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Setting yourself up with good writing habits can mean faster, better output. Here are 12 ideas for how to make yourself a more productive writer. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Until recently, IBM was one of the first and biggest proponents of remote work. But no longer. In March, the company began directing thousands of employees to work from set locations or else look for another job, an ultimatum it extended more widely last week. The move is an alarming policy reversal that neither current trends nor recent history suggest is wise.

HISTORY ISN’T ON IBM’S SIDE

IBM’s curtailment of remote work echoes Yahoo’s reversal more than four yeas ago, when CEO Marissa Mayer began requiring workers to come back to a traditional office so they could start “physically being together,” as then-HR chief Jackie Reses put it at the time.

To all appearances, all that physical togetherness hasn’t worked out so well. After weathering a firestorm, Yahoo initially stood by the policy change. But in the years that followed, it failed to regain its position as a leading internet company, suffered a series of devastating hacks, and finally agreed last year to sell itself to Verizon for about $4.4 billion–far less than the $100 billion market cap it had had at its peak.

Like Mayer in 2013, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty is under pressure to turn her company around. And like Yahoo, IBM claims that the policy change is meant to improve collaboration and accelerate innovation.

It won’t work. Attempting to force workers back to IBM offices is a terrible idea for at least three reasons.

WHY MANDATORY OFFICE WORK WILL BACKFIRE

First, IBM will diminish the quality of its team.

As much as 40% of the company’s workforce was already remote as of a decade ago, so it’s easy to see the new mandate as a way to trim staff without having to actually make layoffs. But if IBM is trying to get rid of people it deems extraneous, it’s pretty short-sighted. In all likelihood, what happened to Yahoo will also happen to IBM: The best talent will easily find new jobs with companies that are more open to remote work.

Not only do flexible work arrangements top job seekers’ lists of priorities, but making successful hires depends much more on relevant skills than on physical location. So if, months from now, IBM points to the number of employees choosing to relocate in order to keep their jobs as evidence of success, don’t buy it. Many will do just that because they have no other options, while the most high-performing, in-demand talent flies the coop. In the end, IBM will reduce the quality of its workforce while its competitors reap the benefits.

Second, requiring employees to work in an office will hurt productivity, not improve it.

In a study published in Harvard Business Review in 2014, remote workers proved both more productive and more loyal than their peers onsite. In fact, IBM’s recent policy switch goes against its own research. In both a 2014 white paper by IBM’s Smarter Workplace Institute and in a conference panel the company hosted just weeks ago, its own experts suggested that remote workers tend to be happier, less stressed, more productive, more engaged with their jobs and teams, and believe that their companies are more innovative as a result of flexible work arrangements.

Third, this is the wrong thing to do and the wrong time to do it–not only for the company but for the U.S. economy.

A big employer like IBM, which employs over 380,000 people worldwide, has a social responsibility it simply can’t overlook. At a time when smaller cities and rural areas are struggling, it’s backward-looking for a major corporation–especially one with such deep experience in remote work–to implement a policy that could take jobs away from regions that need them most. By demanding its employees flock to IBM’s urban headquarters, the company isn’t just sapping everyplace else of highly skilled talent, it’s also contributing to depopulating the communities where those remote workers live, and depressing local economies as a result.

There’s a sad irony to that. Thanks to the technologies and pioneering examples of many tech companies–including Microsoft, Google, Apple, and, yes, IBM itself–work is now far less time- and location-dependent than ever before. That means companies now have the ability to conceive of themselves as “results-only work environments,” where what really matters is what someone produces, not how many hours they work or where they sit in order to do it. Some, like the automation platform Zapier, are even offering bonuses to employees so they can move away to places where the cost of living is lower. Meanwhile, IBM will keep selling cloud-based software and services that support an “anytime, anywhere workforce” it’s no longer a part of. Good luck making that sales pitch.

Flexible work isn’t just the future of work–it’s already here. Forcing people back into offices is like handing them all paper time cards and telling them to start punching in and out. It’s not just retrograde and absurd, it’s also a surefire way to lose the best people you’ve got already and to turn away tomorrow’s top hires. Just ask Yahoo.

Need specialized talent for your next project? Check out Upwork Enterprise, a technology platform powered by the world’s largest freelancing website. Upwork Enterprise combines technology and services, helping companies get more high-quality work done with experienced freelancers.

Uber is a fascinating company.  Love them or hate them, they are one of the few “poster-children” for business model innovation, and have changed the taxi industry for good.  Their approach to pricing has also never been far from the

When I told friends I was going to Puerto Rico, they were jealous. When I told them I booked the trip through Costco, that jealousy transformed into confusion.

"You can buy a vacation through Costco?" I was asked at least a dozen times in recent months.

My answer: Yes, and it's incredible.

I only became aware of Costco's travel deals last May when a friend suggested checking out the warehouse store's website while planning an upcoming vacation.

I was amazed by the variety of options, from airfare and hotel deals in Europe to Caribbean cruises. Costco even has a section dedicated to safaris, with trips to Botswana and South Africa.

That's right — you can book an entire weeklong safari, including a guide, airfare, and a place to stay, through Costco.

The retailer launched Costco Travel in 2000.

"Following the same philosophy as in the warehouses, we offer a limited number of products in an effort to focus on partners who consistently produce high quality, exceptional value and superb service," Costco spokesperson Nikki Chellew told Business Insider. "Costco Travel adds to the overall value of the membership with savings that can exceed the cost of an annual membership."

Three friends and I settled on a seven-day trip to Puerto Rico, and purchased a trip that provided airfare, seven nights in a hotel, and transportation to and from an airport in August, for a little more than $800 a person. 

Now, having returned from the trip, I can confidently say that Costco Travel is going to completely change how I book vacations.

First of all, booking the trip through Costco left me confident I was saving money. While searching for deals, I perused packages sold by airlines, which included flights at inconvenient times, and semi-questionable websites that were too sketchy to trust. Costco matched or beat both in terms of cost, with the added bonus of reliability.

Second, it was incredibly convenient every step of the way. Scanning through Costco's deals felt like browsing a diner's extensive menu — it had plenty of options, but also narrowed down my choices and spelled out the benefits of each one. Once I arrived in Puerto Rico, the bonus of having a car to take me to and from the airport included in the trip was an extra convenience I hadn't given much thought about before booking the trip.

Finally, every aspect of the trip purchased via Costco — hotel, airfare, travel to the hotel — exceeded expectations. To head off skeptics: Costco did not know I cover the retailer when the deal was purchased, this is not paid for by Costco, and there is no weird under-the-table sponsorship here. Everything was simply fantastic.

My biggest question after the trip was why everyone wasn't booking travel through Costco — and was forced to conclude that most people just don't know that they can.

"It is difficult to have travel be top of mind for members when they think of Costco as a warehouse full of tangible products," Chellew says.

However, the company is trying to change that.

Costco is now advertising its travel packages using emails, travel brochures, and deals in the Costco Savings Book. Additionally, every month the retailer publishes an article by travel expert Peter Greenberg in its magazine, the Costco Connection.

Still, Costco is primarily growing its travel business via word of mouth. Chellew says that members sharing their experiences has played the biggest role in Costco Travel's double-digit annual growth.

With that in mind, I'll add my positive experience to the public record. Next time you're booking a trip, check Costco Travel first. I know I will.

SEE ALSO: 7 unexpected things you can buy at Costco

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here are the 8 food items you should only get from Costco

What can you learn about customer engagement from analyzing 5,000 apps? We wanted to find out, so last month, we set off to gather a comprehensive view into how mobile communication and engagement strategies have shifted.

Using data from over 5,000 unique mobile apps of Apptentive’s customers, we packaged our findings in the 2017 Mobile Communication Benchmark Report, which provides a way for companies to understand how their apps’ engagement stacks up against the entire mobile ecosystem. The metrics provide brands with a way to measure the success of their ‘pull’ marketing strategies against industry standards and identify gaps in their customer experience.

Metrics covered in the report include in-app survey response rate, distribution of star ratings in the app stores, customer engagement and responsiveness, and more. It’s a lot to take in, so we recommend downloading your own copy to read and digest all the details. But for those who may need quicker insight into our findings, here are three big takeaways from our research.

1. Survey response rates vary by app category

In-app surveys serve many purposes. Brands use them to conduct mobile focus groups, understand customer satisfaction with their customer experience, and to gain deeper insight into how customers use their app. The value in mobile surveys is tied to the volume of responses, and a higher response rate equals a higher likelihood that the data can be applied more broadly.

When looking at the average response rate to Apptentive’s in-app surveys, the percentage of responses vary based on app category:

For context, the industry average mobile survey response rate is 1-3%. These percentages are markedly higher across every single app category, which proves that, when kept short and concise, shown at the right time and place in the app, and optimized for mobile, surveys allow you to gather thousands of responses in a short amount of time.The ability to quickly gather a large volume of feedback at scale allows you to make data-driven decisions faster than ever.

2. The opportunity cost of a rating and/or review is bigger than ever

Public app store ratings and reviews are the first impression your app makes on consumers and are crucial in understanding customer sentiment. Not only do they help peel a layer back of how customers feel, they impact your app’s discoverability and conversion rate. In a recent survey we conducted, 77% of respondents reported they read at least one review before downloading a free app, and 80% before downloading a paid app.

It’s important to note that reviews influence more than conversion—they also affect your brand’s overall reputation. In the same survey, 55% of respondents said a one-star or two-star app store rating of a well known brand’s app negatively impacts their view of the brand as a whole, while 71% of respondents said a four-star or five-star app store rating positively impacts their view.

The opportunity cost of a star is huge. How huge? Moving a three-star app to four-stars, for example, can lead to an 89% increase in conversion. For a look at the full opportunity cost analysis, consider the chart below.

3. Two-way messages are imperative to mobile customer success

The gold standard of customer interaction is truly two-way dialog. In 2016, chatbots were a hot topic of conversation and brands responded by being more willing to listen to customers. Brands acted fast, highlighted by the 649% year-over-year increase in the number of apps that enabled two-way conversations and the 56% year-over-year spike in messages sent to consumers. Bots certainly made a splash, but the increase in two-way in-app conversations between consumers and brands proves bots can’t replace real conversations.

Giving customers the ability to speak to you directly without having to leave the app sends a strong message to customers that you care about what they have to say. Having two-way conversations with customers also affords you the ability to form real relationships with your customers, which fosters loyalty and a deep sense of connection that consumers will want to tell their friends about. Based on our research, here’s how Apptentive customers currently engage their mobile consumers in two-way dialogues within their apps.

The number of apps that use Apptentive’s Message Center increased by 649% year-over-year. That’s a massive acceleration in the adoption of two-way, in-app communication capabilities. An average of 649 messages per app were sent to brands by consumers over the course of a year via Apptentive’s Message Center. For reference, an average of 846 messages per app were sent to brands in 2016’s benchmark.

In the same time period, an average of 384 messages per app were sent by brands in response to consumer messages over the course of a year via Apptentive’s Message Center. For reference, an average of 246 messages per app were sent to consumers in 2016’s benchmark. That’s a 56% increase in messages companies sent to their customers. This rise in the number of messages brands sent to consumers combined with the explosion of apps that adopted Message Center is a signal that brands are investing more heavily in open, two-way dialog with their customers.

Putting it all together

Pulled from over 5,000 apps, the benchmark metrics in our report are meant to provide a clear picture of how your app measures up to the mobile industry as a whole. Collectively, these metrics provide a comprehensive view of the health of your app, how engaged your customers are with your brand, and how well your mobile experience is living up to industry standards.

By comparing your apps’ metrics to the benchmarks listed, you’ll be able to identify which aspects in your customer experience need special attention to meet customer expectations. In the case that your app exceeds some or all of the benchmarks, use your success to continue forging new standards for mobile app experiences and showing customers you care about what they have to say.

We hope this quick snapshot into our findings helps inspire you to place bigger emphasis on in-app customer communication and feedback. To see deeper learnings about this data and more, grab your copy of the full report now!

Why Video Marketing Garners Great Results for Business Owners and Entrepreneurs

Video marketing is a hot topic for us lately and for good reason.

Online marketing is a dynamic business but not always unpredictable. For years now we’ve seen consistent trends that indicate certainties such as users are used to watching ads while browsing the internet and now more than ever those videos influence their purchasing habits.

To help those on the fence with regards to their own video marketing we’ve put together a list of answers to commonly asked questions.

Is video marketing expensive?

Video marketing is only as expensive as the budget you’re working with. There are lots of ways to create effective videos that don’t cost you anything other than your time. You won’t be butting heads with industry leaders right away and as your marketing efforts help grow your business so should you grow the budget.

When it comes to making your videos focus on the value of the content over the presentation. Getting too creative can be a bad thing if it limits your ability to convey your message.

Where should you use video marketing?

• Include video in your page content

  A study by Mist showed that having video on your landing page increased your chances of being found on page 1 for your targeted key phrases by 53%.

  Having a page 1 SERP listing is a challenge and if you’re in a highly competitive industry where a conversion is highly valuable then it becomes a constant struggle against your competitors.

  Increasing your page 1 rank chances by 53% makes a strong case for including video in your online marketing

  Whether your summarize in a talking head style video or use Power Point to create a slide show video having that in your content is a great way to make the most of your video marketing.

• Include video with your blog posts

  You spend a lot of time on your blog posts and the content can have just as much value as a landing page. Why not include the info as a video and increase the chances of that information reaching more people?

  When you create blog content that users love they link to it in their own content marketing. Anyone marketing online knows the value of a strong link from a reputable website.

  SEO authority moz.com found that by providing a video along with the blog’s text and images you expand your reach by 3X and that means 3X the users and 3X the link earning.

Should video marketing replace your blog?

Generally no but it should be made a part of it. While online videos represent 69% of all global consumer online traffic in 2017 and 69% is obviously not a number you can ignore that’s not to say your industry is necessarily on the high end of the trend towards video.

It’s likely still trending that way but don’t let it override your established efforts. User’s expectations and habits vary per industry and niche within so add it to what you’re doing rather than switching over all together.

How do you know if video marketing is right for you?

The easy answer is it most likely is but to be sure its good to test the waters.

Try some A/B testing between pages and posts and see how your engagement is with your users. You likely won’t affect your rank too much with just 1 video so check your Google Analytics to evaluate the performance.

Additionally, for further insight, you can also utilize the analytics from social platforms you share the content through. Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube all have their own stats you can review to see how well your content did once you added a video.

You can even reuse old content by adding a video and sharing it again. Then look at the first round of marketing’s stats vs. the stats after you added your video.

Bonus tip for marketing videos towards women

Marketing to women? A recent study by adeliestudios.com found 83% of Moms turn to the Internet when they need answers.

It makes sense that if the answer to any question a busy mom may ask is on your website then you should have an answer that’s easy to receive. And that means including video with your content.

Someone in a rush who wants an easy answer could really be assisted by having that answer in a quick, user-friendly format.

Adding a video that covers the answer you have in your content could easily mean the difference between a click back and a new lead, so make sure you have a video option if you are in a position to answer something a Mom might need a quick answer to.

Marketing online is not easy and there is a lot to learn. If you are ready to start but not sure where or how then please sign up for our Social Media Membership Program. It’s a cost-effective and easy way to work with an industry professional while you study the in’s and out’s of social media, video, and online marketing.

There are a lot of great reasons to love direct mail marketing – not the least of which is the fact that it works! While relatively low, online promotional costs can make it tempting for businesses to focus their advertising budgets solely on digital platforms, this misguided strategy is one you’d do well to avoid.

Industry research continues to suggest that direct mail can generate a significant ROI when delivered to a well-targeted audience. Postcard-mailers in particular are a quick and measurable way to:

• bring in more sales,
• boost your revenue, and
• establish your company’s market identity

They’re also ideal for adding proven value to an integrated marketing plan.

To know direct mail, is to love it. Here are some of our favorite direct mail benefits, and just a few of the many reasons why you’ll soon grow to love it as much as we do.

Direct Mail is Personal

Why waste time and money communicating with people who have no reason to be interested in what you’re selling? Direct mail provides a highly-targeted tool for tailoring your marketing campaign to a dedicated audience. Reaching out to current clients and qualified prospects with offers and information specific to their personal needs, is the best way for your business to get noticed, and provoke a favorable response.

Direct Mail is Measurable

Measuring the results of your direct mail campaign doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, this process can be as simple as engaging a service like call tracking to monitor the volume, and quality, of the responses received.

Whether it involves counting the number of:

• coupons redeemed,
• inquiries made, or
• subscribers confirmed,

direct mail has proven itself as one of the most quantifiable of all advertising platforms.

Direct Mail is Tangible

The physical nature of print demands to be touched. And that endows it with great power when it comes to making an impact, and engaging the reader. In our technology-driven world, the daily mail stands out as familiar and reliable: factors that instill confidence in the recipient, and persuade them to act. In fact, consumers are significantly more likely to hit the delete button on an unopened email, than they are to toss that eye-catching postcard in the trash without reading it.

Direct Mail is Versatile

From colorful postcards to multi-panel brochures, direct mail lends itself to communicating any marketing message successfully. Multiple formats and styles make for endless possibilities when it comes to customizing your project. And working with the creative versatility offered by a direct mail consultant or full-service graphics team ensures that your well-designed direct mail postcard will draw readers in, and get them responding.

Direct Mail Provides Cost-effective Marketing Support

Reduced postage fees.

Reliable response rates.

The availability of affordable services that include everything you need to market your business with postcards…

Attractive elements like these are what drives direct mail’s well-earned reputation as a cost-effective advertising medium. Factor in features like a talent for supporting brand awareness and enhancing digital strategies, and it’s easy to see why you’ll soon fall in love with direct mail’s unique capacity to fill a much-needed promotional niche.

Some outsourcing contracts actually ensure poor performance. It’s true! Service levels are too high, penalties drive over-performance in one area at the expense of others, and governance structures look pretty on paper but create zero accountability. Couple these problems with attitudes of blame and superiority that block problem solving and open dialogue and you have a recipe for failure.

Here is the frustrating thing to me—and maybe this resonates with you, too—people on both sides of the buyer/service provider relationship complain about their partners, but then don’t do anything about it. I sat stunned through a recent QBR, as an executive spent 45 minutes reading emails about the service provider’s poor performance. The rest of us could only study the backs of our hands.

I get it: the relationship can be better and the provider can perform better. Why complain and not act? Why not change the relationship and, if need be, change the contract too?

But even in such dire situations, I know there is hope. I puzzled over why companies don’t act in the face of less than stellar relationships. Then I had an epiphany.

How do you garden?

People approach contracting like my grandmother taught me to grow vegetables. There’s only one way: Big vegetable patch, long rows of kale or carrots or lettuce. Long hours of weeding, fertilizing and watering. A rush to harvest the entire row at maturity, followed by processing, freezing and canning. So when a friend described a completely different way, planning and planting the garden square foot by square foot in order to stage when the various vegetables were ready to eat, I thought, “That’s not a vegetable garden.” Then, driving away, I kicked myself: Many business people think about changing contracts the way I was thinking about changing how I garden.

We tend to operate from one paradigm, and we tend to resist changing that paradigm. Negotiating a contract has its own paradigm. We invest tons of time up front to get the contract in place. It’s a headache and we all want to get back to work. Once in the relationship, it seems easier to just deal with the problems (or complain about them) and we don’t even consider making adjustments to make the problems go away.

Unless there’s a crisis, like the 2009 recession, or a change in the scope of work, we won’t take on the “hassle” of anything that feels like re-negotiation. Because that’s how we see it: Live with it or start over.

Change Your Paradigm: Make Incremental Changes

There’s a third option: incremental relationship and contract changes. My clients, including the one above, turned difficult into collaborative. In general, here’s how one of my clients did it:

First, the buying company and service provider together identified problems with the relationship using diagnostic tools. Then they set about changing the relationship, one step at a time: they co-located to improve communications, they refreshed KPI’s to better track performance, and they started regular team meetings including representatives from both companies. They made small adjustments to drive improvements and now their relationship is so strong they are renewing the contract for another several years.

What do companies usually do? More of the same: If service levels aren’t being met, they add stiffer penalties without ever unearthing the underlying issues. If they already have stiff penalties, stiffer is better and micro-management is even better – as if that will solve the problem! If no one attends meetings, no one usually asks why but the “boss” will demand attendance anyway. When no one knows what to talk about, they resort to rehashing the past to pass the time – like that executive reading all those critical emails.

Don’t Know Where to Start?

Frustrated clients ask me where to start. Assuming you have no policies or clauses that prevent modifications, I suggest three options that tend to provide both strategic and tactical benefits.

First, KPI’s. KPI’s drive focus and behavior, so if you’re not getting the results you want, look here. Also look at the service level associated with the metric: 100% might look good on paper but provide no meaningful evaluation of the service provider’s performance vis a vis the end user.

Second, accountability. Strive to have two people accountable for the same outcome, one in each company. This arrangement will inherently drive collaboration, creative problem-solving and a speedier approval process. Remember, the end user doesn’t care about the distinction between buying company and service provider, she only cares about results. That means both companies are accountable. Both companies created the relationship, so if something’s not working, blaming will not solve the problem.

While it is not always possible to have a direct one-to-one accountability relationship at all levels, it must exist at some level, and the closer to the end user the better.

Third, governance meetings, such as QBRs. For many relationships, this change may be the one high-impact change that won’t require any change to the contract itself. If there are problems, meetings should be frequent and focused on problem solving and strategy. Get this: I asked an outsourcing executive the last time his company held a QBR with a particular provider. After a minute he sheepishly said, “last year.” I thought, “Seriously? And you wonder why things aren’t going swimmingly?”

If your people don’t see value in QBRs (you can usually tell if they’re postponed or poorly attended), change them. Provide a forum to step away from daily tasks to look at the relationship in a more strategic light. Set aside 30% of the time to discuss strategy.

What Will You Do Next?

Bottom line, if something’s not working, figure out a way to do things differently. I’m doing that with vegetables. I don’t have the space or the time to do it the way my grandmother did, so rather than feel frustrated that I can’t teach my daughters about growing food, I’m going to start with one square foot: one vegetable and one herb in one pot. This summer my girls and I will enjoy cherry tomatoes and basil.

What commitment will you make to improve your outsourcing relationship? I’ve introduced three options. Not sure where you should begin? Call me to schedule a free one-hour strategy session. I’m sure you will enjoy the rewards of your effort at least as much as I will enjoy mine.

Facebook groups have been a long-standing place where people meet, which is good news for brands. Pages have seen a decline in reach since the latest algorithm changes, but still remain a place for promoting your brand with the use of advertising. By engaging in niche groups you can build your fan base and create more visibility.

Is it possible to still have an organic reach on Facebook? The answer is yes, and the influence from groups for your personal brand is a tremendous benefit to that strategy.

When you become active in groups on Facebook you are building relationships for the long term. It’s important to first know how to make this successful for your business without using this tool as a place for direct selling.

Groups and Their Influence on Facebook

Here are several key strategies to a successful networking strategy that will drive more people to your Page:

• Approach a group with its community in mind – Brands should save their sales message for their Page and email marketing campaigns. Engagement is the key to attracting a fan base along with sharing valuable information — eventually, members will want to know more about your Fan Page and company.
• Discover what your target market is interested in – As your brand shares information, answers questions, and engages with members you can use this information to gather new content ideas that are specifically geared to your audience.
• Cross promote events – Not only can you share your next event on your Facebook Page, but this can be announced to your fellow group members as long as it offers something of value for them. This could be a free webinar on a topic they are interested in her an offline event where you can personally meet people in your area.
• Share your blog content – An article that is written about the main pain points of your community should also be showcased in your group. What better way to help solve problems than offering free advice? Members will appreciate the information and your website will benefit from more subscribers.

While a Facebook Page is about branded content, images, video, and promotions a group is more about creating meaningful relationships that build a strong community. Over time members will naturally be drawn to your personal brand’s Page, and this can cross over into your other social networks as well.

Today I received a little box from a company who wants my attention. Inside the box was a small toy, and a link to a website, and nothing else. The sender wants my attention, and the offer is a serious offer, even though I didn’t watch more than a few seconds of the personal video on the site. I am the wrong audience, but the sender didn’t know that.

He could have called me and I would have told him who to contact.

Minutes later I received a LinkedIn InMail. The person sending that email was also trying to get my attention. She offered me a chance to play Truth or Dare, the dare being me giving her two times to speak with her about her services.

I appreciate the creativity, and I like the playfulness, but not enough to talk to her about her service, especially since I don’t need it.

Last week, a salesperson sent me a list of reasons that I might have not responded to their email. On choice suggested that I did not reply back because I had been eaten by alligators.

The idea is that by being cute, the salesperson will get attention. They hope by being clever, they can gain an appointment. Different is good, and it can work, but different in a way that makes a difference is better. What is missing is the insight that would make a business person sit up and take notice. What the approach lacks is some compelling reason for me to take a meeting, and busy people don’t like to give up their time without getting something in return. This pitch is for receptive people, who are easier targets for this kind of messaging.

The problem with being cute is that the attention you get may not be the impression you are trying to make. If you are trying to be consultative, and if you are aiming to be a person with deep insight, then starting by being cute may not serve those ends. That said, if your real personality is engaging and entertaining, then go with that (but I have seen the alligator thing 11 times, which means it isn’t even your material).

A couple of the people who have sent me emails like this work in lead generation and appointment setting. They mean well, and their intentions are good, and I am certain that there are some markets where this approach yields results, but for many companies who call on people with the charge of making change, this approach feels too clever by half.

[smartads]

The post Don’t Get Cute appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Leaking information about mergers and acquisitions (M&A) boosts the value of a deal by an average of $21 million (£16.6 million), according to new research carried out by content management company Intralinks and Cass Business School.

A report from the pair analysed deals between 2009 and 2016, and found that the median takeover premium for leaked deals was 47%, compared with 27% for non-leaked deals.

The higher premium is based on higher valuations, which are prompted by increased competition. In short, once news of a deal leaks it becomes more like an auction, with rival companies bidding each other up.

Deals leaked this year include Standard Life and Aberdeen Asset Management's £11 billion merger and Walmart's purchase of online retailer Bonobos for $310 million (£244.8 million).

Other significant findings from the report, published on Thursday, include:

• 8.6% of deals worldwide were leaked in 2016, the same as in 2015 but up from 6% in 2014.
• Leaks rose year-on-year in Europe but fell in North America, while Asia-Pacific had the highest rate of leaked deals in 2016, at 9.7%.
• Globally, the consumer sector saw the highest rate of leaked deals across the eight years, hitting 15.5% in 2016.
• The completion rate for leaked deals was almost 5 percentage points higher than for non-leaked deals between 2014 and 2016.
• Of the top ten countries with the most M&A activity, India has consistently seen the highest percentage of leaks.

Leaking confidential information about M&As before the possibility of a transaction is officially made publiccan lead to heavy fines. Leaks have been linked to insider trading, and global regulators have been working to clamp down on this underhand activity.

In both 2015 and 2016, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) collected fines of more than $4 billion (£3.1 billion) for disgorgement — or profit obtained illegally. The percentage of leaked deals in the US also fell between 2015 and 2016.

Fines by the UK's Financial Conduit Authority have jumped by over 700% so far in 2017 compared to last year, going from £22,216,446 to £163,230,322. However, this remains significantly below the huge spike in fines in 2014 and 2015, which totalled £1.47 billion and £905 million respectively. The drop is likely due to investigations coming to an end, rather than more relaxed attitude to law enforcement. The UK has seen a significant improvement in the percentage of leaks since 2009, going from 12.5% to 7% in 2016.

Philip Whitchelo, Vice President of Strategy and Product Marketing at Intralinks, said in a statement: "The rate of deal leaks in markets where leaking was rampant a decade ago, such as the UK, has reduced considerably: a reflection of new regulations against market abuse and much stricter regulatory enforcement.

"Countries such as India and Hong Kong, which have comparatively high levels of deal leaks, are also making more efforts to tackle market abuse and insider trading. Overall, against the perceived benefits, those leaking deals must also weigh the risks, and those benefits appear to have reduced in 2016."

The number of leaked deals declined between 2009 and 2014, but has risen again over the last two years. Details of 462 deals were leaked over the eight-year period, out of a total of 5,997.

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What does content marketing success look like to you? Is a healthier pipeline? Increased client retention? Or something completely different? While every marketing team might have a slightly different goal for content, the message is the same: You have to create a predictable way to gauge the impact of your content.

The content marketing journey can be perilous at times. At every turn there is a new competitor, shiny object or new “best practice”. This can cause teams to get so caught up in the creation of a quantity of content, that content amplification strategies are an afterthought, or even worse, not executed at all.

We appreciate that you’ve travelled 1,000’s of miles with us on this content marketing adventure. We’ve packed and prepped for our content expedition through developing a content strategy and hiked our way to creating a memorable content experience. But what good is content strategy and creation if you don’t have a plan to get your content in front of the RIGHT people?

While it can be tempting to end your journey once you’ve developed content, it’s really just the first leg of the adventure. Now it’s time to focus on top amplification and co-creation opportunities to make your content soar.

For this edition, please join me in thanking our crew of experts including: Peg Miller, Arnie Kuenn, Jessica Best, Lee Odden, Deana Goldasich, Amisha Gandhi, Maureen Jann, Cathy McPhillips, Pierre-Loic Assayag, Justin Levy, Zerlina Jackson, Robert Rose and Anna McHugh!

Share Insights From Our Content Crew Members

If you’d like to share tips from your favorite crew members, simply click below to tweet!

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Stay close to your customer & sales team, & you'll never run out of content ideas. @PegMiller
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Set aside a budget to amplify your content to improve reach. @ArnieK
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The most engaging content is a response. @bestofjess
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Ask prospective customers for preferences & invite them to share topical expertise. @leeodden
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You must be committed beyond the spray & pray posting of content. @goldasich
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Create memorable experiences with interactive content that adds value. @AmishaGandhi
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Messages must be crafted to fit both consumption mode & the marketing funnel. @MaureenOnPoint
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Make it easy for your influencers to share content with prewritten messaging. @cmcphillips
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Partnering with influential experts is crucial to creating engaging content. @pierreloic
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Paid social can help greatly improve reach & engagement if used properly. @justinlevy
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Develop strategies to deliver content beyond your website. Zerlina Jackson
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Better work inherently drives deeper engagement. @Robert_Rose
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Be passionate about the content you're creating and truly believe in the value. @amchughredhat
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What’s Next?

It’s time to book your ticket for Content Marketing World 2017!

To connect with this content marketing crew of experts in person, be sure to check out the agenda for the 2017 Content Marketing World conference.

You can also follow along and participate in conversations via Twitter by using the hashtag #CMWorld, by following CMI on Twitter (@CMIContent) or by subscribing to our blog.

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The post In-Flight Content Guide: Making the Most of Your Content Journey appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Do you want to know the key to having a long-term profitable business? It’s not having more customers. It’s not having more traffic either. It’s repeat customers.

The reason why repeat customers matter is simple: they are worth more than one-time customers.

To increase the number of repeat customers, you need to focus on retention.

Email marketing offers an especially effective way to increase customer retention: post-purchase email automation.

Post-purchase email automation represent customer journeys sent after a customer has made a purchase with the goal of increasing engagement and loyalty.

In this post, you will see how you can use post-purchase email automation to increase your customer retention and grow the profitability of your e-commerce store.

Segment your customer list

Not all customers are alike. Even if all of them have one thing in common – the fact they bought from you – that doesn’t mean you should treat them the same way. If you treat all your customers the same way, you are likely to send them irrelevant emails, making them less interested in becoming loyal customers.

In order to improve your customer relationships, you need to segment your customer list based on their different demographic, behavioral, and geographic attributes. Segmentation will allow you to send better targeted and more relevant emails.

Unless the geography or demographics of your customers affect your e-commerce sales, one of the best ways to segment your customer list is by using engagement and transactional attributes, based on their past behavior.

Engagement segmentation

The goal of segmenting your customer list by engagement is to separate the customers who are still active on your list (i.e. opening and clicking on your emails) with those who haven’t clicked on any recent marketing messages. Engaged customers have shown a positive behavior towards your brand, which makes them more likely to purchase from you. As a result, you can send purchase-focused emails to your engaged customers. Unengaged customers, on the other hand, need better nurturing and less purchase-focused emails so you can win them back before you can ask for a purchase.

There are four main attributes you can use to segment your email list based on their engagement, which are:

• Whether a customer has received an email
• Whether a customer has opened an email or series of emails
• Whether a customer has opened and clicked an email or series of emails
• Whether a customer has converted from one of your emails

Transactional segmentation

While engagement lets you see how people react to your emails, transactional behavior helps you see how people shop in your store.

There are many ways you can slice your customer list based on their transactional behavior:

• Recent purchases (that can be a week, a month, a quarter, or even a full year)
• Number of purchases
• Amount of dollars spent
• Average number of products added to cart
• Category purchased
• Price range of the purchases made
• Time range between purchases

Transactional segmentation can help you find products or categories that your customers are most likely to find interesting so you can upsell or cross-sell them relevant products. You can also send your customers emails with more relevant prices; a customer with a lower average order value may prefer to receive emails with more affordable products.

A simple segmentation tactic: warm vs. cold customers

A basic way to segment your list is to separate “warm” customers from the “cold” ones. Warm customers are those who engage with your email marketing messages and have visited your site recently. Cold customers, on the contrary, are those who are not engaging with your emails and haven’t visited or purchased in a long time.

To segment your cold customers from the warm ones, you are going to take the list of the previously mentioned attributes and pick one or two. Pick a specific threshold, like customers who have clicked an email in the past 30 days and who have purchased more than $30 in the past 90 days. Then, create one segment for the cold customers (i.e. those whose behavior match either of the two selected attributes), and another one for the warm ones (i.e. those who match both behaviors).

Create campaigns for each segment

Once you have created your segments, you can create campaigns for each segment based on the attributes used.

There’s no one-size-fits-all post-purchase email automation campaign; it depends on your company and its needs. There are still two strategic ways you can look at your post-purchase email campaigns:

Follow-up campaigns: A campaign consisting of emails aimed at nurturing the next purchase. Common emails sent in this kind of campaigns include:

• Asking for feedback about the shopping experience.
• Checking in with customers to see if there’s anything your customer needs or has a problem with.
• Recommendations of helpful resources to learn how to use the product bought, among other helpful topics.
• Links to your return policy, contact form, etc.

Reactivation campaigns: A campaign focused on turning unengaged or inactive customers back into active customers. This is where you can use the “warm vs. cold” segmentation shown before. The emails usually sent in this campaigns include:

• Sharing relevant information about the product bought.
• Sending entertaining and inspiring content, like user generated content, blog posts, etc.
• Recommendations of best-selling or related products from the one bought before.

When sending a post-purchase email campaign, you need to be careful about offering discounts to active customers who are willing to pay full price. Offers like free shipping, better return terms, and loyalty rewards can work better than offering full-blown discounts.

However, if you are going to send discounts to your customers, analyze how much profit you are going to lose by offering the discount and how many purchases you would need to get your money back. You can then test it on a small sample.

Also, remember to focus on your “hero customers”; those that represent the 20% that make 80% of your revenue. Instead of losing money on discounting to lower-value customers, focus on driving the most revenue from customers who are more likely to make a purchase from you.

Crate and Barrel, the furniture and home decor online retailer, sends a follow-up email a few days after a customer makes a purchase, incentivizing the next one.

Ulta, the cosmetics retailer, sends an email asking for feedback a few days after a customer makes a purchase.

Analyze the results

There’s no email marketing without analyzing the results of your campaigns.
Start by comparing your engagement metrics, such as open rate and CTR, and your revenue metrics, such as AOV, the number of sales, and ROI, with the average numbers from the non post-purchases email campaigns as well as with the previous campaigns you have sent. Also, compare the results of each post-purchase campaign you currently send.

Then, analyze which segments bring the best results. Compare both engagement and transactional metrics and see which segment converts best.

Finally, test new post-purchase email automation campaigns. This includes:

• Making the campaigns longer or shorter.
• Using different copy in each of the emails sent or on those that have the lower performance.
• Using different images.
• Changing the timing, like sending more emails in less time or less in more time.

Wrap up

Warren Buffet, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway and legendary investor, said once: “Any business that has delighted customers has a sales force out there that you don’t have to pay. You don’t see them, but they are talking to people all the time.”
Keeping your current customers happy and interested in your content is the sales force your company needs to grow without spending any money on customer acquisition.

The strategies in this post have demonstrated how you can discover happy customers, how you can make them more likely to buy from you, and how you can analyze the results from your campaigns.

Hustlers make the calls.

Hustlers aren't in the back learning growth hacking.

Hustlers aren't batching and blasting emails with just a first name change.

Hustlers love to get punched in the face, love the sting of rejection.

Hustlers yell, "Show me the money!"

Hustlers aren't bummed out when they get rejected.

Hustlers are hungry for more.

Hustlers do whatever it takes to be successful, even if that's working a six-day week.

Hustlers show up in the neighborhood and work with the executive assistant (AE) to land the meeting.

Hustlers use caffeinated soap and stay alert 24/7.

Hustlers have the Challenger DNA and won't hesitate to respectfully push back with anyone on any subject.

Hustlers chip away at the C-Level.

Hustlers don't take down the sale single-threaded -- they bring every possible stakeholder to the dance to grow the deal and achieve consensus at every level

Hustlers are persistent, following up until the "no."

Hustlers become SVPs and CEOs by ferreting out the CEO of the problem.

Hustlers fire, tenacity and grit becomes effortless mastery.

Hustlers don't need to close and they don't NEED your business.

Hustlers do seven-figure deals when they say you must pilot in Enterprise SaaS.

Hustlers tap their own CEO, their VC, and/or their board to help them accelerate the deal. 

Hustlers humbly read everything they can get their hands on, but they actually apply it and make it their own.

Hustlers don't trounce their competitors: They focus on selling a complex solution.

Hustlers optimize the pay plan ... any pay plan.

Hustlers have a can-do attitude and love the challenge when you tell them it can't be done.

Hustlers are restless; they never sleep. 

Hustlers are one in a 1,000, and they know who they are. 

Hustlers have a bias toward action and only need a pad, a pen, and a phone to make it rain.

Hustlers win just as much now as they did in 1980s hardware.

Hustlers are masters of reverse psychology and persuasion, architects of intrinsic and extrinsic value.

Hustlers tell the unvarnished truth, even risking the sale, because trust is more important in the long term. 

Hustlers love what they do and have faith in the outcome. This is known as pronoia, or the belief that "the universe is plotting to do me good." 

Hustlers always get promoted by making the others around them shine.

Hustlers conduct the symphony. Why play a single instrument when you can orchestrate a coup from within, and make your customer into a hero? 

Hustlers are Jerry Maguire spiked with Cuba Gooding Jr. with some Florence Griffith Joyner sprinkled on top. They win the deal at "hello."

Hustlers are certain of their win, and by virtue of that confidence, win more.

Hustlers laugh all the way to the bank.

Any questions?

You can listen to me and Noah Goldman "everyone's-a-hustling" here.

If you valued this article, please share via your Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Facebook social media platforms. I encourage you to join the conversation or ask questions so feel free to add a comment on this post. Please follow my LinkedIn post page for all my articles and visit me at www.tonyhughes.com.au if you are looking for a keynote speaker. Go to www.RSVPselling.com for sales methodologies that generate pipeline and manage complex opportunities. 

Editor's note: This post originally appeared on LinkedIn and is republished here with permission.

As influencer marketing gets more sophisticated (and expensive), the demand for reliable measurement of ROI is increasing rapidly.

Are you measuring the value of your efforts the right way?

Read more...

In software, we’ve moved from a world where a customer buys a piece of software to run on their own infrastructure, to a world where a customer pays a vendor to run software on the vendor’s infrastructure. With machine learning, we may see another evolution of this. Machine learning startups create models based on data provided by customers. Should customers be compensated for their contribution?

Unlike the first wave of SaaS software, machine learning startups benefit from the data their customers share with them. Many times, machine learning startups create one global machine learning model that is used across the customer base. Each marginal customer provides additional data that refines the model.

Today, I could argue customers contribute their data altruistically. Another might argue the customer pays for the right to contribute their data and benefit from the software startup’s models. A third might argue that the customer should actually benefit economically from this contribution. Which is the right viewpoint? Which is the viewpoint that will ultimately govern the customer/vendor relationships in SaaS?

Online advertising serves as a potential model for how the machine learning software as a service ecosystem might evolve. In the 2000s, Google and others built global machine learning models for ad targeting across websites. Some customers balked at the idea of contributing their data to benefit their competitors. But there wasn’t a simple way to isolate individual customer data and its benefit to the global targeting. So you either ran Google ads or you didn’t.

As ecosystem evolved, website publishers sought to monetize the data they were providing. This created an opportunity for companies like BlueKai and others to build a Data Management Platform, which aggregated all the publishers’ first party data and allow them to sell their data on a marketplace. And that initiative met some success.

However, many of these publishers soon realized that they benefited more from leveraging their own data directly to improve their own monetization efforts. Rather than selling their data to third parties, they focused on building competitive advantage through their own data.

To summarize, publisher still contribute their data to global advertising networks to improve performance for everyone. But they have doubled down on extracting unique value for themselves from their first party data.

I believe that the SaaS ecosystem will evolve similarly. Startups and incumbents alike focus on a few core areas of competitive differentiation. In those areas, these businesses will focus on first party data, limit the amount of data sharing with competition, and likely build models in-house to maximize their advantage.

For non-strategic areas, these businesses will pay to use ML-based SaaS. And they will be very unlikely to demand a royalty for data rights usage, because the marginal revenue from such an arrangements simply isn’t meaningful for many of them. It also would challenge the business model of the SaaS startup.

In other words, the revenue from data royalties is worth less than the value of an intelligent human resources information system or customer relationship management system or customer support system. The universe of buyers would rather see a successful machine learning SaaS company than generate $15-100k annually in data-royalty revenue.

One of the most formidable challenges related to account-based marketing is the need to build and sustain a high level of teamwork among business functions that have historically operated more or less independently. ABM obviously requires marketing and sales to work together closely, and when ABM is used with existing customers, the need for collaboration can also extend to other business functions.

Some ABM experts now speak in terms of account-based everything to make the point that ABM actually encompasses far more than marketing.

Unfortunately, some company leaders don’t fully appreciate how much and what kind of teamwork is required for ABM success. For example, most ABM thought leaders and practitioners agree that marketing and sales should jointly:

• Select ABM target accounts
• Determine the likely make-up of the buying group at each target account
• Develop profiles or personas of the “buyers” at target accounts
• Develop detailed insights about target accounts

This level of collaboration is necessary to create a solid foundation for ABM success, but it’s really just the starting point. To reap the maximum benefits from ABM, marketing and sales must jointly develop an engagement plan for each target account. This account plan will usually span several weeks to several months, and will likely include marketing and sales activities that must be closely coordinated to produce maximum results.

In addition, marketing and sales must be ready to make on-the-fly adjustments to their account plan based on actual buyer responses and changing business conditions at each account.

Therefore, successful ABM requires marketing and sales to work collaboratively on an ongoing basis. This level of collaboration can be hard to achieve because it represents a major change in how many companies have traditionally managed demand generation.

In many B2B companies, the demand generation process involves a series of “hand-offs” from one business function to another. For example, marketing passes leads to business/sales development, which passes leads on to sales. The metaphor often used is a relay race in which each member of the relay team runs for a specified distance and then passes the baton to the next runner. This approach makes it relatively easy to manage demand generation within traditional organizational structures.

The relay race approach has never been the optimum way to manage demand generation, and it won’t be effective in an ABM program. To address this challenge, some companies create account teams to manage and coordinate the activities relating to their ABM accounts. To use another sports analogy, an ABM account team functions more like a basketball team than a 4 x 100 meter relay team. In an ABM account team, every team member is involved throughout the entire game.

The important point here is that successful ABM requires an exceptional level of cross-functional teamwork that isn’t “natural” for many companies. Some ABM pundits contend that account-based marketing will create better alignment between marketing and sales, but this just isn’t so.

The decision to adopt ABM can be the catalyst for creating better marketing-sales alignment, but ABM won’t cause such alignment to magically appear. It’s more accurate to say that close collaboration between marketing and sales is an essential ingredient in the recipe for successful ABM. Therefore, company leaders must be prepared to create and implement the structures, processes, and culture that are required to make the necessary teamwork a reality.

Illustration courtesy of Katlene Niven via Flickr CC.

In January, I penned this post about the new plateaus of opportunity that open up for both buyers and sellers when we make the mindset shift to becoming a true strategic partner, rather than just a “run and fetch” vendor that recites features and delivers quotes.

There is a fundamental problem (one that is not necessarily limited to contract negotiators): Even people who build long, otherwise successful careers in demanding positions don’t consider themselves professional negotiators — even though they do it every day! They do it internally with their colleagues, externally with clients and vendors, and even at home.

Why? The word “negotiation” itself can be intimidating. But to gain confidence, we must normalize this language in our lives. Negotiation is simply interaction between or among people to facilitate a positive outcome. (Nobody should do the deal otherwise!)

Not long ago we consulted with one of our clients, a vendor to financial services institutions who was on the brink of their biggest deal of the year, approximately $5 million. We enjoyed a unique situation: The customer agreed with our client’s value proposition. This granted our client positive leverage and gave the customer important capabilities that would help them comply with new government regulations in a timely fashion. After six months of discussions, proofs of concept and validation of the business case, both parties agreed to closing the deal by mid-December.

But on Dec. 3, the customer’s chief procurement officer sent a note to our chief sales officer (CSO): “We respectfully request a price reduction of $1M and two additional resources to support 2 separate data centers.” This triggered an immediate conference call with us, our client’s CSO and their CEO.

After some discussion, we recommended that our client politely demur the request. There was no compelling business rationale for making such a change at that point of the deal!

“We have momentum and agreement on just about everything,” I told our client’s CEO. “If we make a change now, there is a good chance this will prolong the discussion. They’re going to come back with another request.”

In our view, the discount request was simply “fishing” for a better price. And the resources could always be added in January when the work was underway, at which point we would gain a clearer picture of whether or not they were actually needed. Additionally, it was in the client’s interest to ensure timely delivery, and they would be willing to pay for those resources and preserve their time to value.

However, emotional pressure has its consequences. Our CEO, feeling pressure from the board to report on the deal, began rationalizing what was essentially a giveaway: He stated “Placing one additional resource at one of their data centers could deliver us value in the form of market intelligence.” As a result, the CEO instructed the CSO to inform the customer that we would give them one resource. What happened next was predictable: Within hours, the customer asked about additional resources and the discount. Now the mid-December signing date was thrown into question.

This kind of thing is understandable and happens frequently. When we are emotionally involved, our eagerness can get the best of us. In these situations, positive leverage and momentum are lost and we have defaulted to the servant’s role.

The illustrious Cicero of ancient Rome recognized that “In the master there is a servant, in the servant a master.” We are in the role of serving, both internal constituencies and clients. But even servants can become masters, especially when they can effectively guide the master. A great servant is one who is looked upon by the master as a leader because they guide them with precision and thoughtfulness, creating what is essentially a peer-to-peer relationship.

But we often unilaterally put ourselves into the servant’s role, where we are continually responding to a stream of requests from within and without. It would be nice if, once in a while, we could get ahead of the game and stop doing ourselves this disservice.

Sometimes this is because we don’t respect our own resources. We were once asked to step in on a troubled project that had generated a lot of unfavorable media coverage. As a result of the press coverage, our client was very sensitive to every request from that customer. One of those requests was for a proof-of-concept (PoC) in one of the customer’s locations. The PoC was running well and the customer was realizing immediate benefits. The PoC was supposed to have ended after a 30-day period, yet here we were, more than 90 days later, with the customer still balking at signing the purchase order.

When I asked my client why the purchase order hadn’t been signed, I was told that the customer “wasn’t ready yet.” What else would they need to get ready? Nothing came to mind. Did my client have resources dedicated to the project? Yes, several. I asked if these resources were important. Yes, the resources were important and could easily be reassigned to more profitable work. But, my client was hesitant to exercise that option for fear of angering the customer. My contention was that they may never get the order if they were not willing to remove the resources.

The simple takeaway is this: If you don’t respect your own resources, why should the customer? We debated this matter for two days, after which our client’s head of services wrote a letter to the customer informing them that: “the resources dedicated to the PoC are valuable and will be reassigned to other commercially viable endeavors by the coming Monday unless [the customer] deems these resources sufficiently important to keep them on the project by executing the appropriate purchase order.”

There was a signed purchase order in hand by Friday of that week.

When we throw our resources at no-win situations, we become beggars, not valued peers who offer demonstrable value. These examples illustrate just two ways that we can commit unforced errors that do more than degrade the size of our deal — they rob all parties of the benefits of participating in a true exchange of value. This is value that we can never realize unless we move beyond being just a “servant”.

Ever try to mow the lawn with a push mower? It’s not fun, especially on overgrown, hilly terrain.

Fortunately, we’ve had power mowers for decades and they’ve changed the way we care for our landscaping, making it easier and less time-consuming.

The same can be said for online marketing. Why work harder than you have to? The landscape of online marketing is often a challenging terrain, as well. Your audience is constantly interrupted by marketing messages, most of which they ignore. As a small business owner, you face the challenge of navigating new technologies and methods for effectively promoting your message online. Fortunately, there are tools available to help you cut through the noise and achieve your online marketing goals. Do yourself a favor and work smarter, not harder.

Building Relationships is Key

Over the past year, we’ve helped many small to mid-size businesses expand their online reach. One thing we have noticed when comparing all of our clients is that those that are building relationships with their customers are experiencing the most growth.

There are a few key elements that work together to make this happen. It boils down to staying in contact with their customers and providing solutions to their needs. In essence, they become a trusted resource.

Your website visitors aren’t always ready to make a purchase or schedule an appointment the first time they find you online. That’s why it’s important to maintain consistent communication with them and to give them a reason to come back to you.

Automated email marketing is the answer.

Email marketing helps develop relationships. You may think of email as an annoyance that fills up your inbox or spam folder. But the truth is that people do respond to promotional emails as long as they have given permission to be contacted. If they subscribe to your blog, fill out a contact form, or request more information, they are giving you permission to contact them. They want to hear what’s new, receive special offers, and read blog articles that answer their questions.

Surprisingly, many small businesses do not use email marketing.

Email marketing solutions don’t have to be complicated. What typically holds a small business back from implementing an email marketing program is the investment it will take to implement it, the time it will take to set it up, and the knowledge and skills to keep it going.

Because of their limited financial and human resources, small businesses must work smarter, not harder. That’s why marketing automation, which includes email marketing, makes sense for small businesses. Once marketing automation is set up, it’s fairly simple to maintain. Compared to tv, radio, and direct mail, it’s an affordable marketing solution that allows you to reach the right audience at the right time.

Why Email Marketing Works

• People like to do business with those they know, like and trust. Email helps you build relationships and credibility.
• Email keeps you top of mind with your prospective customers. It gives you a consistent way to communicate with your customers, repeatedly bringing them back to your business.
• Two-thirds of emails are opened on a mobile device, giving you a way to take advantage of the growing mobile trend.
• You get a big bang for your marketing buck. You can reach your entire contact list easily or segment your list for targeted messages.
• Email increases visitors to your website. Email marketing and SEO work hand in hand.
• It generates leads and nurtures them until they are ready to purchase or schedule an appointment.
• Email lets you start a conversation with your prospective customers. It gives them a way to easily contact you with their questions.
• It promotes your business and builds brand awareness. Your customers may share your message with their network, spreading your reach even further.
• It’s cost-effective. Email automation technology has brought the price of email solutions down to a level that every small business can afford.
• The data it provides is valuable in determining what type of messaging and promotional communications yield the highest ROI.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

Still not convinced that email marketing and automation are right for your small business? Take a look at a few statistics that show the value of email marketing and how small businesses are using it successfully. Research shows these benefits of email marketing:

• 91% of US adults like to receive promotional emails from companies they do business with. (Source: Marketing Sherpa)
• Email is 40% more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in helping businesses acquire new customers. (Source: Campaign Monitor)
• 24% of visitors from email marketing buy something as compared to 2.49% of visitors from search engines and 0.59% from social media.(Source: Monetate)
• In a 2016 study, automated email messages averaged 50.4% higher open rates and 106.3% higher click-through rates than “business as usual” marketing messages. (Source: Epsilon Data Management)
• For every $1 spent, email generates $38 in ROI. (Source: Campaign Monitor)

Related Article: Email is Still a Powerful Marketing Tool

As a small business owner, you may be wondering how to best utilize email marketing. An infographic from Instiller shows how email marketing can wow your customers by using personalization and targeting the right buyers. Automated emails take the buyer cycle a step further by providing after-purchase support and giving your customers a reason to come back to you or refer your business to their friends.

Want to Learn More About Email Marketing?

If your small business is still on the fence about using marketing automation and email marketing, we’re here to help. We can answer your questions and see if email marketing is right for you. Ready to take your online marketing to the next level? Let us help you connect with your customers in a more human way with personalized email automation.

*read time 2 minutes

If you Google the word strategic, one definition places it in the context of selling, best:

Relating to the identification of overall aims and interests and the means of achieving them.

The overall aim is to land sales. Strategic questions (the right question asked in the right way at the right time) increase the odds of landing sales for the following reasons:

4 Benefits of Strategic Questions:

• Strategic questions create a highly relevant dialogue for the customer,
• Strategic questions build trust and reduce tension for seller and buyer,
• Strategic questions cause the buyer(s) to think through their true needs, and
• Strategic questions help the customer make an accurate decision about value.

The alternative to not being strategic is to ask random questions. Unfortunately, random questions enter the prefrontal cortex of our brain where cautious consideration of how the question will come off before using it, has little chance of happening under pressure.

This is when stupid questions occur!

Another big mistake is when we ask the same questions of all customers regardless their situation. Since a knowledgeable buyer won’t take seriously the salesperson that asks uninformed or pointless questions, one-size-fits-all questions won’t work well.

3 Tips For Being Strategic With Questions:

• Preparation. Investing sufficient time before the sales call is critical to coming up with well thought-out, clear questions that make the customer think. My maxim: “Customers must think before they buy and questions make them think.”
• Purpose. Know where you want to take the conversation before you probe. Once you know, create questions that will get your customer thinking in that direction. What do you need them to focus on in order to create high-perceived value for your product or services? Which questions can you ask to get them thinking about needs they don’t see for themselves?
• Power. Powerful questions can move buyers off status quo attitudes and beliefs, switch them from a focus on price to a focus on value, reframe how they view your solution and can head off objections before they are raised.

Million Dollar Questions:

Strategic questions have helped my client-companies win million-dollar sales! Here are four actual million-dollar questions I provide to coaching and training classes. Modify the words in italics to fit your opportunities:

1. How long do you want the training to last?
2. Has your present supplier made you aware of the new RCRA regulations and costly penalties for non-compliance?
3. What is the impact on your customer’s satisfaction if the new supplier does not deliver on time?
4. What are you doing to equip your team to achieve their goals in the third quarter?

Summary: Take sufficient time to prepare in advance. Have a clear purpose. Create powerful questions tailored to each buyer’s needs. Talk less, be more strategic with your questions and watch more sales land!

Note: A shout-out to @JamieLIrvine. Based on one of my tweets he asked for specifics on how to be more strategic with questions. Jamie, thanks for the nudge!

Holy Hollywood Batman!

We lost another film icon this week – the first Batman, Adam West. It got me thinking about the lasting power of the movies. Even today, busy executives who can’t sit still for a ten-minute meeting will carve out the time to watch a two-hour plus movie. Movies have honed the secret to engaging audiences from years of practice and experimentation. While your presentation doesn’t have to be worthy of an Oscar nod, it pays to leverage techniques and tips from the movies for engaging buyers and standing out from the competition.

3 Sales Tips from the Movies for Engaging Buyers in your Presentation:

1. Cut to the chase

Movies don’t start with the director giving his resume or telling the audience what they’re going to be seeing, or why he made the movie. No! Movies are much more likely to start with a car chase, a bomb threat in an action movie, or lover’s meeting cute in a Rom-com. In other words, they cut to the chase by starting with the most interesting part. Hollywood knows that people have increasingly short attention spans and little patience for a lot of introductory fluff.

The same holds true with buyers. You have a precious few seconds during your presentation to grab your buyer’s attention and draw them in. Don’t waste it setting up your story with a lot of prologue. Give your prospect an immediate and compelling reason to pay attention by cutting to the chase. What’s the chase in your presentation? It could be a key issue, an insight or expected value – something that is of most interest to your prospect. Frame it in a unique and relevant way that intrigues your audience without giving away the entire plot, and you’re off to the movies!

2. Raise the stakes

Movies sell tickets by placing characters in high stakes situations. For example, if the hero doesn’t find the bomb by midnight, the city will be destroyed. If the city is destroyed, the country will go to war. If the country goes to war… You’ve seen this movie, right? The stakes keep getting higher until the hero employs every trick he knows until he finds that bomb!

You also need to make sure the stakes are as high as possible when you present your business case to your prospect. If the stakes aren’t high enough, doing nothing remains a viable option. Longer sales cycles and busier prospects dealing with multiple priorities make the need to create urgency during your presentation, dare I say, “urgent?” I am not referring to the manufactured “This is the last one we have left!” type of urgency. I am talking about authentic urgency: the desire to solve a problem that a customer has perhaps dismissed or put off because other issues are competing for his or her attention.

Raise the Stakes in your presentation by determining what’s really at stake for your prospect. Dig deeper by asking yourself (or your prospect during discovery) with the question “and then what happens?” This helps to highlight the importance of making a decision and the consequences of either indecision or a poor decision.

3. Show don’t tell

This technique applies to a wide range of written and filmed works. Showing, rather than telling an audience what’s happening allows the audience to experience the story themselves. Interpreting meaning through actions, words, and senses, rather than a narrator’s description, creates a much more powerful effect.

Chuck Palahniuk, the author of Fight Club, is a big proponent of the “Show don’t tell” technique. In fact, can you imagine how different the movie would be if the narrator had told you all along that (spoiler alert ahead!) Tyler (Brad Pitt) was a figment of Edward Norton’s imagination?!

Prospects are told things all day long: “We’re the best… We reach more customers… etc.” Try doing a little more showing in your presentation. Showing your message, solution or results in action through a story or illustration and letting your prospect reach the desired conclusion has greater lasting power than hitting them over the head with a list of facts.

Use these 3 Sales tips from the movies to keep busy buyers engaged and ensure they remember your message when buying decisions are made!

Thank you to everyone who attended and participated in our successful Sales Machine 2017 event in New York! We had a great time and can’t wait until 2018’s event. Here is our 2017 Sales Machine Recap, breaking down key takeaways and some highlights from individual sessions.

Editor’s Note: Special shout out to Jeremey Donovan, SVP & Head of Sales Strategy at GLG (Gerson Lehrman Group) for the insights.

Sales Machine Recap: Top 8 Takeaways

Cold Outreach – This is often highly ineffective. Instead, focus on: (a) seeking referrals from delighted customers (b) active inbound demand generation (request to become a client; request for demo), (c) passive inbound demand generation (webinar, whitepaper, etc.), and (d) warm outreach with highly disciplined and personalized cadences.

Hiring Is Not Always The Answer – You cannot meet a current year sales gap by hiring. Current year hires drive business next year and beyond. If you have a gap, the only viable answer is marketing and sales execution.

Get It On The Books Or It’s Not Happening – Nothing is counted in forecast unless it has a next scheduled meeting.

Objection Handling With Preparation – Focus on WHY NOT? In other words, do a pre-mortem to identify red-flags. Why won’t they buy? Manager should ask this of reps and reps should ask this of prospects.

Lead Revival Still Works – Recycle leads from closed lost deals, checking in with real value every 90 days.

Goals via AMP – Set monthly goals and share daily performance covering AMP = activities, meeting, & pipeline.

Leverage Reps Based On Their Strengths – Use hybrid hunter-farmer reps when accounts have significant up-sell and/or cross-sell potential that AEs must have significant influence over. Otherwise, separate into specialized hunters and farmers (aka. Customer success / account managers).

Don’t Neglect Your Brand – Manage your online brand/presence since prospects will Google you and look you up on social media (esp. LinkedIn).

The XYZ’s of Selling (Jeffrey Gitomer)

Don’t chase your customers, have them chase you – This happens when you build loyalty with existing customers by delivering exceptional value after the sale. Consistent value creation builds loyalty which serves as the fuel for referrals. Stated another way, deliver a “first class” customer experience.

Don’t find prospect’s pain, find their pleasure – rooted in their WHY. [JD: Frankly, I think this is a false dichotomy. Solving need/pain leads to prospect happiness/success.]

Prospecting Tips:

A. Put yourself in front of people who can buy from you and give them value first

B. Walk in prepared both in terms of them and in terms of you.

Manage your online brand/presence – Prospects will Google you and look you up on social media (esp. LinkedIn)

Build relationships by asking emotional questions – People want to do business with their friends. Examples: (a) ‘Where did you grow up?’ instead of ‘Where are you from?’ (b) ‘When I say (product/service) what one word comes to mind?’

Don’t talk (i.e. brag) about yourself – Instead, you should leverage references and voice-of-customer testimonials.

Love to learn – (speaker cited Dale Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, and Earl Nightingale).

The Future of Sales: What to Know, Do, & Prepare For (Tiffani Bova, Cate Gutowski, Sam Lee)

You’re not selling a product anymore – Most of the time, you are not selling a product or service, you are selling business transformation.

Current applications of AI in sales:

A. Lead scoring/prioritization.

B. Recommending next activity in opportunity management.

C. Recommending next activity in customer success.

Show me you know me – Leverage peer-to-peer executive introductions (your execs and theirs) in new business and renewals.

Scaling Your Sales Team: The Do’s and Don’ts (Sam Jacobs, Kristen Habacht, Bill Sexton)

The Sales Stack – The SDR + AE + sales specialist “stack” is only viable for large ($100K+) deal sizes. If you deal sizes are smaller, esp. < $10K, then you need a much lower cost of sales structure.

Sales Comes Last – Product first, then marketing, then sales.

Outbound sales is highly ineffective – Instead, focus on demand generation.

Smaller companies should build out sales ops in advance– Don’t wait until the last minute.

Sales Ops Defined As –

• Analytics
• Process
• Tech stack
• Collateral
• Training/certification

Hire reps to meet demand – Not (proactively) to create demand. You cannot meet a current year sales gap by hiring. Current year hires drive business next year and beyond. If you have a gap, the only viable answer is marketing and sales execution.

Maintain high hiring standards – Crucial for growth and culture.

Work backward from revenue – to # deals to # of opportunities to # of meetings to volume of activity to amount of needed AE capacity.

Sales and marketing technology – (CRM, marketing automation, etc.) will fail unless you first define your sales process.

Don’t Get Lost in Data – Rather than getting lost in analytics for execs, sales ops should focus on serving first-line sales managers and AEs.

Sales Coaching A.I – Explore coaching via voice analytics (Gong, VoiceOps, etc.).

Don’t hire senior people from the outside – Promote from within: SDR to AE to manager to exec. Have new hires cut their teeth on low quality leads.

Peace, Love & Dashboards: A Lesson in Stakeholder Harmony (Jeremy Wiggett, Marc Jacobs)

Keep It Specialized – At SFDC, SDRs specialize in inbound and BDRs specialize in outbound.

Key SDR metrics:

• Capacity and tenure
• Activity: calls, connects, & “flips” = opps created by SDRs, aka MQLs
• Lead quality, esp. by source
• Speed to lead since every minute counts
• Persistence – # of calls & emails per contact vs. target.

If something is not working, find the leak in the funnel: contact/lead – MQL (“stage 1” at SFDC; created by SDR) – SAL (“stage 2” at SFDC). Handoffs must be flawlessly executed so there is no lost time and no negative prospect relationship impact.

Prioritize active inbound – (ex: request for demo) above passive inbound (ex: whitepaper download) in lead scoring.

Pipeline Management: We’re Doing It Wrong! (Jason Jordan)

Sales Training – Management Training is way more important than AE training. Starting with the latter, and especially only doing the latter, is a recipe for failure.

Sales Pipeline: Bigger is not always better – A bigger pipeline is not necessarily a better pipeline. Ultimately, success is about rep productivity ($/AE/time). The amount of pipeline that is good is = quota/(win rate), rolled up on an AE by AE basis.

Less Forecasting, More Coaching – Managers should spend less time on forecasting and more time on deal coaching. There is little correlation between the former and sales productivity and strong correlation between the latter.

Segment Forecasting vs Coaching Meetings

A. Friday forecasting meeting to meet a Monday deadline

B. Tuesday deal coaching meeting to review specific opportunities.

Something’s Wrong If Managers Are Closing Deals – Managers should be cleaners, not closers. That means getting involved with AEs much earlier in the sale cycle to help qualify or disqualify.

The Playbook to Successful Sales Leadership (Dave Rudnitsky)

Don’t Stagnate – The tactics contained in playbooks should change over time.

Pillars of Effective Leadership – Be passionate, confident, and paranoid but never arrogant.

Have an Entrepreneurial Mindset – Encourage AEs to run their book like their own franchise.

Pro Hiring Tips:

A. Check out the (online) brand of people before you hire them.

B. To hire great reps, ask your customers who their favorite vendor salespeople are.

Leverage Executive Firepower Strategically – Use you execs in the sales process, but don’t bring them in too early.

Focus on WHY NOT? – In other words, do a pre-mortem to identify red-flags. Why won’t they buy? Manager should ask this of reps and reps should ask this of prospects.

Lightning Talks: Seller Metrics, Sales Hiring Operational Excellence, and Revenue Acceleration Hacks on the Cheap (Pete Kazanjy, Noah Goldman, Evan Bartlett)

Hiring – Apply the same discipline to sales hiring as you do to pipeline management.

• Developing a hiring profile
• Screening
• Assessment
• Compensation
• Applicant tracking system
• Hiring funnel metrics
• Operational cadence of weekly hiring review meetings
• Have a playbook for sales hiring and train/certify managers on it.

Metrics – Be holistic and don’t just drive to performance of a single number.

• Higher fidelity inputs
• Avoid super-hero skills that do not scale
• Roll out change with pilot groups before scaling
• Automation/technology should only come after process definition and manual process success.

Leverage Technology – Must credibly prove to AE that new tools and/or process with either them close more deals or close deals faster.

Revenue acceleration hacks – Nothing is counted in forecast unless it has a next scheduled meeting 

Diligently find the person of authority:

“Are you the person who can choose to sign the deal without asking anyone else?”

“Who besides you is involved in the final decision?”

“How are decisions to purchase services like this made?”

“I’m prepping the proposal, whose name should I put on the signature line?”

If CFO Is Involved – Ask how you can them your prospect prepare the internal pitch.

Problem-prospect fit – Should come before you do anything else

• Schedule the decision date working back from the go-live/customer value realization date.
• Recycle leads from closed lost deals, checking in with value every 90 days.

This Is How We Do It: The Salesforce Sales Playbook (Stephanie Glenn)

SFDC State of Sales 2016) – 79% of customers want their rep to be a trusted advisor

Components of SFDC playbook:

• Go to market territory design.
• Lead to cash pipeline machine.
• Data obsession, starting with goals.
• Build your bench.

SFDC structures with:

• SMB for 1-200 employees with geo only
• Mid-market for 201-4500 employees with geo + name accounts only
• Strategic 4501+ with named accounts only.
• Additionally, SFDC has vertical for Financial Services, Healthcare, and Retail.

Plan Ahead – Start territory planning 4 to 5 months before the end of the fiscal year.

Create equal potential territories – Based on per-account upsell & cross-sell opportunity.

Engage leads immediately – Even if that means dropping low scoring leads into drip nurturing) and track activity from lead source to close.

Set monthly goals – Share daily performance covering AMP = activities, meetings, & pipeline.

Create a “clean your room” dashboard

• Pushed opportunities.
• Opportunities without recent activity.
• Big deals missing critical information.

Promote from within – At SFDC from inbound SDR to outbound BDR to AE to manager to executive.

Use hybrid hunter-farmer reps – Especially when accounts have significant up-sell and/or cross-sell potential that AEs must have significant influence over. Otherwise, separate into specialized hunters and farmers (aka. Customer success / account managers). At SFDC, they have hybrids and non-quota bearing customer success professionals focused on driving adoption.

The post Sales Machine 2017 Recap: Key Takeaways, Insights, Strategies, Tips & More appeared first on Sales Hacker.

 Growbots uses machine learning to provide sales teams with the right leads to kickstart their outbound sales process. The service, which argues that its product can save each member of a sales team a few days of work every month, today announced that it has raised a $2.5 million funding round from Buran VC, Lighter Capital and a number of angel investors. This brings the company’s… Read More

Are your clients lost in the digital forest looking for the path to success? With hundreds of look-alike trail markers to choose from, it’s hard to know which marketing campaign metrics to map and track. Are you leading your clients properly through the trees, the footpaths, and streams with the correct marketing metrics?

As a digital marketing agency, you know your clients want quick results and sometimes become disappointed if their investment doesn’t result in an immediate explosion of leads and sales.

So you’ll need to demonstrate the value of your leadership with the signposts of your romp through the digital woods. Prove your worth to your clients with a digital marketing dashboard before they take a hike on their own and truly lose their way.

Start with a digital marketing dashboard template and build it with measurable and timely stepping-stones marking the path to your client’s goals and objectives. Identifying signposts along the trail will help your clients understand the intricate process you’re building over time.

Detail your long-term strategy with hard data and metrics in marketing client reports that show how you’re edging your way toward their business objectives. Every metric you choose to track progress is a rock or a tree on the path through the thicket. You’ll need to flag and explain each trail marker so they’ll truly believe they should trust you as their guide.

So let’s get our hiking boots on and identify the metrics you need to reassure your clients that your digital marketing plan will lead them to success.

Website Traffic Metrics

As you set off, look for your first trail marker – an overall increase in website traffic. This signpost is not just an ordinary rock at the side of the path. It has granular qualities. Look closely and break it down further. Track the number of unique visitors, the amount of mobile versus desktop traffic, and referral sources. Rank the most valuable keywords and make adjustments in content to optimize search.

Conversion Metrics

You’re deep in the woods now. The foliage is so thick that your customer is worried they won’t get out. Reassure them with several conversion metrics. Compare what is or isn’t working to keep website visitors interested and engaged. Track the average time spent on site and on page, the number of downloads, the bounce rate, and the number of completed forms or cart checkouts. Perhaps most important, is the rate of return visitors, indicating that potential customers are in the research phase of their buying journey.

Return on Investment Metrics

You’re near the clearing, but now you need to find the most important trail marker of all. Which metrics prove your digital marketing plan is driving sales and generating revenue? Look for the classic markers proving a return on investment (ROI). Demonstrate the paths that website visitors take to become leads and buyers. Create marketing client reports showing the cost and revenue per visitor, per lead and per customer.

Adding reports such as a Facebook Performance dashboard will help clients see how your campaigns are delivering ROI from social channels too. Aim for a higher revenue per customer than revenue per lead or visitor. Overall, if your digital marketing plan generates more revenue than your fees, they’ll know you’re worth it.

Did you and your clients find all the right trail markers? Were the metrics you chose solid, easy-to-find rocks in the streams you crossed? Make it easy for your client to follow you and those trail markers by aggregating your metrics on one easy-to-use map – a marketing dashboard that shows a bird’s eye view of the forest and the path to success.

Work smarter, not harder. You’ve heard it a million times, and it’s never been truer than it is today. Distractions are a fact of life. Here are five smart ways to cut through the noise, focus on what’s important, and exceed your sales goals—without raising your stress.

1. Eliminate distractions. Salespeople and marketers face a sticky predicament. Social media is a necessary part of your job. Your customers appreciate a personal touch and accessibility is crucial. If a potential customer is poised on the edge of a sale and asks a question on social media, a competitor has the opportunity to steal your sale right out from under you. If you don’t answer fast enough, you’re toast. And if you hang out on social media all day, your sales goals are toast.

The hack: use a social channel monitoring program to set alerts and see only work-related messages. Schedule regular posts with news, chatty comments, quotes, and wit to keep your feed active, and check in on those during your down times, breaks, during commutes, and at lunch. Otherwise, avoid opening social media pages like the plague, lest you be sucked down the endless rabbit hole of cat videos, baby photos, and political bickering.

2. Re-organize your day. Take a hard look at your to-do list. If tasks are just rolling over from one day to the next in an endless loop, and nothing is really ever finished, your to-do list is useless. The problem with to-do lists is their undefined nature. Humans work much better with deadlines.

The hack: Make your tasks super-specific, and schedule a time to get a small group of tasks done. For example, here’s a terrible, but typical, task list:

• Return sales calls
• Write reports
• Send emails

Instead, write a list that looks like this:

• 8AM – 9AM: Process and respond to incoming emails. Set calendar alerts for follow-ups.
• 9AM – 9:30AM: Return sales call to [contact name] at [company name] [link to contact record]
  • Call Notes:
    • [What they need]
    • [What we can do]
    • [Potential upsell]
    • Update customer record.
• 9:30AM – 10AM: Contact existing customer [contact name] at [company name] [link to contact record]
  • Call Notes:
    • [Purpose of call – social, congrats, just checking in to see if you need anything?]
    • [Mention new product launch]
    • Update customer record.
• 10AM – 10:30 Run sales report and prioritize new leads based on customer data.

Break your day into chunks of time filled with just a few well-defined tasks, and check them off as completed. After completing a group of tasks, take a break.

3. Learn to delegate. Routine tasks, scheduling, and paperwork can be handed off to an assistant. Though it may seem counter-intuitive to hire someone because you’re not making enough money, consider how freeing up your time to follow leads and close sales will impact your bottom line.

The hack: Hiring and training an in-house assistant may strain your budget, but virtual assistants have become common. You should be able to find one who is easy to work with and needs little direction, and because they are paid only for time spent working, it will cost less than you expect.

4. Qualify leads. Stop chasing bad leads. Just stop. Low sales numbers on a high-quality product often indicate time wasted on leads that will never pan out. A not-so-great product or off-target marketing are other possible reasons, but that’s an entirely different discussion.

The hack: Get a CRM or project management software with lead management tools, and spend your valuable time on warm, pre-qualified leads with the best chance of panning out. With the right tool, you’ll be able to prioritize leads and maximize your time.

5. Create a routine that maximizes your strengths. Be aware of your own patterns. What time of day do you make the most sales? When do you struggle to answer simple questions? Trying to negotiate when you’re at your worst is counterproductive and may be hurting your sales. You need to sound confident and knowledgeable.

The hack: Schedule your most demanding work during the times you feel sharpest, usually in the morning. Get the hard stuff out of the way and save the least demanding work for mid-afternoon, when most of us are falling asleep on our keyboards.

Taking your sales above and beyond your goals involves working at your best, and ignoring the things that sap your time and energy, including distractions, inefficiencies, and cold leads that will never close. These hacks will help you maximize your sales and blow your goals right out of the water.

​Who wouldn’t like to secure 20 years’ worth of renewals with each of their customers? Well, this is doable and, in fact, if you sell on a subscription basis, this should be your goal from the very beginning. But how do you get there? Ask yourself, “How would I need to approach and manage a new client relationship from the very start?”

Achieving the 20-year renewal requires a shift in thinking and in action. It requires that you change how you approach your sales discussions from the very beginning. Then, it requires that you change your service and value delivery approach to create an environment in which a client is delighted to renew year, over year, over year.

Selling for Logos (and Churn)

When we talk with SaaS vendors, we routinely hear some version of a story about how “sales is really focused on getting new logos” and will “do anything to land a new customer”. Typically, the conversations focus on the features and functionality of the software, how easy it is to use, and how fast they can have the system live. The sales rep closes the deal, gets the commission, and turns things over to the implementation and delivery team to make it happen.

And then it doesn’t happen.

Sure, the system gets turned on and some people get trained on it. Then, the customer waits for it to be used and anticipates all the great business benefits to come rolling in. And they wait. And they wait. And no (or only limited) benefits appear. Soon after that the customer complaints arrive, followed by the inevitable, disastrous Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs), a clear sign of the churn that is yet to come. And then that comes too.

Selling and Delivering for the 20-Year Renewal

So, what went wrong? You won the deal, right? The problem is that if this is your approach, chances are you may have won the deal but already lost the renewal.

Selling for the 20-year renewal requires you shift your sales discussion from the features, functionality and potential benefits of your system to instead focus on how your Customer Success capabilities will ensure customers are successful in adopting the system. From that flows the clear business value from the use of your software, and based on that, customers will be thrilled to continue renewing for the next 20 years.

Here are three ways to do this:

1. Set the Goal of a 20-Year Relationship from the Very Start.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but your initial sales conversations need to move beyond focusing on the immediate, pressing business problem. Instead, address how you will solve the new challenges that will emerge once the current need is met. Jointly think past the immediate need to what happens next. Focus the discussion on the long-term, sustained business value that the customer will need to realize in order to renew for the next 20 years.

2. Map the Critical Path to Value Creation and 20 Years of Renewals.

Most technology project plans focus on the path to go-live and a little bit beyond. But when you map out the critical path to ROI and renewals, you quickly see that accelerated and sustained, effective user adoption is what leads to renewals. So, what are actions and deliverables required over time to make sure you get the levels of user adoption you need to deliver 20 years’ worth of renewable value to your customer? Not sure? Chances are, your customers don’t know either, which is why you need to help them figure it out.

When you walk your prospect through a 20-year renewal timeframe, what will become clear is that after the system is live what becomes most important is having a sustained effort to maximize adoption. Help your customer discover that over 20 years there will be changes to their internal structure, staff composition, products/services, operating environment, and overall organizational performance. The key to a 20-year renewal is helping them develop the capability to accelerate and sustain effective internal user adoption over the course of 20 years of ongoing organizational change and uncertainty.

3. Provide and Sustain User Adoption & Value Realization Capabilities for Your Customer

Most of your customers will not have a clue about how to put in place a program that drives and sustains adoption for 20 years. You may not either. But you, and they, need to figure it out.

Helping your customers map out and proactively manage all the organizational complexities affecting user adoption and value realization they will encounter over time is not a core capability of most software vendors – even those with a great Customer Success team. Yet, this capability is exactly what your customers require to achieve 20 years of value from your system.

To address this need, you either need to build this capability in-house, partner with software adoption and organizational change companies to provide this expertise, or discover some way for your customers to solve this problem on their own. Ultimately, unless your customers can sufficiently sustain adoption and ongoing value realization, the 20-year renewal will remain elusive.

For small businesses and bloggers alike, building an email list is crucial for monetization and brand growth. But it’s not always as simple as what countless online guides depict them to be.

According to a 2016 benchmark compilation, the unique open rate for marketing emails; including niches such as education, eCommerce, corporate services, and entertainment; sits at only 25%. Add the fact that the average opt-in rate for most websites can be anywhere from 1% to 5% and you have yourself a recipe for lost opportunities, delayed growth, and incessant head-scratching.

But despite these numbers, email marketing campaigns are historically efficient from an ROI standpoint – with an average return of $38 for each $1 spent. This is because successful email marketers also prioritize the size of their subscriber base to compensate for low engagement.

Without further ado, below are seven of the best tools you can use to supercharge your email lists:

1. Sumo

First off, Sumo offers a diverse suite of website growth apps that are incredibly useful for Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO). The ‘Welcome Mat’, for example, can be used to emphasize your value propositions above the fold and inspire more visitors to convert.

You may be thinking; pop-ups are intrusive and have no place in today’s UI-centered world. Fortunately, Sumo’s editor includes stylish design options that can make up for the stolen seconds from your audience’s time.

Apart from the Welcome Mat, you can also take advantage of other list-building features like timed popups, a floating smart bar, and heat map tracking for optimization. Here is a post that expounds what you can do with each feature.

2. Thrive Themes

Using WordPress to kickstart your online presence has its pros and cons. Thanks to the myriad of themes and plugins available from the official repository, anyone can build a professional-looking site from scratch. However, they make it extremely difficult to figure out the right combination of conversions.

Thrive Themes can help you skip the trial and error phase by providing preconfigured setups. Its toolbox includes Thrive Leads, which is equipped with an opt-in form builder, lead management, and split testing functionality.

3. Content Upgrades Pro

Offering opt-in bribes is not a new concept, you just need a careful approach to avoid disrupting your audience’s experience. Content Upgrades Pro is a straightforward WordPress plugin that lets you create captivating ‘fancy boxes’ and popup e-mail forms that work hand in hand.

Here’s how it works: upon visiting a particular page, a compact fancy box appears to make your audience aware of your opt-in bribe. Rather than rudely interrupting their reading experience, the email capture form only appears if they click on the fancy box.

You can learn more about Content Upgrades Pro and its full features by reading this review.

4. Vyper.io

Vyper.io is a more comprehensive lead generation platform that can let you hold social media contests, offer content upgrades, and encourage engagement through gamification. The toolkit’s focal point is generating a viral reaction from the online crowd, which is why the key features are aptly named Viral Contests, Viral Content Upgrades, and Viral Leaderboards.

Unlike most mainstream CRO tools, Vyper.io is one of the choices that offer free trials. Use this to your advantage to determine which plan adequately matches your marketing goals. Of course, you can also refer to software reviews for clearer expectations.

5. OptinMonster

You can’t have a roundup of CRO tools without including good old OptinMonster. It is equipped with everything marketers can ask for in lead generation campaigns – from a drag-and-drop form builder to built-in analytics for optimization.

OptinMonster popups utilize the ‘Exit Intent’ technology to predict the best time to show opt-in forms. To spice things up, you can also take advantage of ‘Monster Effects’ to easily incorporate animations and other visual effects.

Aside from converting more visitors into subscribers, OptinMonster also helps you expedite their journey down the sales funnel. Here is a closer look on the technical know-hows to make the most out of the platform.

6. Rafflecopter

Free downloadable content may appeal to some people, but most online users can’t resist a complete, usable product for the price of none. Rafflecopter allows you to leverage their desire for freebies by launching quick sweepstakes in a few easy steps. All you need to do is choose a theme, fill in the contest details, specify the entry requirements, and monitor your campaign as it goes.

Another advantage of Rafflecopter is that it integrates seamlessly with email services like MailChimp and Aweber. This allows you to save time and focus on more meaningful tasks. If you’re new to hosting online contests, here is an articulate post on Rafflecopter and what you should expect.

7. LeadPages

Lastly, LeadPages is one of the most powerful tools that can help you create beautiful landing pages with ease. It lets you modify and personalize every single element of your page—from buttons to countdown timers—without writing a single line of code.

LeadPages is on par with OptinMonster when it comes to depth. It can help you set popup forms, conduct split testing, incorporate SMS opt-ins, and more. Despite being a lead generation powerhouse, it is surprisingly affordable when compared to the rest of the tools on this list.

Conclusion

The digital age may usher in new communication technologies from time to time, but emails are highly likely to stick around – thanks to their convenience and dependability. Hopefully, the tools above can help you grow your email list and secure your brand’s survival for years to come.

I walked into the shop and there they were. Lining up. Handing over the coupon.

Their expectant faces were hopeful. Maybe this was the moment. Dream realized. Most were sure this was “the” day.

But they all left disappointed. Back to reality.

The chances for success were low. A professional betting man wouldn’t bother paying the price. Despite that they keep hoping for that pay day when their numbers came up.

Winning the lottery is “that” big dream for many.

That quick fix. A solution to their financial desperation. But it rarely is.

The long game

According to Bill Gates “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

Playing the long game is a trait that many can’t sustain. But it is the secret to success.

Having the patience to hang in there and keep strapping yourself in and doing the work. Winning at business and life requires patience. That overnight success is rare. Normally it is decades in the making.

Building life transforming habits grow from patient perseverance.

Patience is boring

Success is a game of patience and whether you are a digital marketer, professional or entrepreneur there are some key activities that are worth investing in.

But they take time.

Social media offered a seeming magical solution to our marketing problems and it sometimes can. But the free lunch is turning into a mandatory paid strategy.

The quick fix of instant traffic can be intoxicating but you need money for that. And many small businesses don’t have that spare cash floating around.

But earning traffic, leads and sales can be done. Winning at business is not a lottery. Designing and building a life worth living and celebrating is not found in a coupon.

The secret to success isn’t a quick fix.

It requires patience. There is no other way. It is essential and often boring.

Here are some skills that you need to learn and persevere with to succeed in a digital world.

Earning authority on search engines

Google doesn’t give your organic search traffic for free.

It comes after months and years of creating great content and making sure it gets discovered. Playing the long game in SEO is essential.

Build a following on social networks

Growing you networks and tribes on social media takes time.

It means you have to engage in continuous marketing. The social networks don’t tolerate silence. Grinding out a big loyal tribe is years in the making.

Growing your email list

An email list isn’t as sexy as SnapChat but it is still one of the best ways to turn your passion into profit.

It means taking the time and the perseverance to learn how to convert traffic and attention into an email list. It means working out how to optimize landing pages, create premium content like ebooks, video, and podcasts.

And……. keep going.

Developing your writing expertise

Learning the art of writing is something that many of us can do but not many of us are prepared to pay the price. Steven King still invests in writing 1,000 words a day, 7 days a week.

The investment means reading books on writing, just reading (a lot) and exercising at the keyboard.

Nurturing your communication competence

Some people make standing on stage look easy.

But I can guarantee you that almost all of them have hired multiple coaches, practiced often and long and spoken for free until they could command a fee. It is not just bullet points on a PowerPoint.

It is many moving parts and skills.

The skills required include movement, breathing, cadence, and storytelling.

Earning entrepreneurial skills

Building a business is for most a journey of ecstasy, graft, and pain.

Often is means making mistakes that don’t kill you and just plain hanging in there. Of going to the office or sitting down and doing the many ordinary things that lead to extraordinary.

It means paying the patience price.

Pain is underestimated

Not many of us learn or grow from comfort.

I don’t. My major transformations, growth, and successes have come from being in a sea of pain. Many of us need to be taken out of their comfort zones to make the necessary changes in our lives.

Growth can come from within or the opportunity is sometimes is forced on us. Sure…..wallow in the torment for a while. We are human. But apply the agony to drive you forward to life-changing action.

It’s our attitude to pain which is key to success.

Success often comes from understanding that “pain is just today’s investment in future success”.

How to Perfect Your Lead Generation Follow-up written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

In this post – 5 Steps to Restart, Recharge and Revive Your Marketing Right Now! – I introduced an aggressive initiative to help any business owner struggling to stay on plan with their marketing for the year. The idea is to take the mid-point of the year and get a fresh restart.

In post #3 of 5, I introduced – How to Use Content to Generate a Steady Flow of Leads

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Today we tackle Step #4 – How to Perfect Your Lead Generation Follow-up

The current infatuation of the internet marketing set is complex automated lead funnels. Go on Facebook, and you’ll likely be hit with ads offering to show you how to make it rain thousands of leads on autopilot.

While I’m not opposed to teaching lead generation techniques, I do think there is an issue with just thinking about the lead funnel as a standalone. After all, you don’t just want leads—you want new and returning customers on a consistent basis.

What you need is a client generation system.

I work with a lot of independent marketing consultants and service professionals, and most of them simply want to work with about ten of the right clients at any given time.

So let’s do some math. Let’s say you have four clients right now, and you would like to get six more. The typical consultant acquires new client by attracting a lead that wants to meet and learn about how you might help them. Let’s say one in four of those meetings turns into a client. (That’s terribly low for the approach we teach, but I’ll use it be conservative.)

With the math above it will take you 24 sales meetings to get the additional six clients needed to fill your practice and meet your revenue objectives. So, in building a lead generation and conversion system, there are two primary questions.

What does it take to get a consistent flow of appointments and how can you convert more appointments to clients. Build a system that does that, and you won’t need to worry about all of the lever pulling elements and moving parts in most lead funnels today.

If you need six clients, build a system that gets you in front of 10-12 qualified prospects, and you’ll land six clients in a matter of weeks, it’s that simple.

Below you’ll find the ten steps involved in creating a customer generation system for your consulting business.

Set a goal for meetings

The very first step is to determine your revenue goal for the year and go backward to determine how many clients you need to reach that goal. Then break it down to determine how many meetings, proposals, and pitches you need to make to hit that goal.

Example:

Goal – $250,000 in revenue in 12 months means that if you sell a $500, $3000, or $5,000 service, you will need either 42, 7, or 4 clients respectively to reach that goal.

$500               $3000                        $5000

X 42 clients    X 7 clients                  X 4

X 12 months X 12 month                X 12 months

From this point, you simply need to factor how many appointments it will take to land one new client, and you’ll have your primary metric – X meeting per month. (You may not know how many meetings, but it’s a number you need to watch and reduce as much as possible – lowering this number is the key to success.)

Narrowly define your ideal client

Back on day one of this little restart adventure I asked you to describe your ideal client.

Of course, it’s my hope that you have a pretty good idea of who makes an ideal client for your business but if not keep this in mind. At first target the group you can help the most, the fastest. The reason I advise focusing on this group is that you’ll probably be able to demonstrate how you can help them easily and by getting quick results, build some raving fans.

For example, as a marketing consultant, I can use a set of tools that can show me how badly a business needs marketing help. It’s a matter of auditing their online presence and matching it with a few other bits of data such as industry and even local reputation or groups they might belong to.

Create your workhorse piece of content

Remember back on day three we talked about producing one piece of content per month, but make it awesome.

Now it’s time to create a valuable piece of content that will resonate with your target audience. Most likely this will come out in the form of a blog post.

You may have some ideas about the kind of content that will attract your target audience if you want to make sure this one piece of content is the workhorse you need for your system, spend some time researching the questions and problems your target audience experiences the most.

You can start with a tool such as keywordtool.io to identify the most frequently asked questions around a subject. Then move to a forum search by typing forum+your keyword topic (this can be an industry, i.e., forum+chiropractor), and you’ll find forums where your target audience hangs out to ask questions and get advice. The data from both of these sources may prove invaluable as you search for hot topics for your blog post.

Finally, when you think you have a couple of solid ideas, take your topics to BuzzSumo, and you’ll discover a list of the most shared content for each theme. You can often use this information to determine a very hot topic and ideas for how you could create an even hotter post on the topic.

Build or buy a list of ideal clients

Once you know who you want to target you can usually buy or rent a list based on demographics and location if you don’t already have a list you’ve collected. You could also append this list with some other elements such as members of an association or community group if want to refine it further. If properly targeted this list doesn’t have to be very large either.

Use this list to build a custom Facebook audience and further create an expanded lookalike audience to increase the number of potential targeted prospects.

Advertise the content and upgrade

Now that you have an audience ready to target you can create Facebook ads driving people to your workhorse piece of content. In fact, if you don’t even want to go to the trouble of creating ads you can simply point to your blog post in a status update and “boost” your post to the custom or lookalike audience you created.

This means the post will show in your timeline and show up as sponsored post in the timelines of those you’ve targeted. It’s standard practice for any content, but make sure your post has a large image that pertains to the topic. This will help it stand out.

The key to making this kind of promotion work as the first step in customer generation is to add what is called a “content upgrade” to the post. (Also covered in great detail on day 3.)

A content upgrade is simply an offer for related, but perhaps a different form of, content made inside the blog post that entices those that visit to exchange an email address to receive the upgraded version of the content as well.

The reason this is such an effective form of list building is that the person responded to your ad in the first place because the specific topic appealed to them. Once they visited and found the content was solid, they are much more inclined to trust you to deliver something even greater.

Your content upgrade can be in the form of a checklist, ebook, or even a video. As you can see this post has a form of content upgrade offer above, but in this case, I’m not asking for any sign-up. Your content upgrade should come with an ask for an email address so that you can respond with more information.

We use the Thrive Leads plugin to create all of our content upgrade and subscriber boxes in our content.

Offer value to those who respond

Once someone responds to your content upgrade offer, simply reach out and offer to provide a valuable service for no charge as a way to demonstrate how great it might be to work with you.

For example, as a marketing consultant, I might use a few tools to run an audit on their online presence and quickly show them a few glaring weaknesses or places where a competitor has apparently invested and is benefitting.

I could even spin up a nice looking report and offer to simply mail this to them with a further offer to sit down with them and go over a plan of action for improving their current marketing situation.

If you’ve targeted and educated your prospect in this manner, then you are no longer creating demand and selling your harvesting demand and teaching.

An example offer might go something like this:

“would you like me to show you why your competitors outrank you and what you can do about it?” –  I’m happy to show you free ranking factors and create a custom plan for you – no cost or obligation.”

Qualify and set appointments

As you deliver value and move to an appointment, you want to make sure that your prospect is fully qualified to move forward with what you are going to propose.

We use a series of “Discovery” forms that help us understand the prospect’s objectives, goals, and potential challenges. This tool not only helps us learn more so we can deliver more, but it also places a hurdle that might not be approached and scaled by someone that’s not serious.

You can do a lot of free consulting if you don’t target and educate properly.

This doesn’t mean you only help those who are ready to buy; it means you only expend the precious time and specific knowledge you have with those who need and appreciate what you have to offer.

As part of this discussion I might add something like:

“Let me warn you,  I can’t help everyone – I can only help people who already have a solid service/product, are looking to increase their online presence and are willing to work hard at getting a return on what I ask them to do.”

Do the research and deliver the value

Once you’ve established a need and qualified for fit, do the research required to over deliver on what you promised as you set the appointment.

Run your reports on their online presence, use one of the many research tools to teach them about trends in their industry, give them a full rundown on their competitors, and map out the priority initiatives you see them needing to address right now.

For me there are two very significant ways to help our clients get more business immediately – increase the number of leads they are converting and do more business with existing customers.

These are the two areas I’ll address to show them how they could get more business now as we go to work on building a steady stream of new leads and clients.

Close the deal

Now you’ve done the research, and so you assume you have all the answers and the entire plan and you’re simply going to “show up and throw up” as I’ve heard more than one sales trainer describe it.

The key to engagement in this form of lead harvesting is to help the prospect tell you in their words what’s wrong and what not fixing it costs them. Get them to dream a bit about where they want to go and what they think it might take to get there before you prescribe anything.

Once you have them engaged in their story, you can start to talk about quick wins they could they could realize if they did one or more of the things you have in your plan – remember now it’s solely based on what they are telling you.

Then you can stretch and talk about more things that could be done long term to get the solid gains over time. This near-term vs. long-term vision is important to help your prospect see the road ahead and how they get both immediate and lasting change from working with you.

If done properly you simply need to ask them if they would like to achieve these kinds of gains from working with you.

While there are a few things you need to get in place initially and few moving parts you’ll want to test and tweak as you go, a customer generating system doesn’t have to be that complex, it simply needs to be based on your overall growth needs and goals.

That’s it for day 4 of Restart – tomorrow I’ll be back to close the entire loop and talk about how to turn those new clients into raving fans by creating an awesome customer experience.

Do you get immensely happy with a certain product or service and immediately want to tell your friend about it? Well, the brand that you recommend is at gains here, as it gets a loyal customer as well as a new potential customer. This is called word-of-mouth marketing and it is considered to be the most trusted form of advertising.

Apart from providing great service, running referral email campaigns can be a great way to generate new leads for your business and grow your email subscribers’ list. A research shows that 89% women consider recommendations from a friend, peer or family member more than those from a brand.

Thus, sending emails to your customers to ask them to refer your brand to their friends, can help you in gaining more customers. A successful referral email campaign will be of help to your business as it does the following:

1. Generates word-of-mouth marketing
2. Increases overall traffic to your website
3. Acquires customers at lower acquisition cost
4. Increases conversion rates among existing users
5. Increases customer engagement

Thinking of putting up a referral program in your next email campaign and need some ideas and inspirations? Monks are here to help you out!

The key areas to focus on

Incentives you offer: Include relevant customized offers and incentives that are beneficial and compelling enough for people to share and engage with. This will boost conversions and participation in your referral email campaign.

Look and feel of the email: Keep the content and design of your email simple yet attractive and convincing for your existing users to share with their peers.

Marketing strategy you use: Target your royal customers and make your program visible. The reference experience must be as smooth as possible, and this can be achieved by placing a clear ‘Refer to a friend’ CTA in the email. Send the referral email once every week to increase engagement and gain more customers.

Interesting Referral Email Examples from Brands

Belk

Belk, the online department store company, offers its customers 3 different exciting offers. The message is clear and concise, followed by a CTA that persuades the viewers to click. Apart from this, the email has a “forward email to a friend” option, followed by social sharing buttons, which widen the horizon for sharing.

Digital Ocean

Digital Ocean, the cloud computing company, has depicted the referral offer with an interesting GIF image. Though the image conveys the message clearly, the text and CTA further elaborate the message. This email makes use of all the elements effectively to make sure the customer clicks.

Gilt

Gilt’s referral email has a clean design and bold CTA. The text ‘$25 For You + $25 For Friends” entices the customers to engage with the email. The $25 double-sided reward is a fair deal for both the referrer and the referee. It has an easy to access navigation menu, app store links, and social sharing buttons, too.

Neiman Marcus

The best thing about this referral email from Neiman Marcus is its imagery, an eye-catching header, and clear sharing instructions. The bold CTA and minimal copy makes it a crisp and concise email.

Wrapping Up

Referral campaigns is an essential tool that helps in increasing conversions, sales, and customer base for your business. Choose the strategy that suits best to your business.

Do you have ideas for interesting referral email campaigns or strategies? Do share them with us!