Rnordman

There’s one meeting that stresses all of us out: salary negotiations. It doesn’t matter whether you’re interviewing for a new job or you’ve been at your current job for years, While it may be tempting to avoid that awkward conversation all together and take the first figure that gets thrown out at you, this is rarely a good idea. Research offers up various reasons for why you should always negotiate your salary. Just think about this: If a yearly raise isn’t guaranteed, you need higher pay to account for yearly cost of living adjustments caused by inflation. Essentially, if you aren’t planning...

Read the full article: 7 Worst Tips and Common Mistakes in Salary Negotiations

I just read a piece about how to deal with a brand-new sales hire. It was, to say the least, ridiculous. The opening piece of advice was to start the rep on a Friday rather than a Monday because they may feel “disengaged” on a busy day.

Reality: This is sales. Dive in and start swimming! The water’s fine.

If the first day is busy, ask to help, listen to sales conversations, and take notes. Reps should be learning from the get go.

And if day one is discouraging to the rep, day two won’t be any better.

Rather than hear more of my diatribe on how inaccurate (and complicated) this guy’s advice was, let me just give you a few real-world ideas about how to actually get a new salesperson involved, trained, supported, and rolling on day one, and making sales by week three -- or sooner.

Managers, this advice requires your personal involvement and responsibility for the rep’s initial and ongoing success.

Reps, here are the steps that will get you to success and commissions.

1) Assign pre-work

Reps must study the history of the company, the competition, the marketplace, the products, and especially the present customers and why they’re buying. They should also be familiar with the company’s present market position and performance.

2) Prep the team

Management must prep the team to be ready to meet and welcome the new salesperson. Ask reps to each prepare a “tip for success.” Consider recording them so the new hire can study the video. You’ll also be able to send this content to future hires.

3) Provide valuable tools

To help your salespeople be as successful as people, teach them how to use your CRM and other sales technology tools starting on day one. The longer they go without adopting your stack, the more difficult it will be to incorporate into their routines.

4) Use real-world training

Studying in a classroom won’t properly prepare salespeople for real sales calls and relationships. Product and sales training must include a week-long period working at three different customer’s offices. This gives reps an opportunity to discover your product’s use and value for themselves. They may also discover an opportunity to expand an existing account. Yes, the new hire may actually facilitate a sale during training -- imagine the confidence boost this will give them.

You should also train new reps on presenting, using social media in the sales process, asking questions, building rapport, creating emotional engagement, providing value, and closing.

5) Provide ongoing support and useable training

Online on-demand training for both personal development and sales skills is critical. Use a mixture of customized lessons so that the salesperson knows how to attract, appoint, engage, relate, present, persuade, and persist. You should also show them 10 or more video testimonials from customers stating “why they bought.”

6) Do not have them shadow your best salesperson

Managers, your top-performing rep doesn’t want to have a novice asking her questions. Especially when you’re not giving her a dime for sharing her time and expertise. It’s the manager’s job to show the new rep how you do it. Set appointments, go on sales calls, and make a few calls. Show the new salesperson how it’s done, and you will earn her respect and put her on the path to success.

7) Take responsibility for the new rep’s success

If you’re the sales leader, erroneously referring to yourself as a manager, the preparedness of your new hires, the support of your new hires, the fate of your new hires, and the success of your new hires is YOUR responsibility. No one on your “team” cares if the new kid lives or dies -- except you.

Here’s the question: Why are you “delegating” (a.k.a. shirking) the responsibility for the success of your new hire to someone with zero skin in the game?

I find myself in an unusual position. I’ve always been biased more to the science side of selling than the art side. I believe that selling is a disciplined process, that we can “engineer” those processes to increase our impact, customer engagement, and our effectiveness. I believe in sharp, rigorous execution of those processes in driving sales effectiveness and performance.

Sales people promoting the old “Hail and Hearty,” sales is all about relationships and “when the going gets tough, the tough take a customer to lunch/golf,” have been somewhat abhorrent to me. But then, I’m a physicist/engineer by training–and somewhat of an introvert.

But I’ve been alarmed by the rise of “assembly line” thinking, extreme specialization, and obsession with our own efficiency—to the detriment of building relationships and trust. Much of this seems to be a R 3.0 approach to Predictable Revenue. I read posts and books about customers as indistinguishable widgets that we process from MQL to SQL to SDR to BDM to AE to Product Specialist to Negotiator to Order Entry to Customer Success. At each step, we do our assigned task, then pass the customer down the assembly line. At the same time, proponents of extreme specialization and the assembly line thinking, make vague claims that customers don’t want relationships, they want to solve their problems, so if we give them the right information at the right time, we can move them through our process.

As I read these views about the future of selling, I find myself extremely uncomfortable. As much as a “sales is more science than art” guy as I am, I can’t help but think we are dealing with human beings with all the frailties, fears, ego, opinions, ambitions, dream, and faults that make us human, as opposed to machines. I’ve always thought EQ is as critical, perhaps more so, than IQ.

But since I’m seeing so much of this thinking, I thought, perhaps I’m missing something, perhaps I’m wrong.

I decided to look at it from a different perspective. What causes each of us to choose who we work with, what companies we join, and what we get out of work? For the moment, let’s put those pesky customers to the side and think about ourselves.

We seem to be drawn to companies and people that have similar values, the culture of the company is important to us. Building relationships with our managers, colleagues and others in the company is important–not just because we value human relationships, but it’s through those relationships we get things done. I trust Amy to do a great job in explaining the technical intricacies of our solution, because we have a relationship with shared goals and values. I’ve seen her work before and know she will help me achieve my goals. Likewise, she wants to support me, not just because I’m the next person in queue, but she likes working with me, she appreciates the kudos and the fact that I bribe her with coffee every once in a while. We have dependencies on others in our organization to help us achieve our goals, just as they have of us. We commiserate with our colleagues about the latest edicts from corporate and management–we value the collegiality and the opportunity to collaborate with others. These relationships aren’t just limited to our immediate work group but extended to others in our company and to partners and colleagues outside our companies.

As I look at things we do that have some level of personal or job/function risk, relationships seem to be more important. We want people to “have our backs,” to “be in the same boat,” and so forth.

When I ask people, “Why have you chosen to work here?” More often than not, it’s because we are aligned with the company, our colleagues, and what we are collectively trying to achieve. Yes a paycheck is part of it, but we don’t just work for a paycheck, we work to be part of something beyond each of us as individuals.

I suppose, if I asked any reader or any sales person I might meet, “Are the relationships you establish within your company important to you and important to your ability to achieve your goals and dreams,” the majority would say, “Yes!!!”

Now I go back to the “science of selling” pundits, those that focus on our own efficiency, those that claim relationships/trust are unimportant–or at best secondary. I think, if these relationships/trust are so important for us and our success, why would we think customers would be any different? Why would we think that some level or relationship, some level of connection, some level of trust in helping them achieve their goals and dreams is unimportant? As customers engage in complex collaborative decisions, with possible serious consequences to their organizations and their own careers–human emotions and frailties come to the forefront of those processes.

We can never forget that as long as we are selling to a human being, relationships, trust are important to them, consequently they must be important to us. They need not be deep, they need not be long lasting–though if we have any thought to repeat business, referrals, growing our business, they will be.

We must weigh the impact of our internal drive for “efficiency” with our ability to create value through trusted relationships, and drive results.

In my 2016 blog The Simple Why and How of Product Demonstration Videos, I showed that product demonstration videos enable better conversion opportunities. I also listed 5 reasons why videos should be an important part of your marketing mix and revealed how you can simply create product demonstration videos in 6 steps.

In this blog, I want to explore in depth a subcategory of product demonstration videos, which is product demonstration videos made by users. There are several reasons why you would want user product demonstrations and several reasons why you would not want them. I have also found 7 features that successful product demonstration videos have in common, which I want to share with you. You can use the list if you decide to produce your product demonstration videos yourself or keep it in mind when using user videos.

Why you should use video in your marketing mix

First, let me revisit why it is important to add video to your marketing mix. In 2015, Matt Aunger has collected 6 stats, which I find very convincing and which I believe still hold somewhat the same value in 2017:

• Video generates 3x as many monthly visitors to a website as other content.
• Visitors spend 88% more time on a website that includes video.
• Organic traffic from search engines increases by 157% with video.
• Consumers are 46% more likely to seek information about a product or service after seeing it in an online video.
• Consumers are 85% more likely to buy after watching a product video.
• Consumers have 57% more confidence in their online purchase with video.

5 reasons why to use user product demonstrations

So, are you convinced that video is important for your company? Great! Would you like some more information about why user product demonstrations are a good idea? Larry Alton has 5 reasons for you:

1. A more “real” demonstration

You have been working on your product for months and so you know how to navigate it easily. When you start showing off your own product, all your movements and explanations will be premeditated, scripted, and rehearsed. Your actions will not mimic those of a user seeing your product for the first time. Putting your product in the hands of real users will result in a “real” demonstration of the product. Your demonstration video is not necessarily about the product itself; it is about the experience of using the product.

2. Illumination of non-intuitive features

No matter how well-designed your product is, there will probably be some non-intuitive features in the finished product. Putting your product in the hands of a real user will lead them to explore these non-intuitive features in a real environment, showcasing them to users who are unfamiliar with them. You may even receive information with which you can improve the product.

3. More trust and conversions

People tend to trust other people like them far more than they trust entrepreneurs or salespeople. Any kind of video testimonial, review, or demonstration from another user is going to make other customers on your site trust you more. Anyone can claim that their product is the best on the market, but it is far more believable when an actual customer makes the same claim.

4. Less work

User-generated content allows you to obtain more content from your users rather than producing it all yourself. That means that if you encourage your existing customers to make their own videos, you will spare yourself the effort of creating those videos yourself.

5. Social credibility and sharing potential

You will probably earn some social credibility if you use product demonstrators who have their own followings and influential circles. Anyone who sees and knows the user giving the demonstration is more likely to engage with the video, and may even share it with their friends and followers, greatly increasing the reach of each video you produce this way. It is especially useful to get the help of social influencers in your specific niche.

3 reasons why to use user product demonstrations

User product demonstrations do come with three drawbacks. Alton describes these too:

1. Less predictability

First-time user experiences are unpredictable, especially if your product is new. You will run the risk of a reviewer discovering a problem or not knowing what to do next.

2. Less thoroughness

It is unlikely that a natural reviewer will be able to explore as many details of your product as you will. This keeps the video concise, but at the same time, the reviewer may overlook key details that make your product unique. Giving your user reviewers some pointers before shooting the video can help, but it can also make your video feel more scripted and less effective.

I think that, if you make sure you do not have just one user video, some reviewers will probably notice what is unique about your product. If nobody notices, you may want to work on that unique part a bit more!

3. Loss of brand voice

Finally, the average reviewer will not speak to your audience using your signature brand voice. This can compromise the overall brand experience, which is a helpful tool in pitching the product.

However, I do feel that everybody knows that a reviewer does not use the brand voice and that, when pitching the product, the people you are pitching it to do not expect that from the reviewer.

7 features that successful product demonstration videos have in common

If your product demonstration video contains the 7 features below, you will have a higher likelihood of convincing your audience of your product’s merit, Blog Herald claims. If you decide to produce these videos yourself, make sure to take this list into account. If you decide to use user videos, this list can be useful as well.

1. Conciseness

Your video needs to be as concise as possible. People want to see what your product is and how it works in the shortest amount of time possible. The key advantage to videos over written text is their ability to convey more information in a shorter amount of time, so take advantage of it. Try to get your demo under a minute. If there is more to say after that, you can create another video for a more in-depth look at your product’s features.

2. Approachability

Approachability can be achieved in a number of ways. Number one on the list is friendliness though.

3. User focus

As mentioned, the demonstration video is not all about the product. The real target is the user. Make sure your demonstration video explains why users might benefit from your product, and what the average user experience is like.

4. Simplicity

It might seem like the more information you include, the better. However, as a general rule, simplistic demonstration videos outperform complex ones because they are easier to grasp and less confusing.

5. Entertainment value

You want your users to see the logical value of your product, but you also do not want them to be bored. Your video should contain some kind of entertainment value, whether that is through humor, beautiful designs, or immersive music.

6. Originality

Your video also needs to be original, doing something that no one has ever done before.

7. Memorability

A good product demonstration video is a memorable one. What good is your product demonstration video if your users forget what you are trying to sell by the end of it? What if they do not remember your brand name, or forget how to use your product by the time they get their hands on it? If yours does not seem to stick out in your users’ minds, you need to do more to call out the most important features. People tend to remember novel and surprising experiences, so make good use of striking, unexpected turns. Finally, do not forget to repeat your key points to drive them home.

Every few months it seems another study warns that a big slice of the workforce is about to lose their jobs because of artificial intelligence. Four years ago, an Oxford University study predicted 47% of jobs could be automated by 2033. Even the near-term outlook has been quite negative: A 2016 report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) said 9% of jobs in the 21 countries that make up its membership could be automated. And in January 2017, McKinsey’s research arm estimated AI-driven job losses at 5%. My own firm released a survey recently of 835 large companies (with an average revenue of $20 billion) that predicts a net job loss of between 4% and 7% in key business functions by the year 2020 due to AI.

Yet our research also found that, in the shorter term, these fears may be overblown. The companies we surveyed – in 13 manufacturing and service industries in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America – are using AI much more frequently in computer-to-computer activities and much less often to automate human activities. “Machine-to-machine” transactions are the low-hanging fruit of AI, not people-displacement.

For example, our survey, which asked managers of 13 functions, from sales and marketing to procurement and finance, to indicate whether their departments were using AI in 63 core areas, found AI was used most frequently in detecting and fending off computer security intrusions in the IT department. This task was mentioned by 44% of our respondents. Yet even in this case, we doubt AI is automating the jobs of IT security people out of existence. In fact, we find it’s helping such often severely overloaded IT professionals deal with geometrically increasing hacking attempts. AI is making IT security professionals more valuable to their employers, not less.

Insight Center

In fact, although we saw examples of companies using AI in computer-to-computer transactions such as in recommendation engines that suggest what a customer should buy next or when conducting online securities trading and media buying, we saw that IT was one of the largest adopters of AI. And it wasn’t just to detect a hacker’s moves in the data center. IT was using AI to resolve employees’ tech support problems, automate the work of putting new systems or enhancements into production, and make sure employees used technology from approved vendors. Between 34% and 44% of global companies surveyed are using AI in in their IT departments in these four ways, monitoring huge volumes of machine-to-machine activities.

In stark contrast, very few of the companies we surveyed were using AI to eliminate jobs altogether. For example, only 2% are using artificial intelligence to monitor internal legal compliance, and only 3% to detect procurement fraud (e.g., bribes and kickbacks).

What about the automation of the production line? Whether assembling automobiles or insurance policies, only 7% of manufacturing and service companies are using AI to automate production activities. Similarly, only 8% are using AI to allocate budgets across the company. Just 6% are using AI in pricing.

Where to Find the Low-Hanging Fruit

So where should your company look to find such low-hanging fruit – applications of AI that won’t kill jobs yet could bestow big benefits? From our survey and best-practice research on companies that have already generated significant returns on their AI investments, we identified three patterns that separate the best from the rest when it comes to AI. All three are about using AI first to improve computer-to-computer (or machine-to-machine) activities before using it to eliminate jobs:

Put AI to work on activities that have an immediate impact on revenue and cost. When Joseph Sirosh joined Amazon.com in 2004, he began seeing the value of AI to reduce fraud, bad debt, and the number of customers who didn’t get their goods and suppliers who didn’t get their money. By the time he left Amazon in 2013, his group had grown from 35 to more than 1,000 people who used machine learning to make Amazon more operationally efficient and effective. Over the same time period, the company saw a 10-fold increase in revenue.

After joining Microsoft Corporation in 2013 as corporate vice president of the Data Group, Sirosh led the charge in using AI in the company’s database, big data, and machine learning offerings. AI wasn’t new at Microsoft. For example, the company had brought in a data scientist in 2008 to develop machine learning tools that would improve its search engine, Bing, in a market dominated by Google. Since then, AI has helped Bing more than double its share of the search engine market (to 20%); as of 2015, Bing generated more than a $1 billion in revenue every quarter. (That was the year Bing became a profitable business for Microsoft.) Microsoft’s use of AI now extends far beyond that, including to its Azure cloud computing service, which puts the company’s AI tools in the hands of Azure customers. (Disclosure: Microsoft is a TCS client.)

Look for opportunities in which AI could help you produce more products with the same number of people you have today. The AI experience of the 170-year-old news service Associated Press is a great case in point. AP found in 2013 a literally insatiable demand for quarterly earnings stories, but their staff of 65 business reporters could write only 6% of the earnings stories possible, given America’s 5,300 publicly held companies. The earnings news of many small companies thus went unreported on AP’s wire services (other than the automatically published tabular data). So that year, AP began working with an AI firm to train software to automatically write short earnings news stories. By 2015, AP’s AI system was writing 3,700 quarterly earnings stories – 12 times the number written by its business reporters. This is a machine-to-machine application of AI. The AI software is one machine; the other is the digital data feed that AP gets from a financial information provider (Zacks Investment Research). No AP business journalist lost a job. In fact, AI has freed up the staff to write more in-depth stories on business trends.

Start in the back office, not the front office. You might think companies will get the greatest returns on AI in business functions that touch customers every day (like marketing, sales, and service) or by embedding it in the products they sell to customers (e.g., the self-driving car, the self-cleaning barbeque grill, the self-replenishing refrigerator, etc.). Our research says otherwise. We asked survey participants to estimate their returns on AI in revenue and cost improvements, and then we compared the survey answers of the companies with the greatest improvements (call them “AI leaders”) to the answers of companies with the smallest improvements (“AI followers”). Some 51% of our AI leaders predicted that by 2020 AI will have its biggest internal impact on their back-office functions of IT and finance/accounting; only 34% of AI followers said the same thing. Conversely, 43% of AI followers said AI’s impact would be greatest in the front-office areas of marketing, sales, and services, yet only 26% of the AI leaders felt it would be there. We believe the leaders have the right idea: Focus your AI initiatives in the back-office, particularly where there are lots of computer-to-computer interactions in IT and finance/accounting.

Computers today are far better at managing other computers and, in general, inanimate objects or digital information than they are at managing human interactions. When companies use AI in this sphere, they don’t have to eliminate jobs. Yet the job-destroying applications of AI are what command the headlines: driverless cars and trucks, robotic restaurant order-takers and food preparers, and more.

Make no mistake: Automation and artificial intelligence will eliminate some jobs. Chatbots for customer service have proliferated; robots on the factory floor are real. But we believe companies would be wise to use AI first where their computers already interact. There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit there to keep them busy for years.

As a training manager, you are already your company’s biggest champion of learning and development. You’re well aware of the value leadership training brings to your company.

But convincing your executive team to renew your training budget—much less increase it—can be a tough sell.

Without concrete data to demonstrate the effectiveness and the value of these programs, it’s harder to make your case.

In an earlier post, we outlined some important guidelines for measuring the ROI of leadership development.

It’s been one of our most popular posts to date, so we wanted to take it a step further. Here are the three most important metrics you can measure to determine the impact on your bottom line.

1. Year-Over-Year Percent Increase in Program Participation

If your employees don’t believe in training and development, no one else will. If participation is increasing year after year, it’s a good indicator your employees still find these programs valuable.

Autodesk, a developer of computer-assisted design software, has more than 9,000 employees across the globe. When senior HR and learning development manager Harry Wittenberg first introduced online training courses nearly a decade ago, the response was good, but it was only a small percentage of the total workforce. As he expanded program offerings to include virtual leadership training, he saw an increase year after year. In 2016, more than 1,400 people participated in training, which was 15 percent of the total workforce.

2. Number of Program Participants Promoted

If the goal of your program is to help potential leaders build skills and advance their careers, your company should keep track of how many participants move into leadership positions within a year or two of completing it.

This will help you assess how well participants are able to apply what they’ve learned and use it to move your company forward.

3. Average Cost of Recruiting & Onboarding New Leaders

Developing leaders within your company requires a substantial investment in time and resources, but it’s almost always more cost-effective than recruiting and onboarding new leaders. Research from the Center for American Progress finds the average cost of losing an employee can be as high as 200 percent of their salary, depending on their level of seniority.

Of course, the numbers vary widely from one company to the next.

Keeping track of your own recruiting and onboarding costs, as well as the number of employees promoted internally, can help you put a true dollar figure on the value of your programs. Using this simple formula can help:

(Number of leaders promoted internally) x (per employee cost of recruiting/onboarding) = Total savings

(Total cost of leadership development) – (total savings) = Return on Investment

Bonus Metric: Employee Engagement Scores

While leadership development is just one of many factors that impact employee engagement, it can be a powerful indicator of your company’s health.

At Autodesk, Wittenberg conducts an annual employee engagement survey. He began to ask questions related to training and development as part of that survey.

Year after year, he has seen an increase in the number of employees who say they are participating in training and believe their manager cares about their development.

Making Your Case

Making the business case for leadership development can feel like an uphill battle at times, but arming yourself with data will make it easier.

Re-framing your request can also help. Rather than asking for a certain dollar amount because that’s what it cost last year, ask your executives to consider how much it would cost your company if you didn’t have those programs in place. How many new leaders would you have had to recruit? How many months of lost productivity would you have experienced while bringing them up to speed? How much business might have been lost during those transitions?

When you put it like that, investing in leadership development is a no-brainer!

Want to maximize the ROI of your leadership development programs? Discover how to train in less time and do more with your existing budget in this guide, How to Grow Leaders In Minutes a Day: Training Smarter, Not Harder.

Voice-of-the-customer (VoC) ROI can be elusive unless you’re adamantly driving customer experience transformation. The key to VoC maturity and ROI is not sophistication or breadth of market research. It’s about viewing VoC itself and VoC actions and metrics as value chains.

What is a value chain? It’s a sequence of value-adding activities.

Value chain thinking is extremely valuable in customer experience management. You can easily see its power in a customer experience journey map: nothing is an island — everything has a sequence and a series of connections that build upon one another.

We need to be thinking of voice of the customer as a value chain:

1. Customers have perceptions
2. So we conduct VoC to capture perceptions
3. So we act on VoC to make improvements our customer base will reward
4. So we track our improvement plan progress metrics as predictors of what customers will soon perceive
5. So we communicate what we heard, what we plan to do, and what we’ve achieved — to propel improvement plan follow-through and to reset customer perceptions
6. So we monitor VoC to confirm customers’ perceptions of improvements we’ve made.

This is a flow, a sequence of activities where value is being added at each step. It’s a logical series of effort that generates change that everyone appreciates: customers, employees, and investors. That is mutual value creation.

Voice of the customer is an essential investment! We should design it to inform our entire company about customers’ expectations and to monitor performance of moments of truth. We should design it to enhance customers’ experience in their VoC participation rather than to be a burden to customers. Like any other essential investment, we need to be strategic and bold in what we expect from VoC: the model below shows the value chain that leads from VoC:

1. VoC data is combined from all sources for a 360-degree view of customers, and analyzed for pattern discovery and prioritization (Intelligence & Customer Lifetime Value)
2. Which informs the company’s Strategy and Culture foundation
3. Which sets the stage for customer experience design, improvement and innovation that will be rewarded by the customer base
4. And employees view their roles and responsibilities within a customer experience context, and are engaged in making changes that customers care about
5. Which earns customer engagement and channel partner engagement
6. Which drives retention, loyalty and business results.

This customer experience management (CXM) value chain reflects “laws of nature” — when you short-cut it, you short-cut your results. When you proactively manage it, you transform customer experience and maximize ROI of VoC, CXM, and the business overall.

Feature image purchased under license from Shutterstock.

It was 8:30 on a Wednesday evening when I walked out of a friend’s birthday party for a breath of fresh air and discovered that I was going to have to find a new ride home. For in front of me lay my bicycle…minus a front wheel.

Before we go any further, you should know something about me: I bike absolutely everywhere. Rain or shine, it was my favorite way to get around Chicago, and after moving to San Francisco, nothing’s changed. So you’ll understand why I was devastated when I walked out that evening to see the space between the front pegs of my bicycle so blaringly empty, the whole now transformed into a collection of parts stripped of all usefulness.

You know, I probably should have seen this coming. Even though I bicycle everywhere, I decided to pick up the cheapest bike I could find on Craigslist. $100 for a bike was a pretty great deal, no? Except it was simply unrideable, so I sold it for a loss and got the second cheapest bike I could find ($180), which now has a brand new wheel, at the cheap, cheap price of $90.

Now, the whole reason why I came out to SF was for a new job, where I spend my days helping sales leaders make decisions around the tools that help their teams be productive and successful. It may sound a little odd, but my almost automatic decision to go as cheap as possible when it came to purchasing and securing a quality bicycle for myself really reminded me of the way many companies think when making the decision to bring on a new sales tool.

Looking back on this whole experience, there are three factors that, if I thought about more deeply when I was going through the purchasing process, would have saved me a lot of pain, time and money down the road. Whether you’re going to be buying a new bike or a new CRM, read on to learn about three things to think about before taking the plunge.

Time Spent

The first thing I should have asked myself is: how much time am I going to spend with this purchase? In the case of a bicycle, I commute every day back and forth to work, as well as the occasional trip after work and on the weekend. Which equals to… a lot of time.

At work, I’m in my CRM when I get in first thing in the morning until I leave at the end of the day. Again, that’s a lot of time. This is the first indicator, perhaps, that this isn’t a purchase to take lightly or make too quickly.

Impact on Quality of Life

My biggest mistake in buying a bicycle was to prioritize price over quality. After all, if I’m on the thing all the time, having a quality bike is going to make my life so much easier. Same with security: a good lock is cheaper than a stolen wheel.

In the same vein, the sales tools I use directly impact my productivity at work. In my last job, I probably spent about 25% of my time moving through dashboards and ironing out processes. Remove the need to waste time on admin and suddenly it turns out that I have a lot more time to focus on selling.

Eliminate Risk

In going straight for a cheap bicycle, I’m taking on risk in two areas: safety and cost. Safety is pretty straightforward. A low quality bike means it’s harder to shift gears and the brakes can be a little funky. On the cost front, between a new wheel and a tune up, I’ve basically paid for the bike once over again. Might as well just have bought a good bike right off the bat and saved myself the trouble.

With your CRM, the risk lies in investing so much time and energy with a provider that the cost to change becomes too intimidating. Like I’m suffering along with my low quality bike, I speak to countless clients who are dumping time and money into their CRM when they would be better off just getting rid of it and going for a quality product.

Yet for whatever reason, shopping for quality is a hard thing to train your mind to do. It’s much easier to try to find something cheap that will just help you get by than to really put a lot of thought into a purchase. At the end of the day, if you spend a lot of time with something and if it makes a big impact on your quality of life, then eliminate the risk and go into your purchasing process focused on quality and value, not cost.

That’s what I’ll be thinking about as I ride home from work today on my bike that I’ll probably never replace, my brand new front wheel squeaking away.

If this post got you thinking about all the ways that you may be losing money due to a snap sales platform purchase, I recommend checking out this white paper: Uncovering the Total Cost of Ownership of CRM.

If you’re like me, your browser is at the center of your work.

I’m a Chrome user, and I was sold initially on their minimal design and layout, along with the speed advantages it used to have.

However, other browsers have caught up in many areas and narrowed Chrome’s competitive advantages. What Google’s product still offers which sets it apart from the rest, is a huge store full of extensions and add-ons. The extension landscape Chrome offers cannot be rivaled.

Many of these extensions changed my workflow and increased my productivity. They might be able to do the same for you.

So, we’ve decided to break down a host of extensions which can add value to your browsing experience.

We’ll include:

• Virtual office add-ons
• Handy day-to-day tools
• Language improvement aids
• Developer tools
• Productivity boosters
• Social media helpers

Let’s dive in!

Use extensions to improve your virtual office experience

Office online

If you’re a user of Microsoft’s office package then this extension is a must have. This allows you to view, edit, and create office files in your browser. Seeing as it integrates with OneDrive, you can save your files in the cloud on the go. This extension isn’t just useful, but also shows Microsoft’s desire to shift in cloudier direction!

Click here to get Office online

Save to Google Drive

This isn’t a particularly glamorous extension. It’s like an overly enthusiastic bookmarking tool in ways. However, this extension allows you to grab things you see around the web and save them into your Drive for later, and it makes those saves accessible by others through sharing settings. Generally useful if you’re a user of the GSuite platform.

Click here to get Save to Google Drive

MozBar

This is one of the more exciting options. Moz are a big SEO and analytics company who gather loads of data all the time. Now, with the MozBar, you can access that data in your browser as you visit web pages. If you’re in an area like marketing particularly, the MozBar is a useful friend to have. Simple, sleek, effective.

Click here to get the MozBar

MercuryReader

This one is also pretty clever. Have you ever been on a website where you’re trying to read the content but it just keeps hitting you with distracting adverts at the side? Or maybe the site isn’t particularly responsive and it’s hard to read? This is where MercuryReader comes in. This extension dives into your screen and reformats the written section and its related images to make it easier on the eyes. An effective way to read more!

Click here to get MercuryReader

Feedly

Google Reader may not be a thing anymore, but that doesn’t mean the humble RSS feed is dead. Feedly are the biggest RSS provider on the market and claim to have over 15 million users. Their product is pretty simple to operate as is, but if you want that even-more-convenient experience try using the extension. This will let you really easily add web pages to your feed and make it easier to manage.

Click here to get Feedly

These handy browser tools will make your day easier

Nimbus

Nimbus is a screenshotting and recording tool which slots in nicely on your extensions bar. Simply click the icon and select what kind of screenshot you want to take. Once you’ve grabbed the page or area of a page you want to capture, Nimbus pops up a little editing screen where you can play around with your image before saving it to your computer. Highly recommend.

Click here to get Nimbus

AdBlock

How One Man Stopped Seeing Ads With This One Simple Trick. Advertisers Hate Him! I’m a long time user of AdBlock and I’m happy with the services I have received. One thing I’ve come to appreciate more of late is the exclude functionalities. I normally have Adblock running constantly and it just pauses itself when I visit websites I want to support. Handy tool.

Click here to get AdBlock

Hola VPN

The Hola – Better Internet VPN is good for a number of reasons. It is unlimited and free, unlike its competitor TunnelBear. It generally works very well, though Netflix figured them out about a year ago so you won’t be able to go country hopping through the different libraries. The one word of caution – Hola VPN channels traffic through different channels and one of those channels may be your internet connection. Just be aware.

Click here to get Hola VPN

AceStream

If you haven’t streamed a soccer match through AceStream in UltraHD 4k with powerful Russian commentary, then you haven’t lived. AcePlayer is a very useful media player with its specialty being the ability to also stream in HD very easily. They offer a Chrome extension to make the entire process much easier. Do not stream copyrighted material, though. That would be wrong.

Click here to get AceStream

Check My Links

This is a pretty single purpose tool, but it’s very good at what it does. It pretty much just finds every link on whichever webpage you are on and then clicks them all. It doesn’t open them in front of you. It checks to see whether each of those links work and to make sure they’re not dead. It only takes a moment and it finishes off by providing you with a little summary. Good bot.

Click here to get Check My Links

1Password

If you want to have both security and ease of browsing as priorities, then 1Password is a no-brainer. With this password manager, you can save all of your passwords securely in the cloud so you only need to remember … wait for it … 1 password for everything. It also gives you the opportunity to use password generators which make hard to crack nonsense passwords. Highly recommend.

Click here to get 1Password

Improve your language skills with these helpers

Grammarly

The don of the language game, Grammarly is a pretty powerful piece of kit. It provides you with a spell check system which operates across all windows and text boxes. But it’s not just for spelling like the traditional red squiggly line. Grammarly will correct you on your grammar too. And at the end of each week, Grammarly sends you a nice report outlining your writing stats. The free platform is great and the paid should be considered!

Click here to get Grammarly

Translate

If you’re ever having to deal with languages you don’t understand, Translate becomes an incredibly useful tool. For a long time, Google Translate received criticism for comical mistranslations or overly literal interpretations of language. In recent years though, Translate has become increasingly powerful and has begun to provide increasingly accurate services. A must have for the international worker.

Click here to get Translate

Google Input Tools

To bounce off the back of Translate, Google Input Tools are really handy for anyone who needs to write in another language. You can set on screen keyboards to show different alphabets or special letters. Simple accents on letters can be done with keyboard shortcuts, but Input Tools provide you with every character available. Olé.

Click here to get Google Input Tools

Orwell App Writing Improvement

We’ve published a lot of work about writing and about what makes good writing – particularly from the perspective of marketing and holding people’s attention. One of the tools we often recommend is the Hemingway Editor app. There isn’t a Chrome extension for the American author, but there is for an English author with a similar set of principles. George Orwell was a firm believer in being concise and clear in writing. This extension allows you to paste in your work for its algorithm to check and critique. Very useful for writers.

Click here to get Orwell App Writing Improvement

Power Thesaurus

A good app with lots of big words. Tremendous in its exquisite variety of terminology; allowing you to vastly improve your lexical diversity. Use with caution.

Click here to get Power Thesaurus

Merriam-Webster Dictionary

If you’re going to use a dictionary, you may as well do it properly. Merriam-Webster are the authority on the use and meaning of American English. It doesn’t need more explanation. You can also get Oxford Dictionary Search by Progmonster for those more partial to British English

Click here to get Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Click here to get Oxford Dictionary Search

Turn your browser into your development hub

Live CSS Editor

When you’re building a website and something doesn’t look quite right, it’s useful to have tools available to quickly edit things live in your browser to test and play. The Live CSS Editor allows you to fiddle and tinker live and then save that code back in. Simple and intuitive.

Click here to get Live CSS Editor

ZenHub for GitHub

ZenHub provides a set of project management tools which you can use to help you manage your GitHub account. It provides a really easy to navigate overview of your work while allowing collaboration across teams and on other projects. Worth checking out!

Click here to get ZenHub

Image Tool

This one is handy for front end developers. What Image Tool provides is the ability to inspect images and work out their different dimensions to help you correctly proportion them within your HTML. Particularly useful when building a website based on a set of designs.

Click here to get Image Tool

CSS-Shack

If you like to work in a visual manner, CSS-Shack can help you create beautiful designs and then save them as CSS files. You can use their environment to create the designs – working without code – and they’ll then write the code for you. Super useful for beginners, and potentially a timesaver for even seasoned pros.

Click here to get CSS-Shack

Marmoset

We’re all really proud of the coding you’ve done. I promise. However, when you’re presenting code it can look a bit boring framed as simply strings of text, whether in a presentation or a blog article. Marmoset exists to make your code look sexy to people who don’t understand it. You simply add in a snippet of code and Marmoset turns it into an image which you can easily manipulate to look cool. A great way to impress clients.

Click here to get Marmoset

WhatFont

Super simple tool. Turn WhatFont on and hover over the text on a website. WhatFont will tell you – surprise, surprise – what font the text is in. A nice little timesaver.

Click here to get WhatFont

ColorZilla

Similar to WhatFont, ColorZilla lets you interpret the elements on a page from a practical perspective. If you click on the extension, it will give you the option to Pick Color From Page. Then you click on whatever color you like and voila – you have the code for that shade. It can also do trickier bits with gradients.

Click here to get ColorZilla

JSON Formatter

This isn’t a particularly showy tool. The JSON Formatter simply takes a JSON and displays it differently within your browser so that it’s easier to read and interpret. It becomes collapsible and gives you active URLs to follow.

Click here to get JSON Formatter

Cookies

Every time you visit a website nowadays it seems you’re bombarded with messages about cookies. This extension provides a simple cookie manager to show you all the different cookies stored in your browser. It also allows you to bake new ones. I assume the name Cookie Monster was trademarked…

Click here to get Cookies

Caret

If you’re looking for an open source text and code editor which you can operate within your browser, then Caret is an excellent choice. It has a wealth of features and provides many of the benefits of a native development environment. This one is a particularly good choice for those of you who still want to code when you’re on your Chromebook.

Click here to get Caret

Make your productivity soar with these useful add-ons

StayFocusd

One of the biggest productivity killers out there is social media. Not just social media, but largely. There are certain websites where you waste a lot of time. Maybe you allocated yourself 5 minutes on Facebook during a break, but you’re now 20 minutes deep into photos from Terry’s holiday to Greece in 2014. Kefalonia is delightful this time of year. Snap out of it! If you can’t discipline yourself, let StayFocusd do it for you. You can choose certain websites and allocate a maximum amount of time you’re allowed on them. After that limit they become inaccessible. Even better, if you want to disable the extension, it forces you to complete weird annoying tasks to do so. Tough love.

Click here to get StayFocusd

AutoTextExpander

This is pretty much a shortcut tool you can integrate into your browser. You can create a load of saved shortcuts and as you begin typing them the extension will suggest the rest. The benefits are obvious.

Click here to get AutoTextExpander

Save to Pocket

Writers like myself have to spend a lot of time reading. I regularly find that during my researching process I will discover a whole host of articles I want to read. Sadly, I rarely have time to read them at that moment in time. Save to Pocket is a handy tool because it allows you to bookmark each article. The difference is it doesn’t just save them in your browser like a normal bookmark. Pocket saves them in the cloud on your Pocket account. If you have the Pocket app downloaded on your phone then you can read those saved articles anywhere.

Click here to get Save to Pocket

Momentum

When I said I was writing this article, seemingly my whole team had Momentum as their first suggestion. It doesn’t sound like a revolutionary tool on the surface, but it provides a small change in your working patterns which can make a big impact. Momentum changes what happens when you open a new tab. Instead of a blank page staring back at you, Momentum provides a nice image, maybe a motivational quote or welcome, and even a list of your to-dos and daily goals. You can customize it to fit your needs.

Click here to get Momentum

Sortd for Gmail

Different people like their email clients differently. Sortd is one of those different options. Sortd takes your Gmail account and lays it out in a Trello-esque fashion with columns. On the left-hand side is your inbox, in the middle are your tasks, and on the right, you’ll find your important emails. A potentially very useful tool for someone whose work lives out of their email account.

Click here to get Sortd

Be Limitless

Kind of a competitor to Momentum, Be Limitless is another new tab customizer tool. Yet, Be Limitless has its own USP: monitoring. While you’re browsing, the extension will gather data on how you’re spending your time. It will then show you how long you’ve spent on different websites. This ability to track one’s own behavior could provide a foundation from which to change that behavior…

Click here to get Be Limitless

Strict Workflow

This extension is very similar to StayFocusd except that it is tied to the Pomodoro technique. If you don’t know, the Pomodoro technique is a productivity enhancing methodology founded on the idea that we struggle to focus for more than half an hour. When following this method, you take 25 of working intensely and follow it with 5 minutes of break. You repeat until lunch. Then start again. Strict Workflow forces you to stick to this. It blocks access to sites which you might enjoy for 25 minutes and then lets you back on them for 5. Don’t worry, you can customize this list. At the very least, it will force you to procrastinate more creatively…

Click here to get Strict Workflow

Pomello

Yet another Pomodoro school application. Pomello ties your Trello account to a Pomodoro timer. Through doing this, you can remain on track by tying your individual tasks to predetermined timeslots. Using Strict Workflow and Pomello together would make for one very productive worker! In my experience, the Pomodoro technique works great for roles like sales and coding, but not so much for writers. Find what suits you.

Click here to get Pomello

SearchPreview

What it says on the tin, basically. This extension works with all the popular search engines and shows you previews of the websites contained in your search results. This can help you skim off time spent googling and researching. It also offers related searches and other add-on features.

Click here to get SearchPreview

Noisli

I’ve recommended the productivity app Focus@will on multiple occasions when writing about productivity. However, not everyone works best with music playing – which is what Focus@will offers. Some people prefer more of a white noise. If I really need to be productive then I find complete silence to be a little too oppressive and music to be a little too engaging. I’m a fan of sitting in my office with the window open – the gentle buzz of distant activity and the foreground of chirping birds. That’s my “white noise” of choice. With Noisli you can find your white noise. You can choose to listen to rain sounds as you work, for instance. Not for everyone – but it’s surprisingly cool.

Click here to get Noisli

Lazarus

For the more biblically minded, the word Lazarus may bring associations of rebirth, revival, and zombies. The Chrome extension which shares the name also shares these themes. You know when you’re filling in a form online and either you submit the form or the page crashes or something just generally goes wrong? Normally, you lose that data. Lazarus saves that data as you input it so that you can bring it back from the dead if needed. Crucial for anyone who has to fill in long-winded forms on a regular basis.

Click here to get Lazarus

Evernote Web Clipper

I hope we all already know Evernote. This is the notetaking tool with a range of collaborative features. You can save links to Evernote or take meeting notes and easily distribute them across a team. From notes to todo lists, Evernote is a great tool to keep yourself in order.

Click here to get Evernote

Google Keep

Google’s answer to Evernote, Google Keep, is another handy notetaking app. It has a very clean UI and is certainly user-friendly. Because it is tied to your Google account, it’s a nice way to have different notetaking setups for work and for life. Whether you prefer Evernote or Keep probably comes down to personal preferences and what tool other members of your team are using.

Click here to get Google Keep

Todoist

As far as to-do lists go, Todoist is one of the more popular. But it’s more than that. With its collaborative elements, Todoist more closely resembles a simple project or task management tool than the little scribbles in your notebook. With the extension, you can always have your to-do list one click away.

Click here to get Todoist

Manage your social media with ease

BuzzSumo

If you’re involved in content marketing then BuzzSumo is a tool you should check out. Buzzsumo’s Chrome extension allows you to see instantly how many shares or backlinks a particular piece of content has. Don’t tell anyone, but this could be really useful for checking out your competitors…

Click here to get BuzzSumo

Save to Facebook

We’ve already mentioned Pocket, but this new feature of Facebook’s appears to be trying to corner their market. Facebook has an internal bookmarking system and this extension allows you to save things you find on the web to that set of bookmarks within Facebook. For me, it isn’t an either/or between Facebook and Pocket. You can use the Facebook extension to save things which interest you generally, and the Pocket extension to keep things work related. You don’t need any more excuses to open up Facebook during work hours!

Click here to get Save to Facebook

RiteTag

RiteTag is a really cool piece of kit. It’s like a set of SEO tools but for social media – specifically, #hashtags. RitTag will let you know whether a hashtag you’ve chosen is likely to help your content be seen right now or over time or not at all. In which case, choose a different hashtag. Recommend.

Click here to get RiteTag

Buffer

The Buffer extension lets you line up Tweets or Facebook posts in advance. It also works across Pinterest, Linkedin, and Instagram. See the content you want to post? Click on the extension and schedule the post. Simple as that. Very popular tool. Check out the video!

Click here to get Buffer

Agorapulse

Very similar to Buffer, Agorapulse lets you schedule social media content across different channels. However, Agorapulse leverages its deep reporting capabilities to help you drive marketing campaigns like contests or promotions. Worth checking out for agencies and businesses.

Click here to get Agorapulse

Pinterest

If you’re a Pinterest user, you’re probably always on the look out for images across the web which you can pin to your boards. The Pinterest extension does this in a really user-friendly way. Whenever there is content on a web page which is pinnable, a little Pinterest button shows up over it. Click and save. Job done.

Click here to get Pinterest

Giphy

One of the unsung heroes of the century has been the lowly loveable gif. We all like moving images, but we don’t always like sound. Gifs are particularly useful in social media content. The problem is that you don’t always have the right one to hand. The Giphy extension puts their whole community of gifs at your fingertips.

Click here to get Giphy

Install the right extensions for you!

I can’t tell you which of the above will most benefit your workflow, but I recommend trying as many of these out as you can.

If you can eek out a further hour of productivity out per day then you’ll feel the benefits immediately.

Don’t just work harder, work smarter.

What are your favorite Chrome extensions? Let us know in the comments and we might follow up with you for more!

Accountability couldn’t be more important than in the sales planning process. That cadence with which you are enabling your managers to inspect and reinforce is critical to driving revenue predictability.

You’ve been there. It’s the end of the quarter and your reps are scrambling for the number. The whole organization is a stress ball.

So, what happens? Sales reps go into the accounts and opportunities trying to squeeze anything they can into the quarter. They discount and lose margin, while they desperately try to close deals that aren’t baked. As sales leaders, you need to ensure your reps are doing two things well:

1. Spending time on the critical high-value sales activities
2. Building pipeline at the territory level

Repeatability and consistency drive effective sales planning. Sales organizations that provide their managers with critical line-of-site are able to create efficiencies in forecasting, account and territory planning and opportunity reviews.

A salesperson’s time is valuable.

High-performing sales organizations put processes in place that ensure their salespeople focus their efforts on the highest value sales opportunities. If you create a predictable cadence around territory, account and opportunity planning, you’ll improve forecast accuracy and your reps ability to build a healthy pipeline.

Here are key questions to consider when developing a cadence that drives sales planning activities.

• What are the critical few activities I should focus on?
• How frequently should I be doing those activities?
• What tools are available to help me?
• How will my success be measured?

We call the tool that drives that predictable cadence a Management Operating Rhythm® (MOR). It helps sales leaders focus on executable action with their sales teams. An MOR brings together all of your sales planning and execution processes in one tool. It makes it easy for sales managers to find what they need, when they need it. It also sets clear expectations of job responsibilities with senior management.

When everyone is using the same Management Operating Rhythm®, they’re all speaking the same language and everyone knows the benchmarks they need to create success. As a result, your front-line managers are less burdened and there’s consistency throughout the sales organization. Your sales managers then have the opportunity to become sales leaders, because everything they do has value attached to it, instead of being some sort of compliance exercise.

Providing your front-line sales managers with a repeatable rhythm helps support consistency throughout your sales organization.

Do your front-line managers have a cadence that helps them coach reps to success?

The amount of time your front-line managers waste just trying to keep up with the forecast is valuable time not spent on helping their team sell. Ensure consistency and improve efficiency by giving them tools that make their jobs easier. Develop a sales operating rhythm that provides a consistent language and process around:

• Territory Reviews
• Account Reviews
• Opportunity Reviews
• Forecast Reviews
• Active Sales Call Participation and Feedback

Many sales leaders are completing some of these critical steps to coach teams on building pipeline. It’s important however, that we complete all of these steps to achieve success. Missed steps equal missed revenue.

Often our perception of the time is takes to do all of these steps is typically what keeps us from building this into our routine. BUT, in actual time spent, it is less than what we believe. It’s also nowhere near close to the time it will take for you to rectify poor planning at the end of every quarter.

Remember, elite sales organizations accurately predict their number. Build the process to ensure your organization gets there — every time.

More than 80% of Americans seek out referrals or recommendations when making a purchase of any kind. This means that the majority of your customers are not listening to your advice on how great your products are. This also means that if you aren’t working with social media influencers, the people who your customers look to for recommendations, you could be leaving a lot of money on the table.

Finding these social media influencers is not hard; they are everywhere and they are taking over social sites such as YouTube and Instagram. What is difficult is choosing the right ones — the influencers who will align with your brand and add value, not detract from it and tarnish your reputation.

It’s not uncommon for brands to scour social sites and randomly choose influencers who have a large following and who give them a nice warm and fuzzy feeling inside. But, these are not sound criteria on which to base decisions.

If you want to hit the bulls-eye with your social media influencer search, here are some valuable criteria you can use to choose the right influencer who will align with your brand and boost your reputation.

Brand Relevance

More than popularity, ensure your social influencer is closely aligned with your brand messaging and purpose.

Ask yourself; does the influencer already use my products? If not, would he/she be the type of person that would use them?

Obviously, if the influencer is a vegan and you are promoting a Brazilian BBQ restaurant, you shouldn’t reach out to this person. But, pay attention to more subtle differences. Just because you sell healthy drinks, doesn’t mean that your organic-loving social influencer will be interested in partnering with you. Dig deep in your research to find out if there is alignment.

Here are three important details to research:

• What products do they use? – Are they closely aligned with yours?
• What niches do they cater to? – Are they similar to yours?
• Who comprises their target audience? – Is it similar to yours?

If you can find similarities in all three of the above factors, you will find a good match.

Tip: Take note of the influencers’ saturation. Are they promoting products regularly? If so, their authenticity could be at stake. Look for influencers who are not plugging consistently.

Budget/Demographics

You don’t have to spend a lot to initiate a social influencer campaign but you do want to ensure you spend your dollars wisely.

When choosing influencers within your budget, don’t be swayed by high follower counts and celebrity status. More than celebrities, you need social media influencers who are an exact fit for your brand. If you have a $25,000 budget for your influencer marketing campaign, 25 less-popular micro-influencers at $1,000 each who are closely aligned with your brand may be more beneficial to you than one high-priced celebrity.

Micro-influencer audiences are often crazy about their influencers due to their attraction to authenticity and trust. Use this to your advantage.

One way to ensure you are spending wisely is to match up your audience’s demographic with that of your potential influencer. You can do this by peering into the demographics of the people your potential influencers reach.

For example, let’s say you are promoting a hot new cosmetic product and you want to reach millennial females who spend money on luxury cosmetic brands. Some criteria you could use to match up your target audience to that of a potential influencer may be:

• Females aged 21-34
• Earn $100,000+ a year
• They follow other luxury cosmetic brands and use them
• They live in cities where access to high-end department stores that carry luxury cosmetics brands are readily available

Dig into the demographics of the potential social media influencer’s audience and look for as close to a perfect fit as you can get.

Future Success Predictions

Once you gather a set of social influencers who align with your brand messaging and audience demographics, the next step is to analyze their potential to bring you an ROI.

This is arguably one of the most important steps as it will reveal to you how a potential social media influencer will perform before you even engage with him/her.

The metric we use to measure this here at TapInfluence is CPE or Cost Per Engagement. The CPE metric (rate versus value) gives you a realistic picture of the value each social media influencer will provide your brand and how the influencers stack up against each other. Use this data to pre-qualify which influencer will be the best fit for your goals, brand, and most importantly, your budget. The CPE metric allows you to make predictions on which influencers will perform the best so you can make more educated and cost-effective decisions on which ones to partner with.

If you would like to see how TapInfluence helps brands dive deep into influencer audience demographics, choose brand-aligned social influencers and use the CPE metric to predict cost per engagement, sign up here for a free demonstration. We will be happy to show you exactly how TapInfluence can make your social influencer campaign selection and management process cost-effective, smooth, and profitable.

We’re always looking for innovative ways to drive sales.

One simple step which people often overlook is the potential purchasing power of your existing audience. It can be expensive to market to people who know nothing about your product, but less expensive to increase the lifetime value of your existing customers.

When Facebook first released their custom audiences advertising feature, results poured in rapidly. One e-commerce company, as reported at the time by TechCrunch, targeted their email list and recorded a 43 percent increase in sign-up conversion and a 30 percent decrease of their cost-per-lead.

The Washington Post’s advertising arm, SocialCode, also reported a 15 percent lower cost per new fan after using custom audiences.

Using custom audiences and Facebook retargeting to activate people who have previously shown interest in your product is a strategy which works.

Through this article, we’ll give you a practical explanation of automated retargeting using pixels and then look at custom audiences. Beyond retargeting, we’ll cover:

• Different strategies for generating segmented user lists
• A host of sneaky tips and tricks for maximizing the potential of the custom audiences feature

Retarget, reactivate, and reap the rewards.

How to use pixels to automate your retargeting

Have you ever checked out a product and browsed their website only to find them staring back at you on Facebook an hour later?

How did they know to advertise to you? How did they know you were interested in their product?

Pixels. That’s why.

What are pixels? In short, pixels are little bits of code you can put in your website which track what users do when they interact with your website or advert. There are two types of pixel worth mentioning here. One is the audience pixel which tracks who visits the website and the other is the conversion pixel which tracks how users have interacted with your website once they get there.

Let’s look at each.

How to create and install a pixel

Our aim is to create a custom facebook audience on the basis of who has visited our website. It’s super simple to do.

First step, go to your ads manager in Facebook. The link is located in the bottom left corner of the page under the heading “Create”. Or you’ll find it at facebook.com/ads/manager.

This should take you to your ads manager where Facebook will ask you what your marketing objective is. You can select whichever option you like, but for this one I’m going to keep it simple and select “Traffic”.

Once you’ve selected your objective, Facebook will take you to the next page where you can configure your advert. This section allows you to determine the audience, the placement of the ad, the budget, and a few extra features.

When you see the Audience section, click the “Create a Custom Audience” link shown below.

You’ll then see the option for tracking website traffic. Once you click it, you will be able to name your pixel and Facebook will then generate it.

When the code is created, you’ll be given the option to Create Audience or Install Pixel. If you choose Install Pixel you can access the lines of code you’ll need to put into your website. This is where we find the difference between an audience pixel and a conversion pixel – what Facebook refer to as the Event Code.

The pixel base code goes into your header tag on your website. Facebook recommend including it just before the end of the tag – directly before “</head>”. This will set the system to track visitors to your website and create a custom audience for you.

How to customize a conversion pixel

The second option, Install event code, allows you to add specific parameters to this tracking. You can create customized snippets of code to install on specific pages of your website. The different event options include:

• What someone is searching for
• What content someone has viewed
• What someone has added to a wishlist
• Whether someone has gone through to checkout
• Whether someone has added their payment information
• Whether someone has made a purchase
• Whether someone has registered or become a lead.

You can also create custom events if you’re code savvy.

Once you’ve generated your pixel, you have to find somewhere to put it. Where you place a conversion pixel on your website will define what information you’re able to gather. You have two main options:

1. You can place the pixel in the <script> tags beneath your </head> tag. This will run the script when the page loads. This is good for tracking whether someone has arrived at a thank you page or a specific product.
2. You can place the pixel in a more dynamic area like a button. If you insert the script into the button then a visitor will be tracked when they click that button rather than when the page loads. This allows you to be more specific with monitoring actions.

Facebook offers you three settings when configuring your event code: Basic, Recommended, and Advanced.

The advanced option allows you to add extra variables and therefore provide greater optimization and more useful data.

Lastly, you can name your audience and finish up!

Now Facebook will gather an audience for you to target in your adverts. You can simply follow the Facebook process through defining your budget, your text, and images, and then set your advert going.

Real life advanced segmentation strategies

Segmenting your existing or potential customers well in order to effectively target them is an art form.

I’ve made the argument in previous posts that this kind of effective segmentation was one of the key factors behind both the Trump campaign strategy and the Brexit campaign strategy – both of which were successful against all odds.

The three key strategies we’ll mention range from most expensive/difficult to least. From emotional mapping, to purchase monitoring, to content marketing.

How companies segment their audience by emotion

In my last article, I looked at the role of psychometric testing and emotional targeting in political and commercial activities – the science of persuasion. VisualDNA was one of the case studies I used to show how effective emotional targeting can be in advertising.

VisualDNA used free to play online games through facebook and other viral quizzes to build a vast database of people and to learn something about them. Most of these games or quizzes included a psychometric element to them. The goal was to learn who is susceptible to what – using psychological concepts like OCEAN and the Need for Cognition Scale.

With this knowledge, they were able to provide advertising tailored to individuals’ personalities rather than their particular demographic position. This proved very effective in one of their case studies with a leading health and beauty brand:

Each segment received tailored creative. Because people with high openness are generally more willing to take risks and experiment, the brand sent them a bold, confronting message: “Give two fingers to convention”. At the other end of the spectrum, members of the audience identified as having low extraversion received a softer sell: “Beauty doesn’t have to shout.”

By matching the right creative with the right audience, this leading brand inspired over 1,000 customers to purchase, and boosted ROI by a massive 56 percent compared with a control group.

They create their custom audiences by segmenting via emotional makeup. This is likely a difficult strategy for a bootstrapping startup to employ, but if you’re part of a large company this could be the addition to your strategy you’ll need to boost sales even further.

Targeting different ads at different people works. Check out these two examples given by Neil Patel which show the financial difference regular advert optimization can make. They have different conversion rates, but if emotionally segmented maybe they would score even higher! Who do you think each would be targeted at?

My growing obsession with emotional targeting has reached the point where I feel the need to analyze every advert placed in front of me. Have they used a personality map to focus in on me, and crafted their message in a way I would react to?

Take this advert from the London Review of Books. I’m a writer. I’m British but living abroad. I’m generally frugal online.

Is it suspicious? Maybe, maybe not. And we shouldn’t take one example to be indicative of a whole campaign.

I’ve certainly visited LRB at points, so maybe they’re just retargeting.

However, what about the next advert which comes up in my feed?

Become a fan and discover all the corners of Latin America!

On the one hand, they’re marketing to me in the wrong language. I think. Unless I spend longer looking at Spanish language adverts as it takes me longer to read them? In which case, Facebook might be sending me Spanish ones for a reason – misinterpreting my abilities as an hispanohablante for genuine interest in products.

On the other hand, the imagery and the sentiment across the two adverts are incredibly similar. Both present a sense of wanderlust and look to be focusing on the O in OCEAN; “Openness: do they enjoy new experiences?”. You could certainly imagine a different advert for the London Review of Books which depicts someone curled up in chair with a good book – the kind of advert which may appeal more to the neurotic rather than the open.

I don’t know. I’m probably just paranoid. Let’s move on.

Sell products to people who have bought those products before

If you’re selling high-end Swiss watches, you may disagree with this approach.

However, for companies who sell either perishable or single-use goods, this is a no-brainer.

The retailer Target is a particularly interesting success story in this regard. They set up a system whereby every customer was given a certain ID and their purchasing was tracked with every detail recorded. This resulted in some surprising outcomes.

Analysts at Target had found that the birth of a child is a very lucrative event. Therefore, being able to predict when this is going to occur would give Target an advantage in marketing to that person and securing their trade. As it turned out, their system worked too well.

Target identified 25 products which, if bought over a certain period of time, highlighted an upcoming birth. These 25 products, importantly, did not include baby clothes or diapers – if the customer is already buying these items then Target has missed the event-moment where a person’s shopping habits become “flexible”.

This resulted in an angry father reaching out to target, annoyed that they’d been sending his daughter adverts for baby related goods. He accused Target of encouraging her to get pregnant. What he didn’t know… she was already pregnant. Target found out before he did.

Analyzing your customers‘ buying history can help inform you as to what they may want to buy in future. It could be Target’s big data approach, or it might be one of their simpler stories: when customers bought swimsuits in April they sent them offers for suntan lotion and weight loss books in June.

This is the kind of technique which any already active company can employ. If you’re an online entity, this is a super easy strategy to use as all of your customers will have a login/user ID of some description. If you’re an offline company, you could set up a membership system or club card which incentivises customers to identify themselves electronically whenever they make a purchase.

Use content marketing to have your customers segment themselves

If you’re running a content marketing strategy, you’re probably offering a couple of bonus free-giveaways.

Maybe you’re offering an ebook to explain something further? Perhaps you’re offering a voucher to give discounts on particular products?

Lots of companies who employ this technique request people leave their email in order to access the prize. This gives you an opportunity. It is also a free opportunity – for you cash-strapped startups out there.

Say you have products A, B, and C. They’re different enough from each other to warrant distinct adverts for each and also for secondary related products – D, E, and F, for instance. When you publish content related to product C, you offer access to a voucher for that product. Maybe someone doesn’t go ahead with the purchase, you still have their email.

You can now market to that individual. You can send them adverts for product C, but you can also send them adverts for product F because you know the two products are closely related.

So you end up with 3 lists where each list applies to the primary product and a secondary related product. You can run a strategy like this while spending a minuscule amount.

Sneaky tips which are mostly allowed by Facebook

I’ll just make this clear from the off: I do not advocate you violating Facebook’s terms of service.

This first option merely serves as inspiration and a demonstration of some of the possibilities within Facebook.

How to be specific

If you want to find a person’s unique identifier on Facebook, you can simply go onto their profile and look at their name. For example, facebook.com/myname.1234. Take this URL and add “graph” in front of it: graph.facebook.com/myname.1234. This will show you something like this:

That fbtrace_id can be copied and pasted into a spreadsheet. Now you could (but shouldn’t) target that individual directly with adverts.

It’s the kind of despicable thing I could imagine startups doing to get their product in front of tech journalists, for instance. Or, alternatively, a great way to parade your wedding photos in front of your ex, if you’re an equally despicable person.

Exclude previous conversions

When you’re building your custom audience, you have to recognize that Facebook may know more about your audience than you do.

For instance, let’s say that you have a list of emails of people who bought items from your website. You’re now releasing a mobile app. You want to advertise the launch of the app to all those previous users, but the app is only available on iOS. Considering you don’t have a massive budget, you want to exclude all the users on your list who use an Android operating system.

Simply click the “Exclude people” option below and a new search box will appear. You can click “Browse” in this new box for a drop down menu to browse options. There are many variables, so spend some time going through to exclude the groups you feel the need to exclude.

Fight back against your email open rates

Are you sending out emails religiously and finding very low open rate?

Then look no further!

Use your email provider to filter this list down to exclude the people who open emails. Once you’ve done this, you can hopefully export that list as a CSV. Then, you can upload this as a custom audience within Facebook and have your adverts pop up on the newsfeeds of people who ignore their emails.

Run your marketing with a process

As you’ve probably noticed by now, there are a number of different strategies you can take when configuring your Facebook adverts.

There are also a number of other steps required outside of Facebook if you want to attempt some of these strategies properly.

Trying to juggle multiple campaign styles and approaches can be confusing. At Process Street, we have the mindset that anything which needs doing more than twice requires a well-documented process. Whether you’re creating the process for yourself or building the process to delegate complex workflows, you need to have a system in place.

I’ve included this customizable template below which provides a skeleton structure from which you can plan out your process for creating Facebook ad campaigns. Simply click “Give me this checklist!” and you can add in new steps and edit existing ones to suit the structure of your planned foray into advanced Facebook marketing.

Bring the most out of your marketing potential with Facebook’s retargeting features and its custom audience functionalities.

If you’re advertising without using these tools, you’re throwing money away.

Have you run campaigns with Facebook’s features in the past? What were the results? Let us know your case studies in the comments below and we might follow up with you to find out more!

Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank earns a salary of about $26,000 annually, which is about as much as a Walmart store employee. 

That may seem shockingly low for the chief executive of an $8 billion company, but Plank has found some other ways to get rich. 

Specifically, Plank owns more than 15% of the company's shares outstanding, which are valued at more than $1.3 billion, according to a company proxy released Thursday.

Additionally, businesses controlled by Plank are benefitting from more than $73 million that Under Armour has funneled to them in the last year.

The payments include $2.4 million to lease a jet and a $6,500-per-hour helicopter owned by one of Planks' companies, according to the proxy.

Under Armour also paid $70.3 million to one of Plank's companies last year for a piece of land his company owned near the clothing brand's headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland. Under Armour plans to use the land to expand its corporate headquarters. The Wall Street Journal previously reported on the proxy.

Under Armour has plans to use a hotel owned by Plank and his brother, Scott Plank, for business purposes as well, the company said in the filing. The hotel, located in Baltimore, opened in March 2017.

"We have negotiated corporate rate discounts for use of the hotel with the management company, consistent with rates otherwise available for comparable hotels in the area," the company said. 

For all the other transactions involving Plank's companies, Under Armour says it used an independent outside party to appraise the fair market value of the transaction. In other words, the company tried to make sure it wasn't paying more than it otherwise would, just to do business with Plank's companies.

Under Armour's business dealings with Plank's companies come to light as the company shares have been getting hammered, falling 30% since the beginning of the year following news that revenue growth contracted sharply in the most recent quarter after years of explosive gains. 

The company's net revenue still rose about 12% in the fourth quarter to $1.31 billion, but that was its slowest sales growth in eight years. Analysts had expected revenue of $1.41 billion.

SEE ALSO: Chipotle is quietly raising prices during its worst time in history

Join the conversation about this story »

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A movie is nothing without great music. Whether you’re watching a Disney animated film, an Oscar-worthy musical, or a horror movie, the soundtrack is critical to creating the perfect ambiance. Don’t believe me? Try watching Silence of The Lambs on mute…way less scary, and a perfect way for this scaredy-cat ( oh hey, that’s me!) to tiptoe toward watching her first horror movie. But what does it take to create a perfect sound that elicits the right emotion, at the right the time?

A great team.

An Oscar-worthy orchestra doesn’t happen by mistake. It takes selecting musicians, allocating resources, and understanding the size of the team needed to create specific sounds. Believe it or not, marketers face similar challenges as they’re assembling their account-based marketing team, combining unique roles into cross-functional teams that create beautifully orchestrated campaigns.

ABM Hits the Right Notes

Moving from a broad-based demand generation strategy to a more targeted, account-centric approach requires a shift towards acquiring, retaining, and growing high-value accounts. And that shift is often well worth it because the targeted accounts are likely to generate more revenue and often have strategic significance like helping to penetrate new territories or influence a market.

Just take a look at these industry stats:

• The buyer’s journey is 1.5x shorter with ABM. —Aberdeen Group
• Account-based marketers are 33% more effective at connecting marketing efforts to revenue. —Aberdeen Group
• 97% of marketers surveyed said ABM produced their highest ROI. —Alterra Group

Assemble a Harmonic Marketing Ensemble

Creating the perfect account-based marketing team starts with defining specific roles. Just like instruments are strategically and specifically placed in an orchestra, organizations need to understand the different roles team members play and then coordinate them to target and engage high-value accounts.

For those just embarking on their ABM journey, your team will shape the change management necessary to make your ABM campaigns successful. If you’ve already been practicing ABM, then you may want to tweak your roles to ensure you have the support you need for proper coverage. Either way, these roles will provide the support you need for a successful ABM campaign:

• Executive Sponsor: Typically, your executive sponsor will come out of marketing, but you may have an executive sponsor driving this strategy in sales, support, or services. They will act as a champion for your ABM strategy— offering support and strategic guidance—from an executive standpoint.
• Marketer: Drives the ABM strategy from creation to execution, acts as the point person to ensure cross-functional collaboration, and reports on the progress of the strategy.
• Account Executive Leader: Helps align the strategy around customers and their needs, creates ABM service-level agreements and leads and educates the rest of team on best practices.
• Marketing Operations/Sales Operations: Works to examine your existing database, identify trends, and report on progress. MOPS and SOPS are critical to choosing the right accounts.
• Sales Development Leader: Helps guide research on accounts, providing feedback to the group to recalibrate if necessary.
• Services Leader: Looks for opportunities to support current customers in their product and potentially identifies new opportunities for upsell and cross-sell.
• Support Leader: Strategically monitors target accounts to help ensure customer retention and prioritization of cases.

If you have a lean team, this list may look overwhelming. At the very least, it’s important to have both marketing and sales involved and well aligned, as well as the executives that oversee the teams.

To learn how to assemble the right talent to create engaging ABM campaigns, check out our new gifographic Orchestrate a Solid ABM Team: How to Assemble a Harmonic Marketing Ensemble.

Looking for more on Account-Based Marketing? Check out our Definitive Guide to Account-Based Marketing.

Your brand is your most important asset. How your buyers perceive your company determines whether or not they’ll make a purchase, refer you to other customers, and—most importantly—come back for more. That relationship between you and your buyers is a lot more fragile than you might think. One PR disaster may be all that stands between you and a bad reputation.

If you don’t believe me, consider the mighty blunder of United Airlines. Wow, now there’s a bad reputation in the making. At the writing of this, their stock has dropped $1.4 billion, and is still plunging. Recovering from this could take a while.

Now, in most cases, the ding to a reputation isn’t nearly as devastating as this particular example. Before you despair, try these tips to fix a bad business reputation.

Acknowledge the Problem

Whether your problem is presented within your business reviews or all over the news, it’s important that you first acknowledge that there is an issue. Sticking your head in the sand and hoping it will all blow over will only anger your audience.

Learn from the Bad Press

There is a learning moment within even the harshest reviews. Deconstruct the complaints, categorize the statements within, and determine which should be addressed.

This is where’ll learn how your buyers feel about the quality of your products, the professionalism of your staff, and the helpfulness of your customer service. Without the bad reviews (or bad press), you may remain unaware of the ways in which you’re failing your customers.

Take the criticism to heart and pledge to be better.

Ignore the Irrelevant

You will receive feedback that has nothing to do with your products and services. Once you’ve become well known, it’s inevitable that someone somewhere will attempt to drag you down. Learn how to ignore the feedback that can’t help you. Otherwise, you’ll agonize about things you simply have no control over.

Consumers are savvy enough to spot a smear campaign from miles away. If you’re working hard to fix the actual problems, then you’re building even more trust with your buyers. Those irrelevant reviews will have no bearing on your brand.

Address Your Audience

A simple statement from the CEO or PR representative is all you need, but make sure you cover a lot of ground with your address. Name the problem, provide an explanation—not an excuse—and, if you have a solution, convey the steps you’ll take to fix the issue. If you don’t have a solution, at least let your buyers know you’re working on it.

Then, reach out to the buyers who made complaints. Thank them for their feedback. Invite them to try your services or products again so they can see how their opinions helped you improve. Even more importantly, they’ll see how you’re working hard to solve for their needs.

The Last Ditch Option

A brand refresh is always an option, even if you’re not dealing with negative publicity. However, a brand refresh should be handled with care, simply because you don’t want to alienate your brand advocates. When you make major changes to your image, you have a lot at stake.

Is it time for a refresh? In the case of United Airlines…well, it’s very likely. Digging out of the hole they’ve created will be difficult, but not impossible. If you’re facing total annihilation, then maybe you should consider this option, too.

At any rate, it’s never a bad idea to take a critical look at your company and business practices. Ask trusted friends to give honest feedback, and then expand your circle to include strangers and even detractors. The wider the array of people, the more truthful your feedback will be.

Remember that a brand refresh isn’t turning your back on your established brand. Instead, you want to maintain those aspects of your identity that your buyers still love while tweaking or updating your vision and mission.

Even the strongest of marketers are susceptible to mistakes at times. And inbound marketing is no exception. Whether you have a great deal of experience or you are just getting started, we’ll share with you some of the most common mistakes that are often made with inbound marketing so that you can avoid them.

Unrealistic Expectations

While an inbound marketing strategy is an extremely useful tool, it may take a great deal of time for it to develop and become completely fruitful. It cannot be relied upon to as a “quick fix” for pre-existing marketing problems. In order to be completely effective, an inbound marketing strategy must be well-crafted with identified goals, developing buyer personas, applied best practices, and recognition of it as a long-term investment.

Immeasurable Goals

If you aren’t sure where you are headed, it will be impossible to get there. Prior to beginning an inbound marketing plan, it is critical to identify who your target buyer is and what you hope their response will be to your marketing efforts. This can be accomplished by answering questions about who your current customers are, what problems your product solves, who your competition is, and what actions you want new customers to take. The answers to these questions should help you come up with a definite concept of your hopes for your buyer persona, allowing you to clearly define your inbound marketing strategy.

Forgetting Current Resources

Many marketers try to build an inbound marketing strategy from the ground up, without considering what tools they already have in their tool belts. Before beginning, take stock of what you already have. If you already have a great website, think about how it can be tweaked to perform better. If you have a great brochure, use it to create content for your “About Us” page. Make the most of what you already have first, and then make plans to add to it.

Neglecting Buyer Personas

Not only do buyer personas need to be created, they also need to be updated regularly in order to develop traction for your website. Effective personas include a clear client profile with critical information, as well as an in-depth review of those key people with whom you want to develop a business relationship.

Buyer personas contain clear buyer identifiers, buyer challenges, buyer priorities, buyer experience (with your products or services) and the questions that buyers need answers for. As the information changes over time, personas should be kept up-to-date—annually at the very least but more often is better.

Not Making Use of a Blog

If you think blogging seems like something that is time-consuming and not essential, you should reevaluate. The creation of strong, optimized content is an investment that continues to bring in new visitors over time. Each time you add a blog post, you add value and drive more traffic to your web page. Blogging is a practice and discipline that should never be prioritized.

Using Unhealthy Email Lists

Most inbound marketing strategies make some use of an email marketing plan. But the only way for these to be effective is if your email lists are healthy. Unhealthy email lists produce high bounce rates. Clean them up by removing email addresses that don’t answer these questions positively:

• Do they have any prior affiliation with your organization?
• Do they have the opportunity to unsubscribe?
• Do they want or expect this email from you?
• Have they received an email from you in the past 12 months?

If the answer to each of these questions is “yes”, then these emails should stay on your list.

Forgetting to Nurture

Without measuring and adjusting your inbound marketing plan to analytics, you’ll never achieve the full potential of growth. Sure, the numbers game can be a bit boring, but remembering that there is a possible buyer lying dormant behind each number may motivate you a bit. Make it a regular habit to analyze your metrics and adjust your blog content accordingly, making more of what works and scrapping what doesn’t.

Keep these mistakes in mind as you work through your inbound marketing plan. Don’t get into bad habits or get complacent about your marketing approach.

What uses up the most water in your house: Your shower, toilet, kitchen faucets or bathroom faucets? The answer is, I don't know. And neither do you. Even if you could guess which used the most, there's no effective way to see accurate figures for each fixture.

That's because accurately collecting and monitoring that information would required designing a complicated system that could convey the information to you in an easy-to-understand way, a difficult undertaking that no one has attempted to tackle. Until now. Industrial design firm Matter Global and engineering consultancy Mindtribe have partnered to create Well, an easy-to-install system of sensors linked to an app on your phone.

To measure water usage at your sinks and toilets, the user installs this intermediary device on each incoming line:

Because the incoming plumbing for the shower is often impossible to access without breaking through tile, they've designed a magnetic-mount showerhead that contains a sensor.

Both types of sensors are powered by turbines within that measure the throughput and send that data "via Wi-Fi to a mobile app that displays daily, weekly, monthly, and annual use from individual units and the collective system."

Because the end user can easily see the showerhead, the handle illuminates with LEDs to indicate how much of your household's daily allotment of water has been used. An "Eco-Mode" button on the handle can be pressed to reduce water flow if it seems you're using more than you ought.

The system isn't perfect; there's nothing to measure water usage for a bathtub fixture, and users would of course need a minimum of two sensors for each sink for both the incoming hot and cold water lines. But Matter and Mindtribe say that "The Well™ app uses machine learning to predict consumption rates throughout the entire home without having to install a sensor on every fixture."

The developers reckon that

The Well system allows the average home to immediately save 12 percent on water and sewer costs, which equals about $130 in annual savings for the average four-person home, or roughly 17,500 gallons.

Now we'll have to see what the pricepoint is, so potential buyers can calculate how long it would take to pay the system off.

It's unclear if or when the Well system will come to market; it's still in the prototype phase.

92% of consumers read online reviews and testimonials when considering a purchase. 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. 72% of them say positive reviews and testimonials make them trust a business more.

All of those stats are net positive for online businesses in terms of earning a customer’s cash. But product reviews aren’t beneficial only for conversion. They can also drive traffic by increasing SEO and up-sell and cross-sell additional products to both existing and potential customer cohorts.

Here’s what we know in those arenas:

• Increasing review volume leads to higher conversion rates – even at high volume levels: 50 or more reviews per product can mean a 4.6% increase in conversion rates.
• Fresh, product-specific review content drives search traffic and keyword rankings, specifically when a business earns 10 or more reviews –– resulting in 15-20% increase in search traffic.
• 3- and 4-star reviews contain 2x as many product suggestions as others –– informing brands of products that work, and which do not.

Bazaarvoice’s Conversion Index Volume 8 explains how an increasing volume of reviews affects first conversions, then SEO (and organic traffic), followed by product and business insights gathered from crowdsourcing.

Driving review volume is clearly important. After all, we live in the post-Amazon age. But the most striking data isn’t about traffic, product insights or even bottom of the funnel conversion. It’s about interaction, and how social proof (i.e. customer reviews) affect your conversion rates across the board –– in all industries and on all channels.

When a consumer interacts with your review, three things happen. They:

• Are 58% more likely to convert
• Generate 62% more revenue per visit
• Buy 3% more per order (AOV)

Those numbers in hand, what if you could pre-plant positive reviews across the web to drive not only increased conversions, but increased AOV and return-on-ad-spend (ROAS)?

We already know Google and Amazon heavily merit positive customer reviews. They increase your search ranking on both platforms, and both companies strictly control the process in favor of the customer.

We also know that agencies like the Better Business Bureau affect consumer trust, with the BBB’s security seal coming in 3rd on the Baymard’s survey of consumer-rated trust in checkout seals.

And, of course, take your own personal use case. Do you buy items with no reviews? Do you buy items with low-star reviews? Do you care?

I’d venture to guess those answers are, respectively: not often, rarely and yeah –– I do care.

So then, the next logical step is to begin using the product reviews you are generating on your site more broadly in your advertising across the web. This concept is not new. Best Buy began doing it in 2008. Amazon takes it to a whole new level with their brick-and-mortar bookstores, using floorspace as advertising space for online customer reviews.

Everything is data drive and agile. Books are sold alongside customer reviews within the displays. pic.twitter.com/mW6aBdvgGn

— Paul Shapiro (@fighto) April 2, 2017

Here are how other brands are making this work for them –– and how you can begin incorporating your own product reviews and testimonials into your marketing and advertising strategy to lower your cost of acquisition and increase your ROAS. In general, we’ll be talking about how to take customer reviews and them strategically as customer testimonials.

Where to Use Customer Testimonials to Increase Acquisition

Social Media

There’s no better place to share customer testimonials than across your social channels.

Brands that share authentic user-generated content are constantly building more trust with their social audience. Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn are ideal opportunities to post customer testimonials alongside customer photos and profiles.

Check out how Fugoo intersperses review content and regular lifestyle images of customers using the speaker on their Facebook page.

Or, take a note from Onzie, which shares quotes along with customer-submitted images in a very authentic, human way – the same way you or I would tell our own social networks about a brand we can’t get enough of.

Instead of sharing a 300-word review that speaks to all of the technical or design features of the product, this sparks just enough curiosity to entice new customers to visit the site to learn more.

Even media reviews can be used, like Native Union did here.

Paid Ads

The average AdWords click-through rate across all industries peaks at 1.91% for search ads, and 0.35% for display ads. But, an AdWords ad that includes a customer review extension sees an increased click-through of up to 10%.

Those ratings show up in Ads automatically when a review threshold is met. Those are:

• 30 unique reviews over the last 12 months
• Reviews must average at least 3.5 stars or higher

Tools to Drive Increased Reviews

BigCommerce offers plenty of one-click apps and integrations for brands looking to increase their review volume. Here are a few:

• Yotpo
• KudoBuzz
• FOMO
• TrustPilot
• Feefo
• Verified Reviews
• Ask Nicely

Search Engine Optimization

Search engines are placing more weight than ever on customer testimonials for a number of reasons.

1. Testimonials create fresh, ever-changing, and relevant content that proves to search engines customers are interacting with your brand.
2. Reviews are naturally filled with long-tail keywords that customers are actually searching for.

Customer review and user-generated content software Yotpo performed their own research to see how testimonials could impact SEO rankings. They tested 30,000 ecommerce businesses of all sizes and industries to “see how SEO traffic increased when the only common denominator was adding reviews to their site.”

Over the course of nine months, they found that, on average, a site using customer reviews increases site traffic about 45%.

A few tips to make sure the customer testimonials on your site are optimized for search:

1. Place testimonials in plain HTML instead of Java or Flash so they are readable by search engines.
2. Use schema markups or rich snippets to help search engines sort and make sense of testimonials, and share relevant information on search engine result pages.
3. Encourage longer testimonials by creating a number of fields or asking a series of questions for the customer to describe your product or service.

Consider StoreYourBoard. In August of 2016, the company optimized their on-site review system utilizing product reviews as well as FAQs. In September, their revenue for search traffic jumped from $1.5K to more than $30K. Today, search traffic drives hundreds of thousands in revenue, just behind AdWords and Direct.

Homepage

Engagement is a key factor for increased search ranking. It is also a key factor for any landing page (like your homepage) in moving consumers through from top of funnel to final sale. Customer testimonials can aid here in both SEO as well as merchandising to drive more traffic (thanks to on-site clicks) and move consumers through the funnel.

Homepage testimonial examples

Let’s look at a few examples. First is NatoMounts, which uses customer testimonials at the end of their landing page-like Homepage, in the case a customer needs a final push to purchase.

3x Your Conversions with These Psychological Tactics

Convincing people to buy is more science than you think.

Badass Beard Care also uses customer testimonials on their homepage, as well as a loyalty program and incentives for engagement on social.

How Badass Beard Care Became So … Badass

A free sample, a Facebook ad and a viral product. Here’s how they did it.

Here’s an example of a much shorter homepage that uses only product imagery and customer reviews to drive conversions.

Customer Testimonial Videos

One of the best ways to utilize a testimonial from a happy customer is to create a video. Testimonial videos, when done right, provide a more human and authentic connection than the typical promotional videos.

You can use product review videos like NaturallyCurly does here:

Or help to promote testimonial videos made but your customers,like Native Union does here:

Even better, check out the ads for the exact product available underneath the video.

Testimonial Page

Once you have a collection of happy customers, you’ll need to perfect the way you share their reviews on your website. And it doesn’t have to be complicated.

The Dairy Fairy compiles customer reviews onto a single page, this one for “Mama’s Reviews.” She’ll soon have similar pages for Blog reviews and Media reviews as well.

Remember that press mentions are also great to highlight on a page similarly to customer reviews. See how Vivino does it below.

If you don’t want to reuse your customer reviews, here is a great example of how to combine social media posts onto an interactive page. You can gather these by encouraging customers to use a specific hashtag when they post to Instagram.

Case Studies

Case studies are not the best use case for every ecommerce company. Technology companies use case studies often to prove value and earn customer testimonials. This works well for businesses selling solutions.

For instance, Bright Agrotech has a case studies page featuring the farmers (both new and legacy) using their system. The page is a great resources for their various customer groups to see how success their solution is.

If you sell a solution, you can create case studies by hopping on calls with customers who have already expressed positive feedback. Ask if they’d be willing to tell their story. You can send them a survey via Google Surveys, or use a free service like Uber Conference to record and transcribe interviews.

Here are a few questions you’ll want to ask:

1. What were the main challenges and pain points that lead you to look for a solution?
2. What lead you to our business, and how did we stand out against the competition?
3. What were your goals in the beginning of our engagement/project/purchase?
4. What benefits did you experience from using our product/service? Ask for quantitative data here.
5. What would you tell other customers suffering from the same challenges you were struggling with?

Highlight Target Customers

“Like-me” audiences resonate more with customers. If your target audience is women with young children, use testimonials from women with young children (and include their ages –– not names! –– in the review, too).

See below how Georg Roth Los Angeles uses everyday Yelp reviews on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Third-party review sites like Yelp are 81% more trustworthy than brand-owned channels, according to consumers.

Influencer Marketing

Plain and simple, influencer marketing works. According to AdWeek, marketers say the most valuable aspect of an influencer marketing campaign is:

• 87% –– creating authentic content about their brand
• 77% –– driving engagement around their brand
• 56% –– driving traffic to their websites or landing pages

Find the influencers in your space and work to forge solid relationships with them. Or, if budget allows, pay them outright. Costs are estimated at $25,000 to $50,000 per campaign.

Either way, people trust people they like –– and influencers have a lot of power here. These campaigns work best is done on Facebook or Instagram, where 87% of marketers say the campaigns worked. Popular blogs also have influence, where 50% of marketers say the campaigns worked.

Marucci is hands down one of the best when it comes to influencer marketing. Professional baseball players sue their products regularly, and the brand takes advantage of that loyalty.

See here how they use influencer marketing on their homepage:

And on Instagram:

And on Facebook:

Your brand doesn’t have to be this holistic about influencer marketing, though. You can always do one-off campaigns like Flash Tattoos –– who partnered with Beyonce in 2015.

Marketing Materials

Include customer testimonials in as much of your marketing material as possible. This includes:

• Emails
• Physical mailers
• Packages
• Social media posts
• Events
• Ads

Why? Well, this goes back to an old rule of thumb in advertising called the “Rule of Sevens,” and unfortunately there is no exact date to back it up.

Call it an old wives tales –– at least getting to the exact number 7. There are studies, though, that show increased exposure sticks better in someone’s memory. Some studies even point to a “Rule of Threes:”

Krugman (1972; 1977) captured the imagination of the industry with his three-exposure theory, which described an intuitively appealing sequence of consumer responses to television advertising that appeared to be consistent with a communication threshold. He suggested that the first exposure causes consumers to ask, “What is it?” The second causes them to ask, “What of it?” The third exposure is both a reminder and the beginning of disengagement. … The magic number “three” came to be a commonly accepted industry standard (Lancaster, Kreshel and Harris 1986). [Cannon and Leckenby]

Either way, your customer testimonials help to move consumers through your funnel. Find testimonials that fit each cohort –– both in terms of demographic as well as purchasing cycle. That means you will need testimonials that fit top of funnel, mid-funnel and bottom of funnel — and likely multiple iterations of each.

Where do you use those? In all of your marketing materials.

Providing Incentives

Incentivizing customers to review their purchase is a sensitive area. Offer too much, or ask too frequently, and it can easily seem as though you’re coercing positive feedback. With some creativity, however, you can build testimonials into your retention strategies so that customers want to leave positive reviews about your brand.

Before you do anything though –– just ask your customer to review the product. Once they have received their order, shoot them an email a week later to ask about their experience.

If that doesn’t work, play on a loyalty program and give those who review your products a discount or points incentive for doing so.

In other words, don’t give up the discount too early.

Responding To Testimonials

While responding to customers’ testimonials may seem like a given, the way in which you respond can make a difference. The key is to always invite customers back for another purchase. Here are a few steps on how to respond to both positive and negative reviews that will lead customers back again.

When responding to positive customer testimonials:

1. Thank them
2. Make it personal
3. Invite them back for more

When responding to negative customer testimonials:

1. Apologize
2. Own up to it, and if applicable, try explaining the situation
3. Share the steps you are taking to remedy and improve the customer experience for next time
4. Invite them back again

Final Thoughts

Expect to receive testimonials across all of your sales channels (and even places where you do not sell!). These includes your social channels, Amazon and eBay, your webstore, Yelp, Google, Glassdoor and many others. Be sure to monitor all customer touchpoints daily so you never miss the chance to respond, engage, drive loyalty and build customer lifetime value (as well as SEO and ad copy for the future!).

As digital marketing continues to become more of a challenge every day, utilizing testimonials will help your business stand out among the rest.

Trends tend to go in cycles. There's a reason for the saying "what's old is new again" -- if something was popular once, odds are it'll come back sooner or later.

Modern sales practitioners and experts spend a lot of time talking about ways to optimize sales emails and social media messages for the best response rates. But could it be that face-to-face is actually the way to go in our digital times?Researchers from Western University recently studied the effectiveness of different communication channels to get people to take a survey, and the results spoke loud and clear.

"We found that people were much more likely to agree to complete a survey when they were asked in-person as opposed to over email," Vanessa K. Bohns, assistant professor at Cornell University, wrote in an HBR article. "Face-to-face requests were 34 times more effective than emailed ones."

Bohns attributed this stark difference to two factors. The first is what face-to-face interactions offer that emails lack: Nonverbal communication. "W hen we replicated our results in a second study we found the nonverbal cues requesters conveyed during a face-to-face interaction made all the difference in how people viewed the legitimacy of their requests," she wrote.

Secondly, she pointed to the email recipients' perception of the ask. Think about it: How often do you click on a survey link from an unknown sender? Yup, that's what I thought.

So what does this staggering statistic mean for salespeople? Should reps reallocate their time spent on email to traveling to buyers' offices and shaking hands?

Well ... not quite. Just like so many other things in sales, the effectiveness and appropriateness of different connection channels hinges on the timing and context.

"It's not realistic for a sales rep to go out and meet with hundreds of prospective customers in a territory for the very first interaction they have; nor is a prospect interested in taking an in-person meeting the way they may have 10 or 15 years ago. The sales rep [should] create enough value through channels such as email and social so that the prospect is compelled to take a first meeting," Brian Signorelli, director of HubSpot's global sales partner program, explained. "However, as the mutual exploration continues and approaches the final decision-making stages, asking for a purchasing commitment through email or social is almost never appropriate and should -- at a minimum -- be done over the phone or video conference."

Signorelli also pointed out that the type of sale is relevant when deciding on the best method of communication. "For businesses selling complex, high ticket items, face-to-face is likely appropriate."

Michael Pici, director of sales at HubSpot, agreed that the connection channel should shift as the relationship progresses.

"There is a reason in sales when salespeople receive an email from a prospect asking a question and ask their manager what to do, we say 'Pick up the phone and call them,'" Pici said. "Going from text to phone to in person each adds new context and investment to a dialogue, which in turn leads to better understanding of intent and trust."

As for how to kick off a relationship via email that becomes a phone conversation and eventually an in-person or video meeting, Jeff Hoffman, sales trainer and creator of Your SalesMBA, had some words of wisdom for reps. From his point of view, it's all about making the right initial ask and building from there.

"Keep it simple and easy to respond to," Hoffman said. "I try to create a question that can be answered in less than 10 keystrokes. Something like, 'How can I get a copy of your PowerPoint presentation?' has a better chance of a response than three choices of times on when to meet." Then, once the rep receives that initial response, they can start to build credibility, provide value, and eventually maybe even close a deal.

What do you think about this data point -- is face-to-face back in vogue (or did it never go out of style in the first place)? How do you tailor your ask to different connection channels? When is a face-to-face meeting most effective, or appropriate? Share your thoughts in the comments.

What if someone gave you a sales pitch by saying, “I make some mean pancakes. They’re really good, my kiddos love them. I may be the best at making them. You want to buy some?”

Sounds silly, self-promotional, and probably not true, right?

Unfortunately, we see cold emails like that go out all the time. Emails with a sales pitch talking about “our great link building”, or “social bookmarking”, “directory listing”, on and on. Just like the pancakes, there are lots of other companies with testimonials (like the kiddos in the example), promises, and a similar result as the other guys.

These emails get ZERO responses.

You’d have to send out thousands of them to get just a couple of deals using this type of outreach methodology.

We’re not talking open rate here, we’re talking about what is inside of your emails that are getting sent to leads. Whatever they read will make or break your cold campaigns and possibly the revenue growth of your company.

What else should you do to improve your sales pitch?

How about a case study of one of our clients?

We had a customer that was targeting plastic surgeons. This industry is hard to reach (putting it softly). Surgeons make tons of money, and plastic surgery is almost straight cashflow. These doctors are bombarded with offers from everything from time shares to marketing firms.

Instead of the pancake approach, our customer created a tailor-made podcast specifically to talk about the latest tactics, strategies, and trends in the plastic surgery world.

Did this take time? Yes. Was it worth it?

In ONE month this led to 71 conversations with actual plastic surgeons. From there (very important point), they would go on to make their sales pitch.

Now a relationship was established.

To have any hope in an outreach campaign, you have to establish yourself in a way that makes leads want to talk with you. Telling them how awesome you are isn’t going to cut it.

This guide will walk you through the steps to develop your own sales pitch. One that actually works.

Let’s get started, we have a lot of ground to cover.

“There is no sale without the story; no knockout without the setup.“—GaryVee

What’s In It for Me? (WIFM)

Hopefully, you understand that everyone you try to reach wants to know what’s in it for them.

You know what you get out of the equation…The chance to pitch and sell your product/service and grow your business.

Here’s the catch.

Most don’t want to know your direct benefit at first.

If you do SEO, they don’t want to hear about how you can get them more traffic in only three months. That’s not really on your prospect’s radar enough for them to open a terrible cold email and beg you to take them as a client.

There are three core things that you have to do to get responses:

1. Make what you do interesting (to your target audience).
2. Make what you do relevant (to your target audience).
3. Make your offer compelling (ditto).

Time for a Dose of Reality

What you do is boring. Helpful, but not interesting.

Don’t get mad, it’s bad all over. How many heads you think we turn (outside of Silicon Valley) when we mention we’re in lead gen software. But we love what we do and make great businesses even more money by automating their outreach.

Arnold in True Lies was a super spy who had to act like he was a computer salesman to keep up appearances.

Most businesses have the opposite problem.

You’ve got to convince them that you’re some kinda super hero before you set them up with the usefulness of your product (like those sweet Windows 98 computers Arnie was pretending to sell in the movie).

Sales Pitch Stage One: Research

You may have heard the old sales term, “It’s easier to sell an aspirin than a vitamin”.

If someone has a headache, the aspirin is a sure bet. The vitamin, someone has to be sold. It’s pain point vs. luxury and it’s a very accurate portrayal of how it can be easier to sell products that solve a problem and harder to sell things that don’t.

But if you really want a cold email to get a response, you have to go further by taking that aspirin and putting it in the form of one of those gummy vitamins.

You’re turning something that is useful into something that’s attractive.

You could have even thought, “Maybe we could do something similar to our case study above and make a podcast?”

It could be that simple, but

• What do your targets want to hear?
• What kind of research needs to be done?
• Is there any psychology that can compel them to respond?
• Will your leads listen to a podcast?

These are all questions that must be answered before you begin to worry about packaging your offer into a sales pitch.

Showing them a boring service or product (that they really need) takes thought. Re-positioning your sales pitch to where it’s actually interesting takes time and effort.

There are tons of ways to make people perk up when your email arrives (no matter what you’re selling).

• Restaurant owners want to get positive reviews, lower shrink, and open a second location.
• Manufacturers want to shorten supply chains and improve output without increasing overhead.
• Nursing homes want to protect, improve, and build their reputation.
• Really, take a minute and figure out what your leads want to do to improve their business.

Bonus: Here’s a quick post that could help you (if you’re still having trouble).

Go Where They Go

To begin answering those questions about your prospects, you have to start visiting the same places they do. If you’re not willing to find what interests your targets, you have no business trying to reach out to them in the first place.

You may as well send one of those, “I was going to call you, but figured I reach out here first” canned emails.

Read some industry blogs, or white papers. Try to find some keywords and terms that seem to be buzzing around.

Once you have a loose idea of what your buyers want to hear, it’s time to go into deeper water and extract the things they’ll want right away. We’ll give you a couple of tactics to get you started.

Find What They Already Enjoyed

Go to a site like Buzzsumo (it’s free) and see which terms are getting shared the most. We did a sample search below for the term “lead generation”.

That quickly let us realize that it’s not a perfect method

Then, we tried searching for “dental practice management”. We all know that someone reading this is trying to sell something to dentists. It’s like the go-to B2B market, right? Anyway, here’s what we found in the results.

A couple of the links there and another search let us know that dentists of an unsuccessful practice seem to look up anything from advertising tips to management best practices. (See screenshots below.)

There’s a lot of room here to find a topic that can bridge the gap between you and your ideal client.

Let Others Do the Research

Doing studies and running surveys of your audience is a great way to gather intel, but that will take a lot of time and maybe even a third party.

It’s more likely that the research you need is already available. One of the best places to look is Pew Research. Many LeadFuze clients are in software. And social media is a key component to both gaining and interacting with leads. We went to Pew to find out if their research could help.

A quick search along the menu at the top lead us to see the “Internet & Tech” section.

We found the “Fact Sheets” tab interesting and clicked on it to find a few sets of data.

Low and behold, one of them was about social media.

On this piece, we were happy to find a ton of basic, but useful facts that could be used in creating a resource that speaks to businesses in a way they understand—facts.

The cool part is that you only need to give credit to Pew in order to use these facts in your own material. Like, right now, we are using Pew research to help you understand that we know what we’re talking about when it comes to researching.

Bonus Resource: These are just a couple of ways to find the content that your leads really want from you. HubSpot wrote a great post summarizing 17 different tools. You may want to bookmark it for future use.

A Word on Psychology

There is a lot that goes into the buying process (from your buyers’ point of view).

Almost every step has to do with their noggin. We aren’t going to go deep into the brain activity of the consumer here, but we will cover the basic points that you need to know when creating your irresistible offer.

Copyblogger wrote a great post that is worth reading. In it, they state that “people make decisions emotionally” and “people justify decisions with facts”.

It’s these two keys that help you get responses from your cold emails.

Giving your targets something they want, triggers them emotionally. You are giving them a resource that will help them attain their goals, fulfill their desires, etc…

At the same time, you are setting yourself (or your brand) as the expert.

Readers, viewers, and listeners all need to be moved from their wants to their needs over the course of an email or two. Let’s break it down.

Bottom Line: If you get this, you can get leads to respond. Creating a compelling offer happens when you can make leads emotionally desire a result (that you convey with your resource) and factually prove that you can create the result shown.

Don’t Stop There

Once you find that bridge between what you’re selling and what leads want to learn, it’s important to run the full hundred meters of this race.

It would be tempting to just spin the data you looked up into an original post or white paper. Or to hire someone on Fiverr to write content that barely passes inspection. Nope! Don’t do it.

If you’re going to do that, just send spam. It’ll work about the same.

One of the best tips we could give you to make your pitch unique is to find out the most shared and valuable piece of content—and make it better.

Think about the real-life sales pitch example we gave.

Do you know how much effort it takes to record a podcast and upload it on the internet? If you’re interested, here’s a detailed post and a couple of hours worth of video tutorials on the topic. It wasn’t easy, but the results speak for themselves.

Why would you put so much into your business and not do your best to sell the product?

Stage One Recap:

1. Take what you have to sell.
2. Find (related) things leads want to know.
3. Research to find out what they already like.
4. Make a (better) resource for them.
5. Highlight (factually) your ability to solve a problem.

Sales Pitch Stage Two: Packaging

Hopefully, your offering is starting to become clear. If you’ve read this far, your mind should be starting to think about the ways you can grab the eyes and ears of your leads in ways that don’t start with a cold, hard pitch.

Now, we’ll change gears a bit and talk about how to package the email itself.

You’re Nothing if Not Relevant

There is a lot to convey in such a short amount of text.

You have 2-4 sentences (5 max), to tell them what you do and give them a way to learn more. That’s not a lot of room for an introduction.

In fact, you shouldn’t introduce yourself. That’s why you have one of those fancy signatures at the end. With Gmail, they already see your face anyway.

Just get to the point; the clear value that you hope to tell them more about in a conversation.

“Delivery of your value statement should take no more than 15 to 20 seconds — generally less.” — Dave Hibbard

Here are the elements of a relevant cold email:

Subject Line

You’ve probably read several posts about this one little thing. It dominates that discussion of outreach, because it’s so important to the open rate.

First Sentence

Most readers can see the first sentence, making it barely second to the subject line.

There are a few sentences that you could use, depending on who you’re trying to contact.

The Gush: If your audience is a reach up like to CEOs, celebrities, or others who may be publicly notable—tell them that you enjoy their [insert thing they do here].

• Sales Pitch Example: We’ve been a user/reader/subscriber of [blank] for years and are big fans of…

The Brag: This is where you start off with a closely related and well-known client of yours to prove that you are a potential fit for their brand right up front.

• Sales Pitch Example: We just finished a project for [insert fancy-pants customer you’ve worked with here] and thought….

The Point: You know your leads. If they don’t want their time wasted, often times the best thing to do is give them the goods in the first line.

• Sales Pitch Example: I was wondering if you were looking for more social media leads for your dental practice?

Question Time

Make sure that one of your few sentences is a question. It’s like the call-to-action. The whole email should be geared toward getting a response.

You should actually include a couple of sentences that maximize the potential to getting an email back.

For instance, (using the question above) asking a direct question, first sentence, about their business needs (e.g. do you want more XYZ?). Then, end with a less confrontational and related question. Something like, “Which social media platform gives you the best results?”

Doing this provides two opportunities for the lead to answer, one aggressive and the other not.

If they answered the less aggressive question, they may need more nurturing. But if they email back asking for quotes—it may be a faster qualifying process.

The Signature

Your signature should be the only contact information that you give. Don’t tell them your name, don’t start out with who your company is, none of that.

Put all relevant data in your (professional) signature at the end of the email (before the P.S.).

Don’t make it too long. They don’t need to know your birthday, favorite color, and NO inspirational quote.

• Your Name
• Your Role
• Your Company (with address)
• Your immediate contact data

Post Script (AKA P.S.)

Always include a P.S. in your cold emails.

It’s more likely to get read than the second sentence. O.k., so we may not have hard data on that last sentence. That said, post scripts get read by everyone who opens the email.

If you have a great resource that is perfectly tailored to your ideal leads, this would be the ideal place to put it. Those leads who opened your email and shrugged with a “Meh” may look down and say “Ohh”, leading to an eventual response.

Remember our case study? This is how you go from ZERO to 71.

Sales Pitch Stage Three: Delivery

We have to go over one last critical piece to the cold outreach puzzle—timing.

Your compelling offer is going to be the cornerstone of your outreach, but most of the time it won’t take on the first send.

Often times, it takes multiple touch points and emails to get a response from even the best leads. In order to make the most of your lead list, you’ll want to send several emails; timed in a way that gets a response without annoying people.

What Time Should You Send Emails?

The timing that works best will need to be tested on an individual basis. Your leads may respond better certain days and times (e.g. mornings or evenings). But there are a few bumpers we can put up to keep you going down the pipe.

• Weekends are (usually) out. This includes Friday. Most of the world isn’t working for the weekend.
• Mondays may not be the best either, but it’s not a terrible day.
• Early mornings before 9a.m. in the timezone your sending may work well for executives and other typical decision makers.
• Toward the end of the work day could be effective, too. (Be available to respond into the evening to get the workaholic crowd.)
• Other than that, keep good track and tweak until you see a maximum response.

Cadence Timing

A cadence is just a sequence that allows you to plan when you’ll send your follow-up emails to leads.

Keep in mind that it will take multiple touch points to get a response from almost all of your leads. We don’t want you to go all the way through the process, send one email, and then get disappointed. It takes a few tries (in some cases) to get a hold of someone.

If you don’t get a response, send more emails.

Here’s a sample schedule, but remember — tweak until it works for you.

From here, you can continue to follow-up bi-weekly or monthly until they tell you to go away.

Keep Your Eye on The Prize

If your goal is conversations with quality leads, then your offer (aka your sales pitch) is what you need to focus on.

Timing, email copy, and even subject lines can be tweaked and tested. It’s the offer that has to resonate with your target audience.

Make it a good one.

What are some of the best sales pitch examples you’ve seen/heard? Let us know in the comments!

If you run a small or medium-size business, you may be spending a lot of time trying to figure out how to get more traffic to your website or social networking sites.

The common thread amongst all businesses who operate online is traffic. The more traffic, the better. But if you’re not that great at marketing, you will struggle to get people moving through your site.

Of course, procuring leads is not all about traffic. Proper marketing is more complicated than that. You have all the traffic in the world, but if they are not converting, you’re not making any money. It’s almost useless to waste money on ads to gather leads if you don’t know how to turn them into buys.

Your new strategies will help optimize conversion rates. With the right strategy you’re going to convince your leads to invest in your product or service. Let’s look at four strategies that can help double your leads and convert them into sales.

Strategy #1: Quit Trying to Buck the System

It’s one thing a lot of people do when you are trying to get leads online is they try to buck the system. They’re always on the lookout for ninja tricks and investing money and so called quick fixes, even putting up big money, to learn about somebody else’s schemes for generating tons of traffic. If you pay $999 right now, you can hack your way to the front page of Google.

Let’s say it in a blunt way: there is no quick fix scheme. If you wish to use social media as a reliable and consistent traffic source, then you need to do it the same way everybody else does.

You need to take your time and build a relationship with your followers. Trying to do social media without patience and persistence will often get you nowhere but frustrated the point of giving up.

Also, try not to do social media at sporadic bursts throughout the day. Instead, schedule a block of time which you can devote entirely to building leads and nurturing relationships. By making social media priority and not something you do in your spare time, you will no doubt double your points and your conversion rates.

Strategy #2: Follow the 80/20 Rule of Social Media

If you’re interested in building leads, then you need to be aware of the type of content that you produce.

We all know those marketers on Facebook to keep plugging their product over and over again. That’s really all they do. They offer nothing substantial to their followers in the way of value. And if you’re not offering value, you’re not getting attention.

The 80/20 rule states that 80% of the content you produce on social media, on your blog, the video, or on your website should provide value to your followers. It’s this value that not only attract leads, but converts leads into buys.

Put together a mini-course, add call to actions to blogs and lists, write a guidebook, and offer educational support to your followers. Only 20% in of the content you produce should be about obtaining leads.

In today’s world, full of social networking connections, the secret to success is building relationships with the consumers and giving them values related feel like they’re more than a number on a data sheet.

Strategy #3: Gain Authority

In the business world, authority equals respect. If you have authority in your market, people will flock to you for answers. If you’re a small fish, no one wants anything to do with you. You haven’t put the time into building trust and relationships with the consumer base.

As discussed in the previous two points, a lot of business owners are too busy trying to rush results, but they don’t take the time to build and grow their business the right way.

If you have authority in the market, you’re seen as an expert. But the secret to authority is you need to be an expert. What do you know about your niche? What are you really great at?

If you were to take a good look at the top guys in your field, you’d see they do things a bit different. They seem to double dip their market space.

For example, top guru marketer has two different websites. One is what initially made them successful.

They did all the relationship building, the testing, the ads, the funnels, etc. But what are they doing with their second site? They’re making a ton of money coaching other people how to reach their level. That’s authority.

You should go about your business not just to attract leads and build sales for your business.

Nobody is going to trust you because you tell them to. You need to get involved with helping other clients with a hand up. And the more people you help up, more authority and respect you gain. People start seeing you as an expert, someone who helps other people become successful, and they’re eager to buy.

Strategy #4: Hire a Virtual Receptionist

You need to have a presence online and throughout your business. If things are picking up for you and your unable to answer the phone at all times of the day and night, you’re missing out on a lot of potential traffic trying to get a hold of you. A virtual receptionist will be there for you 24/7.

That means you go home at night and don’t have to worry about taking phone calls. And the best part about hiring a virtual receptionist is a much cheaper than hiring someone in person. They cost around $200 a month, which is extremely affordable even on a tight budget.

Overall, starting a business is not about making you rich. That might be why you started your business originally, but that’s not what’s going to get you successful.

Once you change your mindset and start thinking about how to provide value to other people, find value in building relationships with others, and all the authority, respect, and financial rewards will follow.

According to Fortune.com, an American works an average of 34 hours per week. As this may seem long enough for others, the people in the sales industry have other things to say. With a daily work schedule that is normally packed to its brim, an agent needs all the help he or she can get. And when it comes to the tedious tasks of telemarketing, nothing beats the efficiency a sales predictive dialer injects into the sales process.

Why is a Predictive Dialer System Important in Sales?

Every agent’s life revolves around one thing: their quota. It’s the number that could easily dictate their future in the industry. Meet or beat it, then you’ve done your job. One of the many tools that aid agents to achieving their quotas is the predictive dialer. A predictive dialer for sales is the single most convenient way to collect leads; and eventually, transform these leads into opportunities.

What Are The Elements of a Good Predictive Dialer System?

Given the vast abundance of predictive dialer software that’s available, there’s great responsibility for you to filter through the weeds. Each brand comes up with certain quirks that make their product stand out, but don’t be too caught up with these marketing strategies. It always pays to be extra cautious when choosing the right program for your company. Here are a few things to keep in mind when selecting your predictive dialer according to software solutions company Ameyo:

1. Local Presence Caller ID

A personalizing feature that allows agents to alter their outbound caller ID’s to that of the contact’s area code. Having your area code altered to match your contact person’s will allow for an increase in the chances of your calls getting picked up.

2. Custom Dialing

With so many numbers in their contact lists, your agents only have so much time in their day to go through all of them. Sometimes, not everyone in your list of leads is necessarily call-worthy (i.e. toll-free numbers). These numbers have to be eliminated to avoid wasting time, and this is just what this feature does. It fishes out these unwanted numbers from your list to provide you with an efficient automation of calls.

3. Retry Logics

Leave it up to your predictive dialer to ensure that your contacts are automatically redialed. This feature gives you the option to dictate to your dialer the following: which numbers you’d want to call again, how long should it wait before redialing, or how many times will it keep trying to dial the specific contact.

4. Dial Time Zone Restrictions

If you’re company has ventured overseas then your dialer should be resilient to your clients’ various time zones. This feature improves the rate of your answered calls, thus increasing your chances of turning that lead into an actual opportunity.

5. PACE (Pro-Active Connect Enhancer)

PACE is another crucial feature any dialer should have. The system this feature runs on manages your contact list and segregates your call priority. Basing its filtering on the frequency of your previous interactions with each client, it ensures both a relevant and systematic list of clients to call.

6. SMS and Email Integration

Your dialer should have a feature that conveniently feeds you template SMS and Emails to send to your clients. Prior to sending, the dialer offers you a quick preview of the message. This feature allows you to optimize the number of clients you reach on the daily.

7. TCPA Compliance

TCPA or Telephone Consumer Protection Act prevents overly eager telemarketers from constantly calling clients. Your dialer should be equipped with a feature that filters out contacts listed under the “Do Not Call” registry, and call those who have freely offered their contact details for telemarketing offers.

8. Seamless CRM Integration

A dialer that comes with this feature allows for agents to scan through their clients’ account, past conversations, and tickets among many others. This easily profiles clients for the agent to study before dialing the number.

9. Disposition Codes

Conveniently filter through your contact’s list with status updates on the outcome of your previous calls. Remarks like “Busy,” “Answering Machine,” or “Disconnected” makes both agents and supervisor easily distinguish the reliable contacts.

10. Answering Machine Detection

A call landing on an answering machine is probably one pet peeve every agent has in common. No need to worry about answering machines when your dialer is equipped with a feature that automatically leaves a pre-recorded message to clients who use answering machines.

How Do Call Centers Benefit From Predictive Dialers?

A predictive dialer for call center shifts the whole landscape of outbound marketing. This piece of technology not only arms call centers with competitive advantages like: improving an agent’s productivity or increasing an agent’s contact rate; but also, it benefits the company in certain areas like:

• It singularizes outbound sales and inbound customer service. Predictive dialers coupled with an automated call distribution system allow a prompt assignment of calls to which agent is available. This also allows callers to queue up in case the agent is momentarily dealing with another client.
• It creates a harmonious work relationship between the agents and the administration. With the predictive dialer’s feature of distributing calls, the separation of work load among agents is rendered unquestionable by supervisors.
• It assists supervisors in monitoring their agents’ performance. This is done by call monitoring and recording interfaces that will allow supervisors to assess which areas their agents have to improve on.
• It cuts on cost as it eschews both a private branch exchange (PBX) setup and a call log operator who also routes calls to agents.

Is Your Call Center’s Predictive Dialer the Right One?

Different call centers cater to different industries, but one thing grounds all of them together: the fast-paced nature of work. Thankfully, a call center predictive dialer aids them by taking bits of work load off of their backs through its many beneficial features. Before you equip your call center with its very own software make sure to ask yourself these guide questions:

• Are there business-related notifications I need to be simultaneously sending to a large volume clientele?
• Are my agents consumed more with telemarketing than they are with face-to-face transactions?
• Are my telemarketing strategies supposed to be rendered all at once?

Today, a gamut of predictive dialer software is present for companies to take advantage of. Names like RedCloud, Nuxiba, Voicent, Mojo Dialer, and Vanilla Soft are the common software brands used by most. These are the names you should take advantage of when you want to optimize your agent’s telemarketing efforts. There are other brands out there that you can also pick as your company’s software, but always remember to check these two things laid out for you in this article: the elements of a good predictive dialer, and the applicability of a predictive dialer to your company.

As Patrick Barnard of TMC News puts it, predictive dialers are the ‘unsung hero’ of the call center industry. Much as this software contributes so much to the smoothening of the telemarketing process, it rather is neglected for this same benefit it contributes to a company. It’s high time that we give due recognition to a part of operations which could possibly spell the difference between between failure or success.

At Compass we spend most of our time analyzing data. And time and time again our data shows that Email Marketing is the most effective marketing channel in ecommerce. 

According to our studies, companies we call “top consistent emailers” (those who regularly use email to sell to their customers) get 14% of their traffic and 21% of their revenue from email. Since Email Marketing is one of the most inexpensive channels in ecommerce, their Return On Investment is massive. 

So how do top performers do it? We wrote about Email Marketing before, so this time we asked the pros from Soundest | Email marketing for ecommerce to give us some data-driven advice. Their experience will help you get inspired and thrive using this great sales channel.

The post below was put together by Karolina Petraškienė, a content marketing manager and email enthusiast at Soundest. She will show you 4 Emails to Boost Your Business Revenue. Enjoy!

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Though the email marketing field is not as complicated as astronomy, you may need some initial understanding before implementing it into your business. This is particularly so if you consider that there are up to twenty different kinds of emails, and that is not the limit!

This article discusses four types of ecommerce emails that have either the highest conversion rate or create the biggest value for your brand communication with your customer and help to build customer engagement. In the longer or shorter term they will boost your revenue significantly.

Welcome Email

This email should be sent to every new subscriber just after he/she subscribes to your newsletter. To make sure it happens immediately, some email service providers offer an automated welcome email (or series of them) and send it by itself once the new subscriber appears.

According to surveys, 74.4 percent of new subscribers expect to receive this kind of email. Their expectations are totally right, because if they express interest in you, the least you can do is welcome them.

From business perspective, these are the main reasons to start sending automated welcome email:

1. By sending a welcome message, you consolidate your online store’s credibility.
2. This email is the best way to personally introduce the new subscriber to your brand and product categories as well as the benefits of belonging to your brand community and buying from you. In some cases, you can even surprise a subscriber with an unexpected incentive to buy; i.e., a discount, etc.
3. By delivering a highly relevant message at the right time, you can expect to move your new subscriber from interest to acquisition. Simply put, a welcome email works like an icebreaker for the first purchase of a new customer.

The effectiveness of this email is perfectly illustrated numerically. See the chart below:

Source: Ecommerce Email Marketing Research by Soundest, 2016

Some brands send a series of welcome emails. The same analysis reveals that sending a series of three emails, instead of one, results in 23 percent more orders.

To yield positive results, a welcome email should be attractive. Although the welcome email design does not have to be the same as the bulk email campaigns, it should be in line with the rest of your emails, displaying strong branding, an outstanding call-to-action button, high-quality images, etc. More tips and ideas for you to implement can be found in the guide to ecommerce email marketing for small businesses.

Promotional newsletters

An ecommerce email marketing strategy cannot be effective without a promotional newsletter. With these emails you repeatedly approach your customers, introduce your products and sell them. Promotional newsletters generate the greatest revenue among all marketing channels. The only challenge is the following – what should I say in the newsletter so it is effective?

Subscribers will open and read your newsletters if you they have value. This value should be varied from time to time to retain subscriber interest. Some ideas:

• Send sales and discount offers. This retailer’s calendar will help you plan your seasonal campaigns.
• Insert a column with articles from your blog or other blogs that your subscribers might find interesting.
• Send updates of your store and new arrivals.
• Dedicate some newsletters to attracting new followers on social media.

Check out these newsletter examples that might inspire your campaigns.

How I can achieve better results?

After recent analyses by Soundest of customer data, I would also like to highlight the importance of interactive elements in emails, such as videos or lottery elements. They can significantly increase customer engagement. My most recent findings on interactive campaign results are as follows:

1.   The average click rate of promotional emails with videos is 8.98%. It is twice as much as the average promotional email campaign gets (3.82%). The average conversion rate of emails with videos is 0.39%. Meanwhile, a promotional email without any interactive element is only 0.17%.
2.   A scratch card doubles the click rate and generates an average click rate of 6.59% and conversion rate of 0.38%.

More findings about interactive emails can be read here:

• 5 Interactive Newsletter Examples: Boost Your Click Rates at Least 2X
• Using Video in Email Marketing Can Double Your Customer Engagement

Cart Recovery Series

Ecommerce email marketing is all about finding the best email campaign to maximize sales. For this purpose, you may also like to try abandoned cart recovery emails (one email or a series of three emails).

The goal of the cart recovery series is to encourage the customer to complete the order. Once he/she leaves a cart containing products and does not complete a purchase, the email service provider sends a series of email reminders. The last one usually offers a discount.

These emails are effective because of their high engagement with the customer. He/she has already picked something nice in your store and might be still thinking about it. We do not know the reason why he/she has left the store, so try to send an abandoned cart email and see what happens. For a successful email you may need:

• Challenging/seductive copy
• Images of the abandoned products in the cart
• A big and clear call-to-action button
• To send the email the same day and then of the following day.

Due to the relevance for the customer, this kind of automated message is highly effective. The average conversion rate of abandoned cart emails is more than twenty times higher than a promotional email – at 4.64%. The average revenue per email is $5.46!

Source: Ecommerce Email Marketing Research by Soundest, 2016

Usually, to achieve even better results, merchants use a cart recovery series of emails as it sometimes takes a few tries for the customer to notice, and this brings 131% more orders.

Reactivation Emails to Win-back Customers

To capture a new customer costs five times as much as keeping an existing one. All merchants have customers who have purchased once or twice but failed to become loyal customers. Reactivation emails can help you win them back.

This kind of automated email is sent to customers that have not purchased from you for a certain period of time. If you sell clothing, accessories, etc., reactivation emails should be sent 30–90 days after the customer becomes inactive. However, a different period of time may be necessary for retailers selling other products (e.g., household appliances). Think about your customer cycle and adapt accordingly.

In addition, the reactivation workflow is more powerful when you send a series of three emails instead of one. These emails typically use incentives, such as free shipping, personal discounts, etc. They highlight what is new in the store. Most often, the message is something like: “We miss you, please come back. + [special offer].”

In the example below, you can see how Glotrition uses an unexpected image, great copy, plus an incentive to buy.

The Bottom Line

So there you have it – a short overview of eCommerce email marketing that every small business owner can implement without long hours of work. If you currently send other kinds of emails, you may complement them with the ones discussed above. If you are a beginner, then start from these to experience the true benefits of smart email marketing.

The post 4 Emails to Boost Your Business Revenue appeared first on Compass Blog.

LinkedIn has over 450 million members because the platform helps professionals and advertisers expand their networks. Professionals get access to an extended network of businesses, industry groups, and colleagues while advertisers get to showcase their products and services to a specific demographic.

One of the most effective ways for businesses to maximize LinkedIn is to use landing pages.

Since LinkedIn is the networking site for professionals, it makes sense to have ads and landing pages that are professional and create a great first impression, too.

Remind me, what are landing pages?

Landing pages are standalone pages dedicated to persuading visitors to take an action such as a download an ebook, register for a webinar, sign up for a free trial, schedule a demonstration, etc. (For some landing page inspiration, check out these examples.)

With regards to LinkedIn and its ads, the page you arrive at after clicking an ad is a LinkedIn landing page.

The strongest and most convincing LinkedIn landing pages are streamlined so that users get relevant information quickly and pushed towards the call to action. A strong LinkedIn advertising campaign might use message matching, where the LinkedIn ad and the corresponding landing page both share headline text, images, and/or color schemes.

Let’s take a look at several LinkedIn landing pages, their corresponding ads, and evaluate how well each example persuades visitors to take action.

(Keep in mind, for shorter pages, we’ve shown the entire page. However, for longer pages, we only displayed above the fold. You may need to click through to the page to see some of the points we discuss and some pages may be undergoing A/B testing with an alternate version than is displayed below.)

1.LinkedIn marketing ebook

Why the page was built:

To get visitors to download insider tips for marketing on LinkedIn.

What the page does well:

• No header navigation helps keep visitors focused on the landing page.
• The “sauce” image is relevant to both the copy and the advertisement. The photo of LinkedIn secret sauce is directly connected to the secret sauce copy in the header.
• Good use of white space helps the page to flow better and lets each element breathe, especially the headline and image.
• Bulleted copy quickly explains the main takeaways from the ebook and why visitors should download it.
• The “AutoFill” button lets visitors complete the long lead capture form with a single click instead of completing the long form.

What the page could change or A/B test:

• The LinkedIn Marketing Solutions logo is hyperlinked to their respective blog, which acts as a distraction on this landing page. It’s also part of a sticky navigation in that it’s always present by scrolling with the visitor up and down the page. This constant reminder counteracts the main goal of the page: download the secret sauce ebook.
• The 8-field form causes friction because it can be overwhelming for visitors to complete.
• The CTA button is the same color as other elements on the page. A more distinct color, such as orange, would help the button be more noticeable.
• The CTA copy is bland. “Download Now” is vague and not personalized. A better choice would be “I’m Ready To Learn The Secrets Of LinkedIn Marketing” because it is more specific to the offer.
• A footer full of links provide easy exit routes off the page and away from this LinkedIn ebook.

2. Pantheon hosting

Why the page was built:

To persuade visitors to sign up for a free hosting account.

What the page does well:

• Bulleted copy (along with iconography) describes the benefits that visitors can expect from their free Pantheon account.
• The CTA button appears twice on the page, with a contrasting color from the background both times.
• The short form doesn’t ask for any more information than is necessary.
• The form scrolls with you up and down the page, acting as a constant reminder to sign up for a free Pantheon account.
• The Terms of Service link beneath the form helps add trust to the page for those visitors who are concerned about their information being shared.

What the page could change or A/B test:

• Pantheon’s logo is hyperlinked to their homepage, potentially driving visitors away from signing up for a free account.
• The navigation bar and the footer give visitors an opportunity to leave the landing page without first converting on the offer.
• No secondary header makes the headline feel incomplete because it doesn’t help clarify the offer and demonstrate Pantheon’s UVP.
• The CTA button could be larger to attract even more attention.
• The “Sign Up Now’ CTA copy is not as inspiring as it could be to maximize conversions. “Create My Free Account” is more enticing and could persuade more prospects to convert.
• A footer complete with website pages, social media links, and a separate CTA for the blog all distract attention away from the free account offer.

3. Comcast business internet

Why the page was built:

To encourage visitors to get a Comcast Business quote.

What the page does well:

• The value package and price are included on both the ad and landing page, so visitors know they’re in the right place to redeem the offer.
• There is no navigation in the header so visitors cannot easily escape this landing page.
• The graphic is relevant to the offer because it shows exactly what visitors can expect — internet, TV, and phone service.
• Urgency is used by putting the promotion’s end date in the graphic.
• Bullet points quickly explain why visitors should purchase business internet services from Comcast.
• The word “free” is used in the form headline and the bulleted copy, which helps push prospects just a little closer to converting on this offer.
• The form only asks for first name, last name, email address, and zip code. Short forms like this one reduce friction.
• The privacy statement allows visitors to see how their information will be shared, if at all.

What the page could change or A/B test:

• Comcast Business’ logo is hyperlinked to their homepage. Since this is one of the first things a visitor will see upon arrival, they may be tempted to click away from this free quote offer.
• The phone number could be enabled with click-to-call, so that visitors have another option for immediately contacting Comcast Business about the offer.
• The CTA button color doesn’t “pop” off the page because it’s already been used multiple times on the page. In order to better stand out, the CTA button could be red.
• The CTA copy could be personalized. Instead of “get started” the CTA could say “Get My Free Quote.”
• Multiple footer links including social media and a site map provide easy exit routes away from this landing page — potentially reducing conversions.

4. University of Wisconsin Platteville

Why the page was built:

To get prospects to request information about the Master of Science Organizational Change Leadership degree.

What the page does well:

• The school’s logo is not linked anywhere, so visitors cannot leave this page as easily.
• No header navigation bar means all visitors to this page stay focused on the goal: requesting program information.
• “Your best career move” acts as a form headline and implies that completing the form is a smart decision.
• The CTA buttons on the page contrast with the immediate background color, making them visible to visitors. However, the orange chat window is the same color as the CTA, which prevents the CTA from standing out as well as it could.
• The award badges are a good way to add trust.
• The testimonials provide strong value because they give worthwhile information along with names, head shots, and the type of degree acquired.
• The CTA button below the fold uses an anchor tag that, when clicked, directs visitors back up to the form to complete the goal.

What the page could change or A/B test:

• The header and secondary header could be more specific to the offer.
• The 12-field form is overwhelming, and all but two fields are required. Why is phone number not required, but middle initial is? The number of forms could be drastically cut down, or a multi-step form could be used instead to encourage more conversions.
• The “Submit” CTA copy is uninspiring at persuading visitors to act. A better alternative would be, “Send Me Program Information” because it’s personalized to the offer.
• Visual cues such as down arrows could help persuade visitors to scroll below the fold and read the testimonials.
• The 2015 copyright is outdated and could cause prospects to think, is the program still worth my time? Is the program still on those award lists mentioned?

5. Geico auto insurance

Why the page was built:

To persuade prospects to get a free Geico auto insurance quote.

What the page does well:

• Message matching the ad copy to the landing page headline, as well as the background color, helps make prospects feel more comfortable in converting.
• Geico’s logo is unlinked, which helps keep visitors engaged on the page, rather than bouncing to Geico’s homepage.
• Without a header navigation, prospects can’t escape the landing page very easily.
• The 1-field form eliminates form friction because it only requests the prospect’s zip code.

What the page could change or A/B test:

• The top of the page simply reads “Auto Insurance.” Instead it could say something less vague and more related to the offer.
• The word “free” is not emphasized enough for the offer. It’s only mentioned once and not made more prominent in the headline, CTA copy, or otherwise.
• The CTA copy could be more personalized to the offer, such as “Get My Auto Insurance Savings” instead of “Start Quote.”
• Adding a testimonial or short video could really help add trust to this page and the free quote offer.

Which LinkedIn landing page would persuade you to convert?

Companies using LinkedIn ads understand that they are reaching a professional user base, so they craft their landing pages specifically to that target demographic. Some landing page examples above were more optimized than others, but they all focus on a single offer and push prospects toward that call-to-action.

At Instapage, we emphasize to marketers that landing pages establish a great first impression to generate leads so marketers can nurture those leads into customers. Without a great first impression, you’re likely wasting ad spend on poorly designed pages.

What did you think of these LinkedIn landing pages? Leave a comment below and join the discussion.

Your website must convey your value proposition. Here's how to do it.

Web design and online marketing have gotten more complicated than ever before – it’s possible now to add all kinds of bells and whistles to your site, and there are lots of buzzwords about what your site needs to do to engage visitors and capture email addresses and generate leads. But too many company websites are losing sight of what is truly most important about their site’s design and content – showing people WHY they should care and “What’s in it for me” from the customer’s perspective. Simply put: too many company websites don’t really illustrate a value proposition.

Next time you redesign your website, take some time to ask yourself some big-picture questions to make sure your website really has a compelling case for why people should buy from you.

Here are a few questions that your website needs to answer in the minds of your prospects:

1. What does your solution do best?

Your solution doesn’t have to be all things to all people. Instead of listing every single feature, consider highlighting just the most important aspects of what you sell. What is the “superpower” of your solution? What is the aspect of your product that customers tend to praise and compliment the most? What can you offer that no other company can?

2. Why should people buy from you?

This is where you need to explain your company’s competitive advantage. What do you do best? How can you help your customers save money, boost productivity, or make bigger profits? Show statistics and success stories; use explainer videos to show how and why your product delivers results. What is it like to buy from your company and work with you? Describe the process of working with your company from a customer service perspective – what is involved with the implementation stage? How long does it take to get your new IT system installed? How can your insurance agency help customers save money? Keep in mind that all of these details need to be delivered from the perspective of your customer, and answer the question, “What’s in it for me?” Try to anticipate possible questions that your customers might have during the sales process, and answer those questions on your website.

3. What proof can you offer for why your solution works?

One of the most important parts of your site should be the Testimonials page. Create a dedicated page or subsection to your site that is all about sharing the case studies, success stories and glorious praises of happy customers. Use testimonial YouTube videos or podcast episodes to interview your best customers about their results – don’t be afraid to “go deep” and get personal with the details; use humor, use real human stories. Often the best way to show customers that you’re legitimate is to share personal, engaging stories about how your company helps improve people’s lives. Get creative! Make colorful infographics, comic book-style illustrations, or use animated explainer videos. Case studies don’t have to be “corporate” and stuffy and boring; you can make these stories memorable and shareable.

4. How can we move forward?

Finally, your website needs a clear call to action. This sounds so obvious, but you’d be surprised how many B2B companies don’t make it easy to find the “Buy” button. Whatever the next step is for your customers after visiting your website, make it easy for them to call, email, or sign up for more information from your sales team. Make your call to action visible, easy to access from mobile devices, and make it easy for your customers. For example, don’t make your customers fill in the fields on a hard-to-read email intake form – instead, give them an email address or a phone number that they can easily tap from their smartphone if needed.

Online marketing doesn’t have to be complicated if you can just stay focused on a few key questions. Make sure your website covers these fundamental needs, and your customers will be more likely to buy from you.

Gregg Schwartz is the vice president of sales and marketing at Strategic Sales & Marketing, a lead-generation firm based in Connecticut. His company helps technology companies and various startups and small-to-mid-size businesses in the business-to-business sales category generate sales leads and improve their sales processes.