These days, “talking about our relationship” means more than it used to. Now, it spells game-changing opportunity.

For many, an organization’s relationship with its customers used to be largely limited to the point of sale. Thereafter, contact was a good deal more incidental—maybe a bit of anecdotal feedback or a response to a satisfaction survey, but that was usually it.

Thanks to technology such as connected devices and embedded software, that’s all changed now. Understanding how this technology works as well as its potential can offer your organization both meaningful insight and opportunity.

One Hub: The Internet of Things (IoT)

January’s annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas highlighted the broad potential of products and services related to the Internet of Things (IoT). That’s the Internet-based network of computing devices and sensors embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data and carry out functions based on preprogrammed instructions. As one article detailed, that’s growing to include everything from a bed that automatically adjusts during the night to a “smart” hairbrush that critiques morning grooming technique.

But alongside the new ways users can leverage IoT is the related opportunity for companies providing these products and services—and not just ending at the point of sale. In effect, IoT-connected devices also provide companies with enormous potential regarding product and customer service, greatly boosting interaction and speed of response. (For a piece on how to prepare your customer support team to work with IoT-connected consumers, go here.)

Nor is connectivity limited to basic customer support. Many companies today interact with the customer in many ways, long after the sale is made, collaborating with them on engineer-to-order (ETO), configure-to-order (CTO) or service management processes. Data from connected devices and embedded software enhance these and other opportunities.

Boosting New Product Research and Development

Another advantage from connected devices and embedded software is relates to things yet to come. The IoT can vastly accelerate product research and development. By using sensor, diagnostic and user-interaction data from devices, companies enjoy full product transparency. By seeing how customers are using their products, businesses can quickly update features or adjust future models to better match customer desires and behaviors.

From an anticipatory standpoint, companies can also better predict future consumer preferences. This insight is invaluable – rather than going through tedious trial and error, companies can know in real time what is working and what is not, enabling them to make data-driven decisions and immediately correct or adjust issues. This leads to better product design—both now and in the future.

Marketing and advertising also benefit. With the data from connected devices, companies can better understand and predict customer preferences. Then, rather than creating a general, one-size-fits-all marketing strategy, advertisers and marketers can target individual segments of their customer bases. Instead of flooding all customers with the same offer, marketing teams can create personalized offers geared to attract particular customers.

Privacy—The Elephant in the Room

Understandably, discussion of IoT-related issues brings to mind consumer privacy concerns. Users must willingly supply a fair amount of personal data for these devices to serve their individual needs. And the number of well-publicized hacks in 2016 alone—involving luminaries such as Yahoo and Dropbox—illustrates the very real risk of someone grabbing reams of personal details.

Other concerns go beyond those of the individual user. The move toward universal connection also boosted a surge in the number of distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against businesses in 2016.

But, ironically enough, therein lie other areas of opportunity, as developers look to shore up existing and potential security breaches. For instance, The Norton Core, developed by Symantec, is a router built with IoT in mind, capable of monitoring traffic for unusual activity and able to alert the user of suspected hijacks. This is just one example of new tools that are being deployed to increase security.

A sense of balance is critical. Once adequate security measures are developed and in widespread use, the IoT—and with it, the subsets of connected sensors, devices and embedded software—offers enormous potential for companies to know their customers better. Just as important, companies will be able to be more anticipatory than ever when it comes to staying on top of changing customer satisfaction and preferences.

Selling products on Amazon is a no-brainer. With an estimated 300 million accounts, Amazon is many people’s go-to source for online shopping. This huge e-commerce platform, combined with powerful programs and tools, has made Amazon an attractive and essential market for online sellers. But sellers must consider how they want to sell their products — through Amazon Vendor Central or Amazon Seller Central. Both have advantages and disadvantages that many aren’t aware of, so SEO Inc has taken the time to lay them out for you to help you decide how to best sell your online merchandise.

What’s the Difference Between Amazon Vendor Central and Amazon Seller Central?

When you sell products on Amazon, you will either be an Amazon Seller or an Amazon Vendor. In simple terms, an Amazon seller is a third-party seller to consumers, while an Amazon vendor is a first-party seller to Amazon, which then sells to consumers.

Of course, it isn’t that simple. You can’t simply choose one or the other, even when you’re first launching your Amazon account. There are many more factors that contribute to the differences between vendors and sellers, as well as the reasons why you’d want to choose one over the other. For example, anyone can be an Amazon seller, but to become an Amazon vendor you have to be invited to the program by Amazon.

Read on to learn more distinctions between the two.

All About Amazon Seller Central

If you’re first starting out selling products on Amazon, you will be considered an Amazon seller. You will sell products in Seller Central, otherwise known as the Amazon marketplace. With that status, you gain a host of advantages that help you make the most of your platform and turn a profit.

• Easy to sell. Similar to eBay, all you need to start selling your products is an Amazon account.
• Get paid quickly. Because you are selling directly to consumers, you won’t have to wait as long as you would when waiting on standard payment terms.
• Price and inventory control. You get to set the terms for your prices and storage.

You have the choice to sell on Amazon as an Individual or as a Professional. An Individual seller is recommended when you only have a few items to sell or you only occasionally sell items. A good example of when to use Amazon central seller is when you want to sell an item you no longer use that is in good condition.

There are additional factors to consider as well, such as fees and category limitations. As a Professional seller, you can sell a greater variety of items but you must pay a monthly fee, while as an Individual Amazon seller you pay a fee on each sale. This model is known as “pay as you go.”

Analytics also play a big role for Amazon Seller Central accounts. You gain powerful insights on the best times to sell your items, as well has how much and which of your items to sell. And the info is completely free.

All About Amazon Vendor Central

As stated before, Amazon Vendor Central is by invite only. Once you choose to sell as a vendor, you will face standard pricing terms, meaning each individual sale will be less profitable. The trade off for this, however, is significant — you will theoretically be able make back more than what you’ve lost able because you’re able to sell a large volume of items. With Amazon Vendor Central, you will be selling as a first party distributor and supplier for Amazon, granting you additional exposure and buyer trust.

With Amazon Vendor Central, you also gain access to several other Amazon features that customers take advantage of every day:

• Amazon Vine.
• Subscribe & Save.
• Amazon Marketing Services. (PPC ads)

You’ll also be able to take advantage of more detailed product pages, which can provide more information about your products.

A word about Analytics with Amazon Vendor Central. Unlike when you were an Amazon Seller, you do not get free reports for your Analytics — instead, it is now a paid service that grants you valuable insights into your large volume of product sales.

Bottom line: Move enough product and develop your brand enough, and you could gain the attention of Amazon to declare yourself a vendor. You’ll have challenges to overcome, but chances are if you have the financial savvy to sell items and make a name for yourself, you could be a “prime” candidate to join the A-list of Amazon Vendor Central partners.

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)

There’s one more important factor to consider as an Amazon Seller. Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) is offered as a means of convenience to allow Amazon to store, ship, and handle returns for your products. It also adds extra customer appeal to your store with an eye-catching “Fulfilled by Amazon” label on the product. Your products even become eligible for Amazon Prime and Prime Two-Day Shipping. All you have to do is sign up for it and send your items to one of Amazon’s fulfillment centers.

However, there are downsides. If your items do not sell, you could pay fees to keep them in storage.

Which Should I Choose?

Selling on Amazon isn’t as simple as you’d think. The choice between Amazon Vendor and Seller Central is enough to warrant some major nights spent number-crunching — but for good reason. Both have their advantages and disadvantages to turning a profit.

You can’t deny the flexibility of Amazon Seller Central. Being able to set your own prices and control the flow of items can be an invaluable source of easy cash flow. But the lack of support can be draining, as you’re forced to do everything else yourself.

Amazon Vendor Central is a clear boon to your business in that it takes a lot of the headaches (monitoring prices, staying competitive with competitors, shipping) off you and puts them on Amazon. Some of this is mitigated by Fulfillment by Amazon, but largely Vendor Central takes the brunt of the work. However, you have to then play by Amazon’s stricter set of rules.

No business is the same — only you can know if choosing to be an Amazon Central seller or Vendor distributor will be the right choice. At least now you’ll have a better idea of what to do the day Amazon comes knocking with their vendor invitation.

On Saturday, April 22, Ibbaka partner Steven Forth gave a talk at the New Ventures BC Startup Sprint. Some people are surprised to see pricing as a major theme at a start-up event. The other themes were more predictable: Product Market Fit, The Business Model Canvas, Business Modeling and Talk to Angels—but pricing! Why is New Ventures BC asking early-stage innovators to think about pricing?

There are some who advise early stage companies to worry about product market fit and leave pricing for after they have established a position in the market. Product market fit is, after all, the precursor for everything else. If you don't have a minimum viable product that fits the market then all else is academic—perhaps—but the deferral of pricing is based on a misunderstanding of what is really involved in pricing and setting a pricing strategy.

Some people will tell you that 'the market sets the price' or think of pricing as 'basically just picking a number.' Both of these statements are so simplistic that they might as well be false. The market is reshaped by each new product that enters it, and part of innovation is to think through how your new offer will change the market. Any price is only meaningful in the context of your offer's value, your pricing power, and your pricing strategy.

So the first step in pricing is to understand value. There are a couple of key things to understand about value.

• Value is always for a specific customer, or at most a segment of similar customers. (We will get to what similar means in a moment.)
• Value is relative to the alternative. The customer always has an alternative, even if it is doing nothing, or continuing to do what they are doing now (in fact, this is the most frequent alternative for many innovative new solutions.

There are two main components to value: economic and emotional. New offers have to have both. In general, economic value is more important than emotional value for B2B solutions and emotional value is more important for consumer. But even for B2B solutions, and especially for innovations, an emotional connection with the buyer is critical. 

We are going to go deep into economic value in subsequent posts. So for now, let's suffice to say that you measure your economic value by the impact you have on your customer's business.

• Do you help them to increase revenue? If so, where, how and by how much?
• Do you decrease operating costs? How much and how reliably do you do this?
• Does your solution reduce the need for operating capital? Perhaps, it helps your customer collect accounts payable faster, or accelerates inventory turns.
• Some solutions will help companies reduce capital expenditures, perhaps by making plants more efficient.

The foundation of B2B pricing is understanding your differentiated economic value. Differentiated in that the focus is on what your solution can do that the alternative cannot. Value connects back to segmentation. Finding groups of customers that get value in the same way is the key to market segmentation.

Once you understand value you have to figure out how to track it. What is the unit by which your product or service is consumed that tracks with value. This is your value metric. B2B SaaS and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solutions can create value in many different ways. There are as many value metrics as there are solutions. The key is to understand your key value metric and then track it. When you design your data model, design in value tracking.

A good pricing metric will track the value metric. Pricing innovation is generally the discovery of a new value metric paired with a pricing metric that tracks it. The classic example in B2B SaaS is Google Adwords (which was invented at Idealab and first implemented by Goto.com). The value metric is the click through. This is a better value metric than 'impressions' which is what advertisers used to buy from content publishers. The click indicatessome actual interest on the part of the viewer and interest is what advertisers want. Pay per click is a price metric that tracks interest.

At the beginning, these four simple (but not easy) steps can get you started.

1. Understand the value you provide to a specific groups of customers relative to their alternative solution.
2. Segment your market by finding groups of customers that get value in the same way.
3. Identify the value metric that best tracks how customers get value (customers in the same segment will have the same value metric, by definition).
4. Find a pricing metric that tracks the value metric.
   (Note: you need to code the variables in your value metric and your pricing metric into your data model. Doing so will let you tune your pricing later to make sure that your pricing encourages your customers to get value from your solution.)

Get these four steps right and you will be well prepared when it comes to choosing a pricing strategy, enhancing your pricing power, designing your pricing model and building it into a pricing architecture and to then test and optimize your pricing in the market.

Want to learn more? You can see the presentation from New Ventures British Columbia here. Or contact us, and we will make sure you get off on the right track. Contact info@ibbaka.com.

I recently had a prospective client describe the foundation of his marketing strategy as “developing an awesome viral video.” He said this video will “garner so much attention that it will drive enormous traffic to my website and trigger massive purchase intent for our product.” As an example, he cited the highly-publicized success story of Dollar Shave Club, asserting that the meteoric rise of their brand was due to their clever promotional video, which went viral and to date has received nearly 25 million views. However, he failed to acknowledge that Dollar Shave Club spent over $80 million on advertising in 2016 – which might also have a little bit to do with their “overnight” success. Rather than engage him in a debate on the finer points of integrated marketing strategy, I decided to agree with him. The use of video had a transformational impact for Dollar Shave Club. It helped them launch their brand story and execute their strategy to disrupt and shake up what had been a sleepy and stodgy category.

“Viral video” is a marketing buzz word that is bantered around a lot these days. Everyone wants one but they’re not exactly sure how to produce it. So, what exactly constitutes a viral video? How many views does it need to be considered viral? What ingredients does it take to “go viral”?

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“A guide for creating a successful viral campaign is as effective as a tutorial on how to win the lottery.”

— Christian Haas, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners

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Now, if we had the secret recipe for creating viral videos, we probably wouldn’t be writing this blog post right now! The purpose of this post is not to reveal the secrets of producing a viral video. Rather, it is to convince you of the importance of video as a vehicle to help you transform your marketing, even if your videos never go viral.

Launching a high impact brand story previously relied heavily on distribution through broad reach media, like TV, and focusing on high production value methods, materials, and stagecraft skills. These days, however, online video is king and every kid with an iPhone can go toe-to-toe with a Clio award-winning ad agency.

Looking at this through TopRight’s lens of simplicity, clarity, and alignment, here are a few tips to help you get started with video marketing.

1. Keep it Simple with Explainer Videos

One of the best approaches to get started marketing your products or services is to make an explainer video. An explainer video simply describes who you are, what your story is, and what you offer to your target customers. If you want to amp it up a bit, you can also introduce animation to help demonstrate your product or service in action. Animation gives you the freedom to show things that might not work well with live-action, such as oversaturated colors, big exaggerated movements, and, of course, the integration of symbols to help simplify complex ideas to better engage your audience without putting them to sleep! Explainer videos also share well on social media because of their entertaining and educational nature. When done right, they shouldn’t feel like a sales pitch. If your audience feels like they want to be part of your story, they will be motivated to share with others.

2. Give Your Audience a Clear Reason to Care, Watch and Engage

Your target customers have a lot of other salespeople and marketers vying for their attention. They are constantly bombarded with sales pitches, white papers, infographics, free trials – a never-ending litany of offers. Those things take time to read, and they’re rarely enjoyable. As marketers, oftentimes we are so eager to push messaging at our prospects that we fail to give them sufficient reason to care about, let alone engage with, our brand. Transformative marketers create content as if they were presenting a gift to a friend – generously giving to the audience without necessarily asking for something in return. Video is the perfect medium for delivering that kind of gift. It enables you to tell your brand story quickly and help the audience to envision themselves as part of that story — which is tough to accomplish with text alone. Further, with video, you can trigger emotion, connect with your viewers and clearly measure their interactions in ways that are impossible with written word. And of course, it always helps if you can work in a little humor. It may only be five seconds long, but this dramatic clip of a shocked chipmunk still makes us chuckle.

3. Align Audience Attention on a Specific Call-to-Action

It may be the cinematographer’s favorite transition, but for your marketing video, you should never fade-to-black. If your audience has watched to the end of a video, don’t leave them with a blank screen. Focus their attention on a specific call to action pointing to related videos, stories, research, or white papers. Fading to black is a way of insinuating closure, or an ending, and while that works great on the big screen, you never want prospective clients to think of your message as final. Instead, you want to make potential customers curious or excited about engaging with you. Make the last frame of your video something bright and vivid, with the correct branding and contact info, so that even if their attention wanes and they focus on something else, people still see contact information when they revisit their screen or browser tab. This may seem obvious, but make sure to flash your contact info, especially your URL, throughout your promotional explainer video as well as at the end. Don’t make the mistake of assuming your audience is watching your video on your website or your YouTube channel. The idea behind video marketing is social sharing, so always assume that someone has stumbled upon your brand’s video without ever having heard of you before. Present your website address a minimum of three times to help with memorization.

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“Viral videos aren’t just about being funny. They’re about identity creation.”

— Ricky Van Veen, Co-Founder of CollegeHumor and Head of Global Creative Strategy for Facebook

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In the end, none of these tips will help if you don’t do your homework. Make sure to look at video trends across your industry and see what is engaging people in your category. Research the viewing habits of your target audience and be sure to tailor your content to their specific needs and interests. Most importantly, keep a close eye on the analytics of your own video content so you can see what works and what doesn’t, then make better content and production plans for future videos based on your findings.

Learn more about how to harness the power of the six-second story in your video marketing to engage prospects and inspire remarkable customer experiences. Download our free book: The TopRight Guide to Transformational Marketing.

If I were to assess the worlds of buying and selling through much of what I read, I would come up with the conclusion that Customers and Sales people are on diverging paths, we are doing as much to minimize our interactions with each other. The Holy Grail of these diverging paths is AI–from a buyers perspective, helping us buy efficiently and intelligently. From a sellers perspective helping us sell more efficiently. Someday buyers and sellers will have their bots talking with each other, freeing human beings from the process of buying and selling.

Survey after survey discuss buyer dissatisfaction with sales–they don’t understand customer businesses, focusing on what they care about. They don’t know their own products that well. They waste buyers’ time. We all know the data that customers often prefer digital research (why 100% of customers aren’t researching digitally is beyond me.).

At the same time, sales seems to be on a different path. Yes, there are those Challengers and Insight driven sales people (I’ll come back to this later). But more and more we seem to be focused on driving inbound–waiting for the customer to now they want something, yes, after they’ve completed their research. We seek to automate and segment the process, focusing on our own efficiency. Marketing creates MQLs, SDRs pass leads to BDRs/AEs who pass opportunities specialist and demo’ers, who pass them to account management or closers, all ultimately received by customer success who then go after retention, renewal, upsell, cross sell. We seek to automate as much of the engagement process as we can–sure it’s efficient and potentially cheaper, but does it create meaning for customers?

I was recently speaking to a sales team about a big win, I asked, “What did you sell it for?” Their response was “A little over a $1M.” They missed my point and couldn’t answer when I clarified my question. In another conversation with a senior sales person, I asked, “What do they do?” He didn’t know, but he was busy trying to get them to buy.

It’s easy to see why we are on diverging paths. We are each optimizing our own workflow with little attention to the other.

But customers and sales people need each other—at least in complex B2B situations. Each buying decision is different–there are different situations, differing goals, differing company cultures, priorities, change/risk profiles. No amount of digital research will help customers understand their own situation. No amount of research will help customers know whether they are asking the right questions or oblivious to critical issues.

And then there are those customer who desperately need to change, but are so busy doing their work, they are oblivious to that need.

Great sales people offer great value to customers in addressing these along with a myriad of other issues they may not appreciate in their buying processes.

Sales needs these customers too! Beyond the obvious need for orders and revenue, we learn from our active engagement with customers. It helps us improve, it helps us recognize where we create and deliver differentiated value, it helps us learn how to compete. Without deep engagement with customers, how do we learn about new and emerging problems that drive our own corporate strategies for new solutions, services, and ways to grow.

Customers and sales have a shared dependence. What would happen if we started acting on this, designing our engagement strategies to build on these relationships and value?

What organization can say no to “sales enablement”?

Who in the C-Suite would ever look you in the eye and say, “We don’t find sales to be all that important. Thanks, but no thanks?”

Such is the beauty of the term “sales enablement.” Enabling sales is something every organization should do. Unfortunately, there is a lot of confusion around what it means to actually “enable sales.”

Defining “Sales Enablement”

To be useful as a concept, “sales enablement” should be clearly recognizable and easily defined. Towards that end, in The State of Sales Enablement: Eliminating Ambiguity, Aberdeen defines the practice of sales enablement as:

A strategic alignment of resources and actions to produce effective, efficient sales operations.

While this definition is still somewhat far-reaching, it sets clear parameters for sales enablement. Specifically, it calls for anyone doing “sales enablement” to answer two questions:

1. What resources do effective sales operations require?
2. What actions best support effective sales operations?

Building on this simple framework for understanding sales enablement, sales leaders can more easily choose appropriate metrics for evaluating the success of sales enablement initiatives.

Resources allocated to sales enablement can be analyzed in terms of ROI and profitability: Did the resources provided produce measurable (and, positive!) returns?

Tactical actions prescribed for sales enablement can be analyzed in terms of compliance and effectiveness: Were these actions carried out, and if so, did they work as intended? If not carried out, or effective, why not?

Categories of Sales Enablement

Of course, even organizations that share the same definition of sales enablement can and do execute sales enablement efforts in different ways. That’s why, in addition to a definition, it’s worthwhile to clearly categorize sales enablement efforts.

Based on what we see in the market, Aberdeen Group has identified three categories of sales enablement:

• Content-based sales enablement: Providing sellers with targeted collateral and sales assets that enable effective sales conversations with buyers.
• Technology-based sales enablement: Providing sales reps with tools and technology that enable improved sales performance.
• Training / education-based sales enablement: A process whereby sales reps are trained, educated, or given access to knowledge that enables them to sell more effectively.

Among Aberdeen survey respondents, 52% practice content-based sales enablement, 40% practice technology-based sales enablement, and 38% practice training / education-based sales enablement. Naturally, this means there’s some organizations practicing multiple types of sales enablement.

The fact that, even within the same organization, sales enablement can take on different forms, may be one reason for the confusion around the term. What one person may call sales enablement, pure and simple, another may understand as a single form of it (content-based, for example).

All-In Sales Enablement

For organizations practicing all three forms of sales enablement – what I’ll call, “All-In Sales Enablement” – the value of doing so is apparent. As we can see in Figure 1, these organizations fully outpace their competition when it comes to sales performance.

Figure 1: “All-In” Sales Enablement Practitioners See Better Results

Is your organization practicing “all-in” sales enablement? Or, are you still playing around with this or that flavor of it?

If you fall in the latter camp, what’s your hesitation?

To find out how your sales enablement efforts stack up, read the full report: The State of Sales Enablement: Eliminating Ambiguity.

Image Source (Creative Commons): The U.S. Army.

Four out of five B2B buyers start their journey with a web search. Nearly three quarters of the buying process is complete by the time a prospect is ready to engage with your sales team. With customers now in control, how do you create an effective marketing plan that resonates with target...

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.

If you’re a vendor or business in a constant stage of growth, you may find that preparing for a trade show is a very frustrating and scary experience. Not only do you need to figure out how to present yourself to your target audience in a way that promotes engagement, but you also need to know how to turn that engagement into sales.

With so much to think about, you’d be forgiven for wondering whether attending trade shows was actually worth it. However, today’s companies need to take advantage of any resource they can grab for market awareness. While SEO campaigns, digital marketing, and social media might be the “hot” solutions, face-to-face marketing scenarios will always remain a top priority.

Today’s consumers want interaction, and that’s why trade shows remain one of the oldest tricks in the book for lead generation. So, how do you set your booth up for success?

Step 1: Do Your Research

First things first, you need to find out the specifics of the tradeshow you’re considering exhibiting in. If possible, contact the people organizing the event and ask for details on the kind of visitors that the show might attract, as well as the layout of the area you’ll have to display your business in.

Make sure you find out the size of your trade table if possible, and make sure there’s plenty of space for you to show off your own personal style. Once the specifics have been established, you’ll be ready to start cultivating the resources you need for a big impact.

Step 2: Location is Crucial

Just as location is important to any website’s Google search placement, or business’s brick and mortar store, the location of your trade show booth is critical too. Try to acquire pricing, floor plans, exhibitor information and more from the management department as soon as possible. If you can choose your own location, try to maximize your appeal by selecting the most crowded area along the walkway.

Top tip: A corner location is likely to have people passing by on either side, while an area located next to a popular brand’s space will attract larger crowds.

Step 3: Making your First Impression

Did you know that our first opinions of someone form in a tenth of a second? Similar results appear when it comes to impressions of brands. It takes around a fifth of a second to get an opinion of a website, and around 94% of the opinion is related to design.

If that wasn’t scary enough, studies also show that the first impression we have of someone often correlates with our long-term relationship. That means, if someone instantly likes your brand, then they’re far more likely to become a loyal customer.

In a trade show scenario, you need to make an impression fast, and the best way you can do this is to create the perfect booth design. Using high-quality banners, table covers, and décor is crucial to showing how professional you are. Your design will also help you to stand out from the crowd of other vendors vying for your customer’s attention.

Step 4: Expanding your Reach

If you want to not only make a good first impression, but keep the attention of your audience, and even transform them into promotional solutions for your business, then you need something to give away.

Offering valuable and unique promotional products instantly get you the appreciation of your audience (everyone loves free stuff), and helps you to spread brand awareness beyond your booth. If attendees are using your lanyards to hold their IDs, then everyone who spots them will see your logo.

At the same time, you can ensure that your customers remember you beyond the tradeshow with promotional items that they can use every day, like flash drives for data storage, or stress balls for a rough day at the office. The more innovative the item, the greater the impact.

Step 5: Spice Up the Experience

If you really want your tradeshow booth to be successful, then you need to create an experience that your audience won’t forget. For example, you could give away free promotional items, and gamify the experience by telling your attendees that everyone wearing a custom hat will have a chance to win a big prize at the end of the day.

Alternatively, you could come up with games and raffles that incorporate your products, services, and brand MO right there at your booth. The more fun you have to offer, the more likely your customers are to stick around. Remember, food is always a great choice, but try to find something that speaks to the nature of your brand.

Step 6: Be Ready to Capture Leads

Ultimately, all the interactions that you have at a trade show should be designed to capture leads. That means that you need to be sure that all your staff members know how to act at the booth. Usually, the sales process includes:

• The initial engage, and greet
• Qualifying the lead (are they someone who’s likely to buy?)
• Dismissing time wasters (politely), and nurturing qualified leads

If someone appears to be a qualified lead, don’t just hand them a business card and send them on their way. Instead, ask them for their email address in exchange for a free promotional item. This will help you to build your sales list, and ensure you have a positive ROI for your trade show experience.

Step 7: Demonstrate the Product

Finally, make sure that your potential customers have a chance to see your product, or service in action whenever possible. Though you can always try to explain your value to leads with pictures and sales pitches, the best way to convince someone that you have the solution they need is with a demonstration.

Demonstrations allow you to show off the key aspects of your service or product, and how those aspects relate to the needs of your customer. Remember, don’t just use a demo to tell someone how great your product is, give them a chance to come to that conclusion themselves by highlighting your USP (unique selling point).

Good Luck

Trade shows are often over-looked in today’s digital-first marketing world, but they’re still a highly effective and efficient way to spread brand awareness and generate leads. Face-to-face interaction and a well-designed booth can help you to find loyal customers, and develop new opportunities for your business that keep you growing, and thriving well into the future.

Smarketing is a new buzz word in the world of sales and marketing. Actually, it’s a contraction of sales & marketing. Hubspot defines smarketing as: “…the alignment between your sales and marketing teams created through frequent and direct communication between the two.”

Since a company’s end goal is always the same, it makes perfect sense to integrate sales and marketing processes in the pursuit of those end goals. Establishing this common ground makes the process of acquiring leads and converting them a lot smoother. It also makes more sense for a consumer to undergo a more cohesive experience. A disjointed experience between sales and marketing can lead to consumer confusion and lost opportunities. A consumer should never feel like they’re being tossed around.

Instead of treating sales and marketing teams like two competing units, a company that takes a cooperative approach makes them all part of the same team. Bringing them together as allies will positively impact a company’s bottom line as well. In fact, some companies that have joined their sales and marketing forces reported a 20% revenue growth.

So, what does smarketing look like within a company?

Sales and Marketing Alignment Best Practices:

It starts with a framework

First, a company’s sales and marketing teams need to be on the same page regarding their target market and what they consider a warm lead. They should also know what their respective objectives are. How many leads should marketing be bringing in? How fast should sales follow up with a lead? How many times should they follow up? Making sure everyone is aligned makes the process so much more straightforward. It’s like a team playing together on a soccer field; the infield and the outfield both know when and where to send the ball. A clear sales and marketing strategy is vital.

Using common terminology

In addition to functioning within the same framework, a company’s sales and marketing alignment depends on using common terminology for the entire funnel process. Having set terms and terminology will not only make the discourse between departments clearer, it will also make the process more streamlined for the customer. If sales is using one set of terminology and marketing is using another, they risk sending mixed messages to the consumer.

Frequent sales and marketing meetings

Saying that a company’s sales and marketing teams work together sounds nice in theory, but it must also be put into practice. Regular meetings provide the physical coming together of the sales and marketing teams and focusing on a common purpose. Sales and marketing management should also work closely together to ensure objectives are being met or to establish those objectives.

The purpose of the meetings is to track their collective progress and hone the smarketing process. Bringing ideas, resources, and suggestions together in meetings can bolster the entire process. Bringing the teams together face-to-face as allies reduces any antagonism, replacing it with the constructive opportunity to build on each other’s success instead.

Create boundaries

Even though the purpose of smarketing is to bring the sales and marketing teams together, there must still be delineation between their respective responsibilities. Clear boundaries must be set between where marketing ends and sales begins so intrusion can be avoided. After all, sales and marketing are two different specialties that require different skills. Employees must know what their particular roles are in a company and how they fit together to keep friction to a minimum.

Closed loop reporting

Anyone from sales or marketing should be able to tell where a particular lead is in the sales and marketing process. They should never be left wondering: “Hey whatever happened to that guy I met at that seminar in June?” They should be able to open up a program and see exactly where that guy is in the buying process. Business 2 Community recommends using both marketing automation software and CRM software to provide data access for both teams and build transparency.

Closed-loop reporting also offers more opportunities for two-way discussion and input between sales and marketing teams. They can check in with each other to enhance the process or give each other valuable customer insight. Aligning sales and marketing processes makes both sides feel they’re working towards a collective goal.

The moral?

Creating a sales-marketing alignment plan can boost a company’s bottom line by creating an opportunity to build each other up rather than tear each other down. Environments, where the sales and marketing teams are competitive rivals, don’t make much sense when the main objective is the same.

To create sales and marketing alignment, a company needs to improve the relationship and conversation between the departments. Smarketing puts sales and marketing on the same team for the benefit of the company as a whole. Now that’s smart marketing!

Being described as “classic” can be an honor: A classic album, a classic car, a classic film.

But if your approach to digital marketing is referred to as “classic,” it’s a big red flashing neon sign telling you it’s time for a change.

Unfortunately, if you Google “digital marketing strategies” you’ll get nearly 10 million results. And that’s just pages with that exact phrase in the title. To keep you from going down the Google rabbit hole, we put together a list of four straightforward techniques you can use to get your digital marketing where it needs to be.

But before we get started on how to modernize your digital marketing strategy, let’s talk about what makes a strategy outdated. If you’re utilizing any of the approaches below, stop. Now.

• Concentrating on low-value metrics, such as impressions and clicks. Impressions and clicks let you know whether or not your marketing is actually being seen but not the actual efficacy of your campaigns. Don’t miss the forest for the trees.
• Placing too much emphasis on the number of keywords in your content. Yes, you need to include keywords in your content, but Google is much more concerned with the user experience (UX) and relevancy of the content and less with how many times your website says “project management.”
• Relying on your gut. Your previous experience is certainly valuable, but making decisions about your digital marketing strategy based solely on what’s worked in the past is a bad idea. Using objective data to guide your strategy will yield better results.
• Focusing on your brand, not your audience. You (obviously) want buyers to know who you are but you shouldn’t plaster your brand name all over everything. Your content should be more educational and less promotional, especially when targeting buyers in the Awareness or Consideration stages of the buyer’s journey.

Ready to take your marketing from a Model T to a Tesla? Read on to discover how to build a modern digital marketing strategy.

1. Focus on the Right Methods and the Right KPIs

Wading through a sea of the latest tactics and methodologies is exhausting, and digital marketers can only do so many things so well. To keep yourself from drowning, reach for your marketing life raft: data.

Data keeps us from wasting time on strategies that aren’t producing results. So rather than pointlessly spinning your wheels and trying every new trend, think about what your brand’s key performance indicators (KPIs) should be. Defining your KPIs must be the first step as you refresh your strategy. If you don’t know what success looks like, you have no way of knowing whether or not a strategy is working.

While your list of KPIs will likely include the core metrics of impressions, clicks and conversions, you can’t stop there. Go beyond these basic calculations and think about the number of:

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) — Prospects who have indicated they have an active interest in the company
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) — Prospects who have demonstrated a higher level of intent to become customers and are ready to be contacted by a sales rep directly
• Sales Accepted Leads (SALs) — Prospects proven to be qualified buyers worthy of pursuit

These metrics are a better measurement of the progress of your demand generation and lead generation campaigns. Analyzing this data will help you determine which digital marketing strategy is best for your unique brand, even if it isn’t the latest and greatest approach. And don’t be afraid to test different methods—just keep a close eye on those campaigns.

2. Build (and Maintain) a User-Friendly Digital Presence

Redesigning a website is not a simple process. It usually takes several months and requires the coordination of multiple departments across the organization—specifically, sales, marketing, design and development—as well as the investment of considerable time and resources.

But an outdated or poorly designed website can have a big impact on a brand’s success. Take a look at these stats:

• Nearly 40 percent of people will stop engaging with a site if the layout is unattractive
• A single second of added page load time can lead to a 27 percent lower conversion rate
• Half of the respondents in KoMarketing’s survey say poor navigation or design reduces a brand’s credibility

Your website must provide a positive UX, and a deciding factor in the UX is how easy it is for visitors to find what they’re looking for, such as details about your product or service and contact information for the company. From the moment they hit your site, visitors should be confident they’re in the right place and your brand has the solution they’re looking for.

Since digital real estate is limited, make sure everything on your site is useful—you have no room for fluff. Extraneous content will act as a barrier between buyers and what you want them to do: convert. Calls-to-action (CTAs) on your site should be clear, concise and conspicuous. Again, your goal is to make it as easy as possible for prospects to become leads.

In addition to decreasing the distance between point A (arrival on site) and point B (conversion), the steps along the way should be visually consistent. Every element of your site, from the logo in the header to the font in the footer to the background on least-visited internal page, should reflect your brand identity.

Pro Tip: Always keep search engine optimization (SEO) best practices in mind as you design your site. Don’t let your beautiful site end up at the bottom of search engine results because you didn’t consider site speed, mobile-friendliness, metadata, keywords or your linking strategy.

3. Use Marketing Attribution to Guide Your Process

Attribution models will help you understand the true performance of each channel and determine where time and resources should be invested. Marketing attribution is the process of identifying the individual interactions a prospect has with your brand throughout the buyer’s journey and then assigning credit to these interactions. It allows you to gain full visibility into how much each touchpoint influenced the buyer’s decision.

For example …

Your brand is using search engine marketing (SEM), display advertising and social media campaigns to promote an upcoming webinar. A prospect is first served an ad on the search engine results page, which he clicks. When he gets to the landing page, he decides to postpone registering for the webinar for the time being.

A few days later while the prospect is reading related content on the Google Display Network, he sees a retargeting ad reminding him about the webinar. Though he doesn’t click the banner, it puts your brand back on his radar. The following week, the prospect is served a “Last Chance to Register!” Facebook ad. He clicks on the post and signs up for the webinar.

Without attribution, you would most likely single out the Facebook ad as being the most effective. But in reality, it was a combination of the Facebook ad, SEM and retargeting that led to the conversion. And if this scenario (or a similar one) occurred repeatedly, you may reallocate budget away from your SEM campaigns and into your social media advertising, unintentionally hurting performance.

By using a marketing attribution model, you can see how each marketing channel interacts with the others, allowing you to better calculate ROI and make confident, data-driven assessments about the value of every channel. Following that first conversion event, you can continue to track the behavior of your audience and use the data you gather to see which types of campaigns are most effective at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

4. Harness the Power of Inbound

Though you may have already incorporated some aspects of inbound marketing into your overall digital marketing strategy, are you getting the most out of it?

If you truly want to take full advantage of inbound, you should:

• Offer a variety of content. While you shouldn’t turn your back on blogs, eBooks and infographics, consider creating podcasts, videos or interactive content like an ROI calculator. Different segments of your audience will respond better to different types of content. Providing a mixture of content helps you stand out from your competition.
• Have something for everyone. Prospects just beginning their search aren’t interested in a buyer’s guide, and prospects who are ready to talk partnership probably don’t want an infographic about industry trends. Provide content for visitors in all stages of the buyer’s journey.
• Curate your content. Yes, it’s important to have an array of helpful, relevant content, but quantity should never outweigh quality. Buyers won’t consume your content simply because it’s there—it needs to be something that speaks to their unique needs at the appropriate time.
• Be selective about distribution channels. Every day there are new avenues for you to serve buyers content, but that doesn’t mean you need to be everywhere at once. You need to be where your target prospects are and give them the content that’s appropriate to their stage in the funnel. Most importantly, you should be helping them along their journey—not interrupting it.
• Repurpose your content. Don’t be afraid to repurpose your existing content into other pieces. For example, turn the transcript from a podcast into a blog post. Or take a chapter from an eBook and create an infographic. Ungated content can be used to promote the more comprehensive gated content. In other words, you can leverage demand generation to drive lead generation.

If you want your digital marketing to have the cachet of Casablanca but the gross revenue of Avatar (although that’s quite the lofty goal), you’ll need to make data-driven decisions based on your specific marketing goals and your audience’s specific objectives. By following the steps above, you’ll find it easier to build more effective, more powerful digital campaigns.

Special thanks to Reed Gusmus, Director of Marketing of QASymphony, for his valuable insight on this topic.

For efficient marketing, we need instruments. With hundreds of them available, we try dozens and opt for the best. But how to choose the best without money to burn, especially when it appears that most instruments digital marketers need for work are free?

Here’s our list of over 40 useful, multifunctional, and free mobile apps for marketers. Chances are you’ve heard of them, but you probably haven’t tried all of them. It’s a high time to name leaders and choose those best suited for your marketing goals.

Organizers

A functional organizer is a primary thing to have because the whole process of your work depends on it. Have you tried these?

1. Evernote

Create projects and to-do lists, add reminders and visual notes, and organize your teamwork with the help of Work Chat in Evernote. It’s a user-friendly, fast-working, and visually pleasing application available at both iTunes and GooglePlay.

Plus points:

• Usability
• Design
• Multiple operation features

2. Trello

Free to use, this organizer is multifunctional and mobile. Trello allows you to create boards with checklists, assign tasks, get notifications, control a workflow, and more. The detailed interactive manual and Taco the Dog can’t leave you cold.

3. Todoist

With big dogs such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, and HP as clients, this organizer has both web and mobile versions. Create projects, control them offline, assign tasks, get email notifications, and tag and prioritize to-dos with Todoist.

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Messengers

You know them, but you’ve hardly tried all of them. Choose the best fit for your business communication.

4. Skype

This one needs no introduction, but in case you haven’t tried it yet, here are Skype‘s main functions:

• Free video calls (up to 25 people)
• Free phone calls for Skype’s users
• Up to 300 people in one chat

5. HipChat

A group messaging app, HipChat sends messages, creates team chat rooms, shares files, and integrates with over 80 products such as MailChimp, Hangouts, Twitter, Wunderlist, and more. It allows you to collaborate with co-workers around new ideas, projects, and campaigns. It’s safe and secure, faster than email, and it integrates with Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket.

6. Viber

Core functions of Viber are the same as other messengers’: free calls, chats, and data connection.

Plus points:

• Synchronization with phone contacts
• No registration needed
• Synchronization between a desktop computer and mobile devices
• Public chats
• Games and funny stickers (Marketers don’t have to be all business, do they?)

7. Basecamp 3

A group messaging application, Basecamp 3 designed around six features including scheduling, data storage, real-time chats, to-do lists, messaging, and automatic check-ins. WWF and NASA are among its users.

8. Asana

TED, The New Yorker, Samsung, BBC, and Pinterest use this corporate messenger for work. Asana helps to create chats, tasks, and to-do lists; it allows you to comment, share files, track work, and get results.

Plus points:

• Notifications on projects in process
• Quick registration via Google
• User-friendly interface

9. WhatsApp

WhatsApp is a popular service for calls and message communication. Available for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone users.

Plus points:

• No registration needed
• Text, voice, and video communication
• Public chats and mailing
• Synchronization with phone contacts

10. Hangouts

User-friendly and visually pleasing, this messenger is popular with Google users. Hangouts allows message communication and video conferences (up to 10 people), phone calls, and SMS. You can pinpoint a geolocation here, too.

11. Slack

Slack is a group messenger to try for team communication and workflow organization. Marketers use it to:

• Message
• Share and edit documents
• Search for a team’s past conversations and files
• Organize work on projects
• Stay focused on what matters

Slack integrates into Dropbox, Asana, Google Drive, Twitter, and more.

12. Periscope

Live stream videos work best for business meetings, brainstorming sessions, sharing the news with team members, and more. Periscope is available on iTunes and Google Play; it’s multifunctional and free to sign in with your phone number or Twitter account.

Blogging

Digital marketing depends on content to a great extent. Business blogs become a core source of communication with customers, so consider the following instruments by all means.

13. WordPress

If you blog with WordPress, you need the mobile version of this platform. It allows managing content even if you have no internet access at the moment. As with the web version, you can create, edit, and publish posts, moderate them, get notifications and analytics, etc.

14. Plagiarism Check

This one is a savior for marketers dealing with word-oriented content. No matter if you write or outsource texts for marketing goals, PlagiarismCheck allows proving that your posts have no problems with copyright.

Plus points:

• Interactive and fast
• Complete privacy
• Advanced algorithmic solutions (Detects not just exact matches but also paraphrases, synonyms, and reordered sentences/sentence parts.)

15. Blogger

For those using Blogger, its mobile version is a must-have. Its core functions are the same: create posts, assign publication dates, switch between several accounts, etc. Find it at Google Play.

Office

No marketer can manage projects and campaigns without documenting them. What instrument do you use for that?

16. Kingsoft Office

A free alternative to Microsoft Office, this tool allows creating text documents, notes, sheets, and presentations. Kingsoft syncs with Google and Adobe PDF files, gives you access to Dropbox, OneDrive, Evernote, and Box, supports over ten file formats, is available in 46 languages, and isn’t large in size (30 MB).

17. Google Docs and Sheets

Docs and Sheets’ core functions are the same as with the web version: Create and edit files, work in groups and offline, inter-operate with Microsoft Word, and auto-save your documents. Available for Android and iOS, Google Sheets share the same plus points: inter-operation with Excel, auto saving, group work on projects, and offline access.

18. Adobe Reader

This application allows you to open and create PDF files, comment on them, choose a reading format, highlight texts with different instruments, and more. Adobe‘s plus points include:

• Opens files from any application with public access
• Prints documents from mobile devices
• Exports files to Word and Excel
• Works with Dropbox files

19. Google Presentations

As with the web version, this app allows you to create beautiful presentations for your marketing goals. Google Presentations make it possible to organize a video meeting. It’s inter-operative with PowerPoint, it works offline, and it gives you the opportunity to demonstrate slides on different screens.

News

To stay in step with trends, you need a news application on your mobile device. Check the ones below.

20. Flipboard

Flipboard tells the latest news worldwide. Follow interesting topics, create your articles and journals, add accounts, get notifications, etc. It’s available at iTunes and Google Play.

21. Feedly

It’s an RSS reader to find, check, and save publications from any resource on the web.

• Check updates of your favorite news blogs and YouTube channels.
• Find interesting websites by topics.
• Share materials on Facebook, Twitter, Buffer, Evernote, and Pinterest.

22. BBC News

The most popular news channel is on your mobile device now. Download from Google Play or iTunes, watch livestreams, and listen to BBC World Service radio to stay on top of things.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is an integral part of marketing campaigns, so be sure to try the best applications for SMM.

23. Buffer

Manage several social media accounts with Buffer, schedule dates and time for publications, set auto-posting, analyze your activity on social media, and more. Register with a social account and plan your marketing campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

24. Hootsuite

Join Herschel and NYC in using Hootsuite for marketing, download the application. You’ll get:

• Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn accounts management
• Message exchange
• Scheduling dates and time of publications
• Tracking keywords and brand mentions on Twitter and Facebook
• Analytics

25. IFTTT

If This, Then That is a platform for using functions of several services simultaneously. They call these “recipes,” and you can find them in their Recommended or Collections sections, as well as create your own. Just choose an action (for example, a “like” on Instagram), assign the same for another account (for example, Twitter), and you’ll have a recipe in progress. Also, you can check recipes from other users and share them on social media.

26. Facebook Pages Manager

Use it to create several Facebook pages and manage them from your mobile device. The multifunctional and user-friendly interface allows publishing photos and videos, getting push notifications, scheduling posts, assigning ad campaigns, etc.

27. Facebook Ads Manager

Manage ads on the go, and create and track them to reach people on Facebook and Instagram. Available at Google Play and iTunes, this application helps you assign campaigns and measure results.

Plus points:

• Timely notifications
• Ad editing
• Schedules and budgets adjustment
• Account settings management
• Up-to-date metrics

Also, don’t forget about mobile versions of your favorite social networks: Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and others are perfect marketing channels. Learn how to write compelling content for them, and you’ll rock.

28. Everypost

This social media publishing tool helps to create, customize, schedule, and post content to your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Flickr, Linkedin, and others.

Plus points of Everypost include:

• Search and curate content
• Create and schedule posts
• Send posts via email
• Sort preferred channels
• Check trending topics
• Shorten URLs
• Mention on Twitter
• Save posts in Dropbox
• Manage groups

29. Tumblr

Tumblr combines blogging and social media. You can read and post articles, network with bloggers, and read the news there.

Plus points:

• Registration from the application itself
• Diversity of file formats to publish
• Tracking posts activity after publication
• Awesome design!

Analytics

No matter how creative a person you are, you need to analyze your marketing strategy to measure its effectiveness and results. Sure, you have these instruments, but have you considered their mobile versions?

30. Google Analytics

A must-have for all digital marketers, Google Analytics‘ free application is available for both Android and iOS users. There’s no need to enumerate all the data you can get from this analytical tool (there’s a lot!). All it takes is in-depth analysis and tracking of key marketing metrics in real time.

31. Brand24

Brand24 is a powerful tool for real-time social media monitoring and analytics. It allows keeping track of conversations about brands and products, as well as collecting social data from multiple sources. Its features include but are not limited to:

• Email alerts
• Customer insights
• Influencer analysis
• Infographics
• Metrics around buzz and sentiment
• Automated PDF reports

Visual Content

Why care about visuals for your marketing strategy? Because content with images increases view rate by 94 percent and your audience’s desire to read it by 80 percent. Posts with images produce 180 percent more engagement, and people are 85 percent more likely to buy after watching a video about a product. To make your visuals rock, consider the following applications.

32. Aviary

This photo editor is a powerful tool for creating and editing images in seconds. Download Aviary to take photos, upload them from any device or online, adjust color and contrast, crop, use filters and effects to make your visual content more appealing, and more.

33. Flickr

Flickr is a popular service to upload, organize, and share photos and videos from any device. Download from Google Play or iTunes, and you’ll get:

• Free 1000GB to work
• Instant access to Flickr collections
• Dozens of filters and visual effects for editing content

To use this application, you’ll need a Yahoo profile. Also, Flickr doesn’t allow you to edit videos.

34. Adobe Photoshop Express

This application from Photoshop helps you edit photos with over 20 instruments and filters. You can crop and flip images, adjust contrast and white balance, remove spots and dust, import photos in raw format, and share to all social sites.

35. Flipagram

Create fun photo-video content for your marketing projects with Flipagram. Choose music to add to your images and videos, and tell your brand’s story in a visually pleasing way.

36. Adobe Premiere Clip

Use this application from Adobe to create and edit videos for your marketing campaign. Premiere Clip allows branding video clips, importing content to Dropbox, and publishing to Twitter directly.

Plus points:

• Sound synchronization
• Interactive images
• Photo collections
• User-friendly interface for better editing
• Automatic video creation

37. BeFunky

This photo editor is one of the most feature-filled editing apps, as it allows you to make collages, use fonts, frames, and stickers. BeFunky needs no registration, it’s user-friendly and visually pleasing, and it makes your visual content appealing and loved by consumers.

Email Marketing

Use emails as an extra source of traffic and conversion? Consider these specific instruments to help you succeed.

38. MailChimp

The world’s leading email marketing platform is available for both Android and iOS. Download MailChimp to send letters, add contacts, track a mail status, and get reports.

39. Zoho

Used by The New York Times and Mashable, Zoho is an email platform that allows you to sign in with social accounts (Facebook, Twitter) and schedule newsletters.

Plus points:

• Multiple account support
• Conversation view
• Quick swipe actions
• Advanced search
• Work offline
• Integrated calendar

40. SendPulse

Send different types of letters and SMS through SendPulse. Add contacts, track results, get notifications, analyze effectiveness, and modify your email marketing strategy accordingly.

41. TED

No matter if you crave more creativity or analytics in your marketing, we all need inspiration to keep on moving. The application to help here is TED with its huge collection of video lectures on diverse topics. With the “ideas worth spreading” motto, TED allows you to learn and inspire from personal stories of successful people.

Plus points:

• Over 2,000 videos with subtitles 100 languages
• Downloadable videos and podcasts
• TED Radio Hour
• Bookmarks for creating individual playlists
• Watching on mobile devices or with Chromecast and Android TV

Useful marketing instruments are many, and it’s close to impossible to test them all and choose the most appropriate ones. Be on the lookout for compelling lists of top tools of digital marketers (like the one you’re reading right now), consider free versions to find out if their features are efficient enough for your projects, and choose sides for good.

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

Because of their unique nature, trade shows blend sophisticated marketing strategy with detailed tactics, so having a comprehensive trade show checklist is a necessity for exhibitors looking to make a big impact on the trade show floor.

Below, we outline a detailed trade show checklist including pre-, during- and post-show tasks and initiatives to ensure your next trade show is a huge success.

Pre-Show Trade Show Checklist:

1. Create a primary goal

There are tons of benefits to exhibiting at a trade show. However, you need to narrow down your primary goal to help you measure whether your trade show campaign was a success.

Quick trade show goal ideas:

• Make ten sales on the trade show floor
• Generate at least 50 quality leads
• Network with ten industry leaders
• Find three serious investors.
• Ask potential clients three specific questions for market research

2. Decide on your main message

On average, you will only have 3 seconds to capture the attention of a passerby. Crafting a clever and engaging message can help attract attendees to your trade show booth. Remember, when deciding your message, the objective is to get attendees to stop, so avoid explaining too much about your company. Instead, boil it down to a single, short attention-grabbing phrase or sentence.

3. Arrange a vendor presentation

Many trade shows allow exhibitors to hold presentations for a fee. Arranging a presentation will bolster your company’s presence at the show, as well as an opportunity to put your sales staff in front of qualified prospects. Make sure to add presentations to your trade show checklist.

4. Pick your exhibiting space

Exhibiting space goes fast—especially at popular trade shows—and exhibit location matters. If you know which trade show you want to attend, register as soon as possible to secure prime real estate on the show floor.

Exhibiting space selection tips:

• Exhibiting space near the front of the show is ideal.
• Exhibiting space near the center of the exhibition floor is always preferable to the ends.
• Exhibiting space at the ends of aisles is good because you have a “corner” and traffic can spill out over the edge, allowing you to house more attendees.

5. Design your trade show banner and handouts

Designing and printing banners and handouts takes time to nail down. Work closely with your print vendor to ensure your collateral and trade show banners relay your brand message and theme clearly.

6. Select your booth staff

Your trade show booth staff can be your secret weapon for success, so assembling the right team is important. A good rule of thumb is to plan for at least three booth staffers. This ensures that at least two people are in the booth at all times.

Depending on your trade show goals, you may need to bring a large staff, in which case you will need to assign roles, map out the positioning of personnel within the booth and manage the team more closely than to with a smaller group.

7. Make travel arrangements

Arranging travel to and from the trade show is one of the most important aspects of trade show planning. Book plane tickets, hotels rooms and rental cars early while fares are cheaper and so last-minute surprises.

8. Decide on your exhibit

Your trade show exhibit is the flagship of your trade show campaign, so researching of exhibit options that best suit your exhibiting space and budget is essential.

A custom or custom modular trade show booth works best to showcase the uniqueness of your brand. Likewise, if you are a smaller company or a start-up, a portable trade show display may do the trick.

9. Plan your promotional items

The right trade show giveaways and promotional items will help generate leads and support your trade show marketing message. When planning your trade show promotional items, make sure they are customized with your logo. Like handouts and collateral, promotional items sometimes take a while to get right, so get them done early.

10. Pre-show mailings

Sending out pre-show mailing is one of the most effective ways of building a buzz around your trade show campaign and will help you drive traffic to your booth. Pre-show mailings can be a simple as postcard invites sent to contacts on the show attendees list or as sophisticated as creating an automated email marketing campaign.

11. Schedule meetings

Trade shows are the only chance marketers get to spend time face-to-face with current prospects, members of the media and vendors all in the same place. Make the most of the opportunity by scheduling meetings with the following:

• Existing clients
• Pre-qualified prospects
• Magazine editors and reporters
• Current and potential vendors
• Current and potential partners

12. Pack trade show supplies

Anything can happen on the trade show floor, so making sure you pack all of your in-booth essentials will help you put out fires when they arise. A good trade show checklist supply kit should include:

• Pens (multiple, different colors)
• Sharpie pens
• Scotch tape
• Masking tape
• Extension cords
• Post-it notes
• Rubber bands
• Stapler
• Highlighter
• Paper clips
• Scissors
• All-in-one tool (screwdriver, can opener)
• First-aid (Tylenol, Advil, DayQuil, Band-Aids)
• Zip-ties
• Business cards

13. Bring comfortable shoes

Trade shows require you to stand for long periods of time. Comfortable shoes are a must! Sneakers, clogs and flats are great options for comfort, however, if you have to go with a more formal look, you can use insoles to make dress shoes and heels a bit more comfortable.

During Trade Show Checklist

1. Ask questions

Most of your competitors will use sales pitches to engage visitors on the trade show floor. Be different! Have your staff ask questions that spark conversations. When prospects are engaged in genuine conversations, they are more likely to give your staff permission to sell to them.

2. Be alert and active

Instruct your booth staff stand upright, walk around your trade show exhibit and to present positive body language. Stationary and seated exhibit staff give off the impression that they do not want to be there—and can be uninviting to attendees.

3. Engage the aisles

Staying in your exhibit means you have to rely on attendees to come to you. If you want to increase the number of prospects you speak with, you will have to do a bit of aisle-side engagement. During high-traffic periods, have someone inside your exhibit to talk to prospects inside the booth and another in the aisle bringing attention to your exhibit and directing passersby into your space.

4. Be ready to demonstrate your product or service

Few things on the trade show floor beat a live product demonstration, so always be ready to showcase your product capabilities. Make your demonstration a memorable experience by using larger monitors instead of laptops or by asking prospects to try your product for themselves.

5. Take notes

You are going to speak with hundreds of people on the show floor and it is unlikely you will remember everything. Bring a notepad and write down common concerns or questions brought up while speaking with prospects. Later, you can go back and study your notes and glean consumer insights and better understand exactly what it is your customers are looking for.

6. Use social media

Social media is a great way to stay connect with the goings-on at your trade show and also an invaluable networking and marketing communication vehicle. Post updates about your exhibit to show-related hashtags to amplify your reach and accept and extend friend requests with prospects to expand your professional network online.

7. Take names instead of pushing brochures

Attendees will be laden with brochures, business cards and giveaway items. Instead of handing out items, ask to for a business card, then mail them something after the show. This is a great way to stand out and stay memorable with your contacts.

Post-Trade Show Checklist

1. Follow-up

During the trade show, attendees are swamped with product demonstrations, presentations and sales pitches. If you want to make sure they remember you, you need to follow up promptly. While following up, extend free trials, product samples, white papers, free consultations, special pricing and other inducements to prompt them into action.

2. Apply what you learned about you company

Trade shows are not just for teaching the world about your company, they are also opportunities for you to learn what the world thinks about you. After the show, sit down and evaluate your trade show performance and refer to your notes. Glean insights you gathered from visitors and assess which approaches and strategies worked and which did not.

Questions to get you started:

• Which questions got people’s attention, and what conversations did prospects relate to?
• How can you address talking points and prospect concerns using your overall marketing program?
• What were people saying about your competition? What were your retorts?

3. Apply what you learned about your product or service

Showcasing your products on the trade show floor is a great way to learn what the buying public thinks. After you have demoed your product 100s of times and allowed attendees to try it for themselves, you should have learned invaluable lessons. Now it is time to apply what you learned to improve upon your products after the show and so you can adjust your trade show checklist before your next event.

Questions to get you started:

• What features and benefits did attendees ask about that your product possess, but were not obvious to users?
• What features and benefits did attendees ask for that were missing from your product?
• What part of your demonstration seemed to drag because your product is not easy enough to quickly use?
• What product terminology confused prospect? Are there ways to make it clearer?

Apply the Trade Show Checklist Today

If you would like to learn more about how you can apply this trade show checklist, download our Beginner to Winner: Trade Show Guide to Become a Better Exhibitor, which contains expert guidance on how you can take your trade show program to the next level.

If you use LinkedIn, you've undoubtedly received invitations to connect to people that you've never met or may never meet in your entire life.

The more you stay on the site and the more you gain prominence in your field, the more requests from strangers you'll get.

And while it could seem natural to decline a Facebook friend request from a stranger because you don't want to give them access to your personal information and photos, the dynamic on LinkedIn is much different.

You may think that because it's a social network for professionals, you should simply accept all invitations and see which of them stick.

It's the approach that "Never Eat Alone" author and management consultant to Fortune 100 companies Keith Ferrazzi took for years. Not long ago, Ferrazzi wrote in the 2014 updated edition of his bestselling career guide, he had the privilege of meeting LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and discussing the site with him.

"'You're doing it all wrong, Keith!' That is, in essence, what Reid Hoffman told me when I told him how I was using LinkedIn," Ferrazzi writes.

Here's the gist of what Hoffman told him, as written in "Never Eat Alone," bolding our own:

"LinkedIn is a closed network, and for a very simple reason: For the network to have value as an introduction tool, the connections need to have meaning. It's up to you to vet each and every request so that if someone comes to you and says, 'Would you introduce me?,' you're in a position to evaluate whether the connection would be of mutual benefit."

You don't need to do a deep analysis of every person who asks to connect with you. But if you'd feel awkward chatting with them or introducing them to someone in your network, then decline, without a guilty conscience.

And if you really want to use LinkedIn as it was intended, make "at least one quality introduction a month," per Hoffman's suggestion in his 2012 book "The Start-up of You.

SEE ALSO: How to write a cold email that gets a response from even the busiest people

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 'Shark Tank' star Barbara Corcoran shares her keys to making a good first impression

Batch and blast aren't pretty, and there are better email tactics. But nothing gets you more bang for your buck.

I don’t intend this to be a sales piece but I feel you need to know a little about myself and my company before you read this.

I work in marketing for an email service provider and my company preaches the value in sending sophisticated emails.

Now I’ve told you that, I have something to get off my chest. Something that would appear to contradict the opinions of my industry peers and perhaps, on occasion, that of my own company.

Here we go: although I think sophisticated emails are great, I think a ‘batch and blast’ style of emailing is better.

Yes, batching and blasting emails (the act of mass marketing through email) is great. I highly recommend it. Do it for all it’s worth. Seriously.

You will never, ever find a greater ROI rate in any other marketing effort than a well optimised batch and blast email routine. I mean it.

You name it – TV, social, SEO, paid search, print, your website, etc. – if you’re looking for results, I guarantee your time and money won’t be better spent anywhere else.

Let’s look at the facts: it takes on average 2-3 hours to build and send a half decent batch and blast-type email. You pay (relatively speaking) a small amount to your ESP for each email to be sent. And, if they’re half decent, you get a half decent conversion rate. But because at this point your investment is so low, your ROI is phenomenal.

I mean it. It’s why the DMA claim an average email ROI of 3,800% and Econsultancy found email to offer the highest returns of any marketing channel.

Realise this and you’ll get the email bug. You start to optimise your batch and blast emails; the design, the time you send, your CTA copy and your conversion rate jumps a little – pushing you ROI even higher.

Then you realise that if you send more, you can make more. So you start playing around with how often you email your list. Eventually, you reach the optimal send volume that doesn’t begin to negatively impact your brand and your unsubscribe rate.

You’re now making serious money from what is still batch and blast email. And you want more.

You might try your hand at behavioural targeting, where you tactically resend emails to engaged non-openers. This means you again start to convert a few more people from each campaign.

Awesome.

At this point, you might realise that if you ramped up your list growth, your gains will naturally increase too. So you optimise and incentivise your sign up process.

Then, undoubtedly, you hit your batch and blast plateau. You just can’t get the numbers any higher. You’ve tried it all and it just doesn’t go any further.

Your ROI from email at this point is through the roof. And so is your income from the channel.

So now what do you focus your time and money improving?

There’s SEO, paid search, social… or, you could stick to email. But this time, not batch and blast. Sure, keep milking that cash cow for all it’s worth. But, on top of this, you can start targeting the other people that your batch and blast efforts just don’t reach. Adding more people to your conversion pot.

At this point, you can start investing more and creating your own set of targeted and automated campaigns, triggered off the back of website interactions, store visits or any other customer touch point.

Because these emails are sent at the right time and contain much more targeted content, they will work better. But the technology to enable this will cost you (relatively speaking) much more in terms of both time and money. Your ROI from this will be very healthy, thanks to a boost in conversion rate, but your investment level is no longer tiny. Which means the ROI for the sophisticated part of your emails won’t be phenomenal. It will just be good or great.

Don’t get me wrong, sending sophisticated emails will give you far greater potential increasing your income but – from an ROI perspective – there’s nothing wrong with batch and blast emails. Especially when your team has limited resource.

So my point is this: it’s time for our industry to stop making batch and blast a shameful practice. Everyone does it, because everyone knows it actually works well. Incredibly well, in fact.

But it will only take you so far. When you do inevitably reach that point of batch and blast plateau – and perhaps only when you reach that point – that’s the time to start investing in sophisticated emails. Because sophisticated emails are the next best thing.

Early one morning in the not too distant future one of your customers, let’s call her Alice, wakes up and reaches for her phone. What happens next marks a profound change in the way she interacts with your brand.

Alice has just purchased a new phone which contains the next generation of digital assistants. This digital assistant (DA) has access to every piece of data that Alice generates. Through Alice’s permission to access all of her data including her financial information, social networks, and loyalty programs, the DA knows who she has met, what she has bought, what she searches for, who she is connected to, where she goes and what she does.

Each morning Alice’s DA greets her with a message through an app that says: “Good morning Alice, what do you want to do?” Alice responds with “I’ve been at the office a lot recently and let my fitness slip. I’d love to get outside and do some exercise this weekend.”

The DA reminds Alice that she checked into her local tennis club last summer, “Would you like to play again this weekend?” It asks. Alice approves. The DA then responds: “You also have three friends who like the local tennis court on Facebook, should I see if one of them wants to play with you this weekend?”

Alice approves, so the DA sends out a message to all three of those friends from Alice’s Facebook account and sends a court booking email request to the tennis club.

This isn’t the end of the journey. Alice had previously interacted with Nike. This prompts Nike to send a message to her asking if she required a new tennis racket, which can be customizable and shipped to her front door before the game.

This is simply a story of a very possible future. Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon all have Artificial Powered DAs that are evolving quickly. Consumers will increasingly use digital personal assistants to interact with consumer services in the connected home, according to Gartner, which predicts that, by 2019, in at least 25 per cent of households in developed economies, the digital assistants on smartphones and other devices will serve as the primary interface to connected home services.

We’re already seeing this technology evolving in Australia with brands like Domino’s launching an in-app AI virtual assistant that will allow customers to order a pizza using their voice. Overseas, Campbell Soup Company has built a voice app that suggests what to make for dinner.

These DA apps can give marketers a peek into customers’ behavior and preferences inside their homes. As voice search grows in popularity, we can predict Google and Amazon will open their platforms to additional forms of paid messages from brands.

Consumers are already becoming accustomed to this form of technology. In Salesforces’ State of the Connected Customer Report, 58 per cent of consumers agreed that technology has significantly changed their expectations of how companies should interact with them.

So if this is the world that your customers will soon be expecting what do you do about it? From a leadership perspective, it’s vital to start asking your organization the question, “how can we use emerging technologies like AI to deliver value to our customers and strengthen our brand?”

Collect and manage your customer data to build a rich profile of each and every customer

Most customers understand that personalized journeys are created by brands that collect and integrate data. The Connected Customer report found 57 per cent of consumers agree they’re willing to share data with companies that send personalized offers and discounts.

Keep your organization focused on customer journeys and experiences

Connected customers expect consistent and intelligent experiences across every interaction or communication channel — and a large part of that is being recognized and remembered. 75 per cent of customers surveyed agreed that they expect companies to provide a consistent experience, whether it is online, social, mobile or in person.

Embrace and experiment with technologies like AI to build your ‘Digital Differentiator’

In the age of the customer, technology fundamentally changes the way they interact with companies. Connected customers want to be heard, understood, remembered, and respected. Ultimately, they want to be treated like people — and intelligent application of customer data can help companies deliver experiences with a human touch, at scale.

High-performing marketing teams need to create and engage in one to one customer conversations. While you don’t need to invest in a Digital Assistant app just yet, you should already be curating personalized emails and social media interactions, customized landing pages, product suggestions.

A smarter, more intelligent world is very rapidly evolving. The only question is; are you ready to make the most of it?

For more information on what a more connected customer looks like and how you can meet their expectations right now, check out Salesforce’s State of the Connected Customer report today.

This article was written for the Salesforce ANZ blog.

In the early days of your startup, the ultimate validation is money. 

I’ve talked about this before, but it’s worth repeating: people need to vote with their time and money. That’s how you know there’s a real market for your product.

End-users might think your technology is cool, but they don’t often make financial decisions. Many times, the people you need to convince are C-level executives. 

But here’s the problem: executives get pitched every day. They’re always asked for cash. So how do you stand apart?

Ask for their expert advice

Cold-calling executives doesn’t work if you don’t know about the market. To sell anything effectively, you need to understand their needs and how they buy.

When you reach out to them, say:

“We’re building a new technology and I could use your input. You’re an industry leader and I really value your expertise. I’d love to jump on a quick 15-minute call so that we can build this technology in a better way.”

Here’s why this strategy is effective:

1. You’re appealing to their ego. People like to be experts. They like to give advice.
2. You’re showing them that their advice might directly influence the end product. They’ll get exactly what they’re looking for with this new technology.

This isn’t a bait and switch, though

You should truly want their advice. You need to learn more about them. They could be future customers, so you want to make sure that they’re happy with your solution.

On the call, ask questions so that you understand:

• Who they are
• How they think
• How they buy
• How they would describe your product
• How they would use your product
• What they’ve identified as positives and negatives about your product

If they’re not ready to buy, don’t jump into your pitch

When you ask for money too early, they’ll likely get defensive and the relationship won’t go anywhere.

Instead, ask to stay in touch:

“Can I keep you updated on our progress? In a few months, once we’ve checked off some of the things we discussed today, should we schedule another 15 minutes?”

Most executives will say yes.

When they do, it’s your responsibility to keep them in the loop. The more they hear from you, the more invested they’ll feel, especially if you can deliver on their feedback.

If the call goes better than expected and they’re excited about the future, go for the virtual close

Ask questions like:

• If you were me, how would you try to market this?
• How would you try to sell to people?
• How would you raise money?
• What would it take for you to buy our product?

Push them out of their role and into yours.

If the fit is great, say, “I get the sense that you want to buy this product. Would you like to be an early customer?”

There’s a right time for this, but if the opportunity is there, go for the close.

In the early days of your startup, you need to build strong relationships, create a product with market fit, and generate cash. Reaching out to C-level executives isn’t always easy, so make the best out of every opportunity.

Just remember this simple framework and you’ll be ahead of the game: Ask for money and you’ll get advice. Ask for advice and you’ll get money. 

Want more actionable sales advice now? 

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on Greylock’s blog here.

To build a sustainable and profitable business, you need strong defensive moats around your company. This rings especially true today as we undergo one of the largest platform shifts in a generation as applications move to the cloud, are consumed on iPhones, Echoes, and Teslas, are built on open source, and are fueled by AI and data. These dramatic shifts are rendering some existing moats useless and leaving CEOs feeling like it’s almost impossible to build a defensible business.

In this post, I’ll review some of the traditional economic moats that technology companies typically leverage and how they are being disrupted. I believe that startups today need to build systems of intelligence — AI powered applications — “the new moats.”

Businesses can build several different moats and over time these moats can change. The following list is definitely not exhaustive and fair warning, it will read like a bad b-school blog!

Traditional Economic Moats

Some of the greatest and most enduring technology companies are defended by powerful moats. For example, Microsoft, Google, and Facebook all have moats built on economies of scale and network effects.

• Economies of Scale: The bigger you are the more operating leverage you have which lowers your costs. SaaS and cloud services can have strong economies of scales: you can scale your revenue and customer base while keeping the core engineering of your product relatively flat.

• Network Effects: Best described by Metcalf’s law, your product or service has “network effects” if each additional user of your product accrues more value to every other user. Messaging apps like Slack and WhatsApp, and social networks like Facebook are good examples of strong network effects. Operating systems like iOS, Android, and Windows have strong network effects because as more customers use the OS, more applications are built on top of it.

One of the most successful cloud businesses, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has both the advantages of scale but also the power of network effects. More apps and services are built natively on AWS because “that’s where the customers and the data are.” In turn, the ecosystem of solutions attracts more customers and developers who build more apps that generate more data continuing the virtuous cycle while driving down Amazon’s cost through the advantages of scale.

Some Other Traditional Moats

• Deep tech / IP / trade secrets: Proprietary software or methods is where most technology companies start. These trade secrets can include novel solutions to hard technical problems, new inventions, new processes, new techniques, and later, patents that protects the developed intellectual property (IP). Over time, a company’s IP may evolve from a specific engineering solution to accumulated operating knowledge or insight into a problem or process.

• High Switching Costs: Once a customer is using your product, you want it to become as difficult as possible for them to switch to a competitor. You can build this stickiness through standardization, from a lack of substitutes, through integrations to other apps and data sources, or because you have built an entrenched and valuable workflow that your customers depend on. Any of these can act as a form of lock-in that will make it difficult for customers to leave.

• Brand and Customer Loyalty: A strong brand can be a moat. With each positive interaction between your product and your customers, your brand advantage gets stronger over time, but brand strength can quickly evaporate if your customers lose trust in your product.

Old Moats Can Be Destroyed

Strong moats help companies survive through major platform shifts, but surviving should not be confused with thriving. For example, high switching costs can partly account for why mainframes and “big iron” systems are still around after all these years. Legacy businesses with deep moats may not be the high growth vehicles of their prime, but they are still generating profits. Companies need to recognize and react when they are in the midst of an industry wide transformation, lest they become victims of their own success.

Switching costs as a moat: X86 server revenue didn’t exceed mainframe and other “big iron” revenue until 2009.

Moreover, these massive platforms shifts — like cloud and mobile — are technology tidal waves that create openings for new players and enable founders to build paths over and around existing moats. Startup founders who succeed tend to execute a dual-pronged strategy: 1) Attack legacy player moats and 2) simultaneously build their own defensible moats that ride the new wave.

For example, Facebook had the most entrenched social network, but Instagram built a mobile-first photo app that rode the smartphone wave to a $1B acquisition. In the enterprise world, SaaS companies like Salesforce are disrupting on-premise software companies like Oracle. Now with the advent of cloud, AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are creating a direct channel to the customer. These platform shifts can also change the buyer and end user. Within the enterprise, the buyer has moved from a central IT team to an office knowledge worker, to someone with an iPhone, to any developer with a GitHub account.

No More Moats?

In this current wave of disruption, is it still possible to build sustainable moats? For founders, it may feel like every advantage you build can be replicated by another team down the street, or at the very least, it feels like moats can only be built at massive scale. Open source tools and cloud have pushed power to the “new incumbents,’ — the current generation of companies that are at massive scale, have strong distribution networks, high switching cost, and strong brands working for them. These are companies like Apple, Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Salesforce.

Why does it feel like there are “no more moats” to build? In an era of cloud and open source, deep technology attacking hard problems is becoming a shallower moat. The use of open source is making it harder to monetize technology advances while the use of cloud to deliver technology is moving defensibility to different parts of the product. Companies that focus too much on technology without putting it in context of a customer problem will be caught between a rock and a hard place — or as I like to say, “between open source and a cloud place.” For example, incumbent technologies like Oracle’s proprietary database are being attacked from open source alternatives like Hadoop and MongoDB and in the cloud by Amazon Aurora and innovations like Google Spanner. On the other hand, companies that build great customer experiences may find defensibility through the workflow of their software.

I believe that deep technology moats aren’t completely gone and defensible business models can still be built around IP. If you pick a place in the technology stack and become the absolute best of breed solution you can create a valuable company. However, this means picking a technical problem with few substitutes, that requires hard engineering, and needs operational knowledge to scale.

Today the market is favoring “full stack” companies, SaaS offerings that offer application logic, middleware, and databases combined. Technology is becoming an invisible component of a complete solution (e.g. “No one cares what database backs your favorite mobile app as long as your food is delivered on time!”). In the consumer world, Apple made the integrated or full stack experience popular with the iPhone which seamlessly integrated hardware with software. This integrated experience is coming to dominate enterprise software as well. Cloud and SaaS has made it possible to reach customers directly and in a cost-effective manner. As a result, customers are increasingly buying full stack technology in the form of SaaS applications instead of buying individual pieces of the tech stack and building their own apps. The emphasis on the whole application experience or the “top of the technology stack” is why I also evaluate companies through an additional framework, the stack of enterprise systems.

The Stack of Enterprise Systems

Systems of Record

At the bottom of the stack of systems, is usually a database on top of which an application is built. If the data and app power a critical business function, it becomes a “system of record.” There are three major systems of record in an enterprise: your customers, your employees, and your assets. CRM owns your customers, HCM, owns your employees, and ERP/Financials owns your assets. Generations of companies have been built around owning a system of record and every wave produced a new winner. In CRM we saw Salesforce replace Siebel as the system of record for customer data, and Workday replace Oracle PeopleSoft for employee data. Workday has also expanded into financial data. Other applications can be built around a system of record but are usually not as valuable as the actual system of record. For example, marketing automation companies like Marketo and Responsys built big businesses around CRM, but never became as strategic or as valuable as Salesforce.

Systems of Engagement

Systems of engagement are the interfaces between users and the systems of record and can be powerful businesses because they control the end user interactions. In the mainframe era, the systems of record and engagement were tied together when the mainframe and terminal were essentially the same product. The client/server wave ushered in a class of companies that tried to own your desktop, only to be disrupted by a generation of browser based companies, only to be succeeded by mobile first companies. The current generation of companies vying to own the system of engagement include Slack, Amazon Alexa, and every other speech / text/ conversational UI startup. In China, WeChat has become a dominant system of engagement and is now a platform for everything from e-commerce to games. If it sounds like systems of engagement turn over more than systems of record, it’s probably because they do. The successive generations of systems of engagement don’t necessarily disappear but instead users keep adding new ways to interact with their applications. In a multi-channel world, owning the system of engagement is most valuable if you control most of the end user engagement or are a cross channel system that reaches users wherever they are. Perhaps the most strategic advantage of being a system of engagement is that you can coexist with several systems of record and collect all the data that passes through your product. Over time you can evolve your engagement position into an actual system of record using all the data you have accumulated.

The New Moats: Systems of Intelligence

I believe that systems of intelligence are the new moats. What is a system of intelligence and why is it so defensible? What makes a system of intelligence valuable is that it typically crosses multiple data sets, multiple systems of record. One example is an application that combines web analytics with customer data and social data to predict end user behavior, churn, LTV, or just serve more timely content. You can build intelligence on a single data source or single system of record but that position becomes harder to defend against the vendor that owns the data. For a startup to thrive around incumbents like Oracle and SAP, you need to combine their data with other data sources (public or private) to create value for your customer. Incumbents will be advantaged on their own data. For example, Salesforce is building a system of intelligence, Einstein, starting with their own system of record, CRM.

The next generation of enterprise products will use different artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to build systems of intelligence. It’s not just applications that will be transformed by AI but also data center and infrastructure products. We can categorize three major areas where you can build systems of intelligence: customer facing applications around the customer journey, employee facing applications like HCM, ITSM, Financials, or infrastructure systems like security, compute/ storage/ networking, and monitoring/ management. In addition to these broad horizontal use cases, startups can also focus on a single industry or market and build a system of intelligence around data that is unique to a vertical like Veeva in life sciences, or Rhumbix in construction.

In all of these markets, the battle is moving from the old moats, the sources of the data, to the new moats, what you do with the data. Using a company’s data, you can upsell customers, automatically respond to support tickets, prevent employee attrition, and identify security anomalies. Products that use data specific to an industry (i.e. healthcare, financial services), or unique to a company (customer data, machine logs, etc.) to solve a strategic problem begin to look like a pretty deep moat, especially if you can replace or automate an entire enterprise workflow or create a new value-added workflow that was made possible by this intelligence.

Enterprise applications that built systems of record have always been powerful businesses models. Some of the most enduring app companies like Salesforce and SAP are all built on deep IP, benefit from economies of scale, and over time they accumulate more data and operating knowledge as they get deeper within a company’s workflow and business processes. However, even these incumbents are not immune to platform shifts as a new generation of companies attack their domains.

To be fair, we may be at risk of AI marketing fatigue, but all the hype reflects AI’s potential to change so many industries. One popular AI approach, machine learning (ML), can be combined with data, a business process, and an enterprise workflow to create the context to build a system of intelligence. Google was an early pioneer of applying ML to a process and workflow: they collected more data on every user and applied machine learning to serve up more timely ads within the workflow of a web search. There are other evolving AI techniques like neural networks that will continue to change what we can expect from these future applications.

These AI-driven systems of intelligence present a huge opportunity for new startups. Successful companies here can build a virtuous cycle of data because the more data you generate and train on with your product, the better your models become and the better your product becomes. Ultimately the product becomes tailored for each customer which creates another moat, high switching costs. It is also possible to build a company that combines systems of engagement with intelligence or even all three layers of the enterprise stack but a system of intelligence or engagement can be the best insertion point for a startup against an incumbent. Building a system of engagement or intelligence is not a trivial task and will require deep technology, especially at speed and scale. In particular, technologies that can facilitate an intelligence layer across multiple data sources will be essential. Finally, there are some businesses that can build data network effects by using customer and market data to train and improve models that make the product better for all customers, which spins the flywheel of intelligence faster.

In summary, you can build a defensible business model as a system of engagement, intelligence, or record, but with the advent of AI, intelligent applications will be the fountain of the next generation of great software companies because they will be the new moats.

Thanks to Saam Motamedi, Sarah Guo, Eli Collins, Peter Bailis, Elisa Schreiber, Michael Inouye, my Greylock partner Sarah Tavel, and the rest of my partners at Greylock for their input. This post was also helped through conversations with my friends at several Greylock-backed companies including Trifacta, Cloudera, and dozens of founders and CEOs that have influenced my thinking. All good ideas are shamelessly stolen and all bad ideas are mine alone.

The post The New Moats: Why Systems of Intelligence are the Next Defensible Business Model appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Marketing departments and agencies across the country are already dealing with a burnout epidemic, and it’s not a problem that is likely to abate any time soon. A whopping 80% of marketers claim they feel overworked. And two in three of them expect their workloads to increase.

Marketers are no strangers to stress. Our discipline has become one of high accountability, myriad technical and experiential demands, growing competition, and responsiveness to business cycles that can suddenly pile on work when it’s least expected.

Marketing professionals work more on average than their professional peers. Even the most motivated, driven marketing contractor or full-time professional can eventually get burned out on the never-ending stream of responsibilities and expectations. Every day in the US, about 1 million people miss work due to stress, leading to $150-300 billion in annual lost potential.

Chart from Workfront

Eventually several things are bound to give, beginning with the mental health of your marketers and ending with the productivity of your marketing. Left unchecked, you could be faced with:

• Higher employee turnover as harried talent looks elsewhere for other jobs with more realistic expectations and better work-life balance. That means vacancies in critical skills and leadership positions, and expensive marketing recruitment to hire and onboard a replacement.
• Stressed and overworked marketers that produce quantity over quality. Work will have more small mistakes, be less optimized, and be delivered behind schedule more frequently. ROI will dip as the little things add up.
• Damaged reputation of the Marketing operations to the rest of the organization, clients, and potential employees.

To minimize or avoid the effects of burnout on your marketing team, consider the following actions.

Rotate Extra Marketing Capacity onto the Front Lines

At times of especially high demand, or for critical projects you simply can’t afford not to execute perfectly, bring in additional interim marketing talent to provide an extra boost of expertise and capacity.

Even under strict hiring freezes or headcount restrictions, it’s often possible to supplement your strategy with a marketing contractor, freelancer, or other interim marketing execution capabilities, from creative to digital to technical and beyond. Good talent brought in at just the right time is worth its weight in gold, and is often a viable flexible workforce solution even when full-time headcount is capped or being reduced.

Contract marketing staffing is a fast, flexible way to reinforce your beleaguered marketing team and help ‘hold the lines’ during busy periods. You can bring talent in house or use online marketing staffing to make use of off-site talent.

Contract-to-hire marketing arrangements are often available in instances where you’re unsure whether to create a new full-time position. You can even consider insourcing an agency to support your business on a key initiative and take some of the pressure off your team.

Focus on Results, Not Activity

Unless they’re needed for a meeting or other time-sensitive engagement, there’s not really a pressing need for many of your marketing professionals to be present in the office at any given time.

For instance, someone who leaves at 4:00 every day but always completes their daily duties and regularly meets or exceeds their goals isn’t lazy; they’re efficient.

There’s no value to you or them in forcing them to stick around just to keep a seat warm. As long as they’re keeping their responsibilities covered and KPIs are being met, does it really matter when or for how long they’re in the office every week?

Sure, you might want them available a certain amount of hours to keep them engaged with your company culture and put them in a position to collaborate with their peers. But that also means there’s probably room for flexibility in terms of when they’re expected to clock in and out or how they take their breaks.

If you have strict policies or management expectations about when your marketers are in the office, you need to consider carefully if there’s a strategic advantage to those rules or if they’re based on archaic expectations leftover from the dying traditional workplace.

Re-Evaluate Where Your Marketers Spend Their Time

The State of Marketing Work Report found that marketers spend about 17% of their time writing and responding to emails, 9% in “wasteful meetings,” and 9% on administrative tasks.

Your marketers no doubt have important communications, collaboration, and paperwork responsibilities. However, there certainly seems to be room for improvement.

There’s no one solution to time squandered on seemingly less productive activities. Some organizations have experimented with email and meeting policies designed to minimize the amount of frivolous communication and wasted time. Others implement various project management or collaboration tools to reduce redundant communication and minimize time wasted.

Regardless of your situation, cutting down on unproductive activities across the team will create some more breathing room for your marketers.

Recalibrate Rewards

It’s one thing to feel overworked.

It’s another to feel overworked, underpaid and unappreciated.

Recognizing and, when possible, compensating your team for their extra hard work and dedication during times of high stress can be an effective way to mitigate burnout. They won’t make the risk of burnout disappear long-term, but they can take the immediate edge off.

Recognition can come in many forms, and it’s up to your management team to know what works best for each of your team members. Some will be most motivated by public acknowledgement, others by a few quiet personal words. The important thing is to acknowledge their hard work and make sure they know it’s appreciated.

Likewise, you can offer a variety of different rewards to individuals that are working over capacity all the time. A bonus or raise are obvious financial incentives that are almost always well-received–and they might help retain some team members considering jumping ship for other opportunities. You can also get creative with other rewards, from office parties to corporate events to more PTO to greater autonomy and flexibility with their time.

Robert Pirsig didn't set out in life to change American pop philosophy, or to inspire designers, yet he certainly accomplished both. The writer, mechanic, tinkerer, and philosophizer passed away this week at the age of 88, but he leaves us with a classic text on mindfulness, process and observation. His immensely popular book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was a mechanically minded adventure story about a motorcycle tour with his son, but the layers of philosophical questions inside are still useful at any age or level of motorcycle-interest. 

Rejected by over 100 publishers before being picked up in 1974, it's also a case study in dedication to a project. In the decades since it's inspired innumerable copycats, literary responses, tattoos, mechanics, and critical thinkers. 

Most obituary pieces have focused on Pirsig's early high school graduation and army recruitment, where he encountered Eastern philosophy in the service, or his later adventures navigating a sailboat across the ocean in the days before GPS. But I'd argue that his interim years bouncing between menial and mechanical jobs, technical writing and treatment for mental health were just as formative, rooting his high fallutin thinking in utterly concrete experience. 

While it can drift into pure narrative, mechanical musing, or deeply navel-gazing philosophical critique of belief systems, Zen and the Art... blends the three in such a way that even the most esoteric moments carry a glint of the relatable. Here are a few choice quotes from a book about nearly everything, with particular savor for design thinkers.

On committing to an effort:

"The pencil is mightier than the pen."

"Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values. In motorcycle maintenance, you MUST rediscover what you do as you go. Rigid values makes this impossible."

On testing and perception: 

"The material object of observation, the bicycle or rotisserie, can't be right or wrong. Molecules are molecules. They don't have any ethical codes to follow except those people give them. The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you. There isn't any other test. If the machine produces tranquility it's right. If it disturbs you it's wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine's always your own mind. There isn't any other test."

"The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure nature hasn't misled you into thinking you know something you actually don't know."

Conversely, on the intangibility of "quality":

"Quality . . . you know what it is, yet you don't know what it is. But that's self-contradictory. But some things are better than others, that is, they have more quality. But when you try to say what the quality is, apart from the things that have it, it all goes poof! There's nothing to talk about. But if you can't say what Quality is, how do you know what it is, or how do you know that it even exists? If no one knows what it is, then for all practical purposes it doesn't exist at all. But for all practical purposes it really does exist."

On perspective:

"We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world."

On systems thinking:

 "There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously to ask that question is to look in the wrong direction, for the Buddha is everywhere. But just as obviously to ask the question is to look in the right direction, for the Buddha is everywhere."

On the basis for good work:

"The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there."

"The way to see what looks good and understand the reasons it looks good, and to be at one with this goodness as the work proceeds, is to cultivate an inner quietness, a peace of mind so that goodness can shine through."

"To the untrained eye ego-climbing and selfless climbing may appear identical. Both kinds of climbers place one foot in front of the other. Both breathe in and out at the same rate. Both stop when tired. Both go forward when rested. But what a difference! The ego-climber is like an instrument that's out of adjustment. He puts his foot down an instant too soon or too late. He's likely to miss a beautiful passage of sunlight through the trees. He goes on when the sloppiness of his step shows he's tired. He rests at odd times. He looks up the trail trying to see what's ahead even when he knows what's ahead because he just looked a second before. He goes too fast or too slow for the conditions and when he talks his talk is forever about somewhere else, something else. He's here but he's not here. He rejects the here, he's unhappy with it, wants to be farther up the trail but when he gets there will be just as unhappy because then *it* will be "here". What he's looking for, what he wants, is all around him, but he doesn't want that because it *is* all around him. Every step's an effort, both physically and spiritually, because he imagines his goal to be external and distant."

"Anxiety, the next gumption trap, is sort of the opposite of ego. You're so sure you'll do everything wrong you're afraid to do anything at all. Often this, rather than "laziness" is the real reason you find it hard to get started"

On resistance and new technology:

"This condemnation of technology is ingratitude, that's what it is. Blind alley, though. If someone's ungrateful and you tell him he's ungrateful, okay, you've called him a name. You haven't solved anything."

These days Zen and the Art... clearly carries a western and male perspective, often dated, but the questions posed are worth holding onto, perhaps especially when they call the author's own voice into question. Isn't that where our critical breakthroughs usually come from?

The future of commerce is already unfolding. Even though everyone says, “yes we know the world is changing,” I don’t believe that executives have shifted their thinking or belief system to change how they make decisions to compete differently. The challenge is that many decision-makers are caught in a state of “future shock,” stuck in the past and unable to move in ways that matter to an incessantly evolving market. Why? Because they still operate in an ecosystem that prioritizes quarter-to-quarter performance while change is unfolding in parallel. On one side, you’re optimizing sales and return in a familiar yet legacy market while competitors are investing in longer-term ROI by aligning with market trends. One side is shrinking while the other side is growing.

It’s a matter of future shock vs. future proofing. You cannot compete for the future if you make decisions about tomorrow based on yesterday’s perspective. Executives are often not customers. And still, they attempt to earn relevance among people who by their very nature do not want the past’s interpretation of value. Competing for normal is a death warrant. Customers do not want normal. Every aspect of their life, the things they love and rely upon, devices, networks, apps, services, deliver experiences that are personal, engaging, immediate and anything but normal.

I recently participated in a interview series for Oracle that resulted in a useful tool, “The Executive’s Handbook to Modern Digital Commerce.” It’s free to download but does have an e-mail gate.

Here are some of the interesting insights that should start a fire under that fancy office chair or stand up desk of yours (source).

9 seconds – time spent by shoppers before abandoning their shopping or engaging further.

67% of consumers cite bad experiences as reason for churn.

86% of buyers will pay more for a better customer experience but only 1% of customers feel vendors consistently meet their expectations.

75% of marketers believe that targeted personalization increases engagement. Yet, 39% of online merchants feel that vendors consistently send personalized product recommendations via email.

11% of US consumers strongly agree that retailers are effectively converging.

89% of customers are retained when a company provides consistent service across channels.

80% of merchants report being unprepared for the “shop anywhere, anytime” customer, from an inventory and financial perspective.

Pretty much all customers use their mobile device while in store (I just made that one up, but…)

Reimagining Modern Digital Commerce

There are human barriers to customer centricity…

Digital Darwinism affects businesses in good and bad ways. Keeping insights unbiased is essential for data scientists and technologists as they work across, and under pressure from multiple business decision makers. Many executives are not customer-centric, they are shareholder-centric. And innovation goes against the process of immediate and quarterly returns. Shareholder process is the enemy. Buying innovative technology is an opportunity to be innovative, so leaders need to embrace long-term visions over short-term gains with AI.

Success is not using new technology to improve our current performance, but rather success is in how we use technology to see around the corner and fundamentally change.

Improve and redesign the customer experience with data…

Anybody who wants to change their organization must realize that part of their job now is framing up data and insights to demonstrate new opportunities that can positively impact business performance. Take heed of the traditional business performance metrics that executives use to substantiate work, validate work, and invest in new roadmaps, such as pro tability, scale, and market share. Align new opportunities and customer stories to metrics that leadership already values.

All data needs a story, which means data scientists must become storytellers.

There’s an art and science to this. It takes fresh perspective and brainpower to think creatively about how to steer the ship in a whole new direction, convince leadership to take the leap, and build a successful framework for moving forward.

Innovation reveals new possibilities with digital commerce technology…

But what if that very foundation and legacy was, in and of itself, a model for the excellent customer experiences of tomorrow instead of today?

When we use AI and machine learning, for example, to analyze customer experiences outsideof our industries, we gather new insights which can lead to innovation across the entire customer journey and in the creation of new touch points. This helps in the development of new processes, services, or products that we wouldn’t have otherwise seen. This gives businesses the opportunity to create what doesn’t exist because customers are changing faster than executive philosophies are changing.

Artificial intelligence can transform and rapidly accelerate new business models. But success depends upon how data scientists process and analyze data, and whether leadership prioritizes fundamentally changing course basedon insights.

Naturally, when we apply AI to existing systems, methodologies, and processes, we can improve them.

To help, the Oracle team assembled a checklist that will, based on your level of investment, break the shackles of future shock and move your team closer to the future today.

10 Things Modern Digital Commerce Players are Doing…Right Now

1. Make an epic first impression

2. Fix usability issues fast

3. Develop user experiences that grow average order value

4. Personalize the shopping experience

5. Incessantly test mobile performance

6. Adapt to the physical-digital connection

7. Offer a consistent omnichannel experience

8. Deliver top-notch anytime, anywhere service

9. Offer unique promotions fast

10. Deploy anytime, anywhere shopping

For more on the future of commerce, please read, “11 Ways for Retailers to Survive the Retail Apocalypse.”

Brian Solis is principal analyst and futurist at Altimeter, a Prophet company, world renowned keynote speaker, and 7x best-selling author. His latest book, X: Where Business Meets Design, explores the future of brand and customer engagement through experience design. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn. Invite him to speak at your next event.

The post 10 Things Modern Digital Commerce Players are Doing To Thrive and Survive appeared first on Brian Solis.

Business-to-business (B2B) sales are entirely different to consumer sales. Typically, the whole process is more complex. Sales reps need to deal with a head of a department or buying authority — someone who has the final say before a transaction can be completed. As a result, reps need to nurture business leads and slowly move them through the sales funnel. Here’s how these professionals master B2B sales and boost revenue.

The B2B Sales Cycle

The B2B sales cycle starts long before a sales rep even contacts a business. In fact, 57 percent of the decision-making process is carried out before a marketer communicates with a B2B buyer. Usually, a business has already started to make up their mind about the products and services they are interested in. They might have seen a company’s advertisement on television or visited their website — nine out of 10 online buyers say content influences purchasing decisions. It’s a sales rep’s job to convince these business customers to make a purchase.

B2B selling companies use a variety of marketing channels to communicate with buyers. These include phone, email and live chat. Most of them have already nurtured business customers before they make contact: sales reps have a 56 percent better chance of attaining quota when they engage with buyers before contacting a company.

As sales reps work on commission, they want to secure as many sales as possible. They do this by discovering the client’s pain points — real or perceived issues that businesses have. Sales reps solve these problems with a product or service that provides the client with a solution.

“Great sales reps make it look easy, but superior performance usually indicates that a salesperson has taken the time to hone their skills and is constantly iterating to help their prospects better,” says Dan Tyre, writing for HubSpot.

B2B Sales Techniques

Marketers use many different B2B sales techniques. Eighty-four percent of B2B sales start with a referral, so the client often already knows about a rep’s product. This makes it easier for marketers to close a deal. However, they still need to convince the client to invest in their product.

Sales experts say that having a good attitude, using targeted list building, personalizing communications and not taking “no” for an answer improves B2B sales. However, every sales rep is different. What works for one marketer won’t necessarily work for another. Reps should develop their own strategies when nurturing leads in the B2B sales cycle. “There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for the daily challenges that might come up in the marketing sphere,” says marketing expert Sajeel Qureshi, writing for The Huffington Post.

B2B sales used to be associated with cold calling. As 90 percent of decision makers won’t respond to cold calls, according to research, sales reps now use new digital technologies to facilitate B2B sales. Mobile marketing, for example, lets marketers communicate with prospects via a smartphone, while email automation delivers targeted marketing messages.

Social media is also important. Research shows that B2B salespeople who utilize social media are 79 percent more likely to meet their sales quotas. Many marketers nurture leads with targeted social media campaigns that showcase products on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. This is effective for brand exposure and makes it easier to secure a deal later on in the sales pipeline. Fifty-four percent of B2B marketers say they have produced leads from social networks.

Reps use other, more conventional, B2B sales techniques, too. Trade shows are still the primary source for B2B lead generation — 77 percent of marketers say they produce a significant number of leads. Moreover, 59 percent believe print marketing is effective for B2B.

Measuring B2B Sales

Analytics tools track the entire B2B sales process, from initial contact through to final purchase. This software displays key performance indicators and B2B Sales factors, such as the cost of customer acquisition, sales team response times, sales growth and the lifetime value of a customer. Marketers can use this data to make important sales decisions and predictions about future outcomes.

Marketers, on average, only qualify around a third of leads. This is why it’s important for sales reps to track their marketing efforts so they can discover which methods provide the biggest return. One way to do this to segment B2B clients. Segmentation lets sales reps target leads who share common interests and behaviors — something that often proves lucrative. Moreover, B2B demographics are often smaller than consumer demographics, making segmentation easier. The average B2B buying group contains 5.4 people, according to one study.

B2B sales form the bedrock of many business-related operations. Sales reps use a plethora of marketing techniques to seal the deal, from mobile to social media. Marketers can then measure B2B sales with the latest analytics software. While B2B buyers take longer to nurture than consumers, marketers can secure lucrative sales opportunities when they focus on these clients.

Here’s a proven, step-by-step approach to building an effective sales funnel over on LinkedIn.

Finding new business online can be a lot like going fishing – you need to find the right location and the right bait.

Since LinkedIn is such a highly-visible and trusted platform for business professionals, with over 500 million members, it can be a great virtual fishing hole for generating qualified leads that turn to sales.

The key, of course, is knowing how to reel all those prospects in.

Having spent the past 60 months studying how to sell products and services on LinkedIn, a definite pattern and approach has emerged based on everything I’ve seen and done.

I’ll spend the rest of this post briefly outlining each step of the process!

STEP 1: Create a Client-Facing Profile.

Prospects you encounter on LinkedIn must be able to immediately understand what type of products or services you offer and the key audiences you serve. Your LinkedIn profile should not be about you. Instead it should be focused on what you can do for your ideal audience and what makes you different or better when compared to your competitors.

STEP 2: Create a piece of free content (Blog post, eBook, video, etc.) that targets a specific audience and has a Call To Action (CTA) included.

Content marketing is the price you must pay in order to purchase prospect’s time, attention and interest online. When you create something of value that can help your target audience solve their problems, you get this golden opportunity to demonstrate your authority and expertise, instead of just claiming it.

Once you’ve offered some free content, you have the relationship capital to ask your prospects to opt in for even more information and insight. This becomes your Call To Action, or CTA.

Whatever your CTA is, it must move the person further and deeper into your sales funnel. And remember – whatever “ask” you make with your CTA should be in direct proportion to the amount of trust and value you’ve built up to this point.

STEP 3: Use LinkedIn Search to find and connect with individual members of a specific or niche audience.

On LinkedIn, the riches are in the niches. Most people don’t realize it, but LinkedIn is one of the world’s largest search engines.

Use LinkedIn search to find your ideal prospects, using keywords, such as someone’s job title, and then used LinkedIn’s advanced filters to refine your search to include where someone lives, where he or she went to college, etc.

You now have a customized list of your ideal prospects ready to engage with, including the ice breakers and conversation starters (where someone lives, went to college, etc.) that help get the ball rolling.

STEP 4: Send each person a personalized invitation and get connected.

Remember, the key to success on LinkedIn is personalized, 1-on-1 marketing. You have all the information your need right in their profile: Where they went to school, where they live, even their activities and hobbies.

Find a unique way to personalize your invitations!

You have an ability to break the ice and strike up a conversation around topics that the person is comfortable and familiar with, and you can do it without being sales-y, spammy or sleazy.

STEP 5: Send each new connection a “warm-up” message with your free piece of content.

You can pivot from the initial icebreakers (via your LinkedIn invitation and first messages) into a one-on-one conversation where you offer something of value to your ideal prospect.

The idea here is simple – you must earn the right to ask someone for their time and attention on LinkedIn. You do that by providing some free tips, free advice, content, etc., that is aimed at solving one of the key prospects or pain points your ideal prospect has inside his or her business.

Because you’ve started the relationship off in a casual, 1-on-1 conversation style via LinkedIn, you can share your free tips or resources as a natural extension of the conversation.

STEP 6: Reply to warm leads who engage via messages and/or your content.

Stay engaged with people who like your posts. Reply to every comment and message. People want to do business with people they know, like and trust, and having casual business conversations with your contacts helps humanize you and prove you’re attentive and ready to help.

STEP 7: Go back to targeted prospects 2-3 times per month and send them more valuable tips and content.

It’s rare that anyone says “no thanks” to free tips to help them specifically with their business needs, as long as those free tips are truly of value.

Remember, you must bring real and legitimate value to the other person before you can ask for anything in return.

It might take time to build that trust, but as you move people into your sales funnel and stay consistent with your high-quality content and 1-on-1, personalized interactions, you’ll continue to hook them as new customers.

Why LinkedIn Works So Well

There simply isn’t another platform online right now where all the world’s professionals are gathered in one place, let alone in “work” mode while interacting there.

This is the daily reality over on LinkedIn, and that’s why, if you understand the best way to fish the platform digitally, it becomes a nonstop source of qualified sales leads and new customers.

So get your pole, grab some bait and get after it!

Starting a business is not such a big deal. But managing the process for a long time is the primary challenge for every small business or startup. Small and medium-sized enterprises control over 95% of the business market and regulate 60-70% of employment. But 50% of small businesses can’t make it for more than four years. Over a decade ago, this picture was not as bad. New enterprises were able to market themselves in traditional ways. But the recent era of online marketing has moved the attention of their visitors. New technologies and stiff competition are forcing SMBs to leave the track. But no challenge can be insurmountable. And I want to share some recovery options for the biggest challenges every small organization faces:

1. Lack of ample Funding:

Cash flow or money management is the most nerve-racking challenge every small business owner deals with. In this current economy, where everyone is running in a marathon race in a super-competitive environment, the challenge is harder than ever. And don’t ask about the situation in recessionary times. A U.S. Bank study has surveyed that 82% of businesses fails due to narrow funding.

It’s inevitable. Most businesses start with a limited amount of money and, in the turmoil of the beginning years, it’s the hardest challenge to maintain regularity in the cash flow. At the birth of a business, the invested money returns mainly from the payments received. When the savings is almost empty, it’s hard to fill the gap because of payment retardation. Also, new reasons arise for overestimated expenditures, and a pile of unpaid bills can’t be delayed.

The problem can be solved with the help of expert opinions. There are also some cash management tools that keep track of the incoming and outgoing cash flow. Financial analysis, budget estimation, tax calculation, capital investment and receipt records, payment automation, and credit scores are the key features of these apps. You can set an alert for unnecessary outgoings with the help of these new technologies. Online invoices and automatic payment reminders deal with disinclined customers, too. You can keep options for payments through cash, check, credit or debit cards, or net banking options. You should also plan on growing some savings to confront the rainy days and win.

2. Proper marketing:

Marketing challenges are another evil giant that 76% of small businesses fight. Digital marketing and online resources have changed the entire picture of marketing strategies. Buyers have all sorts of resources for gaining knowledge, so it’s harder to convince than ever before. This is the reason behind the issues with generating enough leads and closing deals with potential prospects.

• First, create a profile list for your target market.
• Try to be everywhere your potential clients can be found.
• Choose proper media platforms. Create an account on well-known professional sites.
• Keep your statements brief and precise.
• Stay connected 24/7. Don’t miss a chance to reply instantly.
• Provide analysed records about your work.
• Research your niche.
• Show feedback from your existing clients.
• Appreciate reviewers and reply to negative comments, as well as try to resolve these issues immediately.
• Create your apps to be accessed from any device.
• Moreover, use your unique skills for personal interactions to stand out from the crowd.

It’s also important to maintain a complete picture of your marketing and sales records. You need some marketing and sales tools to keep up with the modern technological trend. But before that, budget estimation and distribution are crucial aspects you need to focus on. Pinpoint your ROI calculation. Manage your responsive website with load time optimization and security.

3. Targeting and retaining customers:

In this era of digitization, modern business is centered on customer-orientation. Online marketing and resources have educated your customers on almost everything. But there is still something you can do to show your unique colors, and that is with your customer service. First, research your targeted clients. Use social and professional channels to reach them. Try to connect with them through personalized service channels, such as email, chat sessions, etc. Find out their needs and explain briefly how you can meet them.

Express your creativity. They will judge your expertise within your niche, so assemble your information and be ready. Don’t let them wait long. Provide free demo services. Carefully create your offers, which can direct them straight to the solutions they need. Deliver analytical records and customer feedback, when needed. It’s hard to convince a new customer to close a deal, and 78% of them leave before purchase due to unsatisfactory customer service.

Remember, your existing customers are the directors of your success. Their feedback and comments are the most reliable source of information on your reputation for new customers. Also, the chances of persuading an existing customer to purchase is 60-70 percent, whereas it is only 5-20% with a new one (Marketing Metrics). So, follow up. Research your existing customer database and sales records. Decide which ones are your best customers. Also, focus on negative feedback and learn what you need to in order to resolve the issue. Compare satisfied and unsatisfied customer records and find out the reasons for your success and failure, one by one. Make personalized offers to your best prospects, and ask for their opinions.

Your smart audience will show you where to go.

4. Strategic leadership:

Leaders are the pioneers of the entire team. Undeniably, the success of a team depends on the qualities of its leader.

A leader must have the ability to see the whole picture of the business, including customer and employee behaviors. A strategic-minded person always searches for new updates and relevant information sources. Learn from experience. Connect with other experts and ask for their opinion.

If you wish to lead your team to a win, make sure you possess these abilities first:

• Listen to everyone. It’s the most significant quality that differentiates you from the rest. You need to listen to other leaders and experts, so as not to miss any valuable ideas. Listen to your employees to create a productive work culture. Listen to your customers to understand their needs and to deal with them.
• Motivate your employees. Encourage them toward every success. Let them know about every little achievement they reach. Train them on past mistakes. Ask about any confusion. Ask for their feedback, too. Gain their trust. Sympathize with their problems. Create a communicative environment among the entire team.
• Be knowledgeable. Educate yourself in your field in every way possible. Be open to options for new ideas. Research all the analytics that you get.
• Learn from your mistakes. Don’t be afraid to fail. Because without failure, success is impossible. Test your assumptions. Keep analytical records for every area.

5. Finding and recruiting the right talent:

This is a big issue that small businesses suffer from a lot. Don’t be directed by emergencies and salary issues. Seek out the right person for the job. Don’t mix the talent. A salesperson can’t manage marketing issues properly. Similarly, customer service agents can’t handle your sales work. Also, too many different workloads reduce productivity. Distribute jobs in specific departments. Train your existing employees regularly. Demonstrate solutions to their mistakes and provide lessons on new technologies. Encourage them with experience-based studies. Select job seekers with proper experience. Go through their CV and profile details thoroughly.

An inappropriate person can do a lot of harm to your success.

Problems are out there everywhere. You will face challenges. But the winner is not the person who succeeds, but the one who finds a cure for every failure. And then the success becomes timeless.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Ask sales people why they lose deals and most will offer either price or some aspect of the product that led to their demise. I bet the over 40% B2B reps who fail to attain quota in a given year will also lean on the same crutch. While I understand the defence mechanism, you have to wonder when they will face the truth, and actually consider that it is the way they sell that leads to the results they get, nothing else.

Before I go on, it is important to mention that the sales person is not in this alone, the things I will speak to below are not just the fault of the individual seller. Their organizations and immediate manager are complicit in this, and not only enable, but often encourage, with the help of pundits, the behaviour that continues to plague sales, and leads to the results sellers see.

The problem is that most sellers (and their managers, and in many cases leaders in their respective organizations) are nothing more than observers, spectators if you will, rather than full time participants in the arena they are selling in. Being a spectator gives one a great vantage point, but not the same vantage point, or experience, as the actual on field players have. The best sellers, learn to observe and speak to things from the perspective of the player on the field, a real participant, not just the perspective of a super fan, which is how many sellers come across to buyers as. “Enthusiastic, informed, empathetic, but clearly hasn’t walked a mile in my shoes, and does not get the detail required to understand my view” is how one buyer put it.

Here’s a live example, I was working with a group of telco, IT wannabe sellers. At one point the question of why should or do people buy from you or your company?

Rep: We help them be more productive
Me: How?
Rep: We increase their people’s productivity.
Me: OK, give me an example, how do you make them more proactive?
Rep: We increase efficiencies
Me: How?
Rep: By increasing productivity
Me: OK, I’m with you, give me an example

You can hear the gears grinding, smoke ever so slowly seeping out of the ears, he wants to go to price but realizes the VP in the back of the room had him in the cross hairs.

In a last-ditch attempt to salvage the moment, he went for it:

Rep: We help them eliminate their pain points by offering the right solution.

Yup, that should cover it all, I didn’t have it in me to ask what pain, and what he was gonna solve with his solution.

Sure this may seem humours, till my role is played by an actual buyer, in the real world, who is actually a day to day participant in the “game”, not a “spots center” hack who may know the game, the players, and the rules, just hasn’t spend any time on the real field.

You can fake a lot of things in sales, but your buyer will know in a second if you are a real participant who can make a difference to them, or second rate color commentator who can’t contribute to the game.

Become one of the thousands of sales professionals receiving my latest updates on sales execution, tools, tips and more.

Join Now!

The post Participants vs. Observers appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

The blank screen is torture.

The only thing worse is a filled screen and a mere trickle of metrics.

Content that doesn’t connect is as worthless as a blank screen.

In fact, it’s more than worthless: It’s costly. The struggle is universal.

Content-creation challenges were experienced by almost half of B2B marketers and 37% of B2C marketers, according to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 research.

How do you create content that connects with your audience?

That’s the billion-dollar question. I reached out to 21 content marketers and asked for their No. 1 tip to create content their audience will love.

Let’s not waste another minute; let’s dive into the results!

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Content that doesn’t connect is as worthless as a blank screen, says @JoeElliottSYDJ.
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Be strategic

Know thy goals. Content marketers often have stars in their eyes when it comes to traffic, social shares, and their email list. Nonsense. Bigger isn’t better on any of those fronts.

What you have to know is how to make money. Rather than ask, “How do I make content my audience will love?” ask, “How do I make content with the lowest amount of traffic, shares, and email addresses that will still get me to my goals (whether that’s leads or revenue)?”
Aaron Orendorff, iconiContent 

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Produce content w/ lowest traffic, shares, emails that still will achieve your goals, says @iconicontent.
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You need to understand who the big players are in the community on social media and you need to understand what gets interaction and engagement and what doesn’t.
Rand Fishkin, Moz

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You need to understand what content gets interaction & engagement & what doesn’t, says @randfish.
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Before sitting down to write any piece of content, it’s vital that you have a plan. The plan doesn’t just consist of the topic you’re going to cover, but much more:

• The content: Map the content people actually want and need. Why should people read your article vs. someone else’s? What will you be saying that is new and different?
• The influencers: Next, map out influencers who would be interested in this article. You can collect quotes from them, mention them, or simply add them to a list of people you’re going to tweet to or reach out to via email when the article is ready. The more personal you get with them, the more likely they are to share the article.
• The media: Map out websites and publishers that would be interested in your article. Many publishers feature articles they find interesting or syndicate content. Reach out to them and let them know you’re writing a specific article they may be interested in. Reaching out beforehand will give you an indication if they’d like to see certain information in that article for them to share it or syndicate it.
• The promotion: Writing the content is only 20% of the job. The other 80% is promotion. Don’t just rely on sharing it a couple of times on Twitter and LinkedIn. Have a list of all the sites, communities, and platforms you’re going to promote on.
  Talia Wolf, GetUpLift 

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  Writing #content is only 20% of the job; the other 80% is promotion, says @TaliaGw.
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  Make it all about the audience

  The biggest mistake I see is creating content that is focused on you, and not the audience. I hate to break it to you, but your readers don’t care about you! They care about solving their problems. The more you help your readers with what they care about, the more they’ll come back, read your posts, and become loyal readers.
  Sue Anne Dunlevie, Successful Blogging

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  The more you help your readers w/ what they care about, the more they’ll come back, says @SueAnneDunlevie.
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  It all starts with your ability to research your audience. What is their biggest struggle that keeps them up at night? And more importantly, how can your content help them?

  The key is to engage with your readers and actually have a conversation with them. This can be done in the comment section on your blog (or a blog with the same target audience), by emailing them, or through social media.
  Tor Refsland, TorRefsland.com

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  Engage with your readers & actually have a conversation with them, says @TorRefsland.
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  You can validate your content ideas in a Facebook Group, a Quora question, or even just by emailing people who are interested in what your new blog is about.

  One of my favorite approaches to validate my content ideas is with an onsite survey carried out with Qualaroo. I put a quick, one-question survey on a Facebook group that says something like, “I’m working on a new blog post. Which of these topics are you most interested in learning more about?” Visitor responses help me separate the great from the good.
  Sujan Patel, Web Profits

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  Validate #content ideas w/ an onsite survey carried out w/ @QualarooInc, says @sujanpatel.
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  One of the best ways to create content your audience wants is to ask them. Here are a few questions you could ask your buyers:

  • How would you describe yourself? (e.g., I am a 30-year-old male VP of marketing at GEICO that loves cars and poker.)
  • What other (your niche) sites do you frequent? Please tell me the names.
  • What interested you in joining my list?

  Now you have qualitative data to give your audience more of what they want from you.
  Jason Quey, The Storyteller Marketer

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  One of the best ways to create content your audience wants is to ask them, says @jdquey.
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  If you already have a following and/or email subscribers – put together a survey in Typeform (the free version will do).
  Adam Connell, Blogging Wizard

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  Surveys are a great way to ask your audience questions if you already have a following, says @adamjayc.
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  Read the comments on popular blogs in your niche. Listen to what people are saying on Twitter. Attend the Q&A calls and webinars other authorities are holding, and write down the questions people ask.

  And then look for patterns. Almost always, you’ll find one or two questions everyone is asking over and over again, and it never seems to stop. That’s what you need to be writing about.
  Jon Morrow, Smart Blogger

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  Write down questions people ask in your niche & look for patterns to find content ideas, says @jonmorrow.
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  Before writing anything, you should start by creating personas for the various groups of your audience.  For example, you may have both B2C and B2B audience segments visiting your site. If you create personas, by outlining the different needs and pain points of each segment, you can create content around providing solutions and fulfilling needs for these people.

  Making sure you have content that fulfills all of their needs and intent, all the way through the conversion funnel, will ensure you’re creating the right content for the right audience at the right time of their journey.
  Jordan Kasteler, JordanKasteler.com

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  Start by creating personas for the various groups of your audience, says @JordanKasteler.
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  My best tip is to know who you’re talking to. Have what’s called a client avatar (a fully fleshed out example of your target market or average blog reader) and write to that person. Don’t write for SEO. Don’t write to everyone.

  Instead, write to one very specific person. Is that person male or female? How old is the person? What does the person do for a living? How about hobbies or interests?

  If you try to write to everyone, you’ll really be writing to no one.
  Gina Horkey,  Horkey Handbook

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  Don’t write for #SEO. Don’t write to everyone. Write to one specific person, says @HorkeyHandbook.
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  Include a feedback button of some sort. This button is there to consistently ask your audience what they want to see or what questions they want answered. You can also use this method to quiz them on what kind of content they love the most when it comes to your niche. You might be surprised that a large portion of your audience prefers infographics, or maybe even audio that could set you off down the road of creating a podcast in addition to a blog.
  Greg Elfrink, Empire Flippers

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  Include a feedback button to consistently ask your audience what questions they want answered. @gregelfrink
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  I always recommend people or brands focus on small niche market audiences.

  A great example of this can be seen with sports. The “sports” topic in itself is way too generic, and if someone wanted to get scores or highlights they would go to ESPN. However, if you drill this down several times and focus on something like “basketball jump training,” you can then cover every aspect of this tight focus in detail … thus always giving your audience the best content possible.
  Zac Johnson, ZacJohnson.com

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  Focus on small niche market audiences to give your audience the best #content possible, says @zacjohnson.
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  The best way to create content that your audience will love, is to go offline and talk to them long before you start crafting blog posts, writing sales pages, or structuring your lead magnets.

  Find 10 to 20 people within your target market and ask them if they’d be willing to chat on the phone, meet in person for coffee, or grab lunch. Prepare a list of questions and assumptions about what you think your audience wants to learn about and get better at.

  Go into your conversations with an open mind, without too many firmly held assumptions about the needs of your readers. Then, listen.

  Take notes about what your audience is telling you their biggest pain points are and make a prioritized list of content topics that can begin to chip away at their most significant challenges.
  Ryan Robinson, RyRob.com

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  The best way to create content your audience will love is to go offline & talk to them. @TheRyanRobinson
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  Tell it well

  With book writing, it’s always about making the content interesting and always keeping the reader wanting to flip to that next page.

  I think this is something that is lacking with online content creation today, as more people are focused on just putting content out there and not so much about actually providing value and making it their best work possible. With all of that in mind, always focus on the end user and make them want to keep reading more.
  Montgomery Peterson, Original Coloring Pages  

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  Always focus on the end user & make them want to keep reading more, says @MontgomeryPete2.
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  I like to create expert interviews or summary style posts. The benefit of creating these types of posts is that I can start with my own content and outreach, then fill up the bulk of the content with expert advice or resources from other locations.

  For example, if I wanted to create an article, 7 of the Best Free Email Reports for 2017, I could highlight seven different email reports already out there, do a short write-up on each, include a screenshot, and link back to the original source.

  Once the article goes live, I can then reach out to the sites mentioned within the article, and ask them to promote it on their end.
  Brandon Johnston, Blog Reign 

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  Do expert or summary posts – include your insight too – & use them for influencer promotion. @blogreigncom
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  Here’s the thing, there’s nothing new under the sun. Instead of trying to go head to head with established names in your niche by doing what they’re doing, tell a story. We’re hardwired to love a good story. It removes all our defenses and lets us learn lessons while being entertained.

  Tell stories about your experiences with the problem you’re helping them solve. Tell stories about inspirational people. Tell stories about the underdog. The people who’re reading your content may forgive everything from spelling mistakes to bad grammar, but they won’t forgive a bad story. Tell yours like a champ.
  Daniel Ndukwu,  IA Experiment

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  Telling a good story removes our defenses & lets us learn lessons while being entertained. @daniel_ndukwu
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  Document in a spreadsheet the questions people ask in forums and communities in your niche. Make a comprehensive blog post answering the questions you like.

  Once you have done that, just go back to the forum and write a short answer with a link to your post for a more detailed answer.
  Gael Breton, Authority Hacker

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  Document the questions people ask in forums & communities & answer in a blog post, says @GaelBreton.
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  Take it to the next level

  An excellent way to create better content for your audience while also increasing engagement is to include original images, infographics, and video content. Gone are the days when just text content is enough, now it’s all about shareable content and making sure your readers see the value in what you produce.

  A perfect example of this would be if you were writing a report on the latest industry trends and stats. Sure, the article is great in itself, but imagine how much more value it would serve to have custom charts, graphs, and even an original infographic to help complement your content as well.
  Srish Agrawal, Logo Design Team

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  Create better content by including original images, infographics, & videos, says @srishagrawal.
  Click To Tweet
  

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  I hated writing, but used to write blog posts all the time. It would take me forever but I thought that’s what you had to do to find your voice and get better. Then, I decided to start a podcast and video web show. It’s so much easier to create content, and now I hire ghostwriters to do the writing that I don’t like.
  Jaime Masters,  Eventual Millionaire

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  I hated writing. Then I started a #podcast. It’s much easier to create content, says @eventualmillion.
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  Creating great content is all about the relationship with your audience. Anyone can create a website and throw content online, but who is to say the trust factor and relationship is there? For this to take place, not only do you need to provide value within your content, you need to make sure its data is backed up with recent and reliable sources as well.

  A perfect example of this would be if you were to create an “industry stats” post on whatever market you might be. It’s easy to pull stats from anywhere or even come up with your own, but who’s to say these numbers are accurate. If you put in the time and effort to make sure all sources are cited, your content will not only provide more value and gain trust, it will likely be picked up by other publications as well.
  Tim Bourquin, After Offers

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  Your content will provide more value & gain trust if data is backed up w/ recent sources. @TimBourquin
  Click To Tweet
  

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  Conclusion

  Taking the time to understand your audience is the only way to increase your engagement and your overall results.

  Thankfully, that’s far from an impossible task.

  Stop relying on instinct and your own creativity. Get out there and talk to your audience, directly, indirectly, and through aggregate tools built around data. And think about how to get out of a content rut to stand out in a field of crowded content.

  What is your best tip for creating content your audience will love?

  Want daily tips to help your content marketing program? Subscribe to the free CMI newsletter.

  Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 21 Experts Share Their Best Tips to Create Content Your Audience Will Love appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury…

For six years I’ve been prosecuting the case against what several of my friends and I have come to call the #SocialSelling-Only, the Inbound-Only Prospecting is Dead Charlatans. On many platforms, and in front of  many audiences, online and in-person, my friends and I have made the case that salespeople should use ALL MEANS NECESSARY to get the attention of, and to get in front of, strategically selected target prospects. Sellers have an entire arsenal of weapons at their disposal – from email, to trade shows, fromTwitter to Facebook to LinkedIn, from referrals to text messaging, from snail mail to white papers, and from blogging to telephone prospecting, and many more. And much to the dismay of these charlatans who preach the dangerous lie that traditional prospecting is stupid, archaic, and ineffective, we have continued to remind salespeople and sales leaders that the telephone remains a laser-precise and highly effective way to deliver your message and to secure a discovery meeting with strategic target accounts.

Furthermore, in spite of the fact that this harmful messaging that emanates from the social-only/inbound-only camp actually helps our own speaking, consulting, and training business (as we are regularly called in to help struggling, opportunity-starved sales teams who drank the Kool-Aid believing the lie that if you tweet, comment on LinkedIn and blog enough, prospects will run to you – after getting exactly 57% through their buying process – with cash in hand, ready to purchase), we have done our very best to counter the misinformation provided by these charlatans and demonstrate with proof, that telephone prospecting is very much alive and well creating significant new opportunities for many of our clients in various industries. [That may be the longest sentence ever posted on this blog ]

Fellow sellers, sales leaders, and senior executives: I promise you that we have no agenda. Our simple desire is to see salespeople and sales team succeed in developing net new business. That’s why I wrote a book on the topic, which, by the way has exactly one chapter of sixteen dedicated to using the telephone to secure discovery/early-stage meetings with prospects. It’s not that we are “pro-phone” for the sake of being “pro-phone.” It’s that those of us on this side of the argument know that the phone works very well regardless of the ridiculous research and opinions posted by #socialselling experts on blogs and LinkedIn the past week as this battle once again reached a fever pitch. Said another way, there was a lot of Fake News pumped out recently by testy #social-only charlatans who feel threatened that they and their dangerous false message to gullible sellers have been exposed.

Friends, aside from purely selfish motives, I cannot understand, for the life of me, why there are people in the sales improvement business who, without hesitation, regularly and boldly proclaim to any desperate (lazy, reactive, easy button-seeking) salesperson that “prospecting is pointless” and “cold-calling is dead.”

And here is where I would like to make my final, and strongest points to the jury. Don’t take my word for it that the phone and OutBound efforts are still highly effective ways to fill the top of the funnel with new pipeline opportunities. Forget the fact that I have personally witnessed (and helped) dozens and dozens of sales organizations thrive from improving their personal prospecting efforts where sellers actually took responsibility to self-generate their own leads. Forget all the reviews for New Sales. Simplified., Fanatical Prospecting, High-Profit Prospecting, and The Only Sales Guide You’ll Even Need (not to mention Tony Hughes incredible new book, Combo Prospecting, coming later this year). Ignore the testimonials of the 400 sales professionals who packed the first OutBound Conference in Atlanta two weeks ago, or the thousands upon thousands of salespeople who would testify under oath that they are succeeding in sales from using a combination of various prospecting methods, new and old, analog and digital, outbound and inbound, and definitely counting the phone as one of their most powerful sales weapons. That’s right, ignore all of that. But, let me ask you to consider the following:  The next time some faux sales expert on LinkedIn chimes in with a derogatory comment calling you stupid or desperate for even considering using that phone to make an OutBound prospecting call attempting to secure a meeting, and when these same charlatans write blog posts quoting bogus straw man statistics painting the picture that there is no greater waste of time than telephoning prospects, please ask them…

If LinkedIn is the ultimate #SocialSelling platform, and people who master using LinkedIn should never have to make OutBound calls to prospects, then why does LinkedIn have its own salespeople making cold calls? Audible gasp! Read that again. The social selling giant is hiring reps to make prospecting calls. I’ve known this for a while, but never made a big deal about it. I have had several colleagues receive cold telephone calls from LinkedIn sales reps. But this ad, pictured below, for a LinkedIn sales job that Jeb Blount found over the weekend takes the cake. Anthony posted it on LinkedIn, and after reading it, I was immediately compelled to write this post. Exhibit A, ladies and gentlemen. Look at this job description for a sales position working for the behemoth of all #social platforms:

The final piece of my closing argument may be even more convincing if you are still on the fence about whether those who tell you not to make OutBound calls may be right. HubSpot is the King of Inbound Marketing. They are incredible at what they do, and I have tremendous respect for the company, its offerings, and its wonderful past and current employees. And what I am about to write, I’ve known for several years, but except for mentioning it in a generic sense during a webinar, or sharing it privately in front of a client sales team, I’ve never put it in writing. But the time has come to silence the morons and charlatans looking to make a quick buck and expand their platforms while poisoning your sales effort with their nonsense that #SocialSelling and Inbound are the only ways to go.  HubSpot has an OutBound Sales Team. That’s right. The King of Inbound has sales reps making OutBound calls! Their vice president of sales shared this with me just as he was telling me that they were using my book, New Sales. Simplified., to help with their OutBound efforts. In case I typed that too fast or it was such a shock to your system to read it, let me repeat: The biggest, baddest, best inbound marketing company has sellers making OutBound telephone calls attempting to sell their services.

Last week I posted an article cautioning you to be wary of sales experts. If what I shared in this post isn’t proof positive of why that is the case, I don’t know what is. So next time some expert quotes you a bull crap statistic, offers you some magic #socialselling potion and an easy-button, while loudly declaring that my buddies and I are dinosaurs because we think you might improve your pipeline and your sales results by incorporating good phone calls and voicemails into your prospecting, don’t just be wary. Be angry. And call them out for the lies they tell and the damage being done to sellers who listen to their garbage. Oh, and then point them to the FACT that LinkedIn has its salespeople making cold calls and, even HubSpot as wonderful as their inbound tool and platform may be, also has reps doing OutBound work. Be wary, friends. Be. Very. Wary. of these charlatans.

I rest my case.

Productively making first contact with a prospect is a delicate art for sales reps. You never get a second chance at a first impression, and you want to do everything in your power to ensure your outreach registers with potential customers.

The method of outreach sales reps use for a first connect makes a significant difference in response rates. Rather than deciding whether to call a new prospect or send an email based on personal preference, use the method your prospect will be most responsive to.

Let’s break down some of the key differences between a cold call and a cold email.

Cold calls can be more personal.

A cold call can be more personal than a cold email. It can garner an immediate response and lets you deal with a prospect saying "no" right away. Cold calls are also more dynamic than cold emails because they allow you to adjust your strategy to fit a prospect's needs as your conversation with them progresses.

Calling prospects out of the blue can be invasive.

That being said, leveraging cold calls does have some downsides. Cold calls, by nature, are intrusive. People often aren't receptive to receiving them consistently, and many will get frustrated when you use one to reach them.

On top of that, you, yourself, might get frustrated and impatient if the call isn't going smoothly. They're also more expensive and less efficient than sales emails. And if you're constantly inundating prospects with obtrusive cold calls, your company's reputation can take a hit.

Cold emails are easier to scale.

Cold emails lend themselves to a different approach to prospecting. They're cheaper and more efficient, making them more scalable. In the time it would take to make a single cold call, you could send several cold emails.

You can also attach more visually appealing and informative content to a cold email — better capturing figures and concepts that might be harder to convey over the phone.

Cold emails can be easier to distribute and track.

A cold email is also less intrusive than a cold call, so prospects might be a bit more polite in response to one — even if they're saying "no." That might not seem like much, but it can be a big help to morale long term. They can also be automated, tracked, and forwarded — making them easier to distribute and keep tabs on.

Emails are easier for prospects to ignore.

The main risk you run with cold emails is being ignored. Prospects can be inundated with dozens of cold emails every day. The competition is stiff and abundant. In many cases, cold emails get blocked, go unopened, or are flat-out deleted. And if one is compelling enough to generate a response, there's no telling when it will come.

Whether you contact a prospect via phone or email, if you’re conducting cold outreach all communication needs to be handled with care. Make sure you carefully vet new contacts to see if they’re a viable candidate for your offer and be mindful of any boundaries they establish.

All this begs the question: Phone or email? When deciding between trying a prospect by phone or sending an email, let the following factors be your guide.

How to Decide Between Emailing & Calling

1. Time and Day of the Week

First, consult a calendar and a clock. Statistically, phone connect rates rise as the day progresses, and as the week progresses. In other words, a person is more likely to answer their phone later in the workday and workweek.

That said, I like to reserve 3 p.m. and later of the prospect’s local time as my prime calling hours. The same goes for Thursdays and Fridays — I block out large chunks of time on these days for cold calling.

But what if a prospect doesn’t pick up their phone in these timeframes? In that case, leave a voicemail. Response rates to voicemails also increase later in the day since checking phone messages is something people often do before heading home for the evening. Calling late is a win-win.

On the other hand, the ideal time span in which to send email is shorter but more frequent. While I draft connect emails throughout the day, I am careful to send them either 10 minutes before the hour or 10 minutes after the hour.

These brief windows correspond with people leaving or going to meetings. What do they do with the few minutes they have to kill? Scroll through email on their smartphones. If you sync your email to be sent with the time your buyer is most likely to check their inbox, your message will pop up on top instead of being buried beneath others.

2. The Ask

What’s your objective for this first outreach? To set up a meeting? Get some more information? Receive a referral? Figuring out your ask and categorizing it as “weak” or “strong” will help you determine whether to call or email.

Strong asks require commitment from the prospect to do something. I would label requests for meetings, conference calls, or product trials as strong closes. Weak asks seek straightforward information from the buyer — think a prompt for feedback or a referral.

Once you know you're close and have determined if it’s strong or weak, it’s easy to choose between a call or an email. If you’re putting forth a strong close, pick up the phone. Since these asks require more from the prospect, salespeople need to employ their closing skills to secure a "yes." And it’s far easier to persuade on a phone call — when a rep can respond to and smooth over objections in real-time.

But if the ask is weak, draft an email. Don’t take up the prospect’s time on the phone unnecessarily if your request can be fulfilled with a few short lines of text.

It’s interesting to note that most salespeople take the opposite approach — they ask buyers for meetings through emails and reserve simple questions for calls. Why? Because they’re afraid of being rejected on a strong ask over the phone.

Don’t let fear block you from connecting with a buyer. Reverse this equation and watch your response rates climb.

3. The Level of the Prospect

Do individual contributors have assistants? Not usually. But do C-level executives? Almost always.

That’s why the higher up your prospect is in an organization, the more likely you are to reach a live person when you call. Since a live conversation with anyone — regardless of whether they’re the person you were trying to reach or not — trumps an email exchange, lean on the phone with buyers at the management level or above. Also, higher-level prospects are generally more comfortable on the phone, and less intimidated by sales calls.

But if individual contributors don’t answer their phones, no one else is going to pick up — and they’re not likely to return a call from an unknown number. In addition, lower-level professionals are often away from their desks — traveling, working in groups, participating in meetings, and so on. Therefore, a rep is much more likely to connect with a prospect at this level through an asynchronous channel such as email.

4. The Buyer Persona

Some buyer personas favor a different communication style than others. Their preference depends on multiple factors: Their age, the nature of their job, their industry, and more.

In general, millennials like communicating by email more than over the phone. If you're reaching out to a younger buyer, take this into account.

You might find professionals in customer-facing roles are more amenable to talking on the phone because that's what they're used to. Those in internal jobs, however, might be more comfortable sending emails.

Lastly, those in more traditional industries are typically accustomed to phone calls.

5. The Deal Momentum

Are things moving along at a swift cadence? Is your prospect almost always responsive? Are you positive they're ready and willing to close? Then an email to touch base or check on the status of a task or request shouldn't stall your deal.

If, however, your prospect is unresponsive, on the fence about your product/service, or facing many levels of bureaucracy it might be faster and easier to pick up the phone. If they pick up the phone, you can immediately present your ask and receive an answer. If you get their voicemail, leave your message and follow up with an email.

Now that you understand the qualitative cues to follow when deciding to cold call or email, let’s take a look at what the research has to say.

Cold Call vs. Email Statistics

1. 31% of sales reps find sending personalized manual emails to prospects is most effective compared to automated cold emails.
2. While making a cold call, you usually have five to 10 minutes to appeal to the prospect.
3. According to Gong, discussing ROI can reduce cold email responses by 15%.
4. The best days to conduct cold calls are Wednesday and Thursday shortly before lunch (generally between 11 a.m. and noon) or during the last hour of the workday (between 4 and 5 p.m.).
5. Personalized emails sent during the late morning and late afternoon time frames have better open and click-through rates.
6. Cold emails that have a CTA gauging the prospect’s interest perform better than CTA’s asking to arrange a meeting.
7. On average, it takes up to five outreach attempts for top-performing reps and eight outreach attempts for other reps to initiate a meeting or conversation with a new contact.
8. It can take up to six call attempts to convert a new customer, and increasing call attempts can increase conversion by 70%.
9. 48% of reps don’t make any follow-up attempt after a cold call.
10. The typical cold email response rate is just 1%.
11. Only 24% of cold email pitches are opened by recipients.

Cold Outreach Tools

As mentioned above, there are pros and cons to cold calls and emails. Ultimately, the choice comes down to what works best for you and the prospects you’re working with.

Whether you decide to focus on calls, emails, or a mix of both, check out these tools to support your cold outreach efforts.

1. HubSpot Email Tracking Software

If you rely on cold emails for your outreach strategy, consider using HubSpot’s free email tracking software. This tool connects directly to your inbox and notifies you when a prospect has opened or clicked on content within your email.

Email tracking software gives you valuable insight into the best time to reach out to your prospect and offers their email history with your company at a glance so you know exactly what message was delivered when.

2. Outreach.io

Image Source

Outreach offers a robust platform where you can manage all of your prospecting activities in one place. Within Outreach, users can conduct outbound calls and send emails efficiently using personalized messaging.

Outreach is also a collaborative platform that allows teams to share relevant data and leverage sales intelligence technology for smarter outreach.

3. SalesLoft

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SalesLoft is an all-in-one platform where sales teams can conduct sales calls and messaging in one place. Not only can reps conduct cold calls from within the tools, but all calls are also recorded and logged for coaching and development opportunities. A notable feature of SalesLoft is the pre-recorded voicemail drop – no more leaving repetitive messages over and over.

4. Icebreaker by UpContent

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Need help knowing what to say when conducting cold outreach? The Icebreaker tool by UpContent can help. This platform sources relevant third-party content to help you foster stronger connections with your contacts. No more spending hours looking for interesting articles to send to prospects, Icebreaker does the work for you and integrates with your CRM so you know what content delivers results.

Following Up

These criteria make it much easier to choose between an email and a phone call for your first outreach. But what about subsequent touchpoints?

In my opinion, the beginning and the end of each sales engagement should be phone-heavy, since that’s where the strongest asks are — starting a relationship and closing a deal. In between, reps should opt for email as a rule of thumb.

Try implementing these tactics into your sales process to determine what works best for you.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 27, 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Coming up with new ideas for blogs on a regular basis can be really tough. In fact, this is often one of the biggest struggles that new inbound marketers have. After posting blog after blog filled with inspiration and new ideas, eventually the creativity slows down—or it may even come to a screeching halt.

Finding appropriate and relevant topics that feel fresh presents a very real challenge. But there is also a very real solution to the problem. Actively seeking out new topics for blog posts can be much less frustrating if your marketing team regularly applies the Buyer’s Journey to the blog-writing process. This approach uses feedback from actual customers to answer questions, develop solutions, and lead the reader deeper into the buying process.

What is the Buyer’s Journey?

Three basic stages turn a visitor into a buyer: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. Picture it as a sort of funnel, starting out very wide and then narrowing down as the journey moves forward. While these stages are not exactly black-and-white, the general idea goes something like this:

Awareness – The prospective buyer is seeking to solve a problem. Questions are general, working to define the problem in a more specific manner.

Consideration – This stage happens when a prospective buyer begins evaluating various possibilities for solutions to the problem. This may be a very long stage where different approaches are considered, viewpoints are discussed, and experiences or opinions are sought out.

Decision – Once the potential buyer has decided on the best type of solution, the time comes to narrow down the options related to vendors, prices, features, and fit.

Correlating the Buyer’s Journey to Blog Writing

Once you’ve determined the kinds of questions that prospective buyers are asking in the three states of their journey, your blog topics tend to present themselves. Simply take on the role of providing answers to the questions potential buyers are asking, creating a myriad of options for blog post topics. Some creativity and brainstorming still comes in to put a fresh spin on each topic, but the identification of the questions comes first.

Awareness. When curating content ideas for the Awareness stage, remember that a large percentage (81% according to Adweek) of online shoppers will conduct research prior to purchasing. This creates an open door of opportunity for your organization to become a trusted resource who educates and provides answers to a visitor’s more general questions.

Consideration. The Consideration stage is critical because this is the time when buyers begin eliminating possibilities—and you obviously don’t want to get cut. For this stage, your goal should be to prove to visitors that your organization is an expert within your industry. Content geared toward this stage will often include deeper educational content such as webinars, expert guides, and whitepapers that allow you to attract more qualified leads. This is not the time for you to attempt to “pitch” your specific company, but share generalities about the types of solutions you offer.

Decision. Finally, during the Decision stage, your visitor has determined what the best solution will be for the problem, and now they need help narrowing it down to specifics. Calls-to-Action (CTAs) such as request buttons, demos, or trial offers are all included in this stage. This part of the journey is exciting, but it is important to remember that the buyer must get to this stage by working through the other stages first. This is the time to offer literature on your specific products and tell customer stories that educates and entertains. Infographics may be particularly helpful when used to firm up a buyer’s decision-making process.

Inspiration for blog content may ebb and flow at times. But if you map out your editorial calendar using the Buyer’s Journey, you’ll find that your blog topics are not only easier to develop but your company sales should grow and expand at the same time.

We’re living in the golden age of sales enablement technology, and innovative companies are taking advantage of this reality by freeing their reps to engage in more value-added activities with key prospects. Effectively deploying various sales enablement techniques can have positive ramifications across nearly all of your sales processes, and it can also transform your salespeople’s relationships with your buyers.

Make lead qualification more straightforward

No one is going to argue that lead qualification is easy, but it is possible to take some of the guesswork out of the process thanks to sales enablement tools. When lead qualification is an entirely manual process, you’re asking your sales reps to digest and analyze a jumble of various points of data, often from wildly diverse sources, and then make a judgement accordingly. All it takes is a small error to cause a decision to veer off course.

However, with sales enablement, you will have access to simple, automated lead scoring techniques that will clarify the process for your sales reps. When you consider that companies with a robust lead nurturing initiative generate 50% more high-quality leads, and do so for two-thirds of the cost, then it becomes clear you can’t afford not to engage in this strategy.

Take your content creation to the next level

In the game of content creation, can you accept the occasional misses if they’re scattered throughout some hits? You may think that if a prospect comes across a piece of content that isn’t engaging they’ll click away with relatively little harm, at least as long as your product and your salespeople are up to the task.

But ineffective content is actually more damaging than you think because it dilutes the authority of your brand, fails to add value to the prospect’s life, and wastes your own valuable resources. Sales enablement tools help your reps create more optimized content for your buyers in a fraction of the time.

Broaden your analytical reach

The greater the number of components in your sales process you can analyze in detail, the healthier your sales operation will be. Data is more important to B2B sales units than ever before, which means companies are gathering and storing even more of it.

Attempting to analyze all of the data you need to succeed in the contemporary environment without the help of sales enablement software is a fool’s errand, and a recipe for wasted manpower. Enhanced analytics can take your productivity to new heights and companies who use these techniques have been shown to hit team quotas four times faster than others.

Specialize your communications

Not all forms of client communication are created equal. In some cases, there is absolutely no risk of relying completely on automation to create and deliver a message. Other cases require the intimate knowledge of a relationship history that only a salesperson can possess.

It’s your job to use sales enablement to eliminate the distractions of the former in service of the latter. Software tools can help you expertly specialize your customer email strategy so your talented sales reps spend more time nurturing relationships at the moments when they can add the most value.

Create a holistic view of your pipeline

Bottlenecks in the sales pipeline can kill productivity and leave your team members scrambling to find enough high-quality leads to have a shot at hitting their quotas — don’t settle for it. When small inefficiencies can have ripple effects across the entire sales unit, you have to exploit every available opportunity to stamp them out.

With the aid of advanced sales enablement dashboards, you can see how your sales pipeline works in its entirety. Then, you’ll be able to use analytical trend spotting tools to pinpoint potential bottlenecks before they have an opportunity to inflict maximum damage.

Embrace social channels without the hassle

The value of social selling is no longer a secret and even organizations who were slow to jump on the social media bandwagon are now firmly entrenched in its ecosystem. The reason it has become such an important tool is because buyers specifically look to it for value, which means sales teams have a unique opportunity to be exactly where their prospects need them to be, with the information they need.

The issue is manually monitoring all social selling activity takes a massive amount of time. But by employing social listening tools, you can keep track of interactions across a variety of social platforms in a fraction of the time it would take you to manually monitor just one.