Back in the day there was a real issue with finding relevant content online. Now our problem is quite the opposite. There is SO much information and entertainment online that it can be hard to find quality content without getting lost in a sea of cat videos or “fake news.”

How can you avoid the content spam and find the truly valuable content to help you do your job more effectively, and to share with your audience? Content curation tools are a great place to start.

First, a quick definition.

What is content curation?

Content curation is the process of sifting through all the various sources of content on the web to compile a list of the most informative or interesting pieces to then share with your target audience.

Content marketing vs. content curation

Content curation is not to be confused with content marketing since it is the process of sharing content from other sources rather than creating and promoting your own content. For example, a social media marketer might curate the best content, or trending content, from other blogs in her industry and then share those articles from her own company’s Twitter account during the day.

Here are a few more ways that marketers can use content curation tools:

• Find the most shared and talked about stories in your industry to get ideas to blog about
• Find top sources to link to in the content you’re writing
• Get inspired by top-performing headlines

7 of the Most Effective Content Curation Tools

While content curation can be fun, without tools to help, it can feel taxing and overwhelming. Luckily, there are lots of great content curation tools out there to help you out and save time! Here are our top seven favorites for you to try out.

#1: Buzzsumo

As a former content and social media marketer, Buzzsumo was a go-to resource of mine to find the most shareable content that resonated with the largest audience. While not your typical content curation tool, Buzzsumo allows you to type in any keyword or domain, and then provides an ordered list of the top shared content around that topic.

For example, when I type in the keyword “self-driving cars” the first article I see is from TechCrunch and has 62K social shares.

Buzzsumo also allows you to sort by date range, content type (guest post, infographics, videos, etc.), set alerts, view backlinks, follow certain authors, and more. Since these articles are being widely shared already, it is a good bet that they are going to resonate with your target audience.

#2: Pocket

Did you know that the average person spends 10 hours a day in front of a screen, according to a study done by Nielsen Company? A large chunk of that time is likely spent browsing the web or scrolling through your social media feeds.

During that screen time you’ll likely come across several relevant articles aligned with your content curation needs. Perhaps you bookmark these or make a mental note to go back to them, but they end up falling off of your radar. Pocket is the perfect tool to prevent this from happening.

Via Geeky Gadgets

Pocket is an app as well as an extension you can add to your browser that will then save articles to read or link to later in one organized location. Pocket allows you to easily tag articles to group relevant topics or themes together. It also includes robust search functionality to easily locate articles in your Pocket account.

#3: Feedly

If you were a fan of Google Reader, Feedly is a great alternative, since it serves as an RSS feed to curate content around specific keywords, topics, domains, etc. You can easily organize content into boards and flag content to read later. Feedly definitely takes the strain out of curating content manually.

While the free edition has support for up to 100 feeds, organization capabilities and the ability to share to various social platforms, the Pro (roughly $5/month) and Team ($18/month) packages offer unlimited feeds, a higher level of support, as well as more robust integrations. Try it for free, and then find the plan that best suits your content curation needs.

#4: Curata

Curata falls into the enterprise category of content curation tools for businesses with more sophisticated curation needs. The power of Curata lies behind the INSPIRE discover and recommendation engine that powers it to find truly customized and quality content to suit your specific needs, based off of the profile that you customize.

Via Curata

The only downfall of Curata is that it is not super wallet-friendly. There is no free version, and the lower plans start as high as $499/month, but hey – if you’ve got the budget and you’re looking for a very robust solution, then it may be the way to go for your complex curating needs. (You can use it for other tasks, like content management and reporting, too.)

#5: Quora

If you’re looking for content that answers niche questions around specific industry-related topics, Quora is the perfect solution. Quora is all about finding the answers to your specific questions with accuracy and efficiency. As their website reads, “Quora has content you will feel good about having read.”

Quora also works as a keyword research tool and is a great place to find question-based keywords to answer with your content.

#6: Scoop.it

Scoop.it is a powerful content creation tool that is also extremely pleasant to use. Scoop.it runs by crawling more than 35 million web pages every day and then organizing content into the most relevant topics. The tool makes it easy to filter, edit, and share out relevant content.

“With an interface that will remind you of Pinterest, Scoop.it aims to make finding relevant, shareable articles simple,” says Mike Templeman at Forbes.

#7: PublishThis

Similar to Curata, PublishThis is an enterprise solution that prides itself on the powerful engine that runs it. PublishThis claims that the content it provides is so powerful that it can lead to 250% more revenue, 5X time savings, 3X the social reach, and 200% more clicks. Sounds pretty good to me!

PublishThis is a one-stop content shop that will automatically curate high-quality, engaging content for you, as well as serve as a platform to organize and share this content to your audience. PublishThis also has powerful API’s to help you share the content to various platforms and applications. The pricing of PublishThis is not made public, but you can request a demo on their website.

These powerful tools are the perfect way to save you time, curate higher-quality content, increase audience engagement, and improve your content sharing efforts with minimal effort on your end. As you can see there are plenty of wonderful options to choose from.

The first Chinese iPhone copy has been released on the same day as the original device. How so? Only if you are using advanced spying skills as Chinese factories do. Or by following 5 simple steps outlined in our blog.

Tool #1: Use URL shortener to discover valuable stats about any site

How? Via goo.gl.
Many people use Google’s URL shortener to generate short links for posting in social media. Not many know though you can use this tool to find the statistics on the clicks and understand which posts that competitors are sharing via their social networks are most effective, and what content in their newsletters is yielding the best engagement.

What to do?
It’s simple. Put the link ID in the place of the asterisk * here goo.gl/#analytics/goo.gl/*/all_time.
For example: https://goo.gl/#analytics/goo.gl/Zg5wE/all_time
As a result, you’ll get the following picture:

Tool #2. Monitor changes on the websites

How? Track changes on the website pages.
The majority of the websites are never static. To increase the conversion, marketers and project managers constantly change their structure, design, the number of fields in the registration form and CTA on the pricing pages.

What to do?
Тools for tracking website page changes are usually used to keep the resource under control. For example, to get alerts about unauthorized changes in the content, to keep the team up to date with these changes or to stay abreast the modifications for the PPC purposes.

However, you can also monitor the changes that take place on your competitors’ sites.

Comparing the changes for the different periods of time, you can track whether the hypothesis is proven, whether the competitors left the changes on the page, returned to the original version or are testing something new.

This tool will help test your hypotheses, develop new ideas and use the methods proven to be workable in your niche.

Tool #3. Look under the hood

How? Find out what technologies they use.

If we can find out what technologies webpages are using that may help us decide what technologies to implement ourselves.

Check out the BuiltWith service that shows you the infrastructure and technology stack a site uses including the advertising services, analytics and tracking services, JavaScript libraries, content delivery networks, and so on.

What to do?
Just go to builtwith.com, and enter the needed URL. In a few seconds you will receive a full list of technologies that your competitor is using to collect leads, get analytics, send mailings, post advertising banners, accept payments, and manage content.

Moreover, you will find the data on the security technologies and website performance that will be useful for both SEO specialist and a programmer.

Tool #4. Find out where and how they advertise

How? Any business plan, marketing plan or advertising strategy involves a competitor analysis. A lot of marketers monitor different sites themselves as well as subscribe to mailings, get into several remarketing lists and check out the competitors’ advertising. Thanks to the WhatRunWhere it can be much easier (though more expensive) to find out what, where and how the competitor’s brand is advertising.

What to do?
Enter your competitor’s domain into the search field, and you will get everything you need.

An advertising geography will show which markets your competitors are actively conquering, and which they’re testing in order to understand its potential. That will definitely help you in drawing up your own PPC strategy.

Also you can find all examples of the competitors’ banners for different periods that could be very useful for assessing the effect. Moreover, you can easily see all landings with links and tags.
Catch up with your rivals, using technologies that make them stronger!

Tool #5. Explore what products are the most popular

How? Use Wanelo. It’s a social network that is rapidly gaining popularity among clothing brands and their customers.

What to do?
Enter the brand’s name in the search field, then go to their page and click on the Trending tab. You will see the most purchased brand products, their prices as well as user comments.

These 5 powerful methods in combination with tools for competitor SEO/PPC research will help you spy on your competitors in the most efficient and complete manner.

Try SE Ranking’s tool for competitor research and get the things going!

Original Source: SE Ranking

In a perfect world, everything would work as intended and all our customers would be happy. However, things do go wrong and as a business it’s important to plan for when issues pop up. That’s why we all have customer service professionals on our team that work with our customers to ensure they are satisfied with our business relationship. But, in a world that’s always striving to be more efficient, how can you reduce issues to save money and make customers even happier? Here are 4 tips to reduce customer service complaints…

1) Offer multiple ways for customers to reach you – One of the keys for minimizing complaints is to make customers happy at the start of the customer service process. This can be accomplished by offering support across multiple channels including phone, email, and live chat. Through these methods, the conversation starts off on a positive foot as it enables your customers to choose their preferred way to speak with you. If you force them to use a single channel, whatever that channel may be, you’re going to have a percentage of your customers that are already unhappy because they are being forced into something that they don’t want to do. Even if it’s just two or three channels, the impact of choice is very powerful with customers.

2) Match the right agents to customers – This is an important tip more companies need to consider. Relationships matter in the business-to-business (B2B) world and your customers value agents who understand their business. For example, assigning a more technical agent to work with an IT company on their email tickets may reduce complaints because they know the agent is qualified to answer their questions. This can build a level of trust that may earn your company more forgiveness should a larger issue occur and can also improve agent efficiency as they become familiar with a customer.

3) Utilize the benefits of customer service technology – If you’re a smaller or mid-sized business, maybe keeping track of issues over email or in a spreadsheet worked in the past. Now, thanks to cloud-based customer service technology, it’s easier than ever to reduce complaints by deploying customer service software. Not only can you use the software to resolve tickets faster (which can reduce negative feedback) but you can also use sophisticated technology such as ticket automation to make sure certain tickets go to certain agents. Instead of having to manually route tickets from IT companies, this can all be done automatically with the right help desk ticketing software.

4) Make the most of your self-service portal – Letting customers answer their own questions on their own time may be the best way to reduce customer complaints. This is where self-service, or creating an online documentation portal, is highly valuable to businesses. If it contains valuable and relevant content, you’ll see an almost immediate drop in customer service complaints after deploying and advertising a self-service portal. Managing a portal is also easier than ever before with many customer service software solutions now including B2B Portal Software.

In short, there are several different methods a company can use to reduce customer service complaints. From being more accessible to matching the right agents to customers, the human element of communication and knowledge is still important. With this said, a larger push has been made in the customer service industry to aid agents with the right technology to not only assist customers more efficiently but also empower them to find their own answers via customer self-service. Customer service teams should always be looking to reduce complaints, and fortunately in this era of technology there are several ways to go about increasing customer satisfaction both now and in the future.

Building and maintain a sales pipeline filled is mandatory to consistently achieving quota. However, sales teams are all too familiar with the quantity and quality lead debate with marketing. Research has shown that as many as 94% of all MQLs will not convert to a customer. But wait, there is hope as predictive analytics offers some hope for sales teams.

The Need for Predictive Analytics in Sales

• There is a tremendous need to optimize the allocation of expensive sales resources –Field Sales people cost approximately $350K per year and SDRs cost $75K
• On average, sales people only spend approximately 20% of their time selling and about the same amount of time performing administrative tasks
• 20% of the leads sent to sales typically produce 80% of revenue while the other 80% of leads burn precious resources
• Only 17% of SDRs achieved 90% of quota in 2016
• More than two-thirds of B2B marketers are not satisfied with how leads are routed
• On average, one out of every four leads is assigned inaccurately
• Most B2B organizations rely on their CRMs standard if-then statements to route leads
• Manual lead assignment is labor-intensive and prone to error

The Business Outcomes Sales Leaders Expect From Predictive Analytics

• Higher win rates, better deal velocity and larger deal size
• Increased revenue in existing markets by growing share of wallet
• Net new revenue from penetrating new markets with existing or new offerings
• Optimized allocation of sales development, inside sales and field sales resources
• Lower expenses by reducing unproductive leads, companies and contacts and better focus

The Predictive Analytics Use Cases for Sales Include:

Account Selection & Territory Planning

• Account selection for territories and sales reps

Effective territory planning is directly correlated to the retention of sales reps, the achievement of quota and companies reaching their financial objectives. However, territory planning is usually suboptimal in most organizations due to lack of data or time, bad habits or a static one shot rather than a fluid process.

Territory planning should result in the equal distribution of opportunity. Some organizations separate existing customer from new and others have a hybrid approach. Regardless, the opportunity to generate revenue in all scenarios should be as equal as possible for all sales reps. And, territories should be defined before the start of the new year and definitely before a sales rep makes their first call.

The more sophisticated sales organizations have evolved their territory planning and account selection beyond basic demographic scoring (revenue, employees, industry and headquarters location). The best-in-class sales organizations establish a profile of their ideal prospects based on firmographics, technographics, triggers and intent to give every rep a fair shot at success.

Driving Revenue Growth

• Create a steady, predictable run rate of qualified sales opportunity
• Deal acceleration by quickly following up and providing the right information at the right time
• Identification and optimization of what customers to upsell or cross sell and what to sell them
• Discovery of accounts that are not currently targeted but demonstrate similar characteristics to prospects that are in the sales pipeline or are customers
• Increase average order values by recommending a higher priced product or additional products or services

Segmentation is at the heart of success for most companies and this is the case for driving revenue growth. Separating prospects and customers into homogeneous segments is crucial to developing and executing sales plays that work. Without segmentation, sales reps tend to gravitate towards chasing elephants as the deals are huge and they only need to close one to make their number. Or, sales reps seek out small accounts with the hypothesis that closing these deals is faster and it is easier to find someone to talk to. The issue with both approaches is that no science has been applied to whether the prospect or customer has a high propensity to derive value from the solution that your organization offers.

Most organizations collect and maintain a lot of data but do not exploit the hidden relationships in the data to gain a competitive advantage. For organizations that have multiple products, predictive analytics can help analyze customers’ spending, usage, and other behavior, leading to efficient cross sales, or selling additional products to current customers.

Predictive analytics can sift through prospect databases to find more customers who share similar profiles to those that became customers. Usually, in real-time, a look-alike segment of companies can be generated for sales to prospect.

Net – Sales Guide to Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics can focus your sales teams on the right accounts and arm your sales reps with sales intelligence to convert prospects to customers. By developing profiles of your ideal customer based on prior conversion data, predictive analytics can help sales teams quickly target the right prospects grow revenue.

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One of the things I hear from sales leaders most often is that their sales force cannot negotiate. It turns out that this is not often true. What is true is that the sales force does not negotiate with their clients. They often do, however, negotiate very effectively with their sales manager.

There is a difference between negotiating and offering a price concession. If you are negotiating, you try to expand the deal and create greater value for both parties. You also trade things that you want for things that your prospective clients want, like extending the life of the contract by years in exchange for a price concession, or building in a price increase later for a concession now. You might also trade for things like aggressive payment terms.

A price concession is something you give for which you get nothing back other than a signed contract. I am not pretending that is not sometimes necessary, nor am I suggesting that it isn’t possible to make a business case for a price concession. That said, there is a negotiation around the concession, and that negotiation takes place between the salesperson and the sales manager.

The client says they want to buy from your company, and they say the only necessary thing is for you to sharpen your pencil. The salesperson runs to the sales manager, excited that they have a deal, and they are prepared to describe in great detail all the reasons that the price concession should be freely granted.

Look, it’s a big logo, and it’s going to look impressive to other prospective clients. This company spends a ton of money in your category, and this will open up future spending. You’ve pursued this client for years, and this is your big chance. Someone else will easily agree to the price they need. It’s getting close to the end of a quarter. This client ensures that the salesperson makes their number, and it helps you, their sales manager, make your number. This is list will grow longer the more you need the deal, and all of these things are likely true.

A salesperson will use all of their sales skills to sell you, their sales manager, and they will explain the value of the deal to you. Some of them, if allowed, will not turn those same skills around and make the case that the client is going to get even greater value. This makes the salesperson a shrewd negotiator, choosing to negotiate with the weaker party, making it more likely that a deal is done.

Your prospective client is obligated to ask, and they are responsible to get the best deal they can for their business. You are responsible for winning profitable business and ensuring that you reach the targets that allow you to execute for your clients. There is no reason to offer a price concession without first negotiating.

The post Your Salespeople Are Shrewd Negotiators appeared first on The Sales Blog.

When it comes to positioning (and getting your message across), most B2B sales organisations face either a crowded or a barren landscape. If you’re in an established market, you need to find a way of standing out from a crowd of competitors, many of whom probably have significant marketing budgets.

If you’re trying to create a new market, you’re faced with the challenge that your target audience may not recognise the category that you’re trying to create, nor regard the challenges you are seeking to address as being relevant to them.

Either way, without a distinctive message delivered in a distinctive manner, you’re going to struggle to break through with your communications…

Crowded markets tend to suffer from a deluge of marketing messages and themes, many of which use similar language, techniques, and tactics. And when every vendor is saying something similar, your audience will probably notice the one that is shouting the loudest with the largest budget.

Nascent markets, on the other hand, can sometimes suffer from a lack of credibility in their early stages of evolution. The challenge here can simply be to draw your potential audience’s attention to the issue, or persuade them why a new and different approach is required.

LEAD WITH THE PROBLEM, NOT THE PRODUCT

But in both cases – and particularly in complex B2B sales – basing a message around product capability tends not to be particularly effective. Whether in established or nascent markets, potential prospects are far more interested in what you can help them achieve than what features or functions your products or services can boast.

This has some important implications: your positioning must be based on a clear understanding of what problems you are best able to solve for your prospects, how they can recognise the symptoms that will cause them to take action, and what their vision of a solution needs to include.

It should be obvious: if you haven’t yet engaged your prospects at the problem level, they are going to struggle to recognise the need to implement any solution, let alone be open to messages about why your product or service might be superior to others.

And if your prospects have already recognised the problem you’ve chosen to target, then it’s critically important that you establish how and why your approach to solving it is distinctively different – long before you start to claim that your approach is better.

DIFFERENT BEFORE BETTER

“Elevate the problem before you promote your solution” and “show how you are different before you prove why you are better” are two critical mantras when it comes to positioning technology-based solutions – and they apply whether you’re selling into mature or nascent markets.

But the nuances need to be different: if you are positioning into an established market and a recognised problem, you should seek to identify and elevate some previously unrecognised or undervalued consequences or implications – in other words, you should seek to solve more profound (and ultimately more valuable) problems than your competitors.

And if you are positioning into a nascent market where you cannot assume that your audience will initially recognise the importance of the problem you seek to solve, you may need to start by drawing your prospect’s attention to some previously unrecognised or misdiagnosed symptoms at the same time as establishing the negative value associated with sticking with the status quo.

CHALLENGING EXISTING PERCEPTIONS

In both cases, your messages must have the effect of challenging existing perceptions, and helping potentially well-qualified prospects to recognise the need for change. In any complex B2B sales environment and in particular where the solution is a discretionary purchase (where the prospect could and often does choose to stick with the status quo), selling is essentially an exercise in change management.

Getting the messaging right is just the first step in successful positioning. I’ve seen too many instances where a piece of provocative content stimulates interest that is then wasted because the sales person can’t wait to promote their solution rather than sticking with the problem and developing the case for change.

CONVERSATIONS ARE CRITICAL

In any complex sale, the subsequent sales conversation has far more ultimate impact than the initial marketing message. No matter how compelling and well-differentiated that core message might be, it will be wasted unless the sales person is able to adapt, tune and tailor the essence of the message to relate to the particular customer’s specific circumstances.

Here’s a simple checklist that might help you ensure that your positioning is enabling you to stand out from the crowd:

• Have you clearly identified the critical problem or problems that can confidently claim to solve better than any other option available to your customers?
• Have you clearly identified the potential symptoms, implications and consequences of those problems?
• Are you able to make a compelling case for change that will persuade your prospects of the need to take action?
• Can you clearly identify the common demographic, technographic, firmographic and situational characteristics of your most promising potential customers?
• Are you able to identify the typical roles you need to be targeting as potential change agents within these target organisations?
• Can you clearly and credibly establish what sets your approach to solving the problem apart from all the options the prospective customer might consider?
• Have you coached, equipped and enabled every member of your sales organisation to adapt, tune and tailor the message to their particular customer’s specific circumstances?
• Are your sales people all able to confidently articulate your uniquely relevant value in the context of each customer’s specific situation?
• Have you managed to avoid over-using the common buzz-words and phrases that are typically associated with your category of solution?
• Can you distil the essence of your differentiated positioning into a short phrase, a single sentence, a short paragraph and a more detailed description?

If you can master all of the above, you’ll be well on your way to mastering successful positioning – and you’ll be initiating many more of the right sort of customer conversations, and generating many more well-qualified sales opportunities.

But if you can’t claim to have addressed all these issues, your current messaging and positioning almost certainly leaves a lot to be desired…

Sale leaders underestimate just how much impact their sales force can have on the execution of their strategy.

If you do not intend to lead with price, competing on price is a change of strategy. “But we are not competing on price,” you say, “We are competing on value.” This may or may not be true, but every time you match a competitor’s price, you have decided to compete on price. More still, every time you beat a competitor’s price to win new business, you are absolutely competing on price—and by doing so, changing your overall strategy.

If your product or service isn’t undeniably the best in the category to the point that it defines that category completely, you cannot compete on product or service. “Our product really is better than our competitor’s,” you say. If you insist. Look, you know far more than I do. That said, almost everyone has a good product or service. If you lead with product, you are selling features and benefits. This means you are selling at too low a level to be compelling, differentiated, or a trusted advisor.

When your salespeople compete on product without that actually being your strategy, they lose because they have decided to change your strategy.

I know, you want your team to compete on value creation. You want them to be consultative, and you want them to be considered trusted advisors, peers of your clients. But when your sales force isn’t equipped to sell value, that’s the same as not having a disruptive, insight-based strategy.

Some portion of your sales force will try to make selling easy by competing on price, when it is not to your advantage to do so, and by expecting the product to sell itself. It is likely that this isn’t  possible in an economy that is commoditizing everything it can.

If you don’t want your sales force to change your strategy, then you cannot be responsible for changing the strategy either. This means you can’t allow your sales force to compete in ways that aren’t aligned with your strategy.

The post The Leadership Playbook: Allowing Your Sales Force to Change Your Strategy appeared first on The Sales Blog.

“In all forms of love we wish to have knowledge of what is loved, not for purposes of power but for the ecstasy of contemplation… This may indeed be made the touchstone of any love that is valuable.”

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“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge. Neither love without knowledge, nor knowledge without love can produce a good life,” the Nobel-winning English polymath Bertrand Russell (May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) wrote in his memoir at the end of a long and intellectually invigorating life — a life the echoes of which reverberate through some of the most defining ideas of our time.

But Russell first formulated this animating ethos in his 1931 treatise The Scientific Outlook (public library). On the surface, this remarkably perceptive and prescient book can appear to be a critique of science, which may seem surprising coming from Russell — in addition to being one of the twentieth century’s most lucid and influential philosophers, he was also a mathematician and logician himself, whose incisive writings on critical thinking and “the will to doubt” have rendered him an enduring patron saint of reason. But beneath such a surface impression is enormous depth of insight and a timeless, increasingly timely clarion call for nuance in distinguishing between the sort of knowledge driven by a greed for power and the higher-order wisdom that makes and keeps us human. In this light, although science is the book’s subject, its object is to examine the most elemental potentialities of the human spirit — our parallel capacities for good and evil — and to illuminate the means by which we can cultivate a nobler and more humane humanity.

Writing in a golden age of science, just as quantum mechanics and relativity were beginning to reconfigure our understanding of reality, yet well before the invention of the atomic bomb shed light on the dark side of science as a tool of power, Russell issues a poignant and prescient admonition about the uses and misuses of science. Reflecting on how these illuminate the largest questions of what it means to be human, he writes:

Science in the course of the few centuries of its history has undergone an internal development which appears to be not yet completed. One may sum up this development as the passage from contemplation to manipulation. The love of knowledge to which the growth of science is due is itself the product of a twofold impulse. We may seek knowledge of an object because we love the object or because we wish to have power over it. The former impulse leads to the kind of knowledge that is contemplative, the latter to the kind that is practical.

[…]

But the desire for knowledge has another form, belonging to an entirely different set of emotions. The mystic, the lover, and the poet are also seekers after knowledge… In all forms of love we wish to have knowledge of what is loved, not for purposes of power but for the ecstasy of contemplation… Wherever there is ecstasy or joy or delight derived from an object there is the desire to know that object — to know it not in the manipulative fashion that consists of turning it into something else, but to know it in the fashion of the beatific vision, because in itself and for itself it sheds happiness upon the lover. This may indeed be made the touchstone of any love that is valuable.

Nineteen years later, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Russell would list this love of power among the four desires driving all human behavior. But despite its hijacking for practical purposes of manipulation, he argues, science in its truest form originates in this wellspring of love for its object. (Many decades later, pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin, who confirmed the existence of dark matter, would echo this notion in a somewhat surprising and rather lovely remark: “I sometimes ask myself whether I would be studying galaxies if they were ugly… I think it may not be irrelevant that galaxies are really very attractive.” And Frida Kahlo would shine a sidewise gleam on the same idea in her exquisite reflection on how love amplifies beauty.)

Nearly a century before astrophysicist Janna Levin depicted science as “a truly human endeavor,” Russell writes:

Science in its beginnings was due to men who were in love with the world. They perceived the beauty of the stars and the sea, of the winds and the mountains. Because they loved them their thoughts dwelt upon them, and they wished to understand them more intimately than a mere outward contemplation made possible. “The world,” said Heraclitus, “is an ever living fire, with measures kindling and measures going out.” Heraclitus and the other Ionian philosophers, from whom came the first impulse to scientific knowledge, felt the strange beauty of the world almost like a madness in the blood. They were men of Titanic passionate intellect, and from the intensity of their intellectual passion the whole movement of the modern world has sprung. But step by step, as science has developed, the impulse of love which gave it birth has been increasingly thwarted, while the impulse of power, which was at first a mere camp-follower, has gradually usurped command in virtue of its unforeseen success. The lover of nature has been baffled, the tyrant over nature has been rewarded.

Russell cautions that this shift from what he calls “love-knowledge” to “power-knowledge” is the single greatest hazard in the future of science, which is implicitly inseparable from the future of humanity. To protect science from such a shift, he suggests, is not only our duty but our only means of protecting us from ourselves. Half a century before Hannah Arendt’s insistence that asking unanswerable questions makes us human, Russell writes:

When science is considered contemplatively, not practically, we find that what we believe, we believe owing to animal faith, and it is only our disbeliefs that are due to science. When, on the other hand, science is considered as a technique for the transformation of ourselves and our environment, it is found to give us a power quite independent of its metaphysical validity. But we can only wield this power by ceasing to ask ourselves metaphysical questions about the nature of reality. Yet these questions are the evidence of a lover’s attitude toward the world. Thus it is only in so far as we renounce the world as its lovers that we can conquer it as its technicians. But this division in the soul is fatal to what is best in man. As soon as the failure of science considered as metaphysics is realized, the power conferred by science as a technique is only obtainable … by the renunciation of love.

Yet Russell is careful to call for the necessary nuance to prevent his central point from being misunderstood or even turned on itself:

It is not knowledge that is the source of these dangers. Knowledge is good and ignorance is evil: to this principle the lover of the world can admit no exception. Nor is it power in and for itself that is the source of danger. What is dangerous is power wielded for the sake of power, not power wielded for the sake of genuine good.

In another passage of astonishing political prescience, Russell writes on the cusp of the Nazis’ rise to power and speaks across the decades to our own time:

The leaders of the modern world are drunk with power: the fact that they can do something that no one previously thought it possible to do is to them a sufficient reason for doing it. Power is not one of the ends of life, but merely a means to other ends, and until men remember the ends that power should subserve, science will not do what it might to minister to the good life. But what then are the ends of life, the reader will say. I do not think that one man has a right to legislate for another on this matter. For each individual the ends of life are those things which he deeply desires, and which if they existed would give him peace. Or, if it be thought that peace is too much to ask this side of the grave, let us say that the ends of life should give delight or joy or ecstasy.

In a sentiment which Kurt Vonnegut would come to echo decades later in his verse about the secret of happiness, Russell adds:

In the conscious desires of the man who seeks power for its own sake there is something dusty: when he has it he wants only more power, and does not find rest in contemplation of what he has. The lover, the poet and the mystic find a fuller satisfaction than the seeker after power can ever know, since they can rest in the object of their love, whereas the seeker after power must be perpetually engaged in some fresh manipulation if he is not to suffer from a sense of emptiness. I think therefore that the satisfactions of the lover, using the word in its broadest sense, exceed the satisfactions of the tyrant, and deserve a higher place among the ends of life.

Looking back on his own life as a lover of the world, Russell reflects on what it would take to harness the power of science for the true ends of the good life:

When I come to die I shall not feel that I have lived in vain. I have seen the earth turn red at evening, the dew sparkling in the morning, and the snow shining under a frosty sun; I have smelt rain after drought, and have heard the stormy Atlantic beat upon the granite shores of Cornwall. Science may bestow these and other joys upon more people than could otherwise enjoy them. If so, its power will be wisely used. But when it takes out of life the moments to which life owes its value, science will not deserve admiration, however cleverly and however elaborately it may lead men among the road to despair. The sphere of values lies outside science, except in so far as science consists in the pursuit of knowledge. Science as the pursuit of power must not obtrude upon the sphere of values, and scientific technique, if it is to enrich human life, must not outweigh the ends which it should serve.

In a passage of especial poignancy in today’s context of a power-greedy government antagonistic to science and reliant on the propaganda of “alternative facts,” Russell adds:

The purpose of government is not merely to afford pleasure to those who govern, but to make life tolerable for those who are governed… It must become an essential part of man’s ethical outlook to realize that the will alone cannot make a good life. Knowing and feeling are equally essential ingredients both in the life of the individual and in that of the community. Knowledge, if it is wide and intimate, brings with it a realization of distant times and places, an awareness that the individual is not omnipotent or all-important…

Seven decades before philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s timeless treatise on the intelligence of the emotions, Russell concludes:

Even more important than knowledge is the life of the emotions. A world without delight and without affection is a world destitute of value. These things the scientific manipulator must remember, and if he does his manipulation may be wholly beneficial. All that is needed is that men should not be so intoxicated by new power as to forget the truths that were familiar to every previous generation. Not all wisdom is new, nor is all folly out of date.

Nearly a century later, The Scientific Outlook remains an immensely insightful read. Complement it with astrophysicist Janna Levin on what motivates scientists and philosopher of science Loren Eiseley on the relationship between nature and human nature, then revisit Russell on freedom of thought, what “the good life” really means, why “fruitful monotony” is essential for happiness, the nature of time, and his remarkable response to a fascist’s provocation.

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By Mark Schaefer

I’ve been immersed in the digital marketing world for many years and if somebody asked me, “what is the number one tip shared about content/social media success” it would be this:

This may seem like simple — even rudimentary — advice, but it’s also quite true. Any communication we put out there today is not just an expression of our brand, it is part of our ongoing war for attention. And to win that war, you better provide extraordinary value.

Can you define precisely HOW you add value? The question may be more complicated than it seems. Here’s some research findings to help you sort it out.

30 ways to create customer value

There was a very fine article in Harvard Business Review by Eric Almquist, John Senior, and Nicolas Bloch of Bain Consulting. In this comprehensive piece, they present a Maslow-style hierarchy of needs as the fundamental attribute of a brand image. The result of decades of research and experience, the authors claim there are 30 different ways a brand can create value:

If you’re looking at this on a smartphone screen this helpful graphic might be hard to read, so I’ve also listed these 30 value factors here:

• Reduces effort
• Avoids hassle
• Reduces Cost
• Quality
• Variety
• Sensory appeal
• Informs
• Saves time
• Simplifies
• Makes money
• Reduce risk
• Organizes
• Connects
• Wellness
• Therapeutic value
• Fun/entertainment
• Attractiveness
• Provides access
• Reduces anxiety
• Rewards me
• Nostalgia
• Design/aesthetics
• Badge value
• Motivation
• Heirloom
• Affiliation/belonging
• Provides hope
• Self-actualization
• Self-transcendence

If you’re like me, you’re probably already scanning though this list to see which of these values might be delivered by your company, product, or content. But it may not be that easy. For example, the authors write:

In our research we don’t accept on its face a consumer’s statement that a certain product attribute is important; instead we explore what underlies that statement. For example, when someone says her bank is “convenient,” its value derives from some combination of the functional elements saves time, avoids hassle, simplifies, and reduces effort. And when the owner of a $10,000 Leica talks about the quality of the product and the pictures it takes, an underlying life-changing element is self-actualization, arising from the pride of owning a camera that famous photographers have used for a century.

Let’s dig a little deeper into how you can use this research for your own company.

More value is better

Bain also did research to see how these value factors correlated to company performance and it had some interesting findings:

A survey confirmed that companies that were identified with more of these values also had better performance (as expressed by a high Net Promoter Score).

Companies that could claim four or more value elements had, on average, three times the NPS of companies that focused on just one customer value, and 20 times the NPS of companies with none. More is clearly better — although it’s obviously unrealistic to try to inject all 30 elements into a product or a service. Even a consumer powerhouse like Apple, one of the best performers studied, scored high on only 11 of the 30 elements. Companies must choose their elements strategically.

A second finding was that companies doing well on multiple elements grow revenue at a faster rate than others. Companies that scored high on four or more value elements had recent revenue growth four times greater than that of companies with only one high score.

Some are more important than others

Across all the industries studied, Bain found that perceived quality affects customer advocacy more than any other element. Products and services must attain a certain minimum level, and no other elements can make up for a significant shortfall on this one.

After quality, the most valuable elements depend on the industry. In food and beverages for example, sensory appeal runs a close second to quality. In consumer banking, provides access and heirloom (a good investment for future generations) are the elements that matter; in fact, heirloom is crucial in financial services generally, because of the connection between money and inheritance. The broad appeal of smartphones stems from how they deliver multiple elements, including reduces effort, saves time, connects, integrates, variety, fun/entertainment, provides access, and organizes. Manufacturers of these products—Apple, Samsung, and LG—got some of the highest value ratings across all companies studied.

Putting this to use

There’s a lot of debate on the web about content quality versus quantity. If you’re trying to drive “traffic,” there could be an argument for quantity, but this research confirms that if you’re trying to drive revenue and success, the focus should be on quality.

Most of the corporate content out there today is utilitarian. I’m guessing if you’re thinking about your own marketing efforts right now, your supporting content is about helping, answering questions, informing, saving time, etc. Is there room for you to maneuver into other, higher-level categories?

Another interesting application might be in your work to become known. If you’ve read my book KNOWN, you know that an essential part of building a personal brand is finding a way to tell your story online in an un-contested “space.” Perhaps you can use this research to find a way to differentiate yourself in your industry. For example, if competitors are creating content that “informs,” can you side-step into other categories? Is there an under-served value in your industry?

I think the way Bain presented “values” is thought-provoking and I hope it has you reflecting on whether you should be creating value … or values. As I looked over the possibilities, I found at least 10 factors that I might be serving through this blog but it made me wonder if my readers feel the same way!

Did you find anything surprising about this list? How does it apply to you?

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world.  Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

Value chart reproduced with permission from Harvard Business Review.

The post The 30 possible ways you can create customer value appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Social media at its inception was the perfect tool for marketers: direct access to their target market, real-time data, and a powerful bullhorn for their messaging. Marketing drove the social vehicle. But today, with the behemoth that social has become (81% of Americans now use it), customer service teams have taken the reins of social.

To help them, a whole new category of social care tools has emerged. Whereas the old marketing tools focused on content but neglected service, each team now has their own platform. Marketers needn’t worry, however: far from stepping on their toes, customer service teams are using theirs to generate immense value for marketers in interesting ways.

Here’s how.

How social care teams build immense value for marketers

1. Additional analytics and customer-care insights

Tracking data is critical to marketing teams, but standard marketing tools lack the ability to track satisfaction scores from within private social channels. Social customer service software bridges that gap and gives them what they need.

One of most valuable features marketing teams gain from customer service’s use of private channels, is the ability through channels such as Twitter DM to measure customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) in real-time. By monitoring real conversations (private or public) that may otherwise be overlooked, customer sentiment can be tracked and measured as it changes, for example, during a campaign or in reaction to a product change. By understanding these raw consumer opinions, marketing teams can shift their messaging to connect with customers on a deeper level.

Social care lets marketers measure CSAT in real-time.

Along with conversation monitoring, these platforms can also capture invaluable product and customer care success data. On Twitter, for example, it’s possible to filter through mountains of Tweets to allow agents to focus on the most critical issues and conversations. Each of these interactions are then followed by automated surveys which translate into detailed analytics on product feedback and social care success.

2. Sewing the seeds of delight and silencing social outbursts

Social care teams can also help marketers protect their brand in the social space by adhering to messaging guidelines laid out in a playbook, created with input from both teams. A playbook allows marketers to ensure that their social teams fully understand the brand’s messaging and are creating the right impressions while they go out and earn thousands upon thousands of additional, well, impressions. And thanks to social care platforms’ analytics tools, marketers can then easily track the workflows, approvals, and communication to ensure consistency and efficiency—an unprecedented bridge between the two departments.

A social care playbook is a bridge between marketing and customer service.

Social care tools also give agents the ability to shift conversations from a public space to private messaging channels, which have surpassed public social networks in terms of consumer preference, according to CBS. In doing so, agents can take their complaints out of the public eye and resolve them. This helps marketers retain public channels for the marketing messages they construct and deflects complaints and dissatisfaction to channels that can allow private, more discreet issue resolution.

3. Peering into the world of dark social

While traditional marketing tools can easily track traffic through a brand’s pages or hashtags, 84% of brand mentions are made on ‘dark’ social channels—private conversations that are difficult to see or find. Social care tools can scan dark social and allow marketers to hear exactly what’s being said about their product behind closed doors. Customer service issues can surface that were otherwise concealed, candid reactions can be assessed, and loyal customers can be scouted who may have otherwise remained hidden from view.

Furthermore, big brands such as Adidas have started using private channels to push their marketing initiatives by finding and engaging with their customers directly. Marketers and care teams can partner to use these channels to push customized services, up-sell offers, or cross-sell products that specifically relate to a consumer without the noise of traditional social. These personalized interactions are a marketer’s dream, creating loyal customers and memorable brand experiences all at once.

Social care teams armed with the right tools are out there increasing brand awareness, improving satisfaction, reducing negative mentions, and surfacing hidden issues and advocates, and marketers more than ever are reaping the benefits. Learn more about how marketing and social care teams avoid collision by working with best-in-class marketing and social care platforms. Read Chapter 1 of our Definitive Guide to Social, Mobile, Customer Service.

The concept of Marketing serving as a Center of Excellence (CoE) within an organization is beginning to see traction. In their recent 2017 Marketing Benchmark Report: Centers of Excellence Key to Boost MarTech Adoption and Maturity, Marketo identified a variety of challenges and opportunities facing marketers that can be more easily overcome when Marketing operates as a CoE. Marketo insists that Marketing organizations must operate as CoEs to eliminate the inefficiencies of being a siloed organization. Recently, the American Marketing Associate declared that “to keep up with marketing’s continuous evolution, companies could get a jump on their competitors by creating a “center of excellence.”

We concur. Marketing CoEs are more than an exercise, they positively impact the bottom line, which is why, back in 2012, we began offering practical advice on how to create a Marketing CoE.

How to Drive Repeatable and Predictable Marketing Performance

A CoE entails more than centralizing your Marketing or consolidating your suppliers. A CoE serves as a way to develop and deploy best practice processes, discover new approaches, and continuously improve the functionality of your operations. In effect, a CoE is at the heart of performance management. At its most fundamental level, a CoE facilitates operational transformation. For Marketing specifically, a CoE provides your company with a way to merge more closely into your markets and make you more relevant to your customers.

Gartner defines “a COE as a physical or virtual center of knowledge concentrating existing expertise and resources in a discipline or capability to attain and sustain world-class performance and value.” Successful CoEs focus on a specific capability in order to optimize internal processes and resources. Marketing CoEs, to use the vernacular of Allocadia, are about more about how you “run” and “do” your Marketing not how you manage your external suppliers and agencies. In essence, a CoE’s primary focus is to push the organization beyond standard performance norms to deliver incremental value.

The broader the processes and resources covered by your Marketing CoE, the greater the potential impact on your organization. As it should. At its best, your Marketing CoE will help you see beyond the four walls of your organization to understand the implications of Marketing for customers and suppliers.

Perfect Your Marketing Performance with a Center of Excellence

Creating a Marketing CoE takes a significant investment of aptitude, time, and assets. Therefore, it is critical to establish clear criteria of success for both the operation of the CoE and its impact on the organization. As much as possible, define success in terms of value to business. Some examples include:

• Enforcing standard processes and best practices to improve time to market by X%, improve customer experience for A by X%, etc.
• Improving employee decision making, competency, and proficiency in X (such as analytics or metrics selection) resulting in Y improvement on time to decision.
• Improving quality in areas such as: quality of new opportunities, quality of the win rate, etc.

Ideally, your CoE would measure its value in terms of positive changes related to performance, productivity, customer value, competitiveness, and cost – all of which are results that should resonate with your C-Suite. Even so, making the decision to pull the trigger and form a CoE should be based on strategic and business improvement outcomes.

Do you need to build a Marketing CoE? If you answer yes to one or more of these three questions, we recommend that you do so.

1. You need to improve specific capabilities for all Marketers that are important to producing mission critical business results (such as growth).
2. You need all your Marketers to have knowledge about a particular area (such as customer experience or customer-centric marketing), and the knowledge is difficult to acquire.
3. Centralized processes would improve performance and quality parameters.

CoEs take care and upkeep. As you can imagine, considerations associated with a CoE include scope, staffing, governance, performance measurement, systems/tools, and of course operating budget. Realistically, you should only undertake the transformation of your Marketing into a CoE when you want:

• Well-orchestrated Marketing strategies based on insights derived from quality data.
• Informal, consistent, customer-centric approach to Marketing and its associated processes.
• Marketing that is aligned with the organization’s outcomes.
• Adoption of specific performance management processes.

When properly implemented, your Marketing CoE should drive repeatable, predictable, and scalable performance. Are you ready for a reorientation to your Marketing? Begin easing into the transformation with this white paper: What You Must Know About Marketing Centers of Excellence: A Why and How Primer.

As a sales professional with any level of experience, there are several mistakes that, once made, turn even a promising sale into an uphill climb. These seven deadly sins of selling are easy to make, even by an experienced professional, so by recognizing the sins, you can create a plan to avoid them so that your future meetings will be more successful.

To help sales professionals, here are the seven deadly sins of sales and how they impact the customer and their willingness to make a commitment to a sale.

1. Wasting the customer’s time

Small talk, repetition, redundancy and “fluff” in the conversation is going to turn off prospective buyers, particularly if you are selling into the C-suite. Keep the sales pitch streamlined and specific to avoid this sin.

2. Not being fully prepared

There is no excuse today with information readily available online and in social media to not be prepared for your customer, the business, and trends in their industry. Of course, you also need to know your product.

3. Telling rather than selling

Selling is about filling a need, solving a problem and creating a benefit in the mind of the customer. Just reciting facts and numbers won’t accomplish this goal.

4. Personal accountability

Take the time to review your sales process and know what you are going to do in the sales meeting. Be accountable to yourself for setting goals and achieving them.

5. Lose faster (Get to Next)

don’t dwell on a point once it is made. Engage the customer or client, explore the possibilities of the product or service as a solution and move on to the next part of the process. Bogging down will lose momentum and interest.

6. Don’t internalize rejection

Avoid feeling personally rejected with a “no.” Instead, look towards the next meeting and plan for a new, creative approach to working with that client based on new information gleaned from this meeting.

7. Close at every customer touch point

Don’t wait until the end to close an order. Close and confirm on all points of agreement as they occur in the meeting and the conversation.

Another key factor to remember is that listening is a critical part of sales. By listening to the customer, you will gain insight into their needs and problems, helping you to avoid several of these deadly sins.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

It’s interesting to see how different sales people and organisations deal with lost deals. In light of the fact that most sales people including me, have an initial engagement to close ratio of less than 50%, meaning we lose more than we win, you’d think there would be more of a focus on understanding the reason for the outcomes of our opportunities. A better understand of why things turned out as they did, more importantly, how to change things to change the outcome moving forward should be of interest to sales types.

Even among those who do have a formal review process, they at times are limited by their scope and process.

A proper review of a loss is not easy, and may in fact be bruising to the rep involved. Which is one reason, I believe, that the rep involved in a lost deal should not be part of the process for loss review, at least not in parts involving the prospect in question. This is not some form of punishment, it is to ensure you get the best feedback for driving change.

Almost always, when you send the rep in to find out why they lost, you get no usable feedback. First off, the prospect, having made their choice has now shifted to implementing what they just bought (from the other guy). The easiest thing is to tell the rep it was price and product related differences. The reps have egos to protect, so what better than having the convenience of having price and product to blame. “See, it’s just as I and the rest of the team have been telling you….”

You really want this guy walking around the sales floor looking good for loosing?

If you are looking for loss reviews to have real meaning and bring change, not only should you have someone else do it, but have a plan and specific areas that you will probe. Depending on the size of your deals and company, your best option is to go with a third part specializing doing post mortems.

One such professional I spoke to, told me that most of the time they uncover things the rep was not even aware of. As you may expect, reps spent their time on the “product selection” elements, even before the prospect(s) were at that stage of their buying process. As a result, the rep was beat long before price and features were even on the table.

In essence, the rep brought nothing new to the discussion, and early in the buying process was relegated to being the “low end benchmark”. As soon as another vendor/rep took the discussion to a direction that had nothing to do with product, but instead, to place that everything to do with the buyers’ objectives, business realities, and impacts they were seeking, the PP rep (Price Product), became the designated low end comparable, which is why he/she was allowed to stick around, and also why you need someone else to do the post mortems.

While you can’t relitigate the deal, you do have to make sure that you get to the core issue(s). On the surface this may seem like it is about why the rep blew it, but it is really about understanding what needs to be different next time. And if the rep objects, you just remind them that in reality, they were a stranger in their own deal to begin with, so it may as well be so in the post mortem, especially if you really want to learn and change.

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The post A Stranger In Your Own Deal? appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

It is time to rethink some major assumptions and turn conventional wisdom on its head when it comes to how buyers and sellers of software approach user adoption. For many years, user adoption was, at best, an after-thought once a system was live. At worst, it was ignored completely. IT departments and executive sponsors were left scratching their heads wondering why the magical benefits they believed the software would deliver never appeared.

Conventional wisdom had led them to believe that if they selected a great product with the right features, trained people on the functionality, communicated ‘What’s In It For Me’, then everything would be fine. Then the ‘If you build it, they will come’ approach repeatedly failed to deliver the software ROI that buyers expected. Customers reduced licenses or churned completely leading to a big ‘ah ha’ moment for the software vendors. SaaS vendors realized they need to proactively support their customers in adopting their software, achieving their business goals, and consequently renewing. Thus, the field of Customer Success (CS) was born.

Adoption: The Critical Path Problem You Need to Solve

At its core, the root-cause problem that most CS teams need to solve is that customers are not effectively accelerating, maximizing, and sustaining full adoption of software within their organizations. If the customers’ users cannot or will not incorporate the use of a given software into their daily work routines, they will not get the value they need. Quite simply:

No Adoption = No Value = No Renewals

CS teams can spend all the time in the world talking about features, roadmaps, strategy and quarterly business reviews (QBRs), but without adoption, this is all moot.

The Challenge: Conventional Wisdom Doesn’t Apply to Adoption!

If you are still following conventional wisdom and focusing on training and traditional change management, your renewals will suffer. User adoption is not a technology issue. It is not a marketing or sales issue. It is not a training issue (though training plays a role). User adoption is a complex organization and people issue. It is a performance issue, dependent on both organizational and individual performance. The old approaches don’t work.

Effective user adoption is about getting people – lots of people – to change their behavior to reliably use your software to do their jobs. It is about coaching them to develop new work habits and to keep them going day, after day, after day. It is about removing the organizational barriers (which often fall outside the users’ control) that prevent them from using your system. And it is about aligning and focusing how different groups use your software to make sure the customer organization is achieving the desired business goals.

The Future: Actionable User Adoption Playbooks

Let me ask you, what have you done to learn about the components and complexities of user adoption? What sources did you consider? How did you determine the actions you would take to drive user adoption? And what made you think these would be effective?

Once you understand that user adoption is a new type of challenge and the old rules don’t apply, you have freed yourself to work with your customer for answers to these questions. Here are 5 suggestions to get you started:

1. Educate on User Adoption Fundamentals
   Chances are high that your customers do not have expertise in user adoption challenges and methods. Educate your customers (and CS staff) on effective user adoption methods so they can spend their time on proven strategies.
2. Provide Your Customers an Adoption Best Practice Playbook
   Make it easy for your customers to proactively drive adoption within their organization. Provide them with the simple, actionable toolkits they need to drive adoption within their organization.
3. Develop a CS Adoption Coaching Capacity and Playbook
   Your CS team needs to guide your customers through the adoption process. Provide your CS team with the training, skills, tools, and plays they need to coach your customers in adopting your software.
4. Start during the Initial Sales Process
   Introduce user adoption plans and actions very early in the sales cycle. Help your customer understand that without fast, effective adoption they will never get the ROI they want. Use your CS services as a competitive sales differentiator to demonstrate how your organization will reduce their risk and improve their ROI
5. Continue Over Time
   Don’t stop at go-live! Focus on sustaining full, effective adoption among your customers’ users over the life of your system. As soon as users stop adopting and getting value, your customer will churn.

Flip The Model

Developing effective, scalable and profitable Customer Success services requires user adoption expertise and new ways of approaching interactions with your customers. Beware of approaches with an over-reliance on marketing, messaging and training. Our organization, Tri Tuns, has had great success in flipping the model for delivering user adoption and customer success services. By fundamentally rethinking how we approach and deliver our services, we have accelerated how we engage with customers to deliver even faster results. As you go forward building your adoption playbooks, I challenge you to identify where you can throw conventional wisdom out the window and develop a new, more effective approach that delivers faster results for you and your customers.

In many ways, the follow-up call can be more challenging than the cold call, and nobody wants to do the cold call. The follow-up is even more challenging than contacting someone who you don’t even know. It’s the follow-up call that really gets a sales cycle rolling. A number of things could be happening with why your lead loses interest. 73% in business-to-business prospects are not sales-ready, and from that 50 % are not ready to buy. 65% of people don’t nurture leads, and for the 35% of salespeople that want to be game changers and actually are trying to nurture leads, follow-up is often more difficult than a cold call.

The client showed interest and now they don’t. How do you get them re-interested? You have to build your credibility, show and prove your commitment to your product/service and ensure you remain at the forefront of the buyers’ perception using all three of these types of follow-up methods.

1. Text: the number one preferred way to follow up is texting. It’s preferred because it’s so easy and so fast. If you’re going to have one contact, the cell phone is it. It’s not their home phone and it’s not their e-mail. Make it a priority to ask, “what’s your cell number?” or even a better way, “where can I text this to you?” It can be a piece of information, a photo—just ask where you could text the data to. Another move is to just ask to take a picture of them with the product and then send it.

I’ve never had a customer deny me a photo of me and them on their phone that I could text back to myself. Try texting data during the sale. When someone is requesting data from you and you text them during the sale the chance of converting them goes up 300%. The cell phone has proven to be the number one tool when following up a potential customer. Make it a priority— your primary focus should be on the text.

2. Email: this is one of my least preferred ways of follow up but it’s still necessary. It’s a lazy follow-up but because everyone has an email address, it’s necessary. People think they follow up because they sent an email. Look, if the email didn’t get to them, you didn’t send it. Remember that saying about when a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there did it make a sound? If you send an email and it goes to spam, nothing happened. Nobody heard anything, the message wasn’t completed, there is no communication, and therefore there is no follow up. I hate emails. You know why? Because I don’t know for sure if they got them which means I’m left in doubt. The reason I follow up is so I can come out of doubt.

Emails are also forgotten very quickly. They get lost. Today I got maybe 60. Who texts me? My friends do. People that are close to me. Who emails me? Everybody. That’s why in an email you need to embed a call to action and a phone number. That number should be your cell, not your office number. This is a huge mistake many people make. People don’t make a call to action, the text is too long, no promises, no big claims, and there is never a cell phone. Know email is weak, it’s lazy, but you got to use it.

3. Phone Calls: this is one of my most preferred ways to follow up. I go through all the same doubts that you do—am I being too persistent, will they answer, will they tell me not to call anymore, or will they deny me. I go through all that—but at least I know I’m talking to someone. If I talk to enough people, I’ll sell something. Where do you call? Call cell first, then office, then home. Who do you call? Everybody.

When I make a call, I actually make 6 or 8 phone calls. When I call a company and ask for Bob and Bob’s not there, I ask for his voicemail. I leave a message and then call the receptionist again and ask who is underneath Bob. She says it’s Jack, then I ask for Jack and get his voicemail. “Hey, Jack I just left a voicemail with Bob and wanted to leave a voicemail with you, here is my number.” Then I go back to the receptionist and ask for who is under Jack. Shelly is. I call her and she finally picks up. It’s the first contact of the day. You see, I don’t just leave messages, I always talk to somebody. Remember to always have a specific reason for calling. Start with “The reason I’m calling is…”. Also, keep it tight—people don’t have all day.

Pound the phone, use email, and text. It’s a three-pronged attack that are the basic building blocks of follow-up. Don’t just use one or two—use all three. If you’d like many more ideas on how to follow up, get on Cardone University. I have awesome tools for you to get those sales that you’re missing right now. The money IS in the follow-up.

Be sure to get some great follow-up tools and more with my Cinco De Mayo Sale!

Be great,

GC

The dreaded inactive account. You call, you email, you text, you send a carrier pigeon and nothing. No response. Aside from singing the chorus to Adele’s “Hello” – “I must have called a thousand times to tell you I’m sorry for everything that I’ve done but when I call you never seem to be home” – on their voicemail, what’s a CSM to do?

Customers disengage for a variety of reasons – changes in company leadership, too long or arduous of an onboarding process, disconnect between what they thought the product did and what it actually does, lack of clear vision on their end as to what success looks like – just to name a few.

Prevention: You’ve probably heard the saying “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” – keep that in mind when it comes to inactive accounts.

• Ensure your sales team is creating solid partnerships. You know the drill here – your product(s) meet actual client needs, setting proper expectations, creating buy-in on as many levels as possible. Any of this left undone by your sales team will need to be picked up by your CS team.

• Ensure your company has relationships across the organization. Having a single point of contact (and therefore failure) at an account is a recipe for disaster. Folks leave organizations or get promoted frequently so having a variety of solid contacts helps to ensure that you don’t find yourself having to go back in and resell your product over and over again.
• Ensure you have a process for solid handoffs – the handoff from sales to CS and the handoff from the decision maker to the implementation team. Things like encouraging the decision maker to identify the right leader, to share his/her vision with the team, or set milestones can help. Continually work across your organization to streamline both the onboarding process as well as your product to increase the chances that customers can get from contract to go-live as quickly and seamlessly as possible.
• Immediately assess what your key stakeholders’ goals are and begin to demonstrate how your product aligns with those goals – aka create value as soon as you can. Along these same lines proactively check in with as many key stakeholders as possible on a regular basis. This allows you to make course corrections, if need be, versus waiting until the point of renewal to find out that there have been challenges.

Identify Disengaged Customers: It’s important to identify when in your customer lifecycle your accounts typically checkout. Maybe they use your product once but don’t return or they seem to disappear after their credit card on file expires or you lose them during onboarding. Understanding when and why they are disengaging can help you to put people, processes, or other corrections in place to proactively mitigate inactive accounts.

Meanwhile, if your team hasn’t already done so, it’s imperative to identify KPIs specific to your product(s) and company that measure client engagement – some may be quantitative data like usage stats, survey results, or number of support tickets and some anecdotal such as executive leadership changes or a looming merger/acquisition. Ultimately, ensure you are capturing and analyzing enough and the right kinds of data to help you identify red flags as quickly as possible. Many companies assign a customer health score to each account. It’s important this score is reassessed frequently, weekly if possible, so that you can catch customers on the path to disengagement immediately and not wait for the next formal QBR, which may be too late.

Strategies for Re-engaging Inactive Accounts:

• Volunteer to help. A common reason for disengaged accounts is overwhelmed customers, who see your product as just one more thing on their already very long to-do list. What can your team do to help breakdown the tasks a customer needs to complete to implement your product? How can you help the client to find success? Even if just small wins. Is there anything you can do for them – maybe manually load some data – to help them see a small level of progress with their implementation? It’s easy to ignore calls and emails when you feel overwhelmed so try to find a way to truly partner with your customers, so they know you are on the field helping them to score a touchdown and not just cheering from the sidelines.
• Get Personal. I believe in regular and frequent communication with customers, especially when there is no response, but there is a balance between appearing almost stalkerish and continuing to demonstrate support in the hope they will re-engage when ready. So you ask them how you can help and no answer. Instead of sending the same “just checking in” email week after week, maybe change up your tactics a bit – ask how their weekend was or if they watched the big playoff game last night. Something you know is interesting and relevant to them can get them talking to you again, so you can crack into what is truly going on and how you can be of assistance. Maybe ask if they will be at an upcoming conference. Think about things that sales folks typically do to get cold leads warm again. Many of their tactics can work in this scenario as well.
• Ask the Sales Team to Step Back in. Speaking of sales, if you have made multiple unsuccessful attempts to re-engage your customer (and make sure at some point you truly do pick up the phone – no Adele singing though), consider getting the salesperson involved. Early on the salesperson may have a stronger relationship as they worked with the account for months or maybe years and you, as the CSM, may have only met the client a few weeks ago. It’s also possible that they may continue to have a stronger relationship with the decision maker as that is the primary person they work with while you spend your days with the implementation team. Sometimes, a quick reach out from the salesperson to a decision maker to check in on something as simple as how they are liking the product is enough to get the decision maker asking some questions to the implementation team and thereby the account resurrects. The salesperson can also be very handy in the case where you may need to go back in and resell the product to an existing account for whatever reason.

And finally – don’t give up on accounts! I often see CSMs lose patience and throw their hands in the air. Remember, clients are working on their timeframes, not ours. They often define success differently than we do, but ultimately our goal should be to help them to reach their goals. They sometimes just need a bit of nudging and love from us in order to do so.

What other tactics have you found to be successful for raising inactive accounts from the dead?

Are you wondering what social selling is and if it works? It’s not a replacement for your sales process – it’s additive. And studies show it’s very effective.

Ask any salesperson and they’ll tell you that selling is becoming even more challenging than just two years ago.

In Jeb Blount’s new book, Sales EQ: How Ultra High Performers Leverage Sales-Specific Emotional Intelligence to Close the Complex Deal he explains that the sales profession is in the midst of a perfect storm.Buyers have more power—more tools, more information, more at stake, and more control over the sales process than at any time in history.

And sellers are coming face to face with a brutal truth: what once gave salespeople a competitive edge like controlling the sales process, product information, and a great pitch—are no longer guarantees of success.

And just to make things more difficult for salespeople, because of a growing array of technologies to avoid marketing messages (caller ID, email spam filters, digital ad blockers, satellite radio, DVRs etc.), the ability to interrupt and get the attention of prospects is rapidly deteriorating.

As a result, the way your customers research purchases and buy has changed:

• 90% of customer buying decisions are starting online. (Forrester)
• 75% of B2B buyers use social media to research vendors. (IDC)
• 57% of the buyer’s journey takes place before a sales professional is involved. (CEB)

So what are the top performing salespeople doing now? Social selling, amongst other things.

Social selling is not social media marketing. It’s an upgrade to your existing sales approach that reaches and engages customers online, providing value and insight during their buying process. It helps to build the personal relationship with the buyer that leads to more sales and revenue.

Jamie Shanks, in his book Social Selling Mastery: Scaling Up Your Sales and Marketing Machine For The Digital Buyer, explains: “Social selling is additive, not a replacement for how your team sells today.”

Buyers who use social media have larger budgets (typically 84% larger than the budgets of buyers who do not use social media according to IDC). But, studies show that the sales world is struggling mightily with the transition to using social media in sales.

Is it a fad? Call it what you like, but it works:

• Social sellers realize a 66% greater quota attainment than those using traditional prospecting techniques (SBI).
• 61% of organizations engaged in social selling report a positive impact on revenue growth (Feedback Systems).
• 74.9% of companies that leverage social selling report increased sales in the following 12 months (Feedback Systems).

To get the social selling ball rolling in your organization, here are some of the key elements to address:

Optimize social media profiles. Do this before you do anything else, otherwise your social selling initiative effort will be wasted. For social selling, a salesperson’s social profile needs to appeal to prospective customers rather than recruiters. It should project an image to buyers of a trusted advisor who can bring fresh insights to their business challenges. Start with your LinkedIn profile and then your Twitter profile (if you’re on Twitter). Bonus tip: get a professional head shot – LinkedIn’s own research shows it’s the most important element of your profile.

Join LinkedIn groups and relevant forums like Quora. Then check out the profiles of your customers and prospects and join the groups they are in. That way you can stay informed of your prospects’ challenges. If you have something valuable to contribute to a discussion, do it. But advance the conversation – don’t be spammy or you’ll be ignored and/or kicked out. Social selling is more about social and less about selling.

Set up social listening alerts. Use Google Alerts and social monitoring tools to notify you of mentions of your customers or issues pertinent to them.

Subscribe to blogs. By reading blogs about your prospect’s world, you’ll have a better idea of what to talk to them about on social media. Then share the articles you think would be particularly interesting to your buyers on LinkedIn, or tweet them out. You can also email your prospect a link to an article they would find helpful (include a personal message). Bonus tip: easily monitor multiple blogs with a free RSS reader like Feedly.com

Seek referrals. Once you’ve identified specific stakeholders you’d like to be introduced to, stop by their LinkedIn profiles and see if you have any connections in common. Then request an introduction from your mutual friend.

Create content. The right content helps spark sales conversations. But in order to succeed, sales teams need to get involved in content development. Content educates buyers with insights that guide their buying decisions.

And with the right content, it works:

• 65% of buyers feel that a vendor’s content has an impact on their final purchase decision to purchase from them (Demand Gen Report).
• Nearly 82% of buyers viewed between five to eight pieces of content from a winning vendor (Demand Gen Report).
• 67% of top-performing sales organizations support their sales enablement efforts with content (Aberdeen Group).

But there’s a catch – your marketing content needs to align with your buyer’s journey so that your prospect will get the right content and the right time. Companies that are able to successfully align their sales and marketing enjoy 19% faster growth and 15% higher profits (SiriusDecisions).

That’s why Jamie Shanks concludes his book Social Selling Mastery with this observation:

“I truly do believe that social selling is simply the by-product of effective sales and marketing integration. I also believe that solving this challenge will become the most important topic for companies over the next five years.”

photo credit: Tom Simpson Kiss by moonlight via photopin (license)

How to Get Referrals from Your Clients (Three “Easy” Steps)

Depending on how much you charge for your services and how many clients you take in at a time, learning how to get referrals could make up a large chunk of your lead generation strategy.

Once you satisfy, even a handful, of your accounts—you could be getting valuable connections.

Knowing how to get referrals is only a part of the picture. Most B2Bs and marketing agencies know to reach out occasionally, but very few have a process set up to automatically extract those warm leads into their contacts.

There is the time investment factor and you don’t want to lose progress if your outreach is working, but the stats could surprise you.

Key Stat: Research giant Nielsen says that people are 4X more likely to buy when something has been referred to them by a friend.

There’s a lot of psychology that goes into the “why” of people suggesting a product or service. Basically, when someone says we should try something it makes us want to try it.

Our post today isn’t about the “why”. We all know it works, but this is more of a “how” resource.

B2B services can be a different animal when it comes to getting a mention. Here’s what we want to go over in a series of helpful steps:

• What you need to do to prepare for referrals.
• Logistics in terms of how to get them (e.g. timing).
• How to set the process up to last.

Boosting Your Clients’ Confidence

People want to talk about your stuff for selfish reasons.

Think about it.

When you’re having a conversation and someone mentions a problem that you know the solution to, you want to tell them. Not necessarily to be helpful (at first), but because you have the answer.

It becomes about helping eventually, but when the light bulb goes off in your head—you’re excited to have something to say. Social currency, proving your value, it’s basic human nature.

Even if what you do solves a problem and your clients have colleagues who could use your services, they may not mention you. Why?

Well, it’s a matter of three things (or steps):

1. Education (how well your clients know what it is you do)
2. How easy it is to suggest your stuff to others
3. Whether or not you asked them to

Step One: Educate Your Clientele

When I started in content marketing, I didn’t know anything.

But I did ask for referrals. I’d send out a quick email with a few of my core services, and every time clients would say, “I didn’t even know you did X.”

It got me some more business from those clients, but it didn’t get me many new clients.

The (Automated) Solution

Doing this through a drip-fed email sequence over the first month of signing a new client will really get the ball rolling towards lots of referrals.

When they see you offer FB ads, and they just had a business luncheon where Jane Doe said they needed to find a person who does just that, you’re one step closer to referrals.

Note: Doing this is especially important for marketing agencies. You probably have drop-down menus on your drop-down menus to show all of your services. Most of your paying customers don’t know the half of what you do—yet.

Step Two: Make It Easy to Refer Your Services

The other major roadblock keeping your happy buyers from suggesting your services is the logistics of doing so.

While natural conversations where your services come up do happen, it’s not that often. So, getting client referrals “out of season” has to be easy enough for your accounts to want to reach out to their colleagues without a clear reason.

The (Automated) Solution

There are a number of ways to make it easy.

• Start a Referral Program: Your services could warrant referrals all on their own, but incentivizing clients into referring their colleagues works well. This subject could warrant an entire post of it’s own (and may one day), but here’s a list (from ReferralCandy) of 47 actual programs in existence to get your brain flowing in the right direction.
• Create a Specific Landing Page: If you want these leads to be a permanent source of business, you have to devote some resources to the strategy. A specific landing page for all referrals is a nice touch to show you mean business. If you really want to get fancy, create a custom page with either the name of your lead and/or your client. (How: When a client says they have a lead, just ask who it is and send them a custom link.) Works like a digital red carpet.
• Have a Scheduling System: Don’t, repeat—do not—ask for a referral only to have to send a “let me check my schedule” message to the new lead. This is an egregious error, especially in the internet age. Use Calendly, or something similar to set up when you’re available and let them choose a time that’s best for them.

Step Three: Asking Them For A Referral

Even if you do everything you can to make it easy for your clients to refer you, they may not pick up what you’re laying down (is that still a phrase people use?).

Anyway—you will have to ask most of your clients, point blank, to tell their friends.

The (Not-So) Automated Solution

We love automation. Just about anything can be automated to a certain extent. If lead generation can be put on autopilot, every aspect of the business could be systematized to a point.

That said, you will get a lot further at times with a personal touch here. I mean, they are your clients.

Here are few best practices to get the most out of it.

• Timing is Important: There is a grace period to asking for referrals. A sweet spot to getting the news to spread. Aim for no later than 30 days after the initial sale. Ideally, your client will have seen some success from your work and still not have lost that warm and fuzzy feeling before what you do becomes the norm. When they expect the results you give, it’s less likely they’ll think about referring you.
• Schedule a Call: I understand this is not going to be possible for everyone. It’s also dependent upon your price to lead numbers. If a couple of leads make your week/month, why wouldn’t you call leads to make referrals happen? It’s the highest level of personalization to call, see how they’re doing and ask for their contacts.
• Follow Up with Email: You probably didn’t win their business on the first cold email and you won’t always get them to comply on the first attempt either. Throw a quick reminder in their inbox. You can mention your first contact, any benefits you offer for successful referrals, and what you’d like them to do (e.g. send a group email, schedule a lunch, or send them to a landing page).

Making The Referrals Last

Keeping the referral train going isn’t just a matter of pragmatics (like the stuff listed above).

There are a couple of “common sense” tips that can help you entice clients to bring their acquaintances into the fold. We’ll leave you with these two thoughts to really build a business of brand loyal customers.

Target Similar Clientele

Picking an industry (or two) where you can focus your efforts isn’t just a good sales tactic, but an overall great way to establish authority in your (for lack of a better word) niche.

You’re not just a marketing agency, you’re the agency that helps [insert your ideal client here] achieve [insert your unique value proposition here]. After a while of helping a similar audience, they’ll not only refer you to colleagues—you’ll be known as the best.

At this point you move from referral lead generation to authority lead generation.

Do a Good Job

There is no substitute for a job well done.

Those who sell well, but don’t yield results will either run out of leads or reputation (whichever comes first). Providing a quality product should be the end game of everyone who owns or runs a business.

Satisfaction of your clients is the only real way to ensure that you’ll have repeat business, let alone referrals. You’re only ready to use any of the tips we’ve offered in this post after you’re already delivering on your promises that you sold current clients.

Without that aspect of the business in full swing, you’re customers will never suggest you to anyone else. So, even if you are running a tight ship, take some time before you run any referral program to make sure you’re over delivering.

If you know that the results could be better, but you’re concentrating on customer acquisition—get off this site and get to work.

“Do what you do so well that they will want to see it again and bring their friends.” – Walt Disney

How do you go about getting referrals? Let us know in the comments below!

Can you spot the two letters in this line destroying the entire sales pitch?

“If your organization needs help managing X, then Y is the perfect solution for you.”

The problematic word is “if.”

When salespeople say “if,” they immediately reveal two things. First, they don’t know something -- and second, they’re going to assume the answer regardless.

Using the above example: What if the organization doesn’t need help managing X or they don’t yet realize that they do? The buyer will tune out everything you say next.

Don’t let your sales pitch fall on deaf ears. Follow these four guidelines to eliminate “if” from your vocabulary and successfully engage your prospects.

1) Replace “if” with when”

With basic pre-call research, you won’t need to make assumptions in the first place.

Jill Rowley, social selling expert, recommends understanding your prospect’s background, role, and company before you make contact.

Read the company’s About page, browse LinkedIn, check them out on Twitter, and see if they’ve published any relevant blog posts.

Use this information to transform “if” statements into “when” statements.

Before: “If your organization … ”

• “ … requires more sophisticated software”
• “ … has more than 50 employees”
• “ … grows any larger”
• “ … needs help managing X, Y, Z”

After: “When your organization … ”

• “ … experiences X pain point, our software can help.”
• “ ... grows beyond 100 employees, our services can help.”
• “ … is hampered by X solution’s inability to do Y, our software can help.”

This simple change communicates to your prospect that you’re actively trying to solve their problems. It also transforms a boring question into a strong, compelling statement.

2) Ask open-ended questions

It’s one thing to address generic issues based on public information. However, some information can’t be found online, such as specific pain points, or how the prospect feels about the solutions they already have in place.

Guessing the answer or making an assumption will likely lead to some major mistakes. In these instances, you need to ask questions to find the right answers.

For example, imagine you said, “If your marketing team has trouble generating cost-effective leads, then HubSpot can really help you because it has … ”

The prospect thinks, “Our team doesn’t have trouble with that, so I don’t need HubSpot.”

You’d be far more successful with an open-ended question like, “What’s your marketing team’s biggest pain point right now?”

The prospect might say, “It’s difficult for us to measure campaign efficacy. We can’t tell how our spend translates to results.”

Once you know that, you can explain how HubSpot helps marketers monitor their entire funnel.

Questions such as, “How does your startup or business currently manage X?” or “Does your organization ever feel frustrated by Y or Z?” allow you to discover the prospect’s specific pain point so that you can build a bridge to the solution.

3) Don’t reference other companies

Another popular sales line is, “If you like X product, then you’ll definitely love our product.”

This is unwise because you’re assuming you understand your customer’s relationship with another company.

If your prospect has a great relationship with that company, you typically won’t convince them to switch.

If your prospect has a negative relationship, and you align yourself with that organization, you’re automatically making your offering less desirable.

Rely on your own merits and demonstrate your core features without mentioning other products or services.

4) Think “How can I help?”

Rhetorical questions like “What if I said…” or “If I were to tell you” make you seem like the stereotypical sleazy salesperson.

You don’t need to use these old, outdated phrases to get the deal done. In fact, those lines are probably hurting your close rate more than they’re helping.

As Smartblogger.com founder Jon Morrow explains, “People can tell whether you care about them or not. Regardless of whether you’re in person, doing a video, or writing a sales letter, they are silently watching to see where your loyalties lie. And if they sense you care more about making the sale than helping find the product or service that’s right for them, they’ll immediately distrust you. So stop trying so hard.”

How do you start a non-sleazy sales conversation? Make helping prospects your number one priority. Don’t focus on the sale, but rather focus on solving problems.

Instead of asking, “What if I said?” think, “How can I help?”

Now that you know why the word “if” is such a sales killer and how to avoid using it, the time has come to put this knowledge to work. Questions? Please leave me a comment below.

Today’s post is by Aram Rasa Taghavi, co-founder of Traena, a learning and development platform that cultivates a culture of accelerated learning at organizations. Follow him on Medium or LinkedIn. For sales leaders, the quality of wonder – defined as “desire or curiosity to know something” –  is the end-all and be-all trait to hire for. If you hire salespeople who are curious, you will organically create an intrinsic culture of learning, with quick and adaptive knowledge acquisition. Why is this desirable? Intuitive teamwork leads to high performance , which results in employees becoming less likely to leave your organization. People...

The numbers in a typical B2B sales cycle are daunting. Imagine taking an average of 84 days to convert leads into opportunities. Then, it’s another 18 days to work these out into deals – and with only a 6% success rate. This is according to research done by Implisit (now under Salesforce).

Consider another study, this time by Harvard University, which says that at least 25% of B2B sales cycles take a minimum of 7 months to close. According to global B2B research firm SiriusDecisions, the typical sales cycle has lengthened by 22% in a span of 5 years because there are more decision-makers involved in the buying process.

Clearly, it pays to be able to accelerate your B2B sales cycle where you can. Here are 7 tried and tested sales tactics that help move prospects down the funnel faster.

Sales Tactics 1: Automate Your Lead Qualification

Lead qualification is a big part of a salesperson’s day to day. Do it right, and you increase your team’s success rate. On the other hand, if you take lead qualification for granted, you end up wasting time on people who aren’t likely to buy.

Case in point, according to MarketingSherpa, B2B marketing teams send 61% of their leads to sales, presumably because they were deemed qualified. Of these, only 27% turn out to be qualified leads.

There is a flaw in the vetting process, and this could be addressed if you automate your lead qualification.

There are several CRM software that can automatically qualify leads. Choose one that allows you to use both lead scoring and lead grading when ranking your leads. Lead grading uses attributes (such as company size, location, etc.) to determine if a lead fits the ideal lead profile. Lead scoring, on the other hand, measures the prospect’s interest through their activity level.

Through better and automated lead qualification, your team can allocate more of their time to likely buyers.

Sales Tactics 2: Track Prospects

Many of today’s effective sales tactics have to do with making the most of your CRM system. Tracking your prospect is one of them. Top CRM systems offer detailed lead tracking and analytics that let you know exactly where your prospect is in the sales funnel. You know which content they’ve visited or downloaded. You know the actions they have taken on your website. You also get an idea of their interests and needs.

Make full use of your CRM’s tracking and analytics feature. Set alerts and have these sent to your phone or desktop. Be ready to step in when your lead is ready to buy. Offer relevant information at the time that they need it.

According to Gartner Research, prospect tracking, along with other automatic lead management features, leads to a minimum of 10% revenue increase in six to nine months. So, stay on top of things and you will see an increase in returns.

Sales Tactics 3: Nurture Leads

The 2013 State of Demand Generation by Salesforce Pardot surveyed 138 B2B companies and 400 B2B buyers regarding their demand generation practices. One of its key findings is that 76% of buyers require different content at different stages of their purchasing process. If you are able to provide this variety of content, then you’re well-equipped in nurturing leads to the point where they become sales-ready leads.

To nurture your leads, offer a variety of content at the different stages of the sales process. Vary what you extend depending on how each lead responds. This way, by the time they reach out to your sales team, they are sales-ready and require less time converting. According to Forrester, an American market research company, companies that employ effective lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads, at 33% less the usual cost.

Sales Tactics 4: Start Relationships, Automatically

Want to speed things up? Then, look at your prospects – wherever they are in the sales funnel – as relationships. Because in relationships, you are always building towards something. Your prospect’s and your own actions are shared step to the next stages of the funnel.

And, don’t worry. It won’t be as tedious as it sounds. Top CRM software features several ways of automating follow-ups and communications. Get this set up, and the rest will follow.

Sales Tactics 5: Automate Follow-Ups

Follow-ups are tedious yet necessary in sales. They make your clients feel important. You’re attentive to them, and always available.

But, can you imagine the amount of follow-ups a salesperson has to do in a day? With several leads in different stages of the buying process, it can be hard to stay on top of things.

This is where follow-up automation comes in. Draft your follow-ups in advance. Have them automatically send at key events of your prospect’s sales cycle. Make full use of the automation features of your CRM, and you lessen the likelihood of sales funnel leaks.

Sales Tactics 6: Check Your Performance Data

Use the reporting feature of your CRM system to keep track of your progress. These reports can pinpoint problem areas in your sales funnel and marketing campaigns. Know where leads are getting stuck. Find out which aspect of your sales process isn’t working as it should. Then, bring out your “tools” to fix the problems.

Sales Tactics 7: Assess The Health of Your Sales Funnel

To a runner who wants to run faster, the first step to better performance is not to go out and train, check the terrain, and buy the best shoes. No. The first thing he should do is check out his health. Is he even fit to run?

This is how you should look at your sales funnel too. Before anything else, assess its health first. Is it even fit to process all your leads successfully? Does it have parts that need fixing?

Sales funnel diagnosis gives you a clear picture of your sales process. Know problem areas and address issues before employing other sales tactics that are supposed to speed up your sales cycle.

As a web developer, graphic designer or any type of business and freelancer, we always looking how we can improve our work, save time and be more efficient. There are solutions on the market that are a game changer, it means that the results we are getting will be excellent and it will look like large teams worked to obtain them, even if behind the project were only 2-3 guys with the right web tools in their hands.

This showcase is made of web tools & services that are generating outstanding results for all of you. You will find different products like WordPress themes, a high-end WP plugin to sign contracts, website builders and other interesting solutions that work.

1. Be Theme

Be Theme is the biggest premium WordPress theme ever. It comes with 250 pre-built gorgeous websites that you can customize, it is fully responsive & retina ready and it can be highly customized in no time, using efficient tools that they’ve implemented. We are talking about two page builders: Muffin Builder 3 and the Visual Composer which is the most respected website builder on the market. This plugins costs $34 and it’s included for free in the theme’s price. Cool, isn’t it? The customization part can continue with the 200+ shortcode generator, with a layout configurator, with the 20 great heading styles and much more. They’ve even included 2 more useful plugins for free: the Layer Slider (worth $18) and the Slider Revolutions (worth $19). Now imagine that the price of this brilliant theme is only $59, with the plugins included, 6 months free support and lifetime updates. Nothing can beat this theme, check the demo and all the features (fully responsive, retina ready, fully compatible with the most popular apps, seo ready and more).

2. ApproveMe

ApproveMe’s WP E-Signature is one of the best ways to get your contracts signed. Their WP E-Signature App isn’t like other contract plugins. First, the number of integrations it has is unmatched. Their plugin works with some of the top software companies like Dropbox, Ninja Forms, WP Forms, Gravity Forms, Formidable, Contact Forms 7, WP Forms, Easy Digital Downloads, and Woocommerce. Yup, all of those and then some. And when it comes to the features, this thing packs a punch. You can automatically send reminders to contracts who haven’t signed, and when they do, you can automate your follow up. Have signed PDFs waiting in your Dropbox at the end of the day rather than moving the files around yourself. Every file that runs through ApproveMe’s WP ESignature plugin is UETA/ESIGN compliant, meaning that your contracts are totally solid. They make sure to stay up-to-date with all of the electronic signing laws around the world. Another great thing about ApproveMe is their pricing structure. They do things a bit differently. Rather than a monthly fee plus a bunch of other unexpected charges throughout the year, ApproveMe has only a one-time cost or a yearly cost. The pricing starts from $177/year and you are getting a bunch of excellent standard features that will help you hit the ground running. Start with a free trial and put the ApproveMe WP E-Signature plugin to work.

3. Xfive

Xfive has more than 10 years experience in delivering successful web development services. It’s a complete agency that is offering a complete range of services like front-end and back-end development services, WordPress, eCommerce, Email, Sketch to HTML, PSD to HTML and everything you may need for your projects. These experts are friendly, transparent and they try to innovate often. Because of that, the results they provide are excellent. If you ask yourself if they can manage your project with great success, have in mind that they’ve worked with all types of company, including Microsoft, eBay and Twitter. If there are questions, you can easily check their FAQ page or message them. Get quote from Xfive and let the experts take care of your projects.

4. IM Creator

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Founded in 1996 and acquired by Amazon in 1999, Alexa.com was the first free traffic measurement service. It also delivers a variety of other traffic analytics.

This 5-part series corrects widespread misinformation about Alexa. It shows you 6 important ways to use its most important metric, traffic rankings.

It covers why the conclusions from these 6 daily-use strategies are not only safe to act upon (contrary to the opinion of the vast majority of Alexa reviews), they are valuable and will help you on a daily basis.

In addition to traffic, other Alexa metrics provide insight into content quality. The combination of traffic insights (“quantity“) and content quality provides an excellent snapshot of sites other than your own. You can also derive useful deductions about who is growing or fading in your niche. All in all, that adds up to a mighty useful, free tool. That said…

Our analysis and conclusions run counter to most of the literature about Alexa.com. So we’ll take a great deal of room to explain and prove, in detail, why Alexa is so useful and reliable. We have attempted to create the ultimate resource in order to…

• reverse the collective impression left by false negative reviews
• show you how to use these tools to derive actionable conclusions.

Why does a mountain of misinformation about Alexa exist? Partly because it is the oldest and most widely used tool of its kind. In Alexa’s case, reviewers correctly mentioned problems, but missed the fact that its early problems did not invalidate its usefulness.

Subsequent reviews were like an echo chamber. The result? Alexa is the most widely misunderstood tool of significant importance. Using it properly gives you an edge over those who shun it for all the wrong reasons.

We only realized how widely and deeply held Alexa myths have become when we intended to update our original Alexa article. We first wrote it in 2005, making a few edits over the years. The essence, though, has remained intact (including our gorgeous 2005 page design! ).

Given the proliferation of negative articles, we decided that this topic (and Alexa itself) deserved a comprehensive review. Rather than update our original page, these comprehensive articles start from scratch, working from the ground up, including coverage of the best two complementary tools, SimilarWeb (“SW”) and SEMrush.

There is no subjective opinion here. The content is based on working with Alexa (vs. actual site traffic stats) for thousands of sites over more than a decade. You will also find an original study that shows how measured traffic correlates with Alexa (and how solopreneurs do, overall).

We hope this comprehensive, data-supported review helps set the Alexa record straight. If you develop the habit of using it (and its 2 “cousins”) correctly, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that it’s “indispensable.” That’s only true, though, if you understand how and when to use it, when to combine results from SW and SEMrush… and when not to use it at all.

The Basics

Alexa’s results are derived from a sampling of tens of millions of Internet users. Every sampling method has its strengths and weaknesses. The biggest example of that…

TV networks spend billions of dollars based upon reports from the Nielsen survey. The results are based on the TV habits of a mere 40,000 households. They do so despite the fact that it’s riddled with flaws, not least of which is its small sample size. They do so because they understand the issues and can still extract a great deal of valuable information.

Serious TV executives recognize the flaws and understand which data becomes invaluable, actionable information. So it is with Alexa (except billions of dollars are not at risk ).

The myth that “Alexa is useless” or “too inaccurate to be useful” starts with how Alexa originally worked. Its data came from tracking users who implemented its toolbar. This led to biased results among niches whose users were more likely to install the toolbar (e.g., tech-savvy users, Internet marketers, etc.).

Alexa has worked in two ways to correct that bias…

1. It improved its algorithm to reduce the gap (several updates over the years)
2. It widened and diversified its base of users, going from 1 toolbar to over 25,000 to billions of data points from a variety of sources – more on this in a moment

Today, its methodology reflects a wide, representative sampling of online traffic.

Despite these improvements, the myths continue to be repeated in new reviews (more in iUrban Myths below).

To use Alexa, click here and enter any domain name.

Alexa returns where that domain name ranks out of the ~30,000,000 sites that it tracks.

For example, as of the date of this report (April 2017), SiteSell.com is the 23,357th most visited site in the world (and 12,021st in the U.S.).

Google’s rank is 1 — the most visited site. 30,000,000 is the worst numeric score possible.

Beyond that, you’ll get a “not enough data” message (see right) which means that there’s no record of traffic to that site from any of the data points in Alexa’s panel.

Important: Alexa delivers your position relative to other sites. It does not deliver an absolute visitor count in its free version. And that’s fine — relative ranking is all that you really need for the common purposes (covered below) that deliver most of its value.

While Alexa is usually useful on its own, you get a more reliable fix on a site’s popularity when used together with the other two free traffic measurement tools (more on that below).

Misinformation You Should Un-Know

Alexa has often been maligned, originally due to its reliance on its browser-based toolbar. The use of one source created bias in websites with visitors who were more likely than average to use the toolbar.

For example, websites where the topic was Internet Marketing (heretofore simply referred to as Internet Marketing sites) had visitors who were more likely to use the toolbar. This caused those sites to receive better rankings (i.e., lower Alexa numbers — the closer to 1, the higher your traffic) since they and their colleagues would be more likely to visit their sites.

In 2008, Alexa/Amazon announced a major overhaul, pulling in more data from a wider and diversified base of users of 25,000 different browser extensions, browser toolbars and plugins.

This corrected much of the previously described bias, as evidenced by immediate changes in the ranking of many sites. Quoting Alexa (full post here)…

Alexa’s traffic data is based on a global panel of people which is a sample of all internet users.

The panel consists of millions of people using toolbars and browser add-ons created by over 25,000 different publishers, including Alexa and Amazon.

The data also includes all traffic to sites which have installed the Alexa Certify code, regardless of whether visitors are using a toolbar or extension.

Since that time, Alexa’s panel of data has constantly shifted and improved over the years. Many of the original 25,000 extensions have been retired, resulting in a 96% decrease in reliance on such data sources.

In talking to Alexa, we found that they now “source data from a large number of 3rd party providers, representing a significant sample of the Internet browsing population.” Alexa goes on to say that they “also have thousands of sites with Alexa’s Certified Pixel on them, allowing us to directly measure a broad spectrum of internet sites.”

They compare the data from a variety of sources in order to detect, normalize, and correct for bias that exists in any individual source. Then, they compare that data to actual metrics from the Certified sites, allowing them to more precisely estimate traffic and engagement.

Site engagement is now also a contributing factor to ranking.

Alexa also crawls the Web and maintains archives of previous crawls. Since 1999, it has been the source of data for the Wayback Machine, a nonprofit (with the same founders) that enables searchers to see archived versions of web pages across time. Alexa continues to supply its crawls to the Internet Archive.

Alexa has also decreased sampling bias algorithmically. More on how Alexa works and derives its traffic reports…

• How are Alexa’s traffic rankings determined? (from Alexa)
• Detailed analysis of Alexa — our own original research here.

This report also covers two other useful, free tools that are similar to Alexa, SimilarWeb and SEMrush.com…

Where Do SimilarWeb and SEMrush Get Their Data From?

SEMrush data is based on the first 100 Google search results found for each keyword in its database. It delivers a good idea of a site’s traffic from searches.

SimilarWeb gathers its data from its crawl of the Internet, internet service providers (ISPs), and from click-stream data from tens of millions of diversified users who have installed their apps across many devices. The ISP data is additional diversification, further reducing risk of bias.

There are no reported issues of significant data bias in these two tools. Because all three tools get their data from different sources (some overlap between Alexa and SW is likely), they are especially useful together when you want higher accuracy.

Despite the improvements to Alexa’s functionality in 2008 and ongoing algorithmic developments, social influence perpetuated out-of-date conclusions. The result?

iUrban Myths

We’ll use the term iUrban Myths when referring to the online equivalent of offline urban myths.

Most recent Alexa reviews quote no hard, original research. Most aggregate information from earlier reviews (which were based on earlier ones, which were based on… well, you see where this is going ).

Naturally, they come to the same conclusions. Alexa has had a hard time shaking the 1990s and 2000s, despite the fact that the original issues were corrected in 2008. Most reviews don’t even mention the diversification of data sources or the use of site engagement.

Even in the pre-2008 years of sampling bias, the first round of Alexa reviews missed some key points. There were valid uses, despite the bias.

Why do we keep finding inaccurate reviews?

Google ranks “authoritative” articles highly. It depends on visitor-generated signals to determine “authority” (e.g., inbound links and hundreds of other off-page/off-site signals). That only works until humans fail to recognize that a report is wrong or out-of-date. So the older, cited articles continue to rank well, together with some well-received new ones.

Google continues the myths because it keeps ranking cited, but faulty, pages highly. There is little that is unknown in this post by Google-famous Matt Cutts in 2006. Pre-2008, the bias had yet to be resolved. However…

1. the drip-drip-drip repetition will prove hard to reverse later
2. everyone has become so habituated to the negative that they fail to mention the positive.

Take a look at the graph from Cutts. He took 2 lessons from the graph…

1. “TV advertising isn’t jolting Ask’s traffic. The biggest spike was when they dropped Jeeves at the end of February.”
2. “There is some serious webmaster skew in the Alexa data. There is no way that I have 1/4th the daily reach of Ask.

He correctly concludes that his site “gets a little boost because tons of SEOs install the Alexa toolbar.” The second is already known — why not simply accept it and remark on the value of what he has learned from Ask:

1. Traffic spiked when Ask dropped Jeeves. But it also came back down to the baseline in the 2 months that followed.
2. TV advertising made no difference.

For someone as interested in search engines as Matt Cutts, that’s useful information.

He can also see that his own traffic had an appreciable jump in mid-April that sustained to mid-May (end of the review period). That’s not useful information for him (since he would use Google Analytics, not Alexa, to get exact numbers for his own site — more on that later). But it IS of value for anyone else who has an interest in the reach of Cutts’ site.

Bottom line: This is an excellent example of social influence. He has been pre-conditioned to report the negative. The value of tracking trend lines for both Ask.com and Cutts is ignored.

Note:

Alexa no longer provides “Reach.” However, you could use “Traffic Rankings” to arrive at all the same conclusions. The point here is how even the knowledgeable can miss what is important, blinded by social influence from seeing the truth.

Another example…

Perhaps the most dramatic myth comes from those who notice that Alexa itself says its results are not reliable for Alexa rankings beyond 100,000 (bottom of this page):

“We do not receive enough data from our sources to make rankings beyond 100,000 statistically meaningful.”

100,000?! That is so much traffic (in 2017) that it’s unattainable for most solopreneurs. Many reviews have concluded, therefore, that virtually every Alexa traffic ranking is meaningless.

We knew that this could not be correct, though, based on our own experience of correlating many thousands of SBI!-built sites’ actual traffic vs. Alexa.

We wondered why Alexa would be so ridiculously conservative about its reliability. At first we reasoned that they were just being very “mathematical,” speaking about the accuracy of any single measurement and applying a strict level of statistical testing.

Techies tend to do that! It drives marketers crazy!

Even then, based on our experience of working this data, it was way too conservative.

Then the answer hit us. They had not updated that note — ever. Sure enough, you will see the same notice about 100,000 from…

• this page in Oct 2014, and

• an earlier version of that page in 2003!

We do not have an earlier version of the page and therefore can’t comment on when this notice first appeared. So we’ll use 2003. Why is their statement way over-conservative for 2017?

As you can see from this Netcraft Web survey, there were only 18,000,000 sites at the time. That is almost 1/10th of the 174,000,000 active sites currently!

Total Traffic, according to Wikipedia (2003-2015) and Cisco (Fig.4 2015-2017) has increased by 145X.

Our experience of 1,000,000 as being reliable is consistent with 2017 data. Alexa was quoting based on 2003!

However, there’s a bigger point.

Reviewers seem pre-conditioned to accept the negative. No one dug to find how Alexa was only comfortable with a level that’s rarely attained. They repeat the reviews that preceded them, which do the same, and so on.

No wonder this iUrban Myth is so resistant to correction. 12 years of mostly negative reviews carved the myths in stone. Alexa’s reputation has suffered from this unusual combination of circumstances.

What’s the most damaging myth that comes out of all this?

Alexa is USELESS because it only pulls data from a single toolbar, resulting in a bias for those niches with a higher-than-normal rate of its use.

Why is it “damaging”? Because of what you miss out on if you believe the articles.

OK, back to the main topic.

“Myth and Miss” Continues…

To recap: the pre-2008 articles and posts that originally focused on the issue of inter-niche bias started the Alexa iUrban Myth. Oft-repeated since then, it persists despite the changes in 2008 and in the years since.

They are dispelled by Alexa here. In addition, respected blog Kissmetrics concluded (April 2012), after a detailed analysis:

In a nutshell, this means that Alexa’s data may not be spot on, but it
does offer some valuable insights into any website you might
need to research without having access to their analytics.

They hit the key points…

1. “may not be spot-on” — good ballpark estimates are all you need
2. “valuable insights” — bingo!
3. it’s for “any website you might need to research.” — i.e., not your own

Despite the occasional voice of clarity from careful thinkers, the majority of new reviews somehow continue the myth and miss the point.

Even before 2008, Alexa was useful for:

1. comparing 2 or more sites from the same niche.
2. checking to see if a site’s traffic is rising or falling.
3. evaluating a site’s commercial potential (e.g., ads, joint ventures, etc.)
4. getting a “quick fix” on any site for any minor reason (e.g., curiosity)
5. seeking potential influencers to build relationships
6. finding super-affiliates

For the latter two purposes, Alexa is “only” a good starting point. If its ranking is high enough to consider more seriously, supplement with SimilarWeb and SEMrush for greater certainty.

Few, unfortunately, understand how valuable Alexa really is.

Those who reach solopreneurs owe it to them to stop the “myth and miss.” Their impact is most visible when reading the misinformed comments in posts about Alexa.

For example, read the comments to the Kissmetrics post. You will see that the level of misinformation is high and repeated, despite having just read the post. A few of them do sound convincing, but are inevitably flawed (e.g., anecdotal, undocumented claims, etc.).

It’s hard to understand how so few experts want to share the valuable utility of this tool with their readers. Here’s one example of a smart blogger…

This review (2017) gave an example of 3 high-traffic websites. It then explained that 1 of the 3 Alexa rankings was off (significantly) compared to the other 2 because it was the only 1 (of the 3) in a niche that was not marketing-savvy (i.e., the other 2 were). It goes on to conclude that:

1. SimilarWeb.com “is more accurate” than Alexa based on that 3-site sample, as well as a second sample of 4 of his own sites (no names, it does not include all his sites).
2. Alexa is “wildly inaccurate” because of the toolbar…“The fact that some sites have accurate data, and others have wildly inaccurate data just makes it near impossible to make decisions using Alexa Traffic Rank as a metric.”
3. He would not use Alexa or SimilarWeb to make any serious decisions because they are just estimates.

However, the review fails to mention that…

1. 1. SimilarWeb gave similar numbers as Alexa. They were higher than Alexa’s for all 3 sites, but all were still within the top 50,000. And they were ranked in the same ranking order as Alexa (including country breakdown).

That’s confirmation of ballpark, which is useful info. And the fact that SimilarWeb, which uses ISPs and other data sources, varied in the same way that Alexa did, raises very different questions that were not addressed. What else could be causing SW and Alexa to act in the same way, given that SW does not use Alexa’s toolbar?

1. It does not report how the 2 “Alexa-biased” domain names compared to each other (I expect that we’d see a better correlation if the niches were more similar than with the third site).
2. Alexa has diversified its app sources greatly — it has not been dependent on one toolbar since 2008. That bias was not proven in the article — contradictory data was ignored.

But readers will remember one line:

“The fact that some sites have accurate data, and others have wildly inaccurate data just makes it near impossible to make decisions using Alexa Traffic Rank as a metric.”

It’s wrong. He didn’t prove it. Remember, the sample size was only 3. Supplementary documentation for the 3 sites (e.g., Google Analytics) would have been nice.

And the other test of 4 sites must be ignored since they are not named. Also, they were chosen from all the sites that he owns (introducing possible selection bias).

Once again this review, like so many others, failed to address the important issues correctly, and arrived at the wrong conclusion.

He did show that Alexa was useful to get a site into a certain ballpark of data and that SW can confirm and add some precision. But he did not mention that.

And once again, the comments were misinformed. They showed a failure by many to understand points as basic as this… ONLY use Alexa and SimilarWeb (and SEMrush) to check the traffic of OTHER sites. Comparing Google Analytics with Alexa (or SW/SEMrush) is apples to oranges.

The author seems to knows his stuff, but fails to draw conclusions about the valuable, useful ways to use Alexa and its “cousins.” Nothing in that post invalidates his conclusions.

I do, of course, agree with its conclusion not to make any “serious decision” — depending on the definition of “serious.” We can agree that we would not buy a website based on these numbers! But that’s not the point of handy, daily-use tools like Alexa.

It’s posts such as that one, published in 2017, that perpetuate the Alexa “Myth and Miss” phenomenon. Folks seem to start with a mindset that they’ll add a new thought to the widely accepted negative view of Alexa. They ignore the data and conclude what they already anticipated.

In other words, social influence keeps this ball rolling.

Anecdote vs. Data

We’ve studied more “actual site traffic vs. Alexa” than any company (except for the obvious BigCo’s). This article is an example. Our report shows, among other things, that…

1. there is a definite correlation of traffic with Alexa’s rankings.
2. the higher the traffic, the more reliable are the rankings.
3. there is increasing “scatter” (unreliability) as traffic decreases.

Scatter tightens as Alexa traffic rankings drop from 2,000,000 to 1,000,000 to 500,000 and so forth. Your site could jump from 10,000,000 to 5,000,000 just by adding a few visits per day. But your site would need to increase by tens of thousands of visitors per day to rise from 100,000 to 50,000. Random deviation creates greater error at high Alexa numbers.

So what? Think “BALLPARK.” Anyone who understands Alexa will not be saying “WOW” about a site with an Alexa ranking of either 5 million or 10 million. Both are in the “Poor” ballpark — we’ll cover the 7 ballparks in Part 2.

Bottom line on bias? The issue of bias existed with Alexa prior to 2008. Even in those early years, though, Alexa was still valuable for the points outlined earlier. Knowing about the bias in favor of Internet marketers allowed users to discount single measurements accordingly. It was still useful to compare two sites in the same niche (whether the niche was Anguilla or SEO). And if an Internet Marketer bragged about his/her site’s Alexa rank, you would simply discount “the Alexa bias bonus.”

Since 2008, this bias no longer exists. Only Alexa can guarantee that it has been eliminated 100%, but it has been reduced algorithmically and by diversifying Alexa’s data sources.

Indirect methods use a large sampling of Internet users. This is the only way to get reasonable estimates of sites that you do not control. Sampling methods introduce bias, and the sampled data requires extrapolations that approximate reality.

It’s important to understand that all indirect methods will be approximations and will have some type of bias based on sampling techniques. Once you understand that, you can deal with it.

No indirect method for traffic determination will ever be as exact as the direct tools such as Google Analytics, or log file analyzers. However, the problem with GA is that you can’t get that data for other people’s sites. The data is private to the site’s owner.

Those who reach solopreneurs need to get these points out to the typical marketer. Based on the low quality of comments to Alexa posts, the literature on Alexa does solopreneurs a disservice.

I encourage colleagues who advise solopreneurs to adjust their advice about how to use these tools. Alexa, SimilarWeb and SEMrush doubtless all have some bias, but that does not invalidate them for certain uses. A simple approach to using 1, 2 or all 3 (depending on the purpose) can provide the info solopreneurs need for useful insights (see the 6 uses above).

That’s the whole point that almost everyone seems to miss. Alexa, SimilarWeb and SEMrush are valuable tools that provide “good enough” traffic estimates for any site.

You can’t use GA to get that data. There are paid tools that provide better data (e.g., Hitwise, Quantcast, comScore), but they cost more than solopreneurs can afford. And they wouldn’t need those tools at all if they knew how to use Alexa, SW and SEMrush.

Other Metrics

Alexa and SimilarWeb provide other useful metrics. Especially useful are the following, added to Alexa in 2009:

Bounce, Time on Site, and Pages per Visit give you an idea of how well visitors receive a site. The lower the bounce, the longer the time on site, and the greater number of pages per visit, the better the site (these are all measures of sticking around to consume more of what you offer).

That means that Alexa has another valuable use…

Compare these metrics for 2 sites in the same niche (e.g., your site and a competitor). You now get a good snapshot of relative quality of content, as well as quantity of traffic.

Other metrics are also available (% traffic from search, country breakdown, top keywords, clickflow, pagespeed, demographics). This takes us beyond the scope of this article.

Remember, these are all indirect, so are good for ballpark estimates when comparing within a niche. Use Google Analytics to get this data for your own site.

From now on, we’ll focus on the most basic and useful metric of all, traffic.
Speaking of traffic and ballparks, we arrive at the next topic… see you in the next article.

We've launched another episode of Sell Like a Human. Who better to have as a guest than the one and only Queen of Sales, Jill Konrath?

Jill offered the Sell Like a Human audience an amazing number of insights and tips in just a 20-minute interview. 

Read on for a compilation of the best ones from the show, and make sure you check out the full interview. You can also subscribe for updates when we release a new episode.

"We were not designed as human beings to live in a digital world." -Jill Konrath http://hubs.ly/H06mC3z0 #SellLikeaHuman Click to Tweet

"What differentiates sellers today is their ability to bring fresh ideas." -Jill Konrath http://hubs.ly/H06mC3z0 #SellLikeaHuman Click to Tweet

"If we want to minimize the work we're doing we can save hours daily by controlling distractions."  -Jill Konrath http://hubs.ly/H06mC3z0 #SellLikeaHuman Click to Tweet

"If everyone takes a look at what they're doing they'll find they're being sucked in." -Jill Konrath http://hubs.ly/H06mC3z0 #SellLikeaHuman Click to Tweet

"We need our best thinking to do our job and distractions are causing us to be twitchy." -Jill Konrath http://hubs.ly/H06mC3z0 #SellLikeaHuman Click to Tweet

"It amazes me that people want their reps to pound the phones. To me, that's an insanity" -Jill Konrath http://hubs.ly/H06mC3z0 #SellLikeaHuman  Click to Tweet

"Sales is not about volume, it's about quality" - Jill Konrath http://hubs.ly/H06mC3z0 #SellLikeaHuman Click to Tweet

"The reality is we're wasting a whole lot of time making bad calls." -Jill Konrath http://hubs.ly/H06mC3z0 #SellLikeaHuman Click to Tweet

"We need to be of value from our prospect's perspective, not from ours." - Jill Konrath http://hubs.ly/H06mC3z0 #SellLikeaHuman Click to Tweet

Those were just a taster of what Jill had to teach us in her episode of Sell Like a Human. Make sure you watch it here for full impact, and subscribe so you can get notified when a new episode is released.

It’s that time of year again. Students and recent graduates are transitioning from the classroom to the boardroom. One year ago, that was me. I’ve rounded up eight apps that will get you in workflow mode in no time, and help you to make the most out of your internship.

Staples

As an intern, it’s critical to know the office supply store that is in closest proximity to your office. Many interns are sent to run last minute errands such as picking up critical office supplies or printing out materials for a big client presentation. Download the Staples app and gain access to free coupons and daily deals. The app will also tell you where your nearest store is located based on your current location and offers one hour pick-up on most items. Plus, you’ll look like a hero to your boss for saving the company money.

Target, Tesco & CVS

Being a human is expensive. Essential purchases such as food, household and personal care items can really add up. Shopping apps like Target, Tesco, and CVS are here to help. Use each app strategically to identify items on special promotion before you enter the store, ensuring you get the best value for money each time you shop. Save a significant amount of money by stocking up on your favorite items while they are on promotion. You’ll thank yourself in the long run.

LinkedIn

Internships are a great opportunity to build your professional network. Get to know your co-workers and don’t be afraid to ask them for help or advice. Connect with them on LinkedIn so that you can build up your professional network and keep in touch for future opportunities after the internship ends.The LinkedIn mobile app makes this easy to do. It’s also a great way to learn what thought leaders in your industry are talking about and learn from other people’s experiences by consuming relevant content. Connecting with your new co-workers on LinkedIn is also a great way to keep in touch after your internship has finished, making it easy to reconnect with them in the future.

Zara

Dressing well can help you feel more confident in your new environment. Zara has a wide range of clothing to suit every office dress code. The Zara app will help you find the perfect work appropriate outfit with trending picks and new arrivals, all while on the go. The retailer even notifies users soon as their highly anticipated sales begin so you can look good and feel good on a tight budget.

USA Today & Euro News

Downloading a credible news app like USA Today or EuroNews will help you keep track of what’s happening around the globe. You’ll appear intelligent and well informed whenever someone brings up current affairs whether it’s by the water cooler, coffee machine or the beer keg.

As an intern, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The best advice I can give is to add value where possible, work hard and remember that you’re there to gain experience and build relationships. Internships are a great way to add experience to your resume, stand out from your peers and may even open the door to your next opportunity. What advice would you offer to anyone interning this summer?

A pushy salesperson isn’t good for anyone.

Sales today is about helping people solve problems like a doctor or a consultant -- not slamming deals like a used car salesman.Social media didn’t exist decades ago, but today, 75% of all B2B buyers (including 84% of C-level and VP-level executives) use social media to research their buying decisions. If you’re consistently too aggressive while closing deals, you’re setting yourself up for bad press and damage to your reputation that can last a long time.

For more advice on closing, check out The GSD Show -- tips for salespeople, by salespeople.

To excel at modern sales, reps have to juggle a multitude of activities -- learning their product, listening actively, handling multiple stakeholders, and mitigating curveballs -- all while remaining professional, helpful, accommodating, and staying in control of the process. Setting the right expectations and helping people are important parts of selling today and will likely grow in importance over the next 20 years.

But wait -- isn’t sales harder this way?

Maybe, but we have no choice. The rules have changed and you have to change with them. The days of taking prospects golfing to close deals are over.

At the same time, you still have to hit your quota. So what happens if your prospects take their sweet time to make a decision or are spending a lot of time in education or exploration mode?

The key is to manage your deals and sales process in a way that helps prospects move along at a steady clip without being a jerk. The seven strategies below help me exceed my number month after month while still being a helpful, consultative sales professional.

1) Manage a broader pipeline with more deals.

Some of your deals will roll to next month, or next year, or not close at all. Accept that as part of the reality of being a salesperson. In an age where strongarming prospects into signing a deal this month is no longer a viable sales strategy, you have to manage a broader, longer-term pipeline so you have enough volume to hit your number.

Part of managing this pipeline is understanding how to manage your prospects. If your prospects need to delay their start date for a short period of time, that’s fine -- but you can’t forecast based on hopes and dreams. Always be as specific as possible when a deal rolls to next month by establishing a specific date and time to follow up. There’s a huge difference between “We’ll start next month” and “We’ll execute the payment link on Thursday, December 17.”

2) Only spend time with prospects who have real business pain.

Good prospects have real business pain. Your job is to help them formulate a good problem definition. Both are necessary for a purchase, and so my priority is finding and defining business pain.

I’m not above saying, “That doesn’t sound like real business pain to me,” to a prospect. After all, it’s more productive for me to offer to stay in touch and periodically send resources to a prospect in education mode if it doesn’t sound like they have thought through what they need. It’s wasteful to spend calories bringing them through the entire sales process, only to have the whole thing go belly-up because their need isn’t acute enough to buy.

But just because your prospect doesn’t fully grasp the pain doesn’t mean there isn’t any. A top salesperson can dig deeper to see if a mere nuisance right now is caused by an underlying problem that will mushroom into something problematic down the road. You are doing your prospect a huge solid if you can help them anticipate future problems.

3) Identify your prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey.

The modern buyer’s journey has three stages (awareness, consideration, and decision), and buyers have three corresponding modes: education mode, evaluation mode, and purchasing mode. If you treat all your prospects like they’re in purchasing mode and try to aggressively close them, you’ll lose deals and waste time.

Instead, learn to diagnose what stage your prospect is in. For example, if they tell you they need to achieve a certain goal by March 2016 and are speaking with reps at three different companies, they’re clearly in the buying stage. But if they’re still researching what could have caused below-average performance in their last fiscal year, it may be too early to present them with product options.

If the prospect isn’t ready to buy, let Marketing work them instead of Sales. Send them information and then drip them free resources through predefined workflows and have them reach out to you with questions. As they educate themselves on their problem, reach out every few weeks or months to stay connected and check on their progress.

4) Create a buying plan with the prospect’s needs in mind.

In my experience, prospects tend to forget that their journey doesn’t end the day they make the purchase. In fact, the hard work has just begun. To help them understand this, a good technique is to start with their business goals and work backwards to the date they’ll need to implement by to see their ideal results.

The most valuable way to approach this exercise is to have your prospects talk through the timeline themselves and supplement their plan with your knowledge. Having them draw conclusions on their own is far more powerful than telling them what you think, even if you’re right.

Remember to always focus on the implementation, not the purchase, and back up the plan with as much data as possible to create a sense of urgency.

5) Expect curveballs.

Some of your deals will inevitably get delayed or fall through altogether, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Don’t get emotional -- understand that at least 10% of people will be irrational or that life will get in the way. I’ve had deals delayed due to car accidents, last-minute vacations, and illness. Eventually, you’ll experience all these things too.

The key is to not get emotional. Many prospects are afraid to call you back when curveballs rear their heads because they don’t want to have a difficult conversation or be strongarmed into doing something they can’t or don’t want to do right now. So always react calmly, and mutually come to next steps with your prospect so they don’t feel attacked.

6) Be comfortable “firing the prospect.”

Know when to say “when.” I’m happy to offer help to any prospect, but it’s illogical to spend a lot of time on a deal that doesn’t exist or is going to be too hard. I’ve had prospects who have asked me for help over five distinct sales pursuits over several years and just can’t pull the trigger. After a certain point, I have to realize that prospects who aren’t ready to buy after multiple sales processes aren’t ever going to be ready, or I’m not the right person for them to work with.

You have to know your own limits for what makes sense -- for me, it’s two sales processes that go nowhere. Whenever this happens, closely review the process to determine what you could have done differently. This way, you’ll learn to spot the signs of a prospect who will forever drag their feet and won't repeat your own mistakes.

7) Ask happy customers for referrals.

Remember when I said earlier that bad actions can destroy your reputation? Your professionalism and excellent sales execution can do exactly the opposite. By leveraging your existing network of customers, you can make future sales easier.

Whether it’s asking your customers to write you LinkedIn recommendations, having them serve as references for prospects, or blogging about your product, your customer base can help you do your job. After all, there’s nothing more valuable to moving a sale along than having someone who’s gone through the exact same process explain how easy it was.

Ultimately, sales is like dating. Ideally, you’ll find a prospect whom you’re a mutual good fit with, and you can close the deal. But if you find a prospect who isn’t ready for you yet, you have a choice. You can force the relationship and have a hard breakup where you’re left with the person you care about bad-mouthing you. Or, you can let the deal go and accept that it’s just timing or other external factors that are off.

Sales is human, but buyer behavior isn’t personal. All too often it can feel that way, but the best sales professionals remember to keep their heads cool so they can be as productive as possible.

The traditional breakup email doesn’t work as well as it used to. Asking if you can close your prospect's file, or if they haven’t responded because they’ve been eaten by a bear, used to be funny and attention-grabbing -- now it's just tired.

I haven’t responded to a single breakup email following the standard format for a couple months. However, I recently got one I replied to immediately. Read on to see what it said and why it worked, as well as a sales email template you can use with your own prospects.

The Breakup Email That Prompted Me to Respond Right Away

Some background: I’d had two calls with this salesperson about her tool. Although it seemed like a good fit, I decided the problem it solved wasn’t high-priority enough right now.

Here’s the breakup email this rep sent me after I told her I wasn’t interested:

I didn’t think twice before hitting “Reply.” And before you think, "Sure, a response is good, but only if it leads to a sale" -- I ended up buying.

Why This Breakup Email Works

Let’s break down why this email is so effective.

First, it plays upon my desire to help. Like most people, I like the boost of doing a good deed. It’s especially hard to reject a direct request when you know the person is trying to get better at their job.

Second, it’s simple. I knew I could help Jordan in under five minutes. The ease of fulfilling an ask is crucial.

Third, it felt genuine. I truly believe Jordan wanted my opinions and would incorporate them into her future conversations with prospects. And since she wasn’t trying to be clever or memorable, this message stood out from most of the other sales emails in my inbox. (I’m typically a fan of sending humorous emails to your prospects, but you need to know when to be serious.)

Fourth, and most importantly, it made me think about the product and why I’d walked away. I had trouble coming up with a valid reason for deciding against buying. The earlier reason -- the pain point wasn’t pressing enough -- no longer felt compelling once I’d typed it out.

Here’s the message I sent Jordan:

Breakup Email Templates

If your prospect has ghosted within the last few weeks, use this template:

If your prospect ghosted sometime this year, use this template:

Does this mean sending this message will automatically convert revive all of your lost deals? Of course not. But even if your prospect responds with some suggestions for making your presentation better or tells you why they went with the competitor, you’ll gain valuable intel on how to win next time.

Plus, you’ll make a name for yourself as a dedicated, thoughtful rep. That specific prospect might not buy from you, but you never know if they’ll refer their friend or come back to you when they start working at a new company.

There’s a disconnect between brand messaging and blog posts. Visit any number of freelancing writing websites and you’ll find a common thread among many of the job postings that are seeking a writer for branded content.

Typically, a job post will lay out a simplified request with a few key points. The writer is asked to type up a certain number of words, include a focus on a specific topic — and that’s about it.

The problem with these posts is obvious — the writer isn’t required to do a lot of research about the brand that will be posting the content. This leads to incredibly generic posts that fail to capture the brand’s message, miss the company’s demographic completely, and fails to gather the type of quality leads the brand needs to generate new sales and develop relationships with loyal customers.

So how do we solve this brand-to-writer disconnect? At Presto Media we focus on the differences between an article versus a campaign.

An article is any piece of content that serves a purpose. An article might educate a reader, entertain them, or provide some other type of insight. A campaign sets out to accomplish a very specific end goal for the brand. That goal may be to sell more product, provide a positive feedback loop for a company’s actions, or develop a stronger relationship with new and returning customers.

So how can a brand create better branded content that resonates when hiring freelance writers? We’ve compiled a list of several simple but effective tips.

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Learn how a brand can create better branded content when hiring freelance writers.
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How to write killer content for a brand’s blog

Explain Your Company Culture Before You Jump Into A Request

Before a blog post can be written for a brand, a writer needs to understand how the company conducts itself, both internally and externally. A job request should include information about the company’s goals, a few examples of the work conducted by the business on a daily basis, and an understanding of what the company plans to accomplish now and in the future.

Provide Writers With An Elevator Pitch

Attempting to explain the entire focus of your company to a freelance writer is going to take time. Instead, write up an elevator pitch that explains the overall operations of your company. Elevator pitches are typically 30 seconds long so keep it short and too the point. If you can’t explain your brand in 30 seconds or less, it might not be the right time to request branded blog posts.

Supply Links To Previously Written Content That Resonated With Your Customers

Don’t grasp at straws with content that lacks focus. If a reader loves one piece of content then jumps to a second article, only to find a completely different kind of focus, you are likely to confuse them about your brand. Instead, have readers check out what your audience has converted because of in the past.

At Presto Media, our content strategists read through a brand’s previous on-site and off-site content to discover the type of content that gains shares, comments, and provide the best calls to action.

Have A Clear End Goal You Can Provide To The Writer

If you run a healthy lifestyle company your end goal is probably to sell more product or services to your customers. If you request an article titled “10 Healthy Foods That Will Boost Your Metabolism” there’s a good chance you sell products based on the post requested. Be sure to define the products you sell and how they apply to the article. A writer can provide stronger sales points in the form of more direct writing if they understand why the article matters to your brand.

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Break your products or services up into brand pillars - three most important things about your brand.
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It’s smart to break your products or services up into brand pillars. These are typically the three most important things about your brand that you know resonates with buyers and provide value. The writer can use these pillars to focus their content on what matters most to your customers.

When a writer understands your end goals they can use sub-headings, bolded content, and other forms of punctuation to call attention to important aspects of the branded content they are creating for your campaign.

Give Examples Of Content You Like

Branded blog content doesn’t have to look completely different than the content you would find on news sites, personal blogs, and other web platforms. In fact, we would argue that your content should feel like something an internet user would want to see in their social feeds and then click on to read and share.

When hiring a freelance writer, provide them with a few examples of the content that resonates with you and your user base. This provides the writer with an understanding of the “voice” you want applied to your article and it helps jumpstart the research phase of their writing request.

By providing content you find truly worthy, it can also give the writer the fuel needed to position your brand’s products above the competition.

Don’t Be Afraid To Request Calls To Action

If a reader stumbles upon your blog there’s a good chance they were already seeking out information about products and services you offer. If a writer provides valuable information that speaks to your demographic, calls to action can help drive sales following brand awareness. Don’t create so many calls to action that you lose sight of the articles focus, but also don’t shy away from asking for the sale. That’s sales 101!!!

Create Truly Unique Content That Stays On Message

An easy trap to fall into as a brand is “doing what works” in the form of repetitive content. Instead, you need to provide truly unique viewpoints and suggestions for each piece of content. This is where a strong campaign strategy is needed. Make sure your writer understands what you have written about in the past, why you are focused on the type of content you need created now, and what you are planning for the future.

Take your customer or potential client on a journey through your branded blog and they are more likely to see your brand as an authority in its respective space, allowing them to make what they believe to be a more educated buying decision.

7 Powerful Ways to Brand Your Blog

This post was written by James Kosur, co-founder and President at Presto Media, a content company that helps publishers, agencies, and brands, develop high-quality content at scale. He has worked in new media for 18 years with an emphasis on content creation, campaign management, and growth hacking.