

• How would you describe what innovation is?
• Is there a time when innovation can be harmful?
• How can companies adjust to generational shifts?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

• How to look at innovation in a systematic way
• How to innovate if your product may be going away
• How to innovate with a service-based company

Key takeaways from the episode and more about David Robertson:

• Learn more about Robertson and listen to the Innovation Navigation podcast.
• Read The Power of Little Ideas: A Low-Risk, High-Reward Approach to Innovation.
• Follow on Twitter.
• Connect on Linkedin.

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Are you an independent marketing consultant or an agency owner? If so, you may want to check out the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network. It is a growing group of independent marketing consultants and agencies that are partnering and collaborating using the Duct Tape Marketing tools, and really scaling their businesses. Check it out at ducttapemarketingconsultant.com.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and President Donald Trump after their joint press conference on February 13, 2017. (Rex/Shutterstock/CP)

This week Donald Trump’s administration released its objectives for the coming renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, as required by U.S. law. Congress has 30 days to consider the agenda. Talks between the U.S., Canada and Mexico can now begin by the middle of August.

What it means:

It is too early to separate tactics from aspirations. Still, the 17-page outline represents a new life for grievances that U.S. business interests have harboured against Canada and Mexico for decades. Earlier this year, Trump suggested that Canada-U.S. trade needed little more than a tweak. His starting point for the NAFTA negotiations suggest that he’s become more ambitious.

The headline:

Back in the 1980s, the attraction of a free-trade agreement with the U.S. for Canada was the chance to obtain a shield from Washington’s capricious application of punitive duties. Canada failed to win full cover, but it did secure a degree of protection that was extended to NAFTA.

Chapter 19 of NAFTA allows the signatories to appeal protectionist or retaliatory measures at a quasi-judicial panel. NAFTA also guards against friendly fire: if one of the signatories launches a trade assault on a group of countries, the other two NAFTA countries will be spared. Trump wants to scrap both of these provisions in favour of a new approach to dispute resolution. Trade experts say Chapter 19 could be a red line for Canada.

The obsession continues:

Trump and his top trade negotiator, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, justify their revival of protectionism by pointing to the big gap between American imports and exports. Most economists call their argument specious. The Trump administration doesn’t care. The first line of the negotiating plan says the U.S. objective will be to “improve” the U.S. trade balance and “reduce” the trade deficit with Canada and Mexico. The preamble adds colour. “Since the deal came into force in 1994, trade deficits have exploded, thousands of factories have closed, and millions of Americans have found themselves stranded, no longer able to utilize the skills for which they had been trained,” the document says. And: “The new NAFTA will be modernized to reflect 21st century standards and will reflect a fairer deal, addressing America’s persistent trade imbalances in North America.”

So what? A successful negotiation for Trump will be convincing evidence that the U.S. trade deficit will narrow.

A potential surprise:

The closest observers of trade politics and policy were mostly unmoved by Trump’s negotiating list, however normal people might be surprised to learn that Canada’s bankers have as much reason to fret as loggers and dairy farmers. The document makes specific mention of winning increased access for American financial institutions, and calls for the elimination, or at least the reduction, of limits on international investment.

For decades, Canada’s biggest banks were allowed to fatten behind a thicket of rules that deterred international competition. Among those rules are strict ownership limits that prevent a single shareholder from gaining control of any of the banks. That was less an issue when Canada’s banks were mostly focused on fighting for turf at home. But the Canadian market is now saturated. Royal Bank, Toronto-Dominion, Bank of Montreal and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce all have been buying American banks in recent years in order to grow. Yet their U.S. rivals effectively are blocked from entering Canada in a meaningful way. Trump might have heard about this: three of his closest advisers used to work for Goldman Sachs, the global investment bank based in New York.

Glass half full:

The outline is vague, suggesting it’s too soon to panic. The Financial Times reported that the White House still hasn’t settled on its actual negotiating stance. Other observers noted that some of the language, including around e-commerce, resembles sections of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Canada and Mexico still support.

Trump also proposes making side deals on labour rights and the environment part of the main agreement. This could be a ploy to squeeze Mexico, as tougher standards would hurt its competitiveness. But stronger labour provisions and making NAFTA greener fit with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s push for “progressive” trade agreements. Also, many Canadians will cheer Trump’s objectives—foreign ownership limits coddle big Canadian companies, reducing innovation and inflating prices in industries such as finance and telecommunications. The U.S. also wants to make it easier to buy stuff online from the U.S., suggesting North American shoppers be allowed to import goods worth $800 duty free.

Glass half empty:

If this document is a true representation of what Trump wants to achieve, Canada’s negotiators have a fight on their hands.

The U.S. says it wants rules that favour the use of North American goods and services, which could complicate the efforts of Canada and Mexico to work with other countries, especially China and Japan. (“Ensure the rules of origin incentivize the sourcing of goods and materials from the United States and North America.”)

There are hints that the White House is ready to resume old battles, such as United Parcel Service’s annoyance at having to compete with Canada Post’s courier service or Export Development Canada’s assistance to Bombardier and other exporters. (“Specialized sectoral disciplines, including rules to help level the playing field for U.S. delivery services suppliers in the NAFTA countries” and “Require that [state-owned enterprises] not cause harm to another Party through provision of subsidies.”)

And even though supply management wasn’t mentioned specifically, Trump clearly wants to break down the import tariffs that allow Canada’s producers of dairy, poultry and eggs to sell at higher prices. (“Expand competitive market opportunities for U.S. agricultural goods in NAFTA countries, substantially equivalent to the competitive opportunities afforded foreign exports into the U.S. market, by reducing or eliminating remaining tariffs.”)

These are only a few examples. With the possible exception of oil and gas, most of Canada’s core industries risk having their business models upended. There will be losers.

Bottom Line:

The formal negotiation is on and the U.S. is trying to intimidate its opponents with a long list of demands. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government didn’t flinch. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland dismissed the publication of the U.S. objectives as “part of an internal process” and reminded everyone that Canada buys more goods and services from the U.S. than China, Japan and the United Kingdom combined. Under normal circumstances, that probably would be enough to keep NAFTA intact. But these aren’t normal circumstances. Unlike previous administrations, which were willing to look the other way when smaller economies failed to match U.S. policy, the Trump administration insists on reciprocity. That’s why Canadian dairy farmers, bankers and others from sheltered industries should worry. Nor is it safe to assume the businessman in Trump ultimately will keep economic disruption to a minimum. The Republicans failed to repeal former president Barack Obama’s health-care legislation, a feature promise of Trump’s campaign. The president’s agenda is in disarray. The politician in Trump needs a win. NAFTA could be where he next seeks one.

MORE ABOUT INTERNATIONAL TRADE:

• Patriotism is a disastrous way to make trade policy
• Why Calgary could be the next real estate hot spot for foreign buyers
• Why NAFTA 2.0 and free trade will dominate Canada’s 2019 federal election
• Everyone would lose in a trade war between the U.S. and Mexico
• After Trudeau’s Trump meeting, Canada’s sigh of relief is premature
• How Canada could become the missing link between Europe and Asia
• Canada shouldn’t throw Mexico under the bus to placate Donald Trump
• Trump’s guiding rule is “America First.” Canada won’t be an exception

The post Trump’s NAFTA renegotiation stance looks more aggressive than ever appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

A fellow named Yves asked this great question:

Most businesses get this problem backwards. It is true that hiring the right people is important. However, if management doesn’t understand with data how their system (or process) works, they are running a crap shoot, not a business. Hiring the best people into that environment will eventually make them miserable.

To illustrate, I’ll describe a hypothetical situation where managers try to “hire a solution.” Then we’ll see how closely this hypothetical situation matches your average sales department:

You are asked to take over a department that is struggling to meet its production quota. The department has 10 people speaking five different languages. You start by asking them to increase their output, i.e., to work harder. Soon, conflicts arise. These conflicts reduce productivity. You decide to ask the HR department to replace your team with individuals who are more skilled at avoiding conflict.

How effective will changing out these people be?

I would argue it is likely to make matters worse, not better. Why? Because you’ve leapt to a conclusion - that the people are the problem. In fact, you haven’t identified the problem at all.

Consider the things you don’t know: How do people speaking five different languages work together in the first place? What factors determine their ability to produce? When you ask them to work harder, what exactly do they do differently? What is the source of the conflicts? Are the machines and materials they work with adequate for the needed output? How do you know?

This is the sort of situation Deming meant when he said:

• A company could put a top man at every position and be swallowed by a competitor with people only half as good, but who are working together.

When a business system is not working, weak managers blame their people. To make that point, let’s consider whether that hypothetical situation I described above could be a sales department.

First, it is a department that is struggling to meet its production quota. Of course, that is very common in sales.

Next, “The department has 10 people speaking five different languages.”

While salespeople don’t usually speak different languages, it is common for sales and marketing people to not understand each other. It is also normal for salespeople to have a variety of backgrounds, with different knowledge and skill levels. Further, they are usually not in the habit of carefully defining the words they use.[1] To make matters worse, there are many different types and qualities of customers, and disagreement among salespeople for how they should be handled. If this isn’t a “tower of babble” yet just wait.

Why isn’t the sales forecast more reliable? Because most salespeople can’t predict. That’s why they feel the need to “pursue” every sales opportunity. Unwittingly, they prioritize prospects based on subjective decisions and biases (because they have no other way).

With no data available, how do you learn what factors limit the sales department’s output? Ask them to work harder, and they’ll comply. Marketers will do more “marketing” (perhaps producing more “leads”). Salespeople will do more “selling” (perhaps produce more “proposals”). However, unless waste is reduced, these may well produce less productivity rather than more. If technical support doesn’t provide quotes fast enough (or with low enough prices), or if salespeople are too busy to follow up on leads, the blame game will start. As pressure increases, you might see sales managers trying to close deals instead of coaching, and salespeople trying to discount instead of “selling value.”

You might then decide to ask the HR department to replace your team with sales managers who are better a coaching, and salespeople who can sell value.

Remember what we asked in the first hypothetical management situation? “How effective will changing out these people be?”

I would argue, again, that “It is likely to make matters worse, not better. Why? Because you’ve leapt to a conclusion - that the people are the problem. In fact, you haven’t identified the problem at all.”

Defining problems means being able to use evidence and data to distinguish value from waste. Doing this enables marketing, sales and service departments to understand and improve how they work together. The team needs to engage in defining the causes and effects inherent in their system. They need to know which opportunities to walk away from, and which ones to prioritize. They need to know what work they should STOP doing, to make room for more productive work. If that doesn’t happen, any changes you make are not based on evidence. Without data, "attempts to improve" are a crap shoot.

That is more or less the state of most B2B sales organizations today, unfortunately. That’s why despite hiring the best people they can possibly find; sales turnover and productivity remain stubbornly high.

Please don’t get me wrong, high quality people are important to any organization. However, imagine the predicament of a high-quality person who joins an organization that prizes results and is unable to know whether you’ve done a good job. To quote Deming again:

• The supposition is prevalent the world over that there would be no problems in production or service if only our production workers would do their jobs in the way they were taught. Pleasant dreams. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to management.

I wish I knew who said, “A good process adds about 20 IQ points to everyone involved,” because they are entirely right. Processes – especially sales processes – are crucial to successful companies.  It is a mistake to depend on finding Supermen or Wonderwomen as salespeople. Better to create a great organization out of average people.

What could a few exceptional people do if the organization weren’t in the way? I’d love to learn what you’ve seen in the comments section below.

[1] As I’ve mentioned many times, just ask several salespeople, as well as individuals from marketing, customer service, or technical support to “Define who is the customer,” or, “What is a qualified prospect?” You are almost certain to get different, even contradictory responses.

Time is tight for sales managers, and many avoid the CRM because of this fact. But in reality, your CRM system can actually help eliminate redundant tasks and bring you closer to your reps and your clients.

By logging sales data and communicating with contacts directly from your CRM, everything you need to run an efficient sales team is at your fingertips. There’s no need for manually updating outdated spreadsheets or sifting through a pile of emails. And by keeping all data in one centralized place, you can save a significant amount of time.

The six tips below will help you uncover areas of your CRM system that will enable you to efficiently organize and present team data on deal revenue, potential prospects, client communication, and more. As a result, you can focus on managing people instead of managing your day.

1) Track Productivity Metrics

Not only is public reporting of metrics a great motivational tactic, but staying on top of your team’s activity numbers helps you identify your reps’ strengths and weaknesses.

Activity metrics, however, are not always at the top of sales managers’ agendas. According to a study conducted by Harvard Business Review, activity KPIs only make up 17% of the metrics used to manage sales performance despite being the most easily managed. Without these metrics, you lack insight into your team’s productivity habits. How are you able to reward the top performers and get laggards back on track?

Keeping tabs on everyone’s daily activities is easier with a CRM because you can automate the reporting of logged activities such as meetings, calls, and emails. Gather up all the team data in one place, monitor it daily, and refer to these metrics during one-on-ones. These regular activity performance check-ins can help you gauge where each rep is at and spot areas for improvement.

Below is an example of the Productivity widget in the HubSpot CRM. This widget automatically updates with the number of calls, meetings, and emails sent per rep, along with their logged notes and tasks:

2) Track Revenue Metrics

Communication is essential for both your success as a manager and your reps’ growth as sales professionals. Touching base regularly gives you an idea of your reps’ everyday agendas and maintains the overall health of the pipeline.

So how can you start ongoing engagement with your reps? Look at contact, company, and deal records on a per-rep basis in your CRM, and use this data to strike up performance and coaching conversations.

Some metrics most CRM systems can report on include:

• Deals Closed per Owner: Use filters to create a view for each rep that shows the deals they have closed so far along with the revenue for each deal, and send it to them. That way, you can stay on top of how each rep contributes to revenue, and your reps can track their own progress.
• Contacts Owned per Rep with Last Contacted Date: Create a view per rep to show how many contacts they own and when the last time each contact was sent an email, booked for a meeting, or called. This can help you gauge how leads are distributed among your team and how proactive each rep is about reaching out.
• Open Deals with Estimated Revenue: For each member of your team, create a view so they can see their open deals and how much potential revenue is associated with each. This visual will enable them to effectively prioritize their time.
• Deal Revenue Leaderboard: A deal revenue leaderboard ranks reps based on their deals’ forecasted revenue -- from highest to lowest. This will promote healthy competition and give your reps the motivational push they need to close those deals (and climb the ranks).

3) Review Logged Calls and Emails

You can’t monitor each call your reps make or proof every email they send. Instead, refer to the logged engagements on CRM contact records at your own convenience. That way, you can put yourself in your reps’ shoes to gain valuable insight into how client relationships are progressing (or not).

There are many benefits of listening to recorded calls -- especially when it comes to skill development and coaching opportunities.

For example, when listening to a recorded call, maybe you notice a rep’s tone comes across as pushy, potentially scaring off the prospect. If so, bring this call to your next one-on-one, listen to it together, and give them tips on how they can sound less aggressive.

As for email -- perhaps you come across an entirely one-sided email chain logged on a contact record. Your rep is clearly working hard to gain the prospect’s interest, but the buyer just isn’t into it. Time is being wasted.

Send a link of this contact record to your rep and discuss ways they can distinguish good fit leads from disinterested prospects. You can also craft an effective breakup email together that might spark a response.

Using the CRM for call and email reviews is a lot simpler than asking reps to record their meetings or send you messages -- saving a lot of back-and-forth time and making coaching more efficient.

4) Create Team-Wide Reports

Revenue climbs with a CRM. Nucleus Research found that sales teams that use a CRM system earn a company $8.71 for every $1 spent.

Your reps deserve to see the monetary value of their hard work at the team and deal level. Deal reports are a great way to monitor the pipeline on both an individual rep and team-wide basis.

These reports can include information such as where a deal is at in your pipeline or how many deals were closed in a given time period. Put them on a public dashboard so the entire team can see how they’re doing as a unit and in comparison to each other.

With HubSpot’s CRM, you can create a recurring email of deal dashboard metrics to send to your reps so they can see just how far out they are from their personal and team numbers.

5) Route Leads Automatically

Lead routing is an important part of sales operations. Allocating your contacts and companies to different reps will ensure all your prospects and clients receive an adequate amount of nurturing and deals are distributed evenly among all members of your team. Overloading one rep with all the leads will mean less quality time spent per prospect and also fewer opportunities for other members of your team to put money in the collective “bank.”

Use your CRM’s filtering tools to divide your prospects by a number of specific characteristics. Is a particular rep targeting educational institutions? Filter by industry. Maybe you want to segment your companies based on size. In that case, filter by number of employees.

Then, assign prospects in bulk to different sales reps. This will ensure all company and associated contact records are accounted for and distributed evenly to avoid overloading your reps.

Below is what a filtered view of companies in a specific region looks like in the HubSpot CRM:

6) Assign Tasks

The ability to delegate is a key trait of an effective sales manager. Taking on too many tasks will make you less available to your reps and will also rob them of opportunities to build their sales skills, which makes them less effective and self-sufficient in the long-run.

You can build a list of tasks that need to be done right in your CRM, eliminating the need for any external documents. Then, go through the list and assign them to yourself or various reps. Setting up email reminders in your CRM to automate following-up will help keep your reps on track and strengthen communication among your team. With a more organized task system, more time can be spent connecting with leads and closing deals.

With the tips above, you can use your CRM to add structure to your team and gain insight into your reps’ day-to-day activities. Spending less time manually keeping track of data frees up your schedule so you can focus on developing your team and helping your business grow.

In what ways does your CRM system help with team management? Please share your experience in the comments.

At least one-third of the sales emails I get start with a variation on: "I hope all is well."

The line is so ubiquitous it's become meaningless. Both the recipient and the email writer know it's a nicety thrown in before the real point of the email.

With buyers' attention spans at an all-time low, reps can't afford to waste a single line.

If you're an abuser of "I hope all is well,"  or "Hope you are doing well," these different -- and better -- ways to say it.

To that end, here's our list of alternatives that will make your email less vague, more personal, and -- hopefully -- endear yourself to the recipient enough to get a reply.

1. "I hope this email finds you well."

If you're the formal type, this email opening is respectful and varied enough to distinguish your message from the deluge of other sales pitches in their inbox. If you're reaching out to a prospect for the first time and aren't certain of the right tone to strike, you can't go wrong with this opening line. 

2. "I hope you're having an A+ [week, month]."

Although this sentiment is basically the same as "I hope you're well," it's unexpected -- which makes it feel more authentic.

3. "I hope you're having a two-coffee (versus a four-coffee) day."

Your prospect will definitely know what you're talking about.

4. "Anything exciting happening in [prospect name] land?"

If you're reaching out to someone you know fairly well and/or works in a fairly informal industry, take this opener for a spin.

5. "What's the latest in your world?"

A variation on #4.

6. "Are you excited for [upcoming event]?"

Depending on how familiar you are with the buyer -- and how information they include on their social media -- you can either make this question personal or professional.

For instance, if they just tweeted about Game of Thrones, you might write, "Are you excited for the next GoT episode? #WinterIsHere."

If you learned via their website that their company is hosting a conference, you could ask, "Are you looking forward to INBOUND 2019?"

7. "I hope you enjoyed [industry event]."

Connecting with the attendees of an event? Immediately establish your purpose so they know this isn't a cold email.

8. "I hope your iced coffee is as cold as your leads are hot."

Use this humorous one with a marketer or salesperson.

9. "I just met you, and this is crazy. But here's my meetings link: [Meetings Link]. So call me maybe?"

Show your personality and sense of humor with this musically-inspired call-to-action.

10. "I hope your spirits are high and your churn rates are low."

This lighthearted opener works well for prospects selling subscription products. Adapt it to other audiences by switching "churn rates" with one of these options:

• Refund rate
• Marketing costs
• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
• Cancellation rate
• Defects rate

11. "I hope everything's groovy at [company name]."

Transform the "hope you're well" line by adding some customization and a ‘70s spin.

12. "How are you holding up in the [summer heat, winter cold, this weather]?"

This line works with virtually everyone. Just remember to change it once per season.

13. "I request the highest of fives."

Whether your prospect is a How I Met Your Mother fan or not, they'll smile at this cheery opening line. I recommend using it in congratulatory emails (and including this gif!).

14. "I hope your weekend was relaxing (and the transition into Monday wasn't too rough)."

Appeal to your prospect's love for the weekend.

15. "I hope [Last Page Seen] was helpful."

I love this opening line. Referring to the last page on your website that your prospect saw gives you credibility and opens up the door for a conversation about the content on that page. It's also easy to automate, since "Last Page Seen" is one of HubSpot's default contact properties.

16. "Great [blog post, LinkedIn comment, podcast episode, interview] -- I learned [fact]."

A little flattery never hurts. If you want to start the relationship on a high note, find something notable your prospect recently produced, contributed to, or did and compliment them on it.

17. "Traveled anywhere fun lately?"

When you're reconnecting with someone you haven't spoken to in a few months, try this question to kick things off again.

18. "How's life in [Office Location]?"

To show you've put some effort into your message, try this question. If "Office Location" is one of the fields in your CRM, use a personalization token to automatically update the email with your prospect's city.

19. "I hope you've been getting better weather in [Office Location] than we've been getting in [rep's region]."

A combination of #11 and #17.

20. "I hope the X project you mentioned [is off to a good start, is coming along well, is getting great results, was a success]."

Prove you care about your prospect's work -- and pay attention when they talk -- by mentioning one of their ongoing initiatives.

21. "I'm reaching out because … "

It might feel strange at first to launch into your message with no preamble, but trust me: You won't seem rude. In fact, most prospects will appreciate your brevity.

You can make this even more straightforward by simply stating your purpose.

For example, rather than saying, "I'm reaching out to offer some advice on your homepage design," you might write, "Can I offer some advice on your homepage design?"

The first line of your email can compel the recipient to keep reading -- or prompt them to move on. With these alternatives, the former is more likely.

22. "Watching any good shows?"

Everyone's got that one show they're binging at the moment. Build instant rapport -- and maybe even find your next Netflix obsession --with this easy opener. 

23. "I wanted to start by telling you how impressed I was with [insert recent interaction]."

Did they make a great point in your pitch? Or maybe they wrangled a chatty colleague in your presentation? When your champion does something impressive, start your next email by telling them how much you admired their handling of the situation.

24. "Hope you're hanging in there. Sending good vibes your way!"

When you know your prospect is facing a tough week, a big deadline, or a difficult task, make sure they know you're there for them.

A note of encouragement (no strings attached) can go a long way in building a strong working relationship and giving you an edge over competitors. 

25. "Is there anything worse than coming back from a long weekend?"

There really isn't. Reach out to sluggish prospects after a long weekend or holiday with a reminder you're right there with them.

Plus, your email will likely arrive before they've jumped into any large tasks, meaning your chances of receiving a timely response skyrocket.

26. "Any good plans for the weekend?"

Conversational email openers like this are begging for a response. Sending this email on a Monday? Try a tongue-in-cheek approach by adding, "It's never too early to start planning, right?"

Sending exciting emails is a great way to set yourself apart from competitors. Give your prospects something to look forward to responding to when you try these email openers. 

Next, read our list of "thank you in advance" alternatives.

 

Are you struggling to build a strong community for your business on Twitter? It’s easier than you think. You can be successful by making a plan, delivering quality content, organizing with Twitter lists, participating in active Twitter chats, and knowing your Twitter analytics.

A company that successfully embraces Twitter and builds its community around it will move beyond likes and followers. Their activities work to inspire identification with their brand and empower social customers to act, which translates into a willingness to purchase and spend.

In my experience hosting the #TwitterSmarter and #SocialROI Twitter chats, I can tell you that when you take the time and effort and follow the steps I outline below, you’ll see real results.

1. Have a Clearly Defined Plan and Strategy

Besides embracing Twitter as a social channel designed for socializing, it’s important to define and map out how you can leverage it as a long-term interaction between a business and a community. Defining clear, trackable actions tied to business goals for building an engaged community will increase your reach and influence the bottom line. Remember: engaged, connected, responsive and empowered brand community members can help your business scale and it can work for you without spending a fortune.

2. Focus on a Content Creation Process

Consistently deliver high-quality content that is shareable and offers value. Content that connects your brand message and community spirit will help you stand out and position you as an authority in your field.

• Use storytelling tactics to create relatable and interactive content that drives engagement is key to building a community.
• Drive personalization through your content—be a curator and promote others, be helpful, offer advice and show you care.
• Be a connector and focus on gaining high-quality followers.

Ultimately, creating valuable, interesting content will move the needle for your business because your ROI is measured through interactions and engagement.

3. Embrace Twitter Lists

Twitter lists is a powerful, yet underutilized feature. It’s time to embrace this feature! Let lists be your highly tailored and curated rolodex of influencers, industry experts, thought leaders, businesses, communities, keywords, and hashtags that are relevant to your industry. Twitter Lists is your best tool to easily monitor conversations, segment and nurture engaged users, and follow customers and brands.

4. Host and Participate in Twitter Chats

When you’re part of a Twitter chat, it’s the perfect opportunity to not only engage with customers and prospects, but you can create the perfect setting for peer-to-peer engagement. Imagine how your company can be the perfect host—facilitating the venue and opportunity for valuable conversations and discussions. It’s a great opportunity to connect your business with like-minded people, manage authentic, trustworthy conversations and help you generate usable content for your business.

5. Measure Your Impact to Get Optimal Results

It’s important to regularly track and measure your impact and results on Twitter. This will help you see what is working and what is not. You can track directly through your Twitter analytics or some other third party tool. I recommend developing a process to check your results weekly. Set up UTM tags and monitor tweets getting the most traction and biggest reach. This will show you how the traffic is coming to you using your Google Analytics. When you follow these tips it will help you align and improve your Twitter strategy which leads to your success.

Building a community takes time and effort. But the payoff can be huge. These tips will help you succeed as you build your engaging brand community on Twitter.

The benefits of a deeply engaged community on Twitter translates into the building and maintainance of your online reputation, successfully tracking online sales, obtaining valuable direct feedback for product development, and quality interactions that drive purchases and repeat sales.

So now you can go out and start planning your community growth. Create standout content, start using Twitter lists, join in several Twitter chats, and regularly review your Twitter metrics.

Interested in learning more? Join me for an insightful webinar: How to Build a Vibrant Community on Twitter. I’ll dive deeper in sharing my strategies for building an engaging community on Twitter.

The post Top Tips For Successful Community Building on Twitter appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

With the number of salespeople selling SaaS products at an all-time high, competing with heavy-hitting sales teams and cutting through the noise seems impossible. The inboxes of key prospects are filled with pitches, industry conferences are packed with big-league brands, and the rest of us are left looking for scraps and trying to get a single phone call.

Baloney.

Over the last few months alone, we’ve seen and spoken with countless sales professionals using Close.io to sell software to brands and break through the noise. We’ve heard plenty of sales professionals talk about their success, but we’ve also heard from those who have struggled to get any traction selling SaaS.

The question is: Why?

Why do some sales professionals selling SaaS make it look easy while others struggle?

In today’s blog post, we’ll share what we know about finding success selling SaaS, plus advice from a handful of the best talents in sales. If you’re a sales professional selling a SaaS product, this is one you might want to bookmark and come back to. (And if you haven’t yet signed up for our free startup sales course, do it now!)

Here are five things that every SaaS salesperson needs to know.

The average sales cycle will depend on the price

For most SaaS products, the sales cycle will depend on the type of product you’re selling, the reputation of the product and the price tag. Many SaaS salespeople make the mistake of underestimating their sales cycles in order to look good, but it’s better for you to be upfront with your manager or boss about industry expectations.

When Jason Lemkin, founder of SaaStr, was asked for a good benchmark for B2B SaaS sales cycles, he wrote:

1. Deals < $2,000 in ACV should close on average within 14 days.
2. Deals < $5,000 in ACV should close on average within 30 days.
3. Deals < $25,000 in ACV should close on average within 90 days.
4. Deals < $100,000 in ACV should close on average within 90–180 days depending on the number of stakeholders and gates.
5. Deals > $100,000 in ACV will take on average 3–6 months to close.

A game-changing deal isn’t going to close overnight. It takes time.

That means you’re going to need some patience if you want to sell SaaS to enterprise customers. Enterprise sales is a completely different beast than selling a $5,000 or even $25,000 service. When you start dealing with projects that cost six figures a year, the sales process becomes increasingly complicated. That’s why our own Steli Efti points to expecting a long sales cycle as the first rule for startups selling to enterprise clients.

If you do want to try and speed up the sales cycle, here are a few good tips:

Marketing is your friend, not your enemy, when selling to SMBs

Selling SaaS products to small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) requires a bit of kumbaya between sales and marketing. It's not realistic to have a huge sales team calling SMBs in hopes of closing a $500- or even $5,000-a-year contract. You need to have a marketing funnel in place that keeps leads rolling in because people are excited about your brand, your value proposition and the buzz you’re generating in the press.

The best sales professionals selling SaaS products with a ticket price of less than $10,000 a year recognize the role that marketing plays in their success. Instead of telling marketing they need more leads every week, they sit down and work with marketing to ensure that the message they’re sharing lines up with the leads they want to see and the problems that prospects reveal during their calls.

Telesales & inside sales are not the same thing

Don’t mix up the two.

Inside sales is the act of identifying, nurturing and turning leads into customers remotely. It’s an approach to selling that in recent years has become one of the most popular sales models. Inside sales has more built-in growth potential than traditional sales and is becoming more popular as organizations and sales professionals continue to embrace technology.

Telesales, on the other hand, is a completely different ball game. Telesales is essentially the act of calling people (sometimes at random) over the telephone and selling them something they may or may not have ever shown interest in.

Scott Sambucci of SalesQualia once described the difference between telesales and inside sales like this:

Telesales are useful for the $100/month product or timeshares in Vegas. A true inside sales professional is a highly skilled individual that is able to develop relationships, read customer psychology, generate interaction effectively on a product demonstration, and motivate your the prospect to take action—all over the phone.

At Close.io, our focus is on arming sales professionals with great inside sales CRM software and tools that will help them do their job well. While built-in calling is a feature we offer in our CRM software, we also offer email tracking, SMS communication and much more. We recognize that inside sales professionals need a robust toolkit to do their job—not just a phone.

Big deals might require a bit of face-to-face

Not all deals are going to require face-to-face but some prospects will need it.

You obviously want to limit the number of face-to-face meetings you have to take, but when you’re selling a six-figure price tag, it’s likely that a meeting will be needed. In fact, it’s likely that many meetings will be needed—with your direct contact and with other stakeholders in the organization.

Stressing over a long sales cycle is pointless

Plenty of SaaS salespeople find themselves feeling overwhelmed and stressed. The most common stressor amongst salespeople is typically their ability to hit their quotas.

I get it: Your quota is your livelihood.

But when you’re new to selling SaaS, this stress is often misplaced as sales professionals are simply unaware of the typical sales cycle.

If you’ve just started selling a new SaaS product and your sales cycle feels long at first, don’t stress over it. Instead, focus on nurturing the leads in your funnel and establishing stronger relationships. As I mentioned earlier, plenty of products are going to have long sales cycles and if that’s your scenario, it’s just a reality.

What should you do next?

Now that you know a few key insights about SaaS sales, it’s time to put them into action. If you were stressing over a long sales cycle, rest easy and understand the difference between an enterprise sale and a sale to an SMB. If your team hasn’t embraced marketing yet, now might be a great time for you to make it a priority.

And if you already knew all these insights, you’re well on your way. In fact, I’d love to hear what you wish you knew before getting started in SaaS sales so we can share your insights with the entire community. Leave a comment below! I’d love to hear from you.

Want more insights on SaaS sales? Sign up for our free Startup Sales Success Course! It's filled with actionable advice that will teach you everything you need to know about selling SaaS.

Recommended reading:

The ultimate SaaS sales guide: 31 things you need to know about selling SaaS
SaaS is a billion dollar industry—and it's still growing. If you want to succeed in SaaS, you need to master SaaS sales. Here are 31 of our top SaaS sales tips.

5 myths about SaaS sales you probably believe
Here's a much-needed SaaS sales myth buster for everyone building a startup. Have you fallen for any of these myths?

Inside Sales: What it is, why it matters, and how to do it right
Is inside sales right for your SaaS business? It's booming, and it'll only keep growing in the years ahead. Learn more about what inside sales is and how to use it to drive more revenue in 2017.

The next step in building your referral partner channel is to ensure that you are enabling referral partners with all of the information and capabilities they need to be successful. Right after registering, the referral partner should be sent to a personal referral portal that enables them to get all the information they need from you to make a referral, provides them the mechanisms to make referrals and transparency into their referral and reward stats.

Deliver referral partners a personal referral portal with:

1. Multiple ways to easily make referrals
2. Product content to educate and to share
3. Information on target buyer including personas
4. Clear rules for earning incentives
5. Transparency into referral activity and reward status
6. Training materials on the program and how to make referrals

1. Provide multiple ways to easily make referrals

According to, The State of Business Partner Referral Programs – Annual Report, there are six methods that partner programs utilize to make referrals with varying degrees of use and success (see chart below). Poll your partners to determine the ways they connect with their network/your target buyers. For instance, which social media channels would make sense to offer? Minimally, you’ll want to offer Lead form, shareable urls and a way to collect verbal referrals as staples for your program. These are the most successful methods at driving leads that turn into new business. Here are the six referral methods:

• Lead form – a form filled out with contact info once your referral partners have had a conversation with prospects to qualify them.
• Verbal referrals – if direct or partner sales teams are involved in recruiting referral partners and collecting referrals, make sure you have the mechanism to collect this information and input it into your referral system to be tracked.
• Email – Provide emails preloaded with your value proposition that a referral partner can then personalize and send to their contacts.
• Shareable URL – provide the ability to create a personal, trackable referral link that partners can place on their LinkedIn profile, business website, email signature, blog post or in a direct text message.
• Social media – If your referral partners are connected to your target buyers via social media, then give them the tools to share your value proposition in social media. The more functionality you can provide to allow them to post/message to an individual, the better results you’ll get.
• Print cards – A printed referral card with the personal url/tracking code on it can be a great way to bring offline conversations on line. With the value proposition already on the card, this can be an excellent leave behind for face-to-face encounters.

Most used referral methods by partners, The State of Business Partner Referral Programs – Annual Report

2. Give them product content to educate and to share

The best way to ensure that your value proposition is reaching the referral is to lock it into the referral methods. Additionally, you’ll want to provide key content pieces that your referral partners can share as well as content to educate your partners enough to qualify for fit and make the recommendation. Don’t overwhelm, just provide the key staples in simple, easy to digest format. At the bare minimum, provide a pdf overview as well as an explainer video.

3. Clearly define your target buyer and provide persona profiles

The quality of referral leads are only as good as the information you provide your partners on who you want in your pipeline. Right on their personal referral portal you’ll want to give them the following information:

• Target company profile: Industry, size, relevant technographics, any known triggers for needing your product or service.
• Key personas within the target company: department, titles, job responsibilities, role as influencer, buyer, champion, etc.

Make this information easy to access – I recommend on the portal homepage – and easy to understand (use graphics and videos).

4. Provide clear rules for earning incentives

The best way to get activity from referral partners is to make them very aware of the value they get in making the referral. Yes, this may help position them as a trusted adviser and allow them to add value to existing customers, but fundamentally this comes down to the referral fee. Referral partners need to clearly understand the incentive and any hoops they need to jump through to earn it (I’ll cover incentive models in the next article in the series). Blatantly advertise the incentive on their personal referral portal and spell out any rules so that there is no confusion or argument over achievement. And if you’ve got a specific SLA or stretch goal, show them where they are on their way to achieve it.

5. Provide transparency into referral activity and reward status

The last thing you need is to be fielding emails and calls from partners wondering where their reward is. Enable all of the referral tracking to flow in real-time to their personal referral portal. Also, send an email when a referral changes status so that your partner is aware. The data in their portal should include:

• All referral activity – who they’ve made referrals to and which referrals are still open, have been accepted or rejected.
• Referral status – once a referral is accepted and qualified, make sure they can see the progress through the pipeline so they can help support the process.
• Successes – when a referral makes a purchase, notify them of this via email, but also show this in their portal as well as the incentive earned.
• Reward fulfillment – provide the details on the payment of rewards earned.

6. Provide training materials on the program and how to make referrals

I cover training in a future article for onboarding referral partners. But fundamentally, there is no way you will be able to personally train each referral partner. Make sure you include in their personal referral portals training videos/materials on the following:

• The rules for earning incentives
• The target buyer profile – including personas
• How to make a one-to-one referral ask
• The ways to input referrals into tracking system
• Info on what happens to a referral lead once they provide it
• How to access referral activity data and reward fulfillment status

Use technology to enable referral partners

Using technology to enable referral partners is key to getting the scale needed to impact company revenue. Make sure the technology you select makes it as easy as possible for you to deliver these capabilities and information to your referral partners. Additionally, make sure it is white labeled and integrated via SSO into your web properties so that it is a seamless experience for your partners.

Once you’ve got the key enablement pieces in place, you’ll want to build a motivating incentive structure for your partners. I’ll cover best practices for structuring incentive models and fulfillment for referral partners in the next article in this series.

The role of marketing operations has evolved significantly from the 2000’s when the sharp rise of marketing technologies and data-driven practices put all eyes on this critical business function. Marketing Operations now plays a strong leadership role in B2B organizations, especially one that is highly influential in ensuring Account-Based Marketing is a success.

MOPs is instrumental in 3 key areas:

1. Account Foundation – MOPs is a key player in setting up the initial account foundation for successful ABM. They are often responsible for setting up lead to account matching and helping prioritize accounts.
2. Account-Centric Systems /Processes – Part of ABM is having an account centric organization of data, building out white space, and lead routing. By supporting these processes and managing the supporting systems, Marketing and Sales have the framework to effectively go after target accounts.
3. Reporting – By focusing on accounts that teams have jointly prioritized, reporting and reviewing metrics becomes more meaningful to all teams. The conversation is not about lead volume, rather how both Marketing and Sales are driving engagement and key impact in accounts that matter.

Let’s dive into each.

Setting up a stable foundation

Similar to a well-crafted house, you want your marketing systems to be dependable and free of leaks or cracks! Marketing operations can ensure your foundation for account based marketing is reliable and set-up correctly. A common challenge many companies are faced with initially, is not having one system of record where all teams can view accounts.

Also, a lot of important account data is housed in different places, like a rep’s email! To have the right visibility for Marketing and Sales, Marketing Operations can help implement Lead-to-Account Matching. If you lack this foundation, there is no visibility into what is happening at the account level and measuring the impact of your marketing programs is very manual. Leads can slip through the cracks, get routed to the wrong owner, and may not be scored properly.

The good news is processes like lead to account matching have been much more automated and streamlined. This no longer has to be a time-consuming, manual process. Many MOPs teams can get this set up in one day!

Orchestrating an account-centric process

By their very nature, MOPs must be agile to accommodate changing systems, processes, and inputs from contributing teams. They ensure systems are operational to keep the revenue train running. Setting up the foundation is a good first step, but then the team is responsible for the plumbing in the house, or ongoing systems.

Here are a few key steps for ensuring success. Make sure it is clear where MOPs will play a role for ongoing processes. Examples include: supporting target account selection and prioritization, account tagging and routing, contact record white-space analysis and fulfillment, and the ability to score account engagement by minutes and time. Assuming MOPs is the right team to help with these tasks, identify and document a clear process that is followed.

A common mistake many marketing teams make is not being clear on these ongoing processes and documenting the cadence. For example, building out account whitespace could occur monthly, if so, that should be clearly defined with MOPs. If you plan to refresh a percent of target accounts every 6 months, make sure the MOPs team is aware of that so they can be ready to tag new accounts. Lastly, some of the data work or supporting tools takes budget. Have a clear plan to earmark budget for these initiatives.

Reporting on metrics and impact

It’s up to a marketing operations professional to ensure the revenue functions in the business (Marketing, Sales, and Often Customer Success) are tracking against business goals. A big positive with ABM is teams are aligned on goals and outcomes – the focus is accounts. Ideally, the conversation is less about ‘credit’ and more about how teams jointly drove ‘influence’.

ABM reporting historically has been tricky. Marketing often pulls data from marketing automation systems and Sales relies on CRM – there often is not a shared understanding of results. MOPs, with great new technology, can really change the game here – and make sure there is an account centric view of metrics and standard reporting. For those of you getting started, here are a set of ket ABM metrics that show impact from early stage to late that are important to consider.

• Coverage – Do you have sufficient data, contacts, and account plans for each target account?
• Awareness– Are the target accounts aware of your company?
• Engagement – Are the right people at the account spending time with your company? Is that engagement going up or down over time?
• Reach – Are marketing programs reaching target accounts?
• Impact – Are ABM activities improving key sales outcomes?

Lastly, reporting for ABM is different. The focus is quality, not volume. This can be a big shift for many teams so below is a great example from VersionOne on how to report out on ABM.

If you work in marketing operations, we’d love to hear your take on ABM – how has it changed the nature of the job since the beginning of the profession in the early 2000s?

Does the act of measuring something help improve it? Peter Drucker, known as the founder of modern management, seemed to think so when he famously said, “What’s measured improves.”

Forgive us one moment for going on a bit of a philosophy tangent. However, we can’t help but pause to consider the parallels this quote has to modern business—and the importance of key performance indicators (KPIs). After all, we are in the business of measuring, and thus hopefully improving, businesses around the world through use of KPI-tracking dashboards.

We’re big believers that tracking success certainly does improve your overall operations. Here’s why.

Focus on the metrics that matter most.

Unless you’re living under a rock, you’ll notice that nowadays, data is everywhere. This especially holds true for online businesses. You can track just about anything: website bounce rate; email campaign open rate and click-through rate; website traffic; public relations impressions; sales growth; IT systems redundancy. Your business is a digital machine, humming with data. Almost too much of it.

Focusing on KPIs—KEY performance indicators—helps you to zoom in on the data that matters most. There are a hundred ways you can look at your data; KPIs offer a bit of compromise. These are the numbers that matter to you today, right now. In other words, it’s a tool to help you tune out the white noise and zero in on the highlights.

A fact-based gauge of improvement

Take a look at the facts, and step away from the emotion. You may have your heart and soul in your business’ sales pipeline. In fact, you may feel that those leads are so close to signing on the dotted line. It may seem that an average enterprise account takes 90 days to close. Or, you may be a marketer who is hearing good feedback on a new paid search campaign.
Whelp. The facts—the data—may have a different story to tell. And any numbers geek will be the first to say that numbers don’t lie. The numbers give you the ability to take a breath and see what’s truly happening today, last year, last month. They give the ability to look ahead to the future, too, to predict what’s coming around the corner.
Sure, count on your intuition. But stay grounded in the truth.

Drive accountability across your entire business.

This is the real kicker. The numbers aren’t meant to be hidden away in any one person’s back pocket. For a real business to operate with speed and efficiency, they’ve got to be shared and cascaded down the line.
It’s a simple concept: share the KPIs that matter most to every person in every team. And take off the blinders to the rest of the business by allowing everyone to see what’s happening, in or out of their department.

This is where the real innovation and collaboration begins. Because the KPIs serve as a single version of truth to spark teamwork, improvement and growth at every level.

No doubt, Peter Drucker would approve.