Before I get into selling transformation – let me tell you a bit about me. For a hustling, hacking, fist-bumping SaaS CEO who you’ll often find crushing it, killing it, and dropping “truth-bombs” in between a whirlwind of ideating, social-selling, and/or customer-successing (sometimes all at once!)… I’d say I’m just a pretty typical guy.

Awesome wife. Two year-old twins. Friendly brown dog. Nice little 50’s remodel in a trendy part of town. Yep, you might even find me making the casual family outing to Home Depot and Bed Bath & Beyond some weekends. Even got a nice lil’ hipster forearm tattoo this year.

Yep. Chillllll.

Just don’t ever, ever, ever call my smart, data-driven, user-friendly, multi-tenant SaaS “channel partner platform for accelerating recurring revenue” a mother effing “PORTAL.” Period.

You see, friends, in my world, a “partner portal” has been the status-quo “solution” for supporting channel partner and reseller programs for years and years and years. Partner portals — or “PRM” as some of our (un)friendly competitors have been calling it for the last few decades — are, without doubt, the #1 productivity killer in channel sales and marketing.

They’re passive. They’re hard to use. They’re isolated from the rest of your MarTech stack. They can’t integrate and have (gasp!) no API. They’re the epitome of yesteryear’s single-tenant, heavily-customized, password-protected websites that almost always end-up as dumping grounds for outdated content, training and a mess of other “resources” made available so that channel partners can market or sell your product.

Oh, and they’re “dumb” — so not only are they a mess, but they leave it entirely up to your partners (who just have plenty of time on their hands) to not only have to navigate their way to your portal, but then scavenge their way through it, hoping to find what they think they think they should be looking for. And they deliver no valuable data at all. Zip.

Is that the definition of partnership to you? No.

Then why has this been the norm? FOR DECADES, “portals” have been evangelized as an absolute necessity for companies building channel partner programs. And even as a new, digital, cloud-based world has taken over, you’ll find plenty of legacy vendors and consultants hell-bent on holding the market hostage with over-priced, over-customized “partner portals” that they can charge a hefty penny for.

So, last year, we decided that we weren’t going to stand for it anymore. And, if you’re reading this, then chances are you’re like me and decided there was something that you’re not standing for either. And rather than settling for the status-quo, you’re working your tail off to transform an old way of doing things. To turn a stagnant market on its head. To create a category. To eff some shiz up.

And if you’re really, truly anything like me, then even worse than losing a deal to a viable competitor — blood boiling, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde-inducing, little steam-clouds coming out of my ears worse — is losing a deal to fear and apathy. i.e, the old way. i.e, aversion to change. i.e, “we’ve always done it this way.”

So, how do you do it? How do you sell change, disruption and transformation to a market accustomed to legacy, monotony and stagnation?

Simple. You hire Ridley Scott to direct a Super Bowl commercial featuring a woman in a white tank top and bright red shorts on the run, carrying a mallet, bursting into an assembly and flinging said mallet at a screen, unleashing an explosion as a voice-over announces your product launch scheduled for two days hence.

Or if you’re not Apple, you can get to work on these three things that have helped us change the channel. Ha. Get it?

Selling Transformation through content… Content, Content, Content, CONTENT.

First and foremost, you have to teach. To challenge. To evangelize. To prove that your way is better than the old way. And not just a little better — at least 10x better, according to SaaStr’s Jason Lemkin. But even if you can achieve that mark, this isn’t Field of Dreams. Just because you built it, it doesn’t mean they’re coming. And that’s the premise of inbound sales and marketing, a tactic that we’ve embraced since day one. Sure you need to have a steady flow of outbound mixed-in, but without the right content, you’re going nowhere. And again, not just a little, but a wholehearted, top-down commitment to generate real, meaningful thought leadership and content on the problems you’re solving, how you’re solving them and why. But…even that’s not enough. Because even if you’re generating 20 blog posts, 20 podcasts, three webinars, and two webinars per month, they’re worth little-to-nothing if they’re not targeted at the right buyer personas.

Inbound isn’t easy. Nothing is, especially when you’re trying to build a rocketship for an industry accustomed to horses and buggies. But content is the fuel that’ll make your 10x rocketship soar.

Build into Your Story

Just yesterday, I read a great piece from Red Point Ventures’ Tomasz Tonguz that really hit home for me: “Creating Tension in Your Startup’s Marketing Position.” In it, Tonguz recounts the early days of Box (Box.net back then) and their efforts to create variance and tension in their market positioning.  How CEO Aaron Levie would evangelize revolutionizing and transforming the way employees work. Yet their website told a very simple, crisp story: “Box replaces FTP.” So, as any great, ADD-stricken SaaS CEO would do, I got together with our VP of Sales and Marketing and we re-wrote the main value proposition on our homepage.

Then I got to thinking, not only was this about tension, it was about building into your story — not going from zero to 100 all at once, but finding a balance between evangelizing and executing on your ultimate vision (your “why”), while giving your product (and dev team) the time it needs to catch-up. Or as Tonguz stated much more eloquently, “…though the product may not be there yet, the audience understands you’re headed. So when the product matures, the buyer is receptive.” Brilliant. Disciplined. Difficult. But 100% necessary when disrupting a legacy industry.

Help.

My fellow Phoenician fist-bumping friend Dan Tyre wrote about this just a few months ago: “Always Be Closing Is Dead: How to Always Be Helping in 2017.” Listen, I’m the CEO of a VC-backed SaaS company. Chances are, so are you. So, we better be closing our tushes off. But, I’m a die-hard believer that we won’t be closing anything if we’re not helping first and foremost.

By now, it’s inarguable that your prospects own your sales cycle. Period. Meaning, as Dan says, you need to instantly abandon any strategies that involve “force-feeding prospects a product they don’t want and don’t need…Instead, as your prospect moves through the funnel, provide resources and guidance as they attempt to solve a complicated business problem. Always be helping.”

Here’s what I love. As a disruptor, you’re naturally trying to help. It’s in your heart, it’s party of your “why” (or at least it should be). But making that clear and visible to your prospects while balancing the need to close the deal is difficult, to say the least.

So don’t only make it a tactic, make it part of your mission. Part of your content plan. Part of your scripts, your message, your training, your customer success, your coffee cups and water bottles, your everything. Be a company, not just a product. Be a way, not just a utility. Be the transformation your prospects may or may not know they need – because the more you can help them, the more likely they are to see the light you’re trying to shine.

For those of us in SaaS and tech and the Sales Hacker community, disruption is a way of life. At work, at home, and in the little bit of spare time we have left to play. But we have to understand that our views of transformation, revolution, innovation, and change can appear more as rebellion, upheaval, destruction, or disorder to others — especially at its onset. But as long as you teach, lead, stay the course, maintain clarity and help the right audience understand your vision, purpose and methodology, not only will they soon realize that there a light at the end of the tunnel, they’ll realize that you’re the one they trust to guide them there. And isn’t that what you’re really dreaming of in the first place?

The post Selling Transformation in Lieu of Stagnation appeared first on Sales Hacker.

This is what I wish: that my daughters don’t go to school.

I offered my oldest the very prestigious “Altucher Fellowship”. Never awarded before. Only awarded to her.

Basically it says: do exactly what I tell you to do for a year and don’t go to college.

I’m not sure she’s going to take it.

Here’s my ideal program:

• Spend some time each day learning the skills in the graphic.
• Watch one movie a day with me and discuss.
• Publish a book of essays by the end of the year.
• You can take time off to travel.

And, by the way, this will be cheaper than you going to college.

Her answer, begrudgingly: I’ll think about it.

Here are the skills:

A. Networking

A corollary of leadership

B. How to sell

Presentation, vision, motivation, sales.

C. Negotiation

Which means win-win, Not war.

D. The Google Rule

Always send people to the best resource. Even if it’s a competitor. The benefit to you comes back tenfold.

E. The 1% Rule

Every week, try to get better 1% physically, mentally, and emotionally.

F. Idea Sex (but with protection!)

Get good with setting up with ideas. Then combine them. Master the intersection.

G. Reinvention

Which will happen repeatedly throughout life.

H. Leadership (which is really a course about how to deal with both Vision and Anger at the same time)

Give more to others than you expect back for yourself.

I. Mastery; How to master any field

You can’t learn this in school with each ‘field’ being regimented into equal 50 minute periods. Mastery begins when formal education ends. Find the topic that sets your heart on fire. Then combust.

J. Finding Signal in the Noise

News, advice books, fees upon fees in almost every area of your life. Find the signal outside of the noise everyone else marches to .

K. Themes > Goals

Goals will break your heart. Have a theme. You can build your days around your themes. In the short blink that thins out your life, when you reach the point where goals matter no more, the themes of your life will shine bright.

L. Creativity

Take down a pad. Write down a list of ideas, everyday.

M. Failure (a skill not taught until many years after the degree. But it is taught, believe me, you will learn it or die).

Learn how to fail so that failure turns into a beginning.

N. Give and you will Receive

Give constantly to the people in your network. The value of your network increases linearly if you get to know more people, but exponentially if the people you know get to know and help eachother.

O. Simple tools

To increase productivity

---

If I were creating a college – these would be the only classes.

Or maybe I’m just like a failed athlete who wishes for his kids what he didn’t have for himself, whether they want it or not.

I’ll never really know the answer.

But I do know this:

• These skills are not taught in school.
• These skills are absolutely necessary for any kind of real-life success. ALL of these skills.
• Skills > Degrees in the modern economy.
• These skills will put you way ahead of any competition. You will be your own category.
• You can learn these skills (sometimes) on the job, or in online settings. Or by reading.

Or by finding a:

PLUS: mentors to model yourself after (real or virtual)
EQUALS: who can challenge you and bring out your potential
MINUS: people you can teach, to solidify your learning.

Remember winning?

Remember getting an “A”? And it felt good? It felt like, “I won!”

And then it became too easy to get the As. Schools lulled us into some form of complacency, where an “A” was the new normal and anything below was considered unhealthy.

What happened to the idea that a 40% success rate made someone the best baseball player in the history of the world?

Or the idea that if only 50% of your business decisions are correct, you’ll have a billion dollar business.

Or the idea that, in the hands of an artist, even the wrong note can be turned into beautiful music?

Life is improv. Not a fact test. You take the bad notes and weave them into music.

Now we get the “participation” trophy for showing up.

My Mac is broken. The easiest computer in the world to use and I broke the keyboard. Do I suffer for my sins?

Of course not, I get to go to the “Genius Bar” and get it fixed. The Genius Bar at the Apple store is the participation trophy for adults.

One day I will get good at these skills.

I guess I lied.

This is not a letter for my kids. This is a love letter to me.

The post 15 Essential Skills They Don’t Teach You In College appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

In the future, you are likely to find yourself occupying one of three spaces in your market place. Those places will be super-transactional, super-relational, or the muddy middle.

Amazon.com is super-transactional. Before Amazon.com and Kindle, we bought books from bookstores. We also did a lot more shopping in retail stores. When the idea is to reduce friction as the way to create value, super-transactional wins. Uber is super-transactional. So are all of the online travel sites, as are all convenience stores.

The opposite pole is super-relational. My tailor sends me pictures of new suits by text. He knows what I like, and he keeps an eye out for me. In the days before Amazon.com I frequented a small, used bookstore. Without me asking, the people who ran it found me books that they knew I would want. But don’t mistake super-relational for a B2C play. It’s a B2B play, too.

I have purchased enterprise software from a salesperson multiple times, specifically because it comes with some risk, has a high strategic value, and requires greater trust. I have a relationship with my production company for the same reason, even though I am continually called on by other companies. Super-relational means you are part of your client’s team, their decision-making, and their future.

The problems exist in the muddy middle, even though there will always be people and companies who occupy “good enough.” If you aren’t transactional enough to compete against the super-transactional, you have to create greater value—value that is meaningful to your clients. If you aren’t super-relational enough to capture enough of the value you need to support that model, you will be relegated to the market for “good enough.”

If you are super-transactional, you are only competing against the super-transactional. You aren’t geared to compete against the super-relational, so you never have to compete there. If you are super-relational, you can’t compete against the super-transactional, because that market isn’t yours. Super-relational competes with super-relational, and sometimes the “good enough” competitors for the clients who are aspirational and not quite there yet.

The challenge in the muddy middle is that you are forced to compete against both sides. You can lose to the more transactional, and you can lose to the super-relational.

The post Markets Torn Asunder appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Though the exact value of China's spending on its space programs remains shrouded in secrecy, many analysts peg its civilian space budget at around $3 billion annually in recent years, a fraction of the $19.3 billion the United States allocated to NASA in 2016. There a push within China's government to triple spending on space science (from $700 million to $2.1 billion) as well as the emergence of a small but growing group of privately backed space start-ups suggest that both Chinese industry and government see long-term economic benefits in their investments in space technologies.



In 2016, China launched more rockets than Russia for the first time, equaling the 22 rockets launched by the United States. Included among those missions was Shenzou 11, which carried a crew of two to dock with China's Tiangong-2 spacecraft, a temporary orbiting space habitat serving as a stepping stone for a larger, permanent Chinese space station in the early 2020s.

In the past year a number of Chinese space launch start-ups have emerged, largely with the backing of universities and hedge funds. Two-year-old OneSpace is developing a 59-ton launch vehicle that it plans to launch for the first time in 2018. ExPace, founded early last year, plans to market its solid-fueled Kuaizhou rocket to those looking to loft small satellites into orbit. Likewise, Landspace — launched in 2015 — claims it will conduct its first commercial launch this year.


ExPace's Kuaizhou rocket is reportedly based on the launcher for Chinese antisatellite weapons and missile defense interceptors, while Landspace's rocket is based on the government's Long March 11 rocket (for its part, OneSpace was reportedly founded with support from the National Defense Science and Industry Bureau).

Launching small satellites atop rocket technologies borrowed from China's national space programs is simply a way into the market. OneSpace plans to eventually develop a manned space capsule, and Landspace is reportedly mulling a far more powerful, liquid-fueled rocket that could compete directly with the likes of SpaceX, Blue Origin or France's Arianespace.

Read more »

New technologies, including better land mapping, prefabricated construction and cheaper solar power, have begun bringing the costs of housing down 20 percent to 30 percent, say experts.

At the low end of the scale, the changes may be most significant: There is a new market developing to serve 200 million households in slums in emerging markets.

A third of urban dwellers—1.6 billion people—could struggle to secure decent housing by 2025. Here are four approaches that could help. If current trends in urbanization and income growth persist, by 2025 the number of urban households that live in substandard housing—or are so financially stretched by housing costs that they forego other essentials, such as healthcare—could grow to 440 million, from 330 million.

In Pune, India, where the population density is seven times higher than in Manhattan, at 194,000 people per square kilometer, developers are building apartments between 396 and 794 square feet that sell for RS 10-25 Lakh, or $10,000–$25,000. Spurred by the government's push to make affordable housing a priority, a growing number of developers and private equity firms are entering the market, including Janaadhar Infrastructure and Poddar Developers. India has a shortage of 18 million urban housing units.

Technology will make housing cheaper and land use better.

65 million people a year are moving into cities.




The construction industry employs about 7 percent of the world’s working-age population and is one of the world economy’s largest sectors, with $10 trillion spent on construction-related goods and services every year. But the industry has an intractable productivity problem and, according to Reinventing construction: A route to higher productivity, a new McKinsey Global Institute report, an opportunity to boost value added by $1.6 trillion.

If construction-sector productivity were to catch up with that of the total economy—and it can—this would boost the sector’s value added by an estimated $1.6 trillion, adding about 2 percent to the global economy, or the equivalent of meeting about half of the world’s infrastructure need.

Parts of the industry could move toward a manufacturing-inspired mass-production system, in which the bulk of a construction project is built from prefabricated standardized components off-site in a factory. Adoption of this approach has been limited thus far, although it’s increasing. Examples of firms that are moving in this direction suggest that a productivity boost of five to ten times is possible.

Better Mapping makes more land available for development

In every city, there are significant parcels of land, sometimes owned by the government or a quasi-government agency, that aren't available for development. Because so much of the price of housing is driven by the land, big-data mapping that combines geography with databases on land ownership and zoning to identify more land for development indirectly has been bringing down the price of housing.

For instance, an analysis of a sample of parcels in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, found that 40 square kilometers zoned residential and have access to suitable infrastructure have remained idle for two decades, according to McKinsey.

In the least developed cities in the world, many in Africa, where much of the land isn't mapped at all and ownership isn't clear, mapping technology is laying the groundwork for change. If property is mapped, developers often pay slum dwellers for land they occupy, then borrow against the land to finance housing construction and sell or rent housing to the former slum dwellers.

Slum Dwellers international is using mapping technology to map settlements and give slum dwellers addresses.

Read more »

A rare post today. It looks a little further out into the future than I normally tend to. It attempts to simplify a topic that has more than it’s share of coolness, confusion and complexity.

While the phrase Artificial Intelligence has been around since the first human wondered if she could go further if she had access to entities with inorganic intelligence, it truly jumped the shark shifted into high gear in 2016. Primarily because we got our first real everyday access to products and services that used some form of AI to delight us. No more theory, we felt it!

I’m going to take a very long walk with you today. This topic has consumed a lot of my thinking over the last year (you’ll see the exact start date below). It’s implications are far and wide, even in the narrow scope that I live in (marketing, analytics, influence). I have so much to tell you, stuff I’m scared about, and so much I’m excited about.

Here are the elements I’ll cover:

Through it all, my goal is to make the topic accessible, get you to understand some of the key terms, their implication on our work, our jobs, and in a bonus implications on the future we are responsible for (your kids and mine).

Let’s go!

AI | Now | Local Maxima.

AI also seems so out there, so hard to grasp. Let me fix that for you.

Here’s a really simple example, easily accessible. Google Photos.

Humans took 2.5 trillion pictures in 2016. As you are trying to find that one special picture, it feels like all 2.5 trillion are on your phone! A real problem for all of us. Google Photos uses AI to solve this problem.

For example, I want pictures of Sushi… I simply type in Sushi… Boom!

Clearly I’m not your classic I love my food so much I must Instagram every meal person. :)

Notice nothing is categorized or tagged in the pictures above. Google Photos has to be able to recognize the content all on it’s own.

It is actually smarter than what you see above. When I type in the name of my son and Sushi, I get just one photo back! If I type in his name and the word beach, I get pictures of him on a beach… throughout his entire life! Photos can keep track of him from baby to today.

Cool, right? AI.

On your phone, try to search for people in your lives by name, by faces, combine their name with events/things/locations and you’ll be surprised at what the AI returns.

One more.

In trying to see how smart Google Photos really is, I wanted to try something harder… I typed in the query pain (French for bread)… and I got this…

This really delighted me.

On top is a Hong Kong Pineapple Bun, in the middle is an Indian Chapatti, and at the bottom is my wife’s Italian focaccia bread infused with our home grow rosemary. All, breads.

Think of how insanely cool it is that Google Photos can translate pain into bread and find all different kinds of breads that our family enjoys. From tens of thousands of photos in my album. Instantly.

(We’ll touch on this topic later but…) These are moments when I really worry that my job will soon become irrelevant. I mean, just imagine how hard it is to do what you see above, and everything I do is actually so much easier!

AI | Now | Global Maxima.

On that topic… My first true moment of worry about my professional future came in March 2016 when AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol, the unassailable Go grandmaster. It was believed, due to the immense complexity of the game of Go, that computers were at least a decade away from beating humans. The potential legal board positions in Go are greater than the number of atoms in the universe. AlphaGo not only had to compute all the possible positions to play, but to pick the best one it also had to have some kind of intuition and strategic thinking – a challenge beyond raw compute power.

The specific scary moment was on 11th of March. The kids and I were watching the livestream of game two from Seoul on our TV. During the game AlphaGo made its now famous Move  37. We were so confused. The expert commentators on TV thought it was a mistake. It is worth watching the minute of so of the video on YouTube.

It’s the black piece being moved next to the white one almost exactly in the middle of the board, to your right.

The game continued for another three hours, but it was over at move 37. Only AlphaGo knew that, it took a while for humans to come to that realization. It was, in the letter and spirit of the word, inconceivable by humans.

See, why it freaked me out that I might not have a career? Why do we need all these white collared jobs populated by people who will always be slower, more inefficient, and vastly less smart? Even a narrowly specialized AI entity in the short-term can replace their value in a professional environment. As we make progress towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), that entity will do 50 more than in addition to your one thing.

It is important that I share that being scared or freaked out can co-exist with excitement. You know the quote about the importance of being able to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time.

I am excited about AI, and perhaps beyond excited about AGI as it promises the scaled application of intelligence that will truly change the world in ways we can’t even begin to imagine. Consider Move 37. Maybe there is a Move 37 to solve Global Warming, and we simply can’t conceive of it. Maybe there is a Move 37 for fusion. Or perpetual motion. Or… Love. And, there has to be a Move 37 for politics. Consider how incredible it will be that we’ll have AGI around to solve these impossible problems.

I am also excited because I believe that, at least as far out as I can see, the human brain and the human heart will be valued – we will identify new things to value, it just won’t be Digital Marketing Evangelist. Perhaps you now see why I’ve pivoted my career to Storytelling with data over the last couple of years. :)

I realize there are people throwing up red flags, warning us. They are smarter and vastly more knowledgeable on this subject than I could ever hope to be. We should listen to them carefully. I’ve watched at least 30 hours of lectures on YouTube on this topic.

My personal reaction to AI emanates from three things:

My personal strategy: Understand reality. Invest in continuous learning. Adapt. Add new/different value. Rinse and repeat. 

The most conservative estimate is that AI driven changes are expected to replace 25% of jobs across the world, by 2026. My goal: Stay ahead by solving new challenges.

If you’ve thought about it, please share yours in comments below.

Now that we have the basics out of the way, let’s really understand what this thing is.

What the heck is Artificial Intelligence?

People tend to use these phrases almost interchangeably: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning.

It does not help that there is genuine ambiguity about each of them as we are still in the early evolutionary stages.

Let me share a simple definition that helps me understand each phrase.

AI is an intelligent machine.

ML is the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed. Currently, ML is the most exciting application of AI.

Deep Learning is a specific ML technique.

Most Deep Learning methods involve artificial neural networks, modeling how our brain works. At the moment Deep Learning forms the basis for most of the incredible advances in Machine Learning (and in turn AI).

A pinch more about Deep Learning as it plays such a critical role in all the current AI excitement.

There are some who believe that anything modeled on the human brain, like Deep Learning, will be limited in it’s intelligence, that it will inherit the limits and flaws that our intelligence possesses. This will then cap what an AI might be capable of. An additional problem to worry about with Deep Learning is that we might not have massive training datasets for every problem we want to solve (mandatory for Deep Learning).

Hence, while Deep Learning is rightly getting lots of focus and affection at the moment, I’m excited that some outliers, :), are investigating other techniques. One of my favorite alternatives is Counterfactual Regret Minimization.

In summary: Deep Learning is a specific Machine Learning technique which currently powers the most exciting applications of Artificial Intelligence.

Now you know how to use each phrase correctly. :)

Machine Learning | Marketing.

I use the phrase AI sparingly, preferring Machine Learning instead since it is the primary technique that is powering the changes you see in our context.

You are seeing many applications of Machine Learning being applied to Marketing. Here’s a collection of ideas to push your thinking.

The one that I’m most excited about (because we suck so much at it) is the ability to personalize content delivered via our ads. Right message for the right person.

I am also impressed with the advances ML is powering in smart bidding (particularly in AdWords). You set your desired outcomes (target CPA, ROAS, enhanced CPC) and let intelligence help you get to your goals – sans human micro fidgeting! Right message for the right person at the right time.

Broadly speaking it is important to internalize that humans are going to get out of the campaign business (campaign management, content, offers, manual spreadsheet massaging, handful of keywords/pages/whatever focus, etc.).

Here’s one illustrative example. Most manual touch (even with a tool) search campaigns take into account three or four signals. Keyword. Time of Day. Location. Something else. Even the most “automated” approaches from your advanced agency will use a handful more. Yet, an entity like Google or Facebook has hundreds (not a metaphor) of signals it can use to deliver the right ad. There is no way any manual approach can solve for this. Machine Learning to the rescue.

Oh, and you can deliver the right message in a billion queries world (check the size of your current search campaigns for a contrast).

Let me bring some of this home by sharing an actual example from last year.

A large hotel chain wanted to solve this problem: 90k travelers are stranded every day in America across 5,145 airports. How can the hotel ensure that they show up at the right moment for all these people? The solution was to leverage real-time signals like bad weather, flight delays at 5,145 airports, and other such data, combine that with ML powered algorithms to automate ads and messaging in the proximity of local airports. All sans human-control. Result? 60% increase in bookings in targeted areas. ML + Automation = Profit.

Oh, and of course if your company’s data is not limited (and you have solved identity, please, please solve identity) you can leverage ML to do the above campaign across Search, Display and Video. AND (are you sitting down?) rather than guessing how much credit to give each marketing strategy from hundreds of thousands of customer touch points, ML powered attribution can magically analyze every individual’s journey and automatically recommend shifts to your media budget! O. M. G.

This is not some future fantasy. This is last year. Using Machine Learning.

Does it give you a sense for how far behind your company might already be?

Consider the implications of ML on your email marketing program. The dataset you have contains every piece of data about all the people on your mailing list, all the content that has ever gone out, every click they have every interacted with, every product you have, every product’s lifecycle, purchase cycle, attach rates, every outbound click, unsubscribing rates (and on and on) across all of your company history. Can you create the perfect email campaign for every person to maximize their happiness and your profit, always?

With ML, you can imagine that this is just a mid-sized difficult problem to solve.

I’m unaware of any ESP at the moment who is doing this (that does not mean it is not happening). What I’m confident of is that it is coming. So, if you are in the email business as a vendor, as an agency, or as a company…. You should be planning to live in that world now. You should be pushing your people, your agency, your vendor into that world. Now.

One key thing that stymied my efforts, and likely your ML efforts, in 2016 was Identity. Solving Identify will allow us to join isolated pools of data, give them a stronger purpose. While we all work to do that (and it really is your problem to solve primarily and not a vendor’s), it is important to realize that each marketing channel has gotten so much more advanced in being able to identify a singular human on it’s own platform. Yes, a silo but so much better than 2015.

What is great about this is that you can take one important pool where you’ve solved Identity already, your customer data, and all the signals you get from customer scoring, propensity modeling, past purchase behavior, lifetime value and other orgasmic goodness you already have, and combine it with the Identity signals from your marketing platforms to solve some very tough problems you have today.

Your kilobytes of golden signals merged with the gigabytes of customer and intent signals in their terabytes of data. You throw in some Machine Learnings into that and it truly is magic.

Another example from last year.

For a consumer electronics company, rather than engaging with everyone and slathering them all with a spray and pray generic message… The strategy deployed was to classify the existing customers, take into account their predicted value to the company, their past behavior, current expressed intent-signals, the predicted value to the company from that signal, and context the human is in. All this data, across tens of millions of identified signals to deliver a deeply unique message to humans that mattered the most – at scale. A 30 point increase in conversion rate. Thirty points.

And, this is not unusual. I’m thinking of one more example I’ll share with you in the future about an insurance company and being able to combine audience signals with machine learning to deliver a 58% increase in conversions of people who had the same attributes as their top 10% most profitable customers. Insane, right?

All the examples above, all the stories above, are not future looking. They are all real things you can do today, and results we delivered last year. That is how far along marketing already is in its ML journey. I cannot even begin to tell you how pumped I am about the changes coming this year.

All of the above is still at least to a degree human assisted. I expect, looking forward, that the human assisted part will peel off. Sooner rather than later. It is important that you consider this as you plan your career over the next three years. If you want to know what I’m doing, search for the phrase “my personal strategy” above.

For a little bit, I expect that some humans will still be required to fill data gaps (Identity!), humans will still be required for imagining brand copy or coming up with centerfold creatives. But anything that is done often in a repeatable manner is already headed to be sans human.

I really cannot stress this enough… If your marketing’s foundation is to keep adding more hamsters to run on wheels to achieve scale, you are doomed. Even if you find enough hamsters, it is critical to realize the game has changed.

While it is a little sad that our primary job as Marketers won’t be to press the relevant buttons and twist the relevant knobs on the machine, I am happy that in the end the winner is the human at the other end of our marketing. More relevant messages (if not perfectly relevant), at precisely the right time (and perhaps delivered just once!), to the human in the most meaningful moments.

Win-Win-Win.

Yes. I do have a sense for how disruptive the implication of all this change is for me, for you and for our co-workers at a deeply personal level.

Machine Learning | Analytics.

This story is much more straightforward. More and more humans are going to be transitioned out of the business of analytics. There won’t be any need for them. The pace will accelerate over the next handful of years.

We are needed today because data collection is hard. So, we have an army of implementers.

Most humans employed by companies were unable to access data – not intelligent enough or trained enough or simply time pressures. So, we have an army of glorified data regurgitators. I kid. I mean Analysts. They send out reports and dashboards. They are in the business of answering known knowns.

Some companies, some of the times truly want strategic questions answered, and they hire a small platoon of Analysis Ninjas. Most of the times they are in the valuable business of answering the known unknowns, they aim to get to the priceless unknown unknowns.

[Sidebar: If you don’t know these three phrases, please watch my short talk: A Big Data Imperative: Driving Big Action.]

Insane as it seems like, data collection should get sorted out in the next few years. As close to perfect data, with little to no instrumentation, because it will all already be built in.

The current crop of Analytics tools are getting better and better at the known knowns, the process of disintermediation of the humans doing that work is only going to accelerate… And then that work will disappear. If you are solving for the known knowns, and ML can do that a million times better than you AND can take the necessary action, why are you or I needed in the data puking business?

If you are a report writer in your company most of the time, ponder the above thought. Here’s the great news: Time to move up the food chain or move to a different chain. Hurray!

The Known Unknowns are going to be a source of job security for the next two or three years (perhaps less on the Marketing side). As ML creates new possibilities whenever people give you a finite, repeatable question, for which they don’t have an answer, ML will ask: Why do you need the answer? Why don’t I just go take the action for you?

Ok, it literally won’t say that, but for predictable questions there are predictable actions to be taken. Why can’t we automate them and infuse them with intelligence?

The barrier to this is that your Analytics vendor is in a silo, your campaign vendor in their own, your CMS in it’s own, your mobile anything in it’s own. None of them caring to extend and collaborate. Still, a solvable problem. And, if you read my marketing stories above carefully, this is already solved in those examples. So, there is a blueprint.

If you are in the business of answering unknown unknowns, you have job security for another five years or so. This is simply because analytics vendors are still not taking the ML revolution seriously. Not at Adobe, not at Google, not at SAP, not at IBM. There are small efforts. Click on link called Assistant in the left nav of the Google Analytics app, or click on the link in Analytics that says Data Driven Attribution. They should you hints, even as they leave the action entirely on the human. I think we need our version of the Manhattan project. Hopefully analytics vendors will pivot in a big way – why solve the pressing, surely going to go away in two years, problems of today?

Here’s the higher-order-bit…. Anthony Goldbloom phrased this beautifully: Machines will excel at frequent high-volume tasks, humans can tackle novel situations.

In Analytics and Optimization, almost everything we do today would fit in the category of frequent high-volume tasks. It puts pressure on the longevity of our jobs. Until complete disruption arrives, try to migrate your job’s focus on the unknown unknowns – that is still a novel situation.

Analytics was a means to making smarter decisions. I am glad analytics as we know it will go away. It will be automated, scaled, faster, more delightful and deliver higher impact.

Over the last few years you’ve seen a huge infusion on this blog of business strategy, of influencing shifts in direction, of trying to fill gaps in people’s thinking where no data exists, of being able to function in ambiguity. All of these, until we get truly Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), will still continue to be a source of gainful employment. Hence, that’s the Analyst of the near-future in my humble view.

Artificial Intelligence | Future | Kids.

I don’t normally talk about this, but in context of this discussion I wanted to be a bit more open.

All this time I’ve spent on AI, on the acceleration of change, on the massive disruption that’s coming, it got me thinking about my kids and the world I have to get them ready for.

Two thoughts to share with you, to spark your imagination in case you have kids or you play an influential role in a child’s life.

The Strategic.

Our kids are young, hence almost nothing they are learning in school or they’ll learn at University will really get them ready to live in the world they’ll graduate into. And. What scares me is that I can’t even predict what that world will be like. What will work actually mean? I don’t like being helpless, and hence I gave some thought to what key skills / attributes could I possibly want them to have that will help them to be ready to tackle what might be coming.

We choose three that might serve them well:

There are more of course. One that came close was the ability to always know one’s unique strengths. These three felt right to us.

I invite your suggestions via comments below.

The Tactical.

My son has a propensity towards computer science. Even at his young age he programs in Java, he has learned Perl, JavaScript, and other web technologies. He is working on his second Android app. While all that, and his Sunday tutoring at Stanford, is helping stretch his brain, training him to think in clever ways, he will start his professional life, less than a decade away, with no jobs where those skills are going to be required.

Because he is headed into this specific direction, we are pivoting our strategy for him. We are going to prepare him for the world that will be well here, by the time he is in his chosen field of interest. The team at Facebook had a very nice article that collected their guidance. It is going to help inform my son's strategy.

Here’s the relevant excerpt from their blog post:

Summary: Loads of Advanced Math, Engineering, Neuroscience with a pinch of philosophy, and loads of analytical thinking.

If you have a child in your life who is headed in the "IT" / "Computers" (or honestly any job that will come in five years), please consider this valuable guidance.

Update: I'm a big fan of Prof. Max Tegmark. Here's a wonderful article by him on kids and careers: Career Advice for the Future.

Artificial Intelligence | Worry about Humanity.

I can’t cover AI without at least touching on this thought:

AI is going to wipe out humanity. To a super intelligence that is in control of the planet, we will appear to be the equivalent of how ants appear to us – mostly pests who get in the way, even as we express passing appreciation for their “primitive intelligence.”

It is important to understand two incredibly valuable definitions that I’ve paraphrased from the brilliant Yuval Noah Harari.

Intelligence is the ability to solve problems.

Consciousness is  the ability to feel things.

People who express the thought above mix the two things.

Absolutely no one can predict the future a hundred years out (I encourage you NOT to Google Mr. Harari’s prediction about what he sees happening 300 years out). But, everything we know at the moment, everything we can see peeking into the future to the best abilities of our best thinkers, indicates that we are solving for Intelligence, there is no current path to Consciousness.

It does not mean we will keep control of the Super Intelligence or that we or a Super Intelligence won’t want to solve for Consciousness (honestly, why would it?).

It is important to understand the difference, if only to be able to see through the hysteria and think cogently.

Speaking of thinking cogently, if you want to have a broader imagination related to AI’s potential to be valuable and disruptive to the current order, here are a clutch of articles…

NTT Resonant, a Japanese tech company, has trained an AI to give love advice to troubled hearts. This is not a lame chatbot with very short answers. Oshi-el can take in complicated pages long questions, which often family and other context, and responds with answers. Not perfect, but so incredible even today.

Health is a space that is seeing some exciting progress. 415 million (!) people are at risk worldwide and you need a medical specialists to detect it – specialists who are not available in many parts of the world. Google’s algorithm, leveraging ML and Computer Vision, is already on-par with Ophthalmologists in being able to detect Diabetic Eye Disease. There is more work to be done, but how cool that so many lives can be saved. And, this is one of so many health related efforts leveraging ML.

Augmentation is perhaps the most optimal way to think about the near-term future. The world will find some use for what we are good at, and we’ll use AI for what it is good at. Maurice Conti presents a cluster of ideas that are in the play today that demonstrate the incredible inventions of intuitive AI. Mind-blowing what is already possible.

It is not clear what the future beyond the next 50 years will bring. I hope the articles above give you clues.

Please be curious about AI and its implications on your job today, and on the generation you are helping prepare for the future. Now's the time to pivot.

As always, it is your turn now.

Are you leveraging Machine Learning in your job or as a personal curiosity? If you’ve already downloaded TensorFlow, what are you doing with it? Is a piece of your marketing strategy leveraging ML powered options Facebook or Google are making available to you? If you had to give advice to an Analyst to get ready for an AI-first world, what would it be? Have you thought of the implications of all this change on your children? Any tips for me and my kids?

Thank you.

Bonus Reads: Here are additional posts I've written that cover my latest thinking on newer elements on the topic of Machine Learning:

Artificial Intelligence: Implications On Marketing, Analytics, And You is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

There is no such thing as a good list. I am sure that my opinion about lists makes purveyors of lists unhappy, but it is the truth. For the most part, lists suck. There are reasons:

• Chief among the reasons is that lists are incredibly expensive to keep clean. People change jobs, big guys buy little guys. Big guys buy big guys. Big and little guys shut down. The speed of change accelerates every year. It is costly to keep up.
• Another reason is that people have a perception as to how much lists should cost. They think they should cost a lot less than they do, they devalue them. As an example, I have seen senior executives authorize $10, $15 even $20 for a “lumpy” or “dimensional” mailer and then argue over $.25 per name on their selected list. Assisted awareness of having received even the most expensive packages is in the low teens. Most never get delivered. The cute mailer and/or premium goes home with the mailroom attendant – all because nobody was willing to pay to keep the list current. That certainly does not incent list owners to make investments in list cleansing.
• Finally, vendors simply get away with selling sub-optimal lists. They get away with it because in many cases the buyers of the list, which was used to send emails or direct mail, have no idea what percentage of the list got delivered. Not a clue! There was no list validation or testing … and that is, as Paul Harvey used to say, “the rest of the story.” [One of my favorite Paul Harvey “Rest of the Story” broadcasts can be found here.]

List Testing

List testing is cheap and just makes sense. The easiest way to explain is with this story:

I was in the client’s office talking about program results and the client let me know that they were going to ask us to follow-up on a direct mail piece going to 685 senior executives in the New York City metropolitan area. It was an expensive mailer – about $12.35 each. The offer was an upscale dinner in NYC followed by an NBA game – it was a big game.

My first question was “have you tested the list?” The client said no. It was a relatively expensive list and the vendor guaranteed 100% deliverability. I suggested that they take a few extra days and call into 100 of the targets. I told them we would do it at no charge.

The results: half of the list was outside of the Northeast. Of the remaining half, 20% had no contact name associated with the record (the mail house would have mailed it anyway – and it would have gotten dumped). Over 10% of the remaining addresses were bad. Some companies had moved and some were just, well, bad. A number reported that the contact was no longer employed by the organization.

The bottom line is that we trashed the entire list, built them a new, accurate list (for a fee) and the campaign results were excellent.

Remember: Lists suck. List testing is cheap and a no brainer.

Testing is extremely important if you use marketing automation. Read this blog (published by CMO by Adobe) for more information about calibrating and validating marketing automation. 

Recently, I read an article in which the position was put forth, “Inside sales does not have the responsibility for creating pipeline, only the responsibility for selling. They should never pick up the phone and make a prospecting call!” Many of you can imagine what my knee-jerk reaction was to this statement. But for a moment, I managed to contain myself. The speaker was clearly smart and had been very successful in selling, perhaps there was something I misunderstood.

As I got into the article, the question was posed, “Who is responsible for developing pipeline?” The response was, “Someone else….”

The article went on, I realized the speaker was arguing for a very high degree of specialization within the sales function. Specialization makes sense—where it makes sense.

Specialization has been around for decades. We’ve long had product line specialists, organizations where sales is oriented around different product lines, each sales team responsible for the sale of a specific product line. A terrific strategy for driving product line growth. But then the questions come, Who is responsible for the customer relationship? Who is responsible for maximizing our share of customer? What experience do we want to create, how do we want the customer to “think” of our company? Where product lines are very diverse, with different and unrelated buyers within the account, this issue may not be important (But I’m still driven by my mantra, “It’s our God-given right to 100% share of customer and territory…”). But as buying teams start to overlap, this issue becomes critical.

Enter the realm of account management/territory. Often, the way we solved the inherent challenges of a product-oriented sales force, is we shifted to account/territory management, with sales people responsible for selling the entire product line to their customers. There are some clear advantages to this, but also limitations—particularly if you have a large, diverse, and complex product line. No one person could be expert in each.

Organizations solve this by creating hybrid/overlay sales organizations. Perhaps account/territory managers for core product lines and managing the overall customer relationship, with specialists for the more complex product lines. The idea here is for the account/territory people to work collaboratively with the specialists. The concept of “team selling” arose. Variations started being introduced as partners and channels became part of the go to customer model.

Then, the idea of specialization by simple/transactional versus complex sales arose. We started segmenting the sales process with people focused on the simpler/transactional sales (usually inside sales) and those that focused on complex sales (usually the field/territory people and specialists). There were still challenges from the customer point of view (if it wasn’t for those pesky customers worried about their experience and how they want to buy), but this specialization was another turn of the crank in making the sales organization very efficient. Often, the idea being, inside sales was a lower cost of selling than field sales, they could more cost effectively handle the transactional/lower margin product lines.

As selling becomes more complex (though I think at least in B2B, it’s always been complex), sales executives have always been confronted with the issue of “How do we become more efficient? How do we reduce the cost of selling?” Oddly, they don’t ask the question, “How do we become more effective, how to we align ourselves to buy the way the customer wants to buy,” very often.

Over time, we continue to slice and dice what sales people do—all in the name of efficiency. We’ve sliced and diced the sales process, getting people expert at one thing–prospecting, qualifying, discovering, proposing, closing. Each expert at doing their job and only their job, each waiting for others to do their jobs.

We have SDRs, they have further been segmented by inbound/outbound, BDMs, Sales Executives. We have Account SDRs, BDMs, managers/executives. We have inside/outside/partner/channel sales people. Based on the argument of the person I cite at the beginning of this diatribe, we need to further be segmenting by having people–but not sales people–prospecting and generating pipeline. We have marketing generating pipeline–or at least a marketing pipeline–which always seems different from the sales pipeline. We have organizations that have “closers,” only focused on the final steps of the sales process.

In our quest for optimization and efficiency, we’ve created a giant assembly line, passing the customer from specialist to specialist. Each specialist doing their job, then passing the customer along to do the next part of the job, then the next.

(We, also, have to recognize, that we are driving increased levels of complexity into our business (managing the transitions is a challenge), as well as huge levels of complexity for our customers in doing business with us.)

Wait a minute, haven’t we seen this model before? Oh, yes, it’s the manufacturing line made so famous by Henry Ford. The job of building cars was segmented down to minute steps, each performed by a specialist, with hundreds of specialists doing their thing–perhaps tightening a bolt, installing a door. But there were problems with the approach. Back ups/problems in one area would shut down all the other functions–upstream and down stream. Quality became an issue. Each person doing their job, but no one responsible for overall quality–so by the time the product got to a customer, it didn’t work. (In engineering, we call it the “stack-up problem—each part fits its specs, but taken together they don’t.)

Toyota did huge amounts to address this with the Toyota production method. A fundamental principle is to eliminate all variability (Hmmmmmm, works well with inanimate objects, but what about people?)

Soon many manufacturing organizations started looking at the issue from the “whole,” not the “pieces/parts.” They started clustering work, reducing the number of specialist, building teams, empowering them to change the process (but they are still doing inanimate parts).

You get the picture. Specialization works–where it works. But sometimes specialization sub-optimizes the entire process. Focusing on the efficiency of the pieces-parts may not create an overall efficient or effective end to end process.

But the most important thing lost in this discussion is the customer and their experience!

Efficient manufacturing works because we can design out variability. It works because we are dealing with objects that have no emotions, that have no fears, that aren’t learning, growing, or changing their minds. It works because we’ve broken down what may be complex and made it simple–but that’s not how our customers work–they are in the world of the complex (6.8 decision makers involved in the consensus decision).

Perhaps, in our quest for our own efficiency, we are solving for the wrong problem. What if we focused on the customer–their efficiency and effectiveness in their problem-solving process? Perhaps, in solving for this problem, we discover how we might become more efficient and more effective–for them and for us.

Are you a hunter or a farmer?  In the sales world, those two terms describe the strategy a sales rep uses to close deals.  Which approach should you use?  Well, there’s certainly a place for both strategies in sales, but at times we place too much emphasis on that shiny new account and overlook the treasure trove that lies within our existing portfolio.  So for this blog, let’s take a closer look at why it’s beneficial to be a farmer.

In my recent webinar, Sales Strategy or Train Wreck, I dug into what happens when sales teams of all sizes forge ahead without a clear plan. (It happens, and it happens a lot.) When Alice and I were talking about the webinar, and the great feedback I got from it, she suggested I write a blog post on the topic. Good idea!

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We have all been in meetings when someone says, “We can sit around planning forever, or we can just get going and do something.” And, rightly so. Strategy without execution is a waste of time. But, execution without strategy is like saying “Ready, Fire, Aim” or more accurately “Fire, Look—OMG!”

I believe in strategy. I have seen what happens when sales teams of all sizes forge ahead without a clear plan. In short, it’s chaos.

A business strategy, market strategy or sales strategy should deliver these critical results:

• Clear priorities everyone understands
• Clear outcomes everyone can measure
• Clear guidelines everyone can follow
• Clear goals everyone can work toward

Without a strategy, sales teams and leaders make decisions based on what is best at the moment. Not because they are selfish or short-sighted, but because they don’t know the big picture.

The best analogy I can think of is a ship. Imagine if the captain yelled “Cast off,” but the crew didn’t know the plan. How would they know which way to steer? How to trim the sails? Or even how to stay out of the way? A strong crew works most effectively when they are well trained, have clear instructions, and know where they are going. If any of those elements are missing, then that’s a recipe for a shipwreck.

Your sales team may not need to know how to trim the sails, but they do need to know the following:

• A clear Ideal Customer Profile
• A SWOT analysis
• A clear market strategy
• Clear revenue goals
• Clear positioning
• Clear action plan

Too often, sales strategies start with someone at the top coming up with an arbitrary growth number based on investor demands, new product development, operational capacity, or some other factor that has absolutely nothing to do with sales. That growth expectation gets divided among regions and reps in ways that are equal, arbitrary or based on some often-unsubstantiated belief about which markets or reps can support the most growth. Unfortunately, these poorly-planned strategies often result in declining morale, increased attrition and ultimately poor business results.

Whatever orders come from above, they must become a strategy that can support the desired growth.

The secret to sustained growth is creating a powerful sales strategy to support it. Here are the seven steps I recommend to create this type of strategy.

1. Assess Where You’ve Been and Where You Are Now

Before you can begin to plan the future, first look toward the past. Do an assessment of the previous year of business and ask questions such as:

• What did you do last year? Dig into your sales numbers as well and look at key indicators such as:
  • How much did your team sell?
  • Who sold it?
  • To whom did they sell it?
  • How much will result in repeat business?
  • Which clients brought in the least and most profit? Make sure to add in support time!
  • Which clients had the shortest sales cycles?
  • Which clients had the highest revenue?
• What has changed?
• How are you positioned to achieve the revenue targets you have identified?
• Where is the most logical place to look for growth?
• What exists to support the desired growth?
• What additional support will your team need to achieve the desired increases?

By understanding where you have been, you can begin to determine where you should go.

2. Create A Clear Ideal Customer Profile

For most companies, 80% of revenue comes from 20% of clients. By reviewing your previous year, you can figure out which clients spend the most money, buy more than one product, are the easiest to work with and have the shortest sales cycle. Figure out what your top clients do and make a list of those criteria. This will become your Ideal Customer Criteria. Dig into the demographics and psychographics of your ideal customer to create a complete profile for your reps.

An ideal customer profile provides guidelines for your sales reps that help them spend their time efficiently on prospects who are most likely to convert and deliver repeat business quickly.

3. Time For A SWOT Analysis

How well is your company positioned to grow existing accounts, find new accounts like the ones you have, and land new ideal customers? Pull your sales, marketing, and product teams together to do the SWOT.

A SWOT is not an exercise in imagination. It should be as rooted in reality as possible. Your job is to figure out how to leverage your strengths to capitalize on opportunities. Consider your weaknesses and threats, the internal and external obstacles that will hinder your ability to achieve those goals. Ask yourself and your team what needs to be done to minimize these threats and weaknesses. Be specific in your efforts. Look for the reasons you are not selling more to existing clients, and the reasons reps are having a hard time closing business. Understand which products sell well and why. You will need this information to build your plan.

4. Set A Clear Market Strategy

Now that you have assessed where you have been and what has worked start thinking about where you are going.

This is the time to think about a market strategy. Consider the following questions based on your work so far:

• How much can you grow existing accounts?
• How can you leverage existing accounts to get referrals?
• How much can you increase revenue inside existing territories with existing products?
• How much can you increase revenue inside existing territories with new products?
• How much can you increase revenue outside existing territories with existing products?
• How much can you increase revenue outside existing territories with new products?

It is likely that the cheapest, fastest revenue will be from existing accounts, then referrals, and on down the line. The slowest and most expensive new revenue will result from cultivating sales for new products in new territories. I would start this process with large account plans for your top 10 clients.

5. Create Clear Revenue Goals

When you combine your given revenue targets with the market strategy you’ve created based on an assessment of the past and current situation, you can generate realistic revenue goals for territories and individuals.

Now is time to think about what support your sales team needs to reach these goals. Get your marketing team, sales team, and product team together to work on a plan.

Handing your sales team new quotas with no basis in reality will leave all parties disappointed and frustrated.

6. Develop And Communicate Clear Positioning

The market strategy you created will help determine how you need to position your company and products to achieve the growth. Remember, you have different market segments that each need a clear positioning plan.

• Large Accounts
• Opportunities inside existing accounts with different product lines
• Opportunities inside existing territories and markets
• Companies that meet your ideal customer profile
  • How will you identify them?
  • How will you make them aware of your product?
  • How will sales and marketing work together to prospect and sell
• New Markets, New Products.

It is not sufficient to ask sales people to figure out the positioning. The sales, marketing, and product teams need to work together to create buyer personas or positioning statements and value propositions that meet each different need.

7. Clear Action Plan

We tend to send sales reps out to prioritize their work alone. If you want your sales reps to be successful, it is time to implement a well-functioning funnel and opportunity planning process.

Now that you know how much revenue you need to get, and where it should come from, each sales rep will need to create a funnel that shows how they intend to generate that revenue. They may be more successful working with marketing and including existing leads that support specific goals.

When your sales reps create their funnel, coach them to ask themselves the following questions:

• How much of each type of revenue do I need to make?
• How many sales does that represent?
• How many calls does that represent?
• How much time does that represent?
• If I am calling on existing clients, how many calls do I need to make to close 10 existing clients on new products?
• How many new ideal customers will I need to call on to close?

Capture the answers to these questions on each rep’s funnel, along with next actions and timelines. But, worry less about close dates and more about next actions and next action dates.

These seven steps are the basis of an executable sales strategy. At the end of this process, your sales team will have clear priorities everyone understands, clear outcomes everyone can measure, clear guidelines everyone can follow and clear goals toward which everyone can work.

You will have righted the ship, and be ready to embark on a successful journey. Shipwreck avoided!

For a deeper understanding of sales leadership strategy, watch my webinar Sales Strategy or Train Wreck. 

For help creating a sales strategy specialized for your company, call Alice at 775-852-5020 or schedule time to chat about it.

The post 7 Steps To Build A Successful Sales Strategy appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

I am not sure if it truly qualifies as serendipity, but I had a couple of experiences one day recently that confirmed some sales basics that we choose to ignore at times.  After leaving a meeting, I heard an interesting report and discussion on CBC Radio.  They were looking at the cooking and eating habits of Canadians.  A key point was that Canadians spend more time watching cooking shows on TV, be it specialized networks or mainstream, than they do cooking.  Wow.  They went on to explain that more Canadians are eating out at restaurants, and the impact of that on our health (not so good), the economic impacts, good for restaurants, not good for Canadians.  While they were not knocking restaurants, it was more about balance and understanding around how and what we eat.

This was on the heels of a revealing meeting I just left with a VP of Sales and her Director of Business Development.  As the topic turned to sales methodology, the VP was very curious and focused on social selling.  She was up to date on all the current “insights” from all the usual socialites.  When we got around to conversion rates, she could not immediately talk about what the current metrics were, and rightfully deferred to the BD Director, who leading the BDR team.  He did know the numbers, and was honest enough to admit that they were not where they needed to be to drive the company’s objectives.

He then offered an unsolicited observation that brought a bit of tension to the conversation.  “I think they spend too much time on social searching and knowing all there is to know, not enough time reaching out.  They need to make more and better calls.”  Not surprising, and a great opportunity to present some real insights on successful prospecting, especially where BDR’s primary function is to work the phone to drive engagement from leads gathered via social, inbound, and lists procured in so many ways.  By the time I left there was middle ground, and agreement about the balance they need to create to drive results, and everyone focused on the need leverage all available avenues to a conversation, not waste valuable time and energy positioning one vs. the other.  (A uniquely social quality).

Much like the state of Canadian’s culinary habits, things in sales have gotten a bit off centre, and sales leaders, be they pundits or VP’s need to step back and see what best meets their objectives.  I understand that it may be easier to place all your bets on one horse, and then do your best to drive it.  But in sales, as with diet, a balanced approach based on what you, or more importantly your buyer is trying to achieve will usually lead to greater results, even if not always the easiest; but we get paid to make it happen, not to make it easy.  Successful leaders implement processes that encompass all elements required to deliver the best long term outcomes for all parties, be they nutritional, or financial.

The approach one takes needs to be driven by the outcomes they are trying to achieve not personal bias, fears, or by following only those pundits that reinforce those fears.  Whatever method or style of selling you adopt should be based on what works for the buyers, not what sounds good to you only.  The experts you follow should be able to demonstrate how it works, and why it meets your specific objectives, not just because it is in their book.

As one former White House chef said of his book, it is easier and more profitable to talk and write about cooking than cooking.  Don’t get caught doing more socializing than selling.

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Crazy, I know uh.  Why screw with an organization like that. We’re trying to get sales and marketing on the same page, and now I’m telling you they need to be on separate fiscal calendars.

Yup, that’s what I’m telling you, and it’s BECAUSE sales and marketing are becoming closer. Sales is relying more and more on marketing for leads and top of the funnel support. Therefore, they have to be on different fiscal calendars if it’s gonna work.

Let’s break it down from a business perspective. Let’s say marketing has committed delivering 50% of your 2017 revenue goal.  (That’s awesome, but it’s only half, let’s get it on marketing ;).) That means your salespeople are going to have to find 50% of the number.

For simplicity, let’s say that your revenue goal for 2017 is 1 million dollars and your average deal size is $10,000. That means your team is going to need 100 deals.  Let’s assume your marketing team has a 50% SQL (sales qualified lead) conversion rate and sales then converts 50% of all the leads into opportunities. Let’s then say sales has a 30% close rate.  That means marketing has to deliver 4500 SQL’s.

Anyone see what’s wrong here yet?

So, marketing accepts this number and sets out to impress.  They start their inbound engine; they’re firing out emails, content, and boom, they get 375 leads that month, they’re on track. Or, are they? They do it next month and next month and next month until December, and everyone is excited until they’re not.  Sales missed its number.

Why?

Sales missed it’s number because the average time to close wasn’t factored into the number.  Yes, marketing delivered on the 4500 leads they committed to. However, the average sales cycle is 120 days long, which means any deal that came in after September won’t close until the next calendar year.   Thirty percent of marketing’s contribution isn’t going to materialize until 2018.

I call this marketing lag.

Marketing lag is the time it takes for a marketing generated sales qualified lead to close.

Making matters worse, this doesn’t even incorporate time to revenue.  If your business has a 30, 60, 90, implementation period or time to revenue period, you might as well push back marketing’s influence another thirty to ninety days. Now we’re talking getting just four to six months of marketing impact in the fiscal year. Yeah, not what you were expecting uh? I didn’t think so.

Marketing needs to be on a fiscal calendar that aligns with at least the bookings number if not the revenue number.

Ex:

Goal: 1 million in bookings

Marketing/Sales Mix: 50/50

Average Sales Cycle: 90 days

Average Time to Revenue (after close) 30 days.

In this example, marketing needs to be on a calendar that starts 90 days BEFORE the sales fiscal year to capture bookings and 120 days before to capture marketing-generated revenue.  This has you starting to count marketing’s contribution in September/August of the preceding year.

In this model, marketing starts their 2017 lead engine September/August first. They deliver 375 leads a month starting in September; these leads start closing in January and generating revenue in February. The opportunities created in October, start closing and generating revenue in February/March. The leads from November, yup start closing in March and drive revenue in April.  By the time marketings fiscal calendar ends in August, the leads created that month have a high probability to close in that calendar year, giving sales the final push they may need.

Far too often, I’ve had to tell companies almost an entire year in advance; they weren’t going to make their number because the bookings/revenue plan was based on marketing and sales working from the same fiscal calendar. It’s easy to forget the impact the sales cycle has on converting marketing’s efforts.

Move marketings fiscal calendar back by the number of months it takes to close a deal once it gets into the pipeline. Put marketing ahead of sales. It takes time for opportunities to close. It takes time for a lead, once it becomes an opportunity to close. Make sure you build that time into your sales and marketing plan.

Don’t let marketing lag mess with your business. It’s always better to be ahead of where you need to be, than behind.

Marketing and sales work in different parts of the sales cycle, and the more you bring them together, the more it is important to separate them, at least their measuring cycles.

 

 

The post Marketing Should Be On A Different Fiscal Calendar appeared first on A Sales Guy.

Jeffrey Gitomer, author of The Little Red Book of Selling and King of Sales, once said: “Value the relationship more than the quota.”

He talked about the prospect-salesperson relationship here but he might as well have talked about the relationship between the sales manager and his team. Your team will have a hard time achieving goals if you do not have a solid relationship with them. And, this relationship starts with motivating your sales team.

Motivating A Sales Team

Regardless of how amazing or cheap your product is, you won’t reach your market without the push of a motivated sales team. And, having a great sales team is never just about hiring the right people.

A variety of factors come into play. Their life goals, personal lives, emotional and intellectual capacities, and attitudes all have bearing on how they go about their work. Would they be moved enough to be the superstar salesperson that they are? Or, will they slide into lackluster performance?

This is where your sales team motivation comes in. People are motivated differently, and it’s up to you to put together the right mix of tangible and non-tangible rewards.

Sales Team Motivation 1: Money

Money, as a motivator, works – most of the time. After all, success in a sales team is measured by the amount that you bring in. Earning monetary rewards because of this follows.

Your commission scheme is basic and, as is, it can be a driving force for your team. The key is to put together an effective commission structure. Motivate your team to go after long-term accounts by rewarding repeat sales. Encourage them to make an effort to reach out to big clients by giving them a bigger slice of the commission pie.

Of course, there are other parameters to consider when it comes to doling out monetary rewards. For instance, you can count the number of units sold, money value, or accounts opened. Or, you can also count the number of no’s received. (And yes, you read that right.)

Fuelzee CEO and founder, Dan McGraw, says that his company tracks and rewards those who lead in the number of no’s. While this sounds crazy, it is a strategy that actually adopts a famous quote from American salesman, author and motivational speaker, Zig Ziglar: “The top salesperson in the organization probably missed more sales than 90% of the sales people on the team, but they also made more calls than the others made.”

In the case of Fuelzee, McGraw says: “Every time someone got a no, we tracked it in our system, and the person with the most no’s received a $100 gift card every week…. The more no’s you get, the closer you are to getting a yes. The prize of getting a yes is way larger than $100, so you still wanted to get there. This nearly doubled our outbound calls and motivated the whole team.”

Remember that one business’ approach might not work for your business. Mix things up and see what’s best for you.

Also, consider what Mark Palmer, executive coach and sales consultant, once said, “If compensation were a sufficient motivator, your people would already be performing.”

Sales Team Motivation 2: Gamification / Fun

According to Palmer, a unifying quality of top sales people is their need to be on top and win. This is perhaps one of the best reasons why gamification has been a popular means of motivating a sales team.

Friendly competition in the workplace can ignite your sales team’s need to win. Through leaderboards and the like, you publicly acknowledge top performers and encourage others to catch up. You inspire your sales team to level up and perform at par with the rest.

Of course, let’s not leave out fun in the equation. Your internal games, while bringing out the winner in everyone, should also encourage cooperation and improve workplace satisfaction.

Take the case of Rick Hanson, former vice president for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Security’s worldwide sales and field operations. Under his watch, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Security began to use FantasySalesTeam as a means to gamify sales. Like fantasy football teams, “players” work together and earn points for certain sales tasks.

Hanson says “Reps earn points for their FantasySalesTeam based on the performance of their chosen peers and friends, and this creates an environment of encouragement and pressure amongst the players….To win the game, they must rely and push on each other to perform. Even more exciting is just how many reps in our sales organization can, and want to, participate.”

Another way to infuse fun in the workplace has to do with your choice of reward. After all, money isn’t everything. You also have gadgets, trips, and gift checks, among a million other alternatives.

Kevin Baumgart, sales vice president of Hireology, also suggests: “You might not think that a pingpong table for the office would push people and drive behaviors…. Try it. From my experience, chair massagers, beanbag chairs, stand-up desk converters, cube art, etc. can all be motivational rewards as well.”

Sales Team Motivation 3: Work Environment and Career Development

Arguably, the ultimate reward from work is the opportunity to reach further and improve in your chosen career. This brings the limelight to the current environment and development programs in your workplace.

Is your work environment – co-workers, work ambience, attitudes and management – motivating enough for your potential sales superstars? Or, is being around the office a burden more than anything else? Are you communicating opportunities to grow within your organization? Are you encouraging your team to look into the future and set goals for themselves?

Creating the best work environment starts when you put together your team. Give value to potential and attitude. Instill and give incentive to cooperation, mentorship and support. At the same time, provide learning opportunities.

A great example here is a suggestion of Your Sales MBA founder and educator, Jeff Hoffman. He says: “Try a sales contest where the prize or a midway bonus is you…. Work for the leading rep for a few hours, doing whatever they direct you to — calls, demos, presentations, etc. Not only does this motivate your team; it also shows you aren’t afraid to roll up your sleeves and get in the trenches…. The whole team will see you leading by example, creating an inspirational ripple effect.”

A Final Word on Motivating Your Sales Team

At the core of an effective and efficient sales team is having a sturdy foundation for everything they can achieve. It starts with putting together the best team, people who can work together and push each other to move forward. It is helped by implementing systems, software and processes that make focusing on actual sales easier. It is pushed even further through the right work environment, sales team motivation and incentives.

Be consistent in your efforts. Motivating your sales team is daily work that reaps long-term benefits.

Salespeople commonly come up against the competitor objection when talking to new prospects. As soon as the buyer realizes the nature or function of your product, she says something along the lines of, "We already work with Competitor X," or "We already have a supplier for that."

To overcome the competitor objection, you must:

1. Figure out if your prospect truly has an existing vendor relationship or is simply blowing you off
2. Keep them engaged in the conversation long enough to show them the value of working with you (even if they've already purchased an competing solution)
3. Uncover weaknesses in their current offering or contract

Accomplishing all three can be tricky -- especially when you're on the phone and losing your prospect's attention by the millisecond.

For more tips on handling objections, check out The GSD Sales Show -- tips for salespeople, by salespeople.

The following 12 responses will help you effectively overcome the competition objection so you can move forward with the sale.

12 Ways to Overcome the Competitor Objection

1) “That’s good to hear -- [competitor] is a great company. In fact, we share a lot of mutual customers. Companies that use both of our offerings often find that our product makes accomplishing [X goal] much easier, since it has [unique benefit #1] and [unique benefit #2].”

This response lets you differentiate your product from the competition without slinging mud. 

Plus, it opens the door for another conversation down the line. Once you’ve won the prospect’s trust, you can start talking about a switch if that’s in the buyer’s best interest.

2) “At this point, I’m not asking you to rip anything out. I’d just like the opportunity to show you how we’re different and how we’ve provided additional value to our customers. I can present some use cases of other companies like yours who work with us and with Competitor X. When is a good time to schedule a follow up call?"

According to Bryan Gonzalez, business development manager at Procore, this response will give you the opportunity to prove what your product does differently -- and ultimately, show the prospect why they need it.

3) “Got it. Can I ask what type of evaluation process you go through to be sure you're getting the best service available?”

As president of Business By Phone Art Sobczak explains, you need to plant doubt in the prospect’s mind before they’ll ever consider changing vendors. They probably haven’t thought about their decision to use the competition since they signed the contract -- this question will have them wondering whether it’s still the right choice.

4) “Have they ever let you down?”

Founder of Trigger Event Selling Craig Elias recommends using this question to challenge the prospect’s status quo. If the prospect says yes, follow up with, “How did that impact your business?”

Finally, ask what the vendor did (if anything) to make up for the issue and prevent it from happening again.

“Once you know more about the letdown, you can ask if they would like to work with a more reliable vendor they can have confidence in,” Elias writes.

5) “That’s great. What do you like best about working with [competition]?"

Asking the prospect to think about all the reasons they love the competition probably seems like a bad idea. But sales strategist Dan Fisher says this question actually prompts his prospects to explain what they didn’t like about their vendors. The trick? You have to be patient.

“No matter what they say in response, wait seven to 10 seconds,” Fisher says. “The silence will become uncomfortable -- and that’s when the prospect will often offer up a negative comment or concern.”

6) “I’m glad you’re [dealing with X challenge, recognize the importance of doing Y]. How’s it going?”

The first part of this answer validates the prospect, while the second gets them to open up. Once they’re talking about their situation, you can figure out how happy they are with their current vendor. What’s working well? What’s not? Pay special attention to complaints that could be solved with your product.

Alternatively, try: “Oh, I’m familiar with [competition] -- we actually used them at my old job. Right now, I’m not trying to convince you to go with us instead. I think it makes sense to explore your situation first and see if [product] is even a good fit.”

Mentioning you’re a former user gives you instant credibility. In addition, many prospects respond well to this calm, friendly approach. Again, the goal is to simply get them talking about their situation.

7) “That’s great. I’m wondering, however, if you’re still struggling to overcome [X challenge]. I ask because I saw you [posted something along those lines on LinkedIn, tweeted about it, downloaded one of our ebooks on that, etc.] I actually have a couple suggestions for you related to that challenge -- would it make sense to schedule a call to discuss them?”

Of course, not every buyer will be so kind as to advertise displeasure with their current provider through a negative review or critical social media post. But if you take the time to research before reaching out and analyze the prospect’s online behavior, you might get wise to a not-so-perfect fit.

For instance, are they seeking help in a specific area that your competitor should cover? If they’re looking for help online, their current vendor clearly isn’t solving all of their needs. Help the prospect first, and they’ll be more receptive to to hearing about your product later.

8) “Of course -- many of our current customers have used different suppliers in the past. But I’m reaching out to discuss ways you could [tackle business pain, increase results, maximize this investment]. Would you be interested in scheduling another call to talk about that?”

In modern sales, “Always Be Closing” has been replaced with “Always Be Helping.” After you’ve helped the prospect with a challenge, they’ll be more receptive to hearing about what your company has to offer. Even better, it’s probably been a long time since anyone from their current provider called them up solely to offer some free advice -- so you’ll start to look more attractive than the competition.

9) “I see. Do you have a contract with them?”

If the prospect is locked into a contract and you truly believe switching is in their best interest, you have a couple options. Help them off-set the costs of breaking it early by giving them a discount or showing them the ROI of the switch. Alternatively, find out when their agreement expires, and let them know that you’ll reach out again a month or two before that date.

10) “Good to hear. I’m curious, what do you think makes the relationship work so well?”

Mike Schultz, president of RAIN Group, says this question is a non-threatening way to make the prospect open up. After they respond, you can probe further into the relationship by asking a series of “I’m curious to know” questions.

For example: “I’m curious to know -- what’s their average response time when the network goes down?” or “I’m curious to know -- does your account manager call just to check in?”

When the prospect answers “no” to a question, Schultz recommends digging deeper to find ways you may be able to improve on their current service.

11) “I see. What results are you getting?”

There's always room for improvement. Once the buyer tells you the return they're currently seeing, you'll know what you're up against.

Imagine your prospect says the recruiting service she's using reduces average cost-per-hire by 30%. You might respond, “Clients who have switched to our firm from your current one typically drive down their average CPH by a further 10%. Would that have a significant impact on your hiring budget?”

If she says no, she's probably not the best fit anyway.

Alternatively, you can offer your help in improving their existing strategy -- no strings attached. Say, “That's great. I have a few tips that have helped my customers get their CPH even lower. Would you be interested in setting up another call to hear them?”

Once you've earned her trust and gratitude by helping her, she'll be far more receptive to your pitch.

12) “How long have you been working with that vendor?”

This question allows you to learn more about your prospect's relationship with the competition without sounding too aggressive or intense. 

It's simple enough for him to answer, but you'll be able to intuit a good deal of information. For instance, if he says, “We've used them since our company was founded in 1996,” that tells you he's probably experiencing some of the pains of a legacy system or an offering that hasn't scaled with their business.

On the other hand, if the buyer says, “The person who previously held my role set up the contract two years ago,” you'll know he wasn't personally involved in the decision. There may be an opportunity to present your product as a more sophisticated, useful, or well-designed alternative that'll help him drive better results than the current one.

There’s a silver lining to hearing the “we already use Competitor X” objection: It means that half your work is already done. After all, you don’t have to educate your prospect on their problem -- you just need to show them why your product is the best fit.

Sales team building activities can feel counter-productive.

That’s the first thought that can come to both leaders and employees when you mention a scheduled activity to do “team building”.

Even people who love their job will shiver at change. It’s to be expected, especially when you’ve never done anything like it.

If you start doing these things in a culture-building way, the team will catch up. Those who don’t, may not be the type to help you build your company—but that’s not our topic.

Our post today is to help founders and leaders go from doing no activities that build team morale to having a crew that gets as excited as children going on a field trip.

You remember those days, right?

Everyday school was good. But when it was different, you were actually excited.

It didn’t matter if you were going somewhere more “educational”, or just to the zoo. You wanted to be there.

Yes, we want people who love to come to work.

But that doesn’t mean you want an office full of people who wouldn’t enjoy a break from their day-to-day responsibilities.

(courtesy of Meme Guy)

Let’s take a look at the things you and your team can do to grow closer, appreciate work more, make the world a better place, and lead to a healthier sales team.

Here we go.

Easy Sales Team Building Activities

You don’t have to try on zip line gear to have a morale boosting sales team building activity in the office.

There are all kinds of things to try that serve as an introduction into the world of team building.

It’s surprisingly easy to set up an environment that will help moods and encourage the crew to interact with one another in a real-life way. In between sales calls or meetings, you can do something that builds others up.

Here are four ideas.

• Encourage a Water-Cooler

80’s business culture both created and shunned the water-cooler phenomena.

A place where the latest gossip, television, and (eek!) politics were quietly discussed while getting a quick sip of water.

While this can be done in excess, a place for everyone to communicate about things other than projects should be encouraged—even digitally.

This really isn’t difficult. Provide a snack area, a place for conversation and BAM! It’ll happen naturally.

Here at LeadFuze, we use Slack (we know, who doesn’t). Even though most of us are in the office, we added a channel called “#water-cooler” (see screenshot). It’s a place where you can mention things about sports, recent funny news, and just about anything else.

• Eat Food

Think about all of the bonding that happens through eating a meal. No, you don’t have to cater lunch in every day.

• Have you hit a goal, met a deadline? Get some grub delivered.
• Working late? Order take out.
• Introducing a new initiative/policy? Make it a nice meal.
• Haven’t eaten lunch as an office in a while? Do it today.

Pizza, sandwiches, catered meals. It can be as quick or as thoughtful as you’d like. The benefits of eating with associates speak for themselves.

• Play Games

There may be no greater “ugh” than the one that comes from co-workers who hear they’ll have to do “ice breakers” or play in an office game. If you even mention that something is “supposed to be fun”, everyone will think the worst.

How do you avoid this? It depends on attitude (of you and the team) and introduction.

In fact, here’s an epic post from SnackNation full of 87 games from businesses around the globe. But the biggest way to ensure success is the way you introduce the games.

There is a big difference between “hey guys we’re going to do some team building” as opposed to one morning everyone walking into an office set up for a ping pong tournament.

• Contests (not sales related)

Sale quotas and even friendly competition is great, but not necessarily good for boosting morale and creating culture. However, there are contests that could generate camaraderie.

• Fantasy football/baseball/etc. for the sports fans.
• Tasteful costume contests (i.e. star wars, 80’s, monster).
• Healthy eating to encourage good habits.

Moderate Sales Team Building Activities

Ok. If you’re feeling a bit more adventurous, or have seen the success of the intro sales team building activities, you may be ready to venture into deeper waters.

While these sales team building activities still aren’t “hardcore” in nature, they may require outside of the office interaction among your team.

Here’re a few ideas.

• Learn New Things

There are two primary venues to take when going about it—work-related or interest-based learning.

If you run a sales team, it could be morale-boosting to watch a cutting edge webinar in the field and then have an idea generation and discussion period to implement and plan strategies to increase qualified appointments and customer acquisition.

Or, you could do something unrelated to work, like buy everyone a Bonsai tree and have a class on how to take care of it.

• Get Physical

Promoting health and wellness in the office is fast becoming a recruiting technique. Millennials want an employer that genuinely cares for them and organizations that need talent are scrambling to figure out how to prove their level of care.

Actively promoting health, and even paying/reimbursing for gym memberships could give you an edge on drawing the best help your way.

• Eat Food (Again)

Ok, so you eat lunch in the office occasionally. That’s great!

However, taking it up a notch and going out to lunch/dinner with your staff is a bigger venture with a (potentially) bigger payout.

Rent out a room, acknowledge accomplishments, or have a brief recap of the previous quarter. But make sure you have fun.

Price doesn’t matter here (typically).

If you’re having an award ceremony something nicer may do, but why not reserve a BBQ joint and get messy? Or go to the park and grill some burgers (bring a frisby)?

Just leave the office and eat somewhere.

• Give Stuff Out

We talked about an award ceremony, but you don’t need a reason to shower your team with gifts. Swag is something that tech and software companies love.

How many Volkswagens have you spotted with an Apple sticker?

Hoodies, headphones, or the traditional pens and stickers—give it away to your people.

Aggressive Sales Team Building Activities

Sometimes, you just gotta go for it.

In this case, you’re doing sales team building activities that will not only build morale, but could create memories and friendships between staffers.

While these will dip into the pocketbook, they will also help solidify and grow your culture to a level that few other organizations ever find.

Let’s go to the deep.

“Life is fragile. We’re not guaranteed a tomorrow so give it everything you’ve got.” — Tim Cook, Apple CEO

• Do an Actual Activity

Interactive entertainment will likely grow into a frenzy over the next decade.

You know, those places that lock you in a room with a bunch of props until you figure out how to leave? It may or may not be your cup of tea, but it will make your introverted, yet intelligent people shine like the stars.

This example isn’t the only way to go and do team building.

There’s volunteering.

You could clean up a road, serve food to the hungry, or visit a nursing home.

• Take a Retreat

Ok, now you can try on the zip line gear.

Work retreats can be close to the office, or even far away. They can be a single day, or even an entire week.

The flexibility makes them a great option for small teams with low budgets all the way to execs who need to do some serious vision casting.

There are activities that make it memorable and the benefits will far outlast the stay and the financial commitment (with proper planning).

• Go Learn Stuff (Conferences)

Instead of the staff sitting in uncomfortable chairs around a computer screen in the office for a webinar, you could take them all to a conference!

There really isn’t anything that can induce that “field trip” feeling than announcing that your organization is going to give everyone an adrenaline-pumping few days—airfare and accommodations included.

Go ahead, it’ll make them feel like kids on Christmas morning.

• Bring in the Family

If you’re in the tech and software space, many of your employees may have young families.

This means that work, even though they may love it, isn’t their main priority.

Bringing together the career they have with the family that keeps them in that career can be powerful in creating the type of work environment that has little turnover and very high morale.

You don’t have to be fancy. You just have to make room.

The Benefits of High Morale

Those same millennials that are filling in more and more of your workforce are notoriously known for switching jobs a little faster than previous generations.

They keep looking for “work/life balance” like the wanderers in storybooks looking for the fountain of youth.

While you can’t provide that, you can prove that you genuinely want to keep those who add value to your organization. Not only because they do good work, but because you care.

Building a culture of innovation is fickle. It is neither obvious nor deterministic (following a straight path). Neither is the process of innovation immediately embraced or recognized as valuable in the environments in which the ideas are generated. Instead, innovations are usually resisted and only later recognized as valuable (often after competitors take advantage of the missed opportunity).

The path of discovery often limits the opportunity to explore other paths as resources are committed and momentum gains speed. Innovation and corporate systems design often follows a path that can be compared to a decision tree. Competing paths are not always illuminated and other paths & opportunities are missed as one option is chosen over that of another. Even when some level of illumination exists it may not be enough to respond adaptively or with a larger systems understanding of the situation and opportunities available. The path most often traveled may lead to the wrong and unintended destinations.

Where one person envisions a new path or idea another person, or corporation, sees a waste of resources (at best) or misalignment with the values espoused by the corporate culture (at worst). Either perspectives (or rationalizations) may obscure the realization of a novel and improved solution without even realizing it.

The challenge for each innovative visionary is how to best champion these new improvements and thereby overcome the often social, political, and economic barriers that surface?

Hierarchies often establish the premise that wisdom generated from above has more value than that generated from below. Challenging this often held belief are leadership models that emphasize team development or agile models that emphasize generating insights, and identifying opportunities to improve performance, from all levels.

Both approaches recognize that wisdom is more often generated in and at the moment the problem is created than from a viewpoint outside the system. Yet both are difficult to systematically and consistently implement due to corporate values that re-prioritize chain of command, efficiency, cost savings, and information skimming. A culture of innovation is needed.

Consider the following examples:

1. Project “W” schedule has several critical tasks left. The risk of two different critical chains departing from schedule has been identified by ignored.
2. Project “T” requirements are only described in broad generic terms. The risk of unclear requirements has been identified earlier but not resolved in time to keep up the project’s momentum.
3. Project “I” schedule and roles have only been described in broad generic terms. The risk of these unclear items on the project schedule and quality has been identified earlier but not resolved in time to adhere to the project’s schedule.
4. Project “B” requirements and roles have not been formalized with a project charter. The project scope has then expanded during the past two quarters, with the third quarter facing an almost complete stall of the project. The risk of working with unclear requirements and roles has been identified earlier with the first intervention producing some improvements. Subsequent evaluations discover the result of the one-time intervention was not sustained, as the project drifted back into the challenge of scarce resources and commitment.
5. Project “P” requirements were established and quickly changed as the sociopolitical landscape was assessed and the weak support for the project was confirmed. Best practices and standards from within the corporation were identified to reassert momentum but declined. The project goals essentially vanished into thin air as the office attempted to keep up a semblance of best practices while recognizing their application continued to be inconsistent.

What is considered a unique process innovation from one perspective was actually viewed as standardized evidence-based practice from another perspective. The solutions proposed were only innovative in these scenarios because they were yet to be standardized practices. Although the proposals actually included multiple components they can be simplified to the following for each scenario:

1. Innovative Solution “W”: Respond proactively
2. Innovative Solution “T”: Maintain vision
3. Innovative Solution “I”: Maintain cohesion
4. Innovative Solution “B”: Maintain Focus
5. Innovative Solution “P”: Standardize Existing Evidence-Based Practices

Innovation includes both improvements in technology and processes. Often iterative in nature, innovation often builds upon earlier discoveries and lessons but struggles with the leap of faith necessary to depart from earlier paths of reasoning. Previous commitments limit the corporation’s ability to identify, evaluate, and course correct when missteps occur.

Previous commitments can stall corporate attempts to change course, set up a culture of innovation, and thus interfere with the pursuing incremental improvements. The ability to recognize opportunities for innovation, and to identify problems that require novel solutions, requires the following abilities:

• Recognize problems that need to be solved
• Recognize possible solutions to the problem identified
• Test possible solutions until the best answer is discovered
• Objectively evaluate the performance of each solution
• Challenge existing assumptions and commitments

A commitment to building these culture of innovation competencies is only the first step. Deploying these competencies requires the commitment of leadership to cultivating the best solutions instead of the easiest ones. The path of least resistance is often selected for its ease of implementation where corporations should be instead selecting solutions based on their best systemic fit.

What is your company’s path to building its:

• Revenue or business model,
• New product or services,
• Protocol or guidelines

Who identifies what discoveries were missed? Who is responsible for taking the lead on discovering lessons and opportunities lost? Building your culture of innovation? And identifying the consequences of the company’s present course?

Share your comments below.

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Ikea is joining the smart home market with a line of connected lights, The Verge reports.

Known as Trådfri, the line — which includes lights, sensor triggers for lights, lighting panels, and a remote control — will be available for purchase in Sweden starting March 31.

For the devices to work, users must purchase a networking gateway from the Trådfri line; this device plugs into an Ethernet port and creates a local network to connect the bulbs. Users can control the lights either through the remote or the associated mobile app.

The prices of the Trådfri products are comparable, if not more expensive, than competing devices, so they'll likely do little to spur mass market adoption. A bulb from the line costs 199 Swedish krona (about $25 USD), whereas a smart bulb from GE costs $14, and one from Philips Hue retails for $20. High prices of smart home devices remain a deterrent to adoption, according to a recent PwC survey.

But here's why the products could see some success at Ikea:

• Interacting with the Trådfri line in person may encourage Ikea customers to purchase the devices. Consumers don't yet see the value proposition of smart home devices, which serves as another barrier to smart home adoption — 19% of global consumers haven't purchased a smart home device because they're unsure of the benefits, according to the same PwC survey. If consumers can go to an Ikea store and see the lighting products in action, they might be more inclined to purchase them.
• Consumers shopping at Ikea might be more likely to add smart lights to their cart if they're already spending a significant amount on furniture. Though Ikea's home offerings are relatively inexpensive, customers could end up spending quite a bit on furniture; these customers may be more willing to spend the extra money on smart lights.

Ikea could do well in the smart home space, as it's jumping into one of the more successful segments of the market. As BI Intelligence noted in a prior report, despite a stagnant overall market, smart lights have moved into the mass market phase of consumer adoption. BI Intelligence projects that smart light bulb shipments will reach 50 million by 2021.

Not that long ago, many home-appliance and consumer-electronics makers were gearing up for what they thought would soon be a rapidly growing market for smart home devices.

The instant popularity of the Nest thermostat, introduced in 2011, seemed to confirm their hopes. But those expectations were dashed in the coming years as the market for connected home devices later stagnated. 

Even with these challenges, many of the biggest consumer technology companies are now moving into the smart home market. For example, Apple, which recently released its self-installed smart home ecosystem, called the Apple Home, traditionally doesn't move into a market until it's very mature and only when it can release a perfected product. Further, Google this fall launched the Google Home and its companion ecosystem, hoping to jump into the voice-activated smart home speaker market, which Amazon currently dominates with its Echo product line. 

Nicholas Shields, research associate for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on the self-installed smart home that examines the demographics of the average smart home device owner and discuss why current smart home device owners are appealing to tech companies. The report also examines the plans of various tech giants in the smart home market and discuss their monetization strategies, and makes suggestions for how these companies can position themselves to make their products and devices more appealing to the mass market.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Tech companies primarily enter the market to enhance a core revenue stream or service, while device makers desire to collect data to improve their products and prevent costly recalls.
• We forecast there will be $4.8 trillion in aggregate IoT investment between 2016 and 2021.
• These companies are also seeking to create an early-mover advantage for themselves, where they gain an advantage by this head start on adoption.
• Major barriers to mass market adoption that still must overcome include technological fragmentation and persistently high device prices.

In full, the report:

• Details the market strategy of prominent tech companies and device makers, and analyzes why which ones are best poised to succeed once adoption ticks up.
• Offers insight into current ownership through an exclusive survey from BI Intelligence and analyzes what demographics will drive adoption moving forward.
• Explains in detail which companies are poised to succeed in the market in the coming years as adoption increases and mass market consumers begin to purchase smart home devices.

To get your copy of this invaluable guide to the IoT, choose one of these options:

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of smart homes.

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By Bruce Jones, Senior Programming Director, Disney Institute

Walt Disney once said, “Whatever you do, do it well. Do it so well that when people see you do it, they will want to come back and see you do it again, and they will want to bring others and show them how well you do what you do.”



In today’s increasingly competitive, global economy, Walt’s advice is more important than ever. No longer is it good enough to simply offer good value, or a great product alone. While these will always be necessary conditions for success, today they are simply the ante to get in the game!

In fact, in order to truly continue to stand apart from your competition, today’s biggest business opportunity could very well be your organization’s ability to consistently deliver an exceptional customer experience (CX).

CX can be a game-changer—one that spans across all industries and organizations. In fact, the recent Conference Board CEO Challenge 2017 survey shows that CEOs clearly understand the need to be more customer-centric, “Today, companies compete as much on customer experience as they do on product and price.”

At Disney, we’ve been striving to perfect our customer experience over the many decades since Walt Disney founded the company – attempting to do things so well that our guests want to come back and see us do it again and again. And, CX continues to be something our leaders think about each and every day. That’s why we’ll spend three days this May at the Disney Institute Customer Experience Summit, with business professionals from around the world who are equally focused on delivering exceptional CX.

So, how can you and your organization start to think differently about refining your CX? Here are three Disney principles that any organization can leverage to achieve their own CX goals.

1. Create an organizational common purpose

The essential foundation on which all other service decisions can be developed, a common purpose is a succinct explanation of what you want the customer experience to be at the emotional level. It represents to all employees what you stand for and why you exist, and it is the primary tool for getting everyone “on the same page.” 

2. Understand your customers holistically

Your knowledge of the customer must extend far beyond the boundaries of traditional service criteria. Truly understanding their needs, wants, and expectations is key to creating personalized interactions. As we have found, listening posts provide a customer-centric mechanism that companies can use to assess the customer experience and immediately identify areas where customer expectations are (or are not) being met and exceeded.

3. View exceptional service as an economic asset, rather than an expense

The return on investment associated with lifetime customer relationships often justifies the short-term costs associated with designing and delivering exceptional service experiences.

In times of significant change, stronger innovators inevitably outperform their peers, so keep an eye on the future and ensure your customer experience does not become a commodity.

Think about it, how big are your organization’s customer experience goals?

Do you aspire higher? Join us at the Disney Institute Customer Experience Summit, May 23-26, 2017, and learn new ideas and time-tested principles for delivering exceptional CX from one of the world’s most trusted brands.

 This post is sponsored by Disney Institute.

Join the conversation about this story »

China's outbound Merger and Acquisition activity surged in 2015 and 2016 with a broad universe of acquirers executing transactions with an increase in pace and deal size.

This surge has been driven by a range of macro factors, including the pursuit of long-term and sustainable growth, consumption by the rising middle class, and a favorable regulatory and financing environment. Chinese buyers are becoming more active and experienced in M and A and are comfortable executing public takeovers and arranging acquisition financing in overseas markets.

Global mergers and acquisitions set a record in 2015 with transaction volume reaching nearly $5 trillion, driven by the globalization of the M&A market and the emergence of Asia Pacific as a key player in it. Asia Pacific companies’ appetite for M and A has increased due to a range of macro factors, with overall Asia Pacific M and A volume approximately doubling from $748 billion in 2013 to $1.5 trillion in 2015.

Chinese buyers are playing an increasing role in Asia Pacific M and A activity, with their volume nearly tripling from $259 billion in 2013 to $735 billion in 2015. In addition, seven of the 10 largest cross-regional acquisitions out of Asia Pacific in the first four months of 2016 were announced by Chinese buyers.

China is transforming its economy from export-driven manufacturing to one driven by technology, industrial know-how and consumption. The strategic priorities of Chinese buyers have evolved to reflect this shift. Chinese companies are acquiring North American and European companies to enhance technological capabilities and move the nation’s industrial sector upstream, to obtain high-value brands that can be offered to the maturing consumer in China, and to build scale and distribution in strategically important markets and geographies. Chinese companies are looking beyond market share in China to global markets, with their sights set on becoming market leaders globally.

China invested $9.9 billion into new Silicon Valley firms in 2015 and made an additional $3.5 billion in tech investments in the first nine months of last year.

- Boston-based artificial intelligence start-up Neurala
- China bought US tech companies make rocket engines for spacecraft, sensors for autonomous navy ships, and printers that make flexible screens that could be used in fighter-plane cockpit
- In May 2015, Haiyin Capital invested an undisclosed in XCOR Aerospace, a Mojave, Calif., commercial space-travel company that makes spacecraft and engines and has worked with NASA
- In 2016, Tianjin Tianhai bought Ingram Micro for $6.07 Billion
- In 2015,WeEn Semiconductor acquired NXP Power Semiconductors for $1.8 billion. ISSI was acquired by a Chinese consortium for $765 million; and Hua Capital Management Co. Ltd. Acquired OmniVision Technologies for $1.9 billion.
- In 2016, a Silicon Valley start-up called Kateeva that makes machines that print flexible screens raised $88 million from a group of Chinese investors.





Read more »

Tired of being saddled with unfair stereotypes about sales professionals? 

Me. too. That's why I take pains to demonstrate different actions and to disassociate myself from the ones that cause buyers to cringe or to avoid me. 

Welcome to "The Pipeline" — a weekly column from HubSpot, featuring actionable insight from real sales leaders. For more "Pipeline" Content, check out our Flipboard.

You don’t get many chances with your prospects. Send a self-serving, pointless, or pushy email, and they’ll probably write you off. Do it again — and they definitely will.

As a result, you should think carefully about every message you send. Does it provide new information? Does it have a clear purpose? Does it somehow benefit the buyer?

If you can’t answer “yes” to all three of those questions, head back to the drawing board. To help you out, we’ve outlined the five worst types of sales emails and how to fix them.

5 Worst Types of Sales Messages

1. The “Me Me Me” Message

When was the last time you interrupted what you were doing to take an unexpected call from a telemarketer? Probably never.

Sending an outreach message solely focused on your product is essentially the same thing — you’re asking the buyer to pause their work so they can read your sales pitch. Don’t be surprised when these promotional emails get zero responses.

How to Fix This Message

Rather than leading with a description of your product and its features, talk about the prospect's situation and reference a challenge or opportunity they’re probably facing. Once you’ve demonstrated your understanding and experience, your prospect will actually want to talk to you. You’ll have a far better chance of earning their business at this point.

If you’re struggling to craft buyer-focused messages, tell yourself you can’t mention the name of your company or offering.

2. The “Get Rich Quick” Message

Some reps assume promising fantastic returns will make their prospects eager to buy. After all, who wouldn’t want a product that could double their profits in two months or eliminate virtually all of their hiring issues?

However, modern buyers are far too sophisticated to believe these claims. Inflating your solution’s results will only damage your credibility and ensure future emails are sent to the trash.

How to Fix This Message

If you find yourself exaggerating what your product can do, press the “Delete” key. Then find a case study from a customer who’s similar to your current prospect: They’re in the same industry, face the same issues, serve the same market, belong to the same business coalitions, are subject to the same regulations or legislation, and/or exist in the same region.

For instance, you might write, “Canteen, a B2B company that also sells to large-scale furniture stores, saw a 5% decrease in delivery issues after they started using our QA technology … ”

The buyer will be far more swayed by a specific example than a broad claim that seems too good to be true.

3. The “Remember Me?” Message

We all have at least one “friend” who only gets in touch when they need something. You might help them out the first few times, but eventually you’ll cut them loose.

The sales equivalent is the rep who contacts her customers two or three times per year: When they're hoping to upsell or cross-sell them.

Customers see right through this trick, and it gives the impression you only care about their money.

How to Fix This Message

If you want to create a long-lasting relationship that generates real opportunities to grow the size of the account, check in regularly — and make sure you’re providing value rather than making an ask at least half of the time.

Here are several potential reasons to reach out to an existing customer:

• To say congratulations for a recent company or personal announcement
• To make sure they’re satisfied with the product
• To forward them a relevant piece of content
• To wish them happy birthday
• To invite them to a virtual or in-person company event
• To compliment a blog post they wrote
• To send them a tip about the product or their strategy

Sending periodic helpful emails means that, when the time comes to ask for more business, your prospect won’t feel like you’re using them.

4. The Fake Personalized Message

At some point in the future, sales technology may become sophisticated enough that an automated email is indistinguishable from a human one. But we’re not quite there yet — and trying to pass your email off as a stand-alone message when it’s not will only make your recipients angry.

To illustrate, here are some sample lines:

• “I was checking out your website … ”
• “Your company looks like it could use [rep’s product] … ”
• “I’m impressed with your services … ”
• “Glancing at your reviews, I noticed … ”

Basically, any generic statement that could be applied to hundreds or thousands of companies will raise a red flag for your prospects.

How to Fix This Message

The takeaway? Don’t send email blasts. Here’s how you might rewrite each of those lines for a single buyer:

• “I love the minimal design and neutral color palette you chose for your athleisure retail site.”
• “Does Hermagenix have a word-of-mouth marketing strategy in place? I noticed most of your online reviewers mention finding your clinic via Google.”
• “The breadth of the copywriting services you offer is impressive.”
• “Glancing at your Yelp reviews, I noticed your service seems to be pretty variable … ”

5. The “Nudge” Message

It’s frustrating to send your prospect an item that requires their action — something like a meeting invite, pre-call questions, a proposal, or a pricing link — only to hear crickets.

When this happens, reps usually send a well-meaning nudge via email:

• “I know it’s easy for things to get lost in your inbox … ”
• “How’s it going with the questions I sent over on Monday? Can I clarify any of them?”
• “Did you get a chance to review the contract?”
• “Just wanted to check in about scheduling a demo.”
• “In case you missed my first email … ”

Although the salesperson’s trying to sound polite, these messages usually come across as passive-aggressive. Prospects feel like they’re being rebuked.

How to Fix This Message

Of course, sometimes you need to jog the buyer’s memory or motivate them to reply. Find a legitimate reason to follow up so you're not "just checking in."

Once you’ve taken an objective look at the emails you’re sending prospects — and made the appropriate changes — your response rates will increase dramatically. You’ll also find it easier to start and maintain your relationships.

The following is a follow-up guest post by Jeremy Epstein, CEO of Never Stop Marketing, to his previous articles on blockchain marketing, blockchain brand promises, blockchain brand “logos,” and blockchains as brand equity. Jeremy currently works with several of the leading companies in the blockchain and decentralization space.

DON’T MISS A CHANCE TO HEAR JEREMY SPEAK. He will be presenting at the MarTech Conference in San Francisco, May 9-11, with a fascinating talk on Marketing in a Blockchain World. Register now for the “beta” rate discount on tickets to guarantee your seat.

If someone came to you in 1992 and said, “Hey, there’s this thing called the Internet. Let me explain how billions and billions of dollar are going to be created in value in entirely new business models.” How would you have reacted?

The state of the blockchain industry — really, the decentralization industry, is at a similarly nascent stage, and the opportunities are immense.

My friend, and leading blockchain industry analyst, William Mougayar (subscribe to his excellent blog), who wrote The Business Blockchain, makes this comparison frequently.

I’ve co-opted it, and after attending the DC Blockchain Summit recently, I’m even more convinced of this analogy. The point of this post is to explain it and think about it more deeply.

How the Industry is Initially Shaping Up

Aside from the evolution and implementations of the technology, it’s interesting to see how the market is shaping up in a similar way. There are plenty of people focused on leveraging shared ledgers (a.k.a. blockchains) for efficiency gains within the largest enterprises.

They should. In the short-term, there’s a ton of efficiency and waste that should be removed from the system. This is where Accenture, Deloitte, and Cognizant all live.

Cost-reduction is great, but it’s not the same as value creation. As usual, Fred Wilson says it succinctly and with authority in his post, The Golden Age of Open Protocols. I believe that business model innovation is more disruptive that technological innovation.

Which is why I think it’s worth exploring the “blockchain tech stack.” Understanding the stack, even in its earliest stage will help us all begin to explore where the huge value creation will occur.

Understanding the Blockchain Tech Stack

Full disclosure: I got the outline of the blockchain tech stack graphic at the top of this post from Tom Serres (and am using it with his permission). Tom is a co-founder of Animal Ventures with Bettina Warburg (who has a great TED talk you should watch). Together, they have a fantastic Udemy course on the Basics of Blockchain. I took it and highly recommend it.

Ok, so let’s dig in and explore this from the bottom up.

BLOCKCHAINS — as has been said by many people, “It’s just a database.” And that’s pretty much true. It’s a distributed database (instead of centralized) where each entry in the ledger is time-stamped and cryptographically secured and linked to the previous and following set of entries in “blocks” of transactions.

This linkage, if you will, forms a chain of transactions. Hence, “blockchain.” Instead of a central authority stating, “here is the state of the ledger,” the network’s contributors and participants maintain the consensus and reject anything that doesn’t fit.

For a good intro to blockchain, see Common Craft’s overview of blockchains. A bit more technical, but still consumable is this one from MIT.

STORAGE AND CONTENT — A giant spreadsheet of time-stamped transactions doesn’t really require that much storage space. You can keep that on your computer without much fanfare.  But what happens when we have images, audio, video, and VR worlds running off of blockchains?

We’ll need those to protect media rights of creators and ensure redundancy in our systems (to avoid things like the recent Amazon S3 crash).

Think about it this way. Most of us have unused assets that could be turned into value in the form of hard disk space. You may have a 500 GB drive on your computer, but you are only using 200 GB of it.

So, what do you do?

You can rent it out to someone like Storj (disclosure, I own some StorjCoin), Sia (own some of that as well), or FileCoin. Their network protocol then pays you for hosting some of the files that people put on the network. These files are encrypted and sharded (cut up), so you only have a fraction of someone’s file and you have NO idea what’s in it. And, these files are copied to many places, so you don’t even have the only copy of it.

A developer who wants to use one of these protocols as the back-end system for storing the data required in their application then pays the network via one of these coins. So, you may get 1 StorjCoin or SiaCoin for hosting a file. The developer may get 1.1 StorjCoin or SiaCoin from an end consumer for the service the app provides to the end user. That .1 is the profit to the developer. These numbers are totally made up and just for example.

The network doesn’t take a commission at all, which is why these networks will be able to provide the same storage as Amazon or Google for a fraction of the cost, say 90% cheaper. Of course, for it to work, they need hundreds of thousands of people to rent our portions of their computers. In a classic chicken-and-egg problem, those people will only come if there are developers who are building on these platforms — which they will do only if there is enough storage. You get the picture.

Eventually, however, it will be worked out, and the creators of these protocols (at least the winning ones) will see the value of their limited tokens increase because of the increased demand for it. That’s how they will make money.

Investing in the coins of the winning storage protocols now is how you can make money. For a primer on how I invest, you can see this post.

SMART CONTACTS — if you think about a legal contract or a business agreement, it’s essentially a series of “if, then” statements. If Party A agrees to do X, then Party B will do Y. And so on.

Now, if you think about that, you realize that it’s basically the same thing as software code. Put it all together. We call it a “Code of Law,” don’t we? The “legal code.”

Except now, instead of having it in big volumes or stuck in contracts that are just sitting on DocuSign’s servers (eventually replaced by someone like BlockSign), the digitization of all of these assets can be programmed to have the legal and business rules associated with them directly connected to them, not sitting in a “legal silo.”

I’ll give you a simple example of one I used at a site called, appropriately enough, SmartContract.

Let’s say I want to be #1 in SEO for the search term “blockchain marketing” (ed: I’ll give that link juice for example purposes), “marketing in a blockchain world”, or “blockchain + marketing” and a few derivations of that. I might find a world-class SEO person who says, “Yep, I can do that for you in the next 2 months, and it will cost you 2 Bitcoin (or whatever).”

In a traditional model, that person sends me a contract, I sign it, she does the work and then after 2 months, let’s say she gets the job done. She might send me a screenshot saying, “Hey, I did it, now pay me.” I would say, “Okay, send me the invoice.” I’d get the invoice, send it to accounts payable, they would do a check run or whatever and eventually, maybe 30 days later, my vendor gets paid. There’s time, effort, and friction in that process.

In a smart contract, we set up the rule that says, “If the result for search term ‘blockchain marketing,’ goes to Never Stop Marketing on May 21, then pay Sandy 2 Bitcoin. If not, only pay .5 BTC.” We might agree that we will use the .json feed from Google (called an “oracle”) to serve as the arbiter, and then we would both sign it with our unique cryptographic signatures. I would put the 2 BTC into an escrow account for payment. Then, we let it run.

On the prescribed date, the contract queries Google, sees the result and the appropriate amount is released immediately (or not, if it fails). Either way, the contract is recorded in a blockchain and open to verification (here’s one I ran).

Done. Basically no friction or time delay. The provider of the service, in this case, SmartContract gets a transaction fee of .0001 BTC. Do that 10,000,000 times and you have 1,000 BTC — which is $1 million dollars.

DECENTRALIZED ECONOMY — A good primer on this one is Joel Monegro‘s excellent post on Fat Protocols. It’s also where we’re seeing a ton of innovative efforts and initiatives such as OpenBazaar, Fermat’s Internet of People, Steem, Synereo, uPort, Metamask, and Blockstack,  among many, many others.

In this layer of the stack, you will have these protocols, which are basically open-source, portable, and reusable software codified rules, that replace the proprietary systems which dominate our current landscape.

One of the most obvious ways that this layer will be monetized is via so-called “crypto-tokens” or, the more benign, “digital assets.” There’s an explosion of conversation going on around about this now, and I will readily admit that I am still trying to get my head around it.

For some good primers, check out Nick Tomaino’s post, Albert Wenger’s post, and both Jake Brukhman’s and Naval Ravikant’s excellent contributions to the ebook, Blockchains in the Mainstream: When Will Everyone Else Know?. I’ve also blogged on crypto-token possibilities more than once.

The key point here, I think, was summarized well by Nick in the aforementioned post, where he explains the difference between “network effects” (which we all know from phone, fax, email, Skype, etc.) and “network ownership effects,” which is what tokens unleash.

You not only get utility from more people joining the network, but since participation in the network requires ownership and use of network-specific tokens, you actually gain an increase in the value of the tokens you hold.

Let’s take La’Zooz as a very early example. It’s an effort to become a decentralized Uber.

In the Uber model, you join the network, and as more users and drivers join, the utility of the network goes up. As the utility of the network increases, the value of Uber increases, because they are effectively the “protocol” (rule maker), connecting buyers and sellers. The value appreciation goes to the owners of the protocol, in this case, Uber. (Facebook, eBay, Etsy, Craigslist, Twitter and most others in the so-called “sharing economy” fall into this category.)

In the decentralized token economy world, La’Zooz creates a token (which they have, it’s called a “Zooz”) and offers it for ownership to members of the network. Leaving the marketing question aside (though it’s my favorite topic and admittedly, critical), here’s what happens:

Riders need Zoozs in order to pay for rides. Drivers accept Zoozs in return for rides. As there are a finite number of Zoozs — or a predictable inflation to it based on the protocol rules — (though they are digital, so they can be cost-effectively sliced into multiple decimals), the value of each Zooz increases as the demand for them increases.

Let’s think of it this way and keep it very simple.

• There are 100 Zoozs out there.
• Each one is worth $1.
• There are 100 network participants. 50 drivers and 50 riders.
• Each ride costs 1 Zooz.
• As word gets around that La’Zooz is cheaper than Uber, more people want Zoozs. So they trade their dollars or Bitcoins for Zoozs, which increases the price of a Zooz to $2. So now, everyone who has a Zooz has $2 worth of value instead of $1.
• The purchasing power has doubled, so you can afford 2 rides for 1 Zooz instead of 1. So you sell half a Zooz to someone who needs one, keeps the Zooz you want for buying rides and get the profit from the other one.
• The drivers who were charging 1 Zooz now see the value of the ride they gave in the past go from $1 to $2 (retroactively) and are more inclined to accept Zoozs because they expect more people to join the network. In effect, by taking these tokens, you are getting value today and getting value in the future.
• Instead of Uber capturing the value that accrues, the owners of the network (the token holders) capture the value. Whoa!

This is what will happen in all kinds of networks. Identity networks, reputation networks, social networks (why should Facebook get all the value that you create by posting? You should), and many more will eventually take hold.

This is precisely what has happened with Bitcoin over the past 9 years. It’s why Olaf was so damn smart to get paid in Bitcoin only when the price was mega, mega low. He understood this very early on. And it’s why he has started a fund to find the next of these.

You can also research and invest in these (though it’s definitely caveat emptor time). Again, for a primer on how I invest, you can see this post.

Some networks will issue tokens and see the value creation there. And, if you question what’s the incentive for the protocol creators, the answer is that the protocol creators will hold a portion of the tokens for themselves and get to profit from the future value creation.

The number of tokens that the protocol creators receive will be transparently available for inspection by anyone via a blockchain. That way, you or anyone can decide if it’s too much — they are being greedy — or if it’s not enough — they won’t stick around, which seems kind of stupid.

Others will develop the protocol and not issue tokens. They (and others) will attempt to monetize the efforts of the creators of the decentralized economy protocols via the app layer instead.

DISTRIBAUTED APPS (dAPPS) — When you have a shared data layer and a shared protocol, the management of information becomes liberated. It is freed from silos and you have much more flexibility.

Let’s take a simple example, photos.

Right now, you take a picture on your iPhone or Android device and you save it to the cloud. Except the “cloud,” in this case is proprietary. Your iPhone picture sits in iCloud, and if you want to use the photos in any type of application, you need to use iPhoto. But what if you really love the way that Google does the “auto-animation” or if you want Adobe Photohop to interface with the same photo?

Well, you have to download the picture and then upload it to a different proprietary cloud. Now, you have two copies of the picture in two different clouds, both of which are technically owned by you (but now actually owned by Apple and Google) and management, tracking, and rights management (in some cases) becomes even more complicated.

Built on a photo asset tracking protocol, the world of distributed apps works differently.

The data layer is shared among any app that uses the protocol, so any photo editing app can interface with the same original photo. Obviously, you’ll be able to create a copy or version of it based on how you tweak it, but you don’t have to move it around from one proprietary cloud to another.

In this model, you might pay a video editing dApp creator a small token for use of their software (connected back to the protocol we just discussed above) and then a slideshow dApp creator another token for use of their software. All of this will be run in your browser, and the coins will be managed behind the scenes on your behalf. (Brave is starting this trend with micro-payments to publishers in Bitcoin in return for no ads, but there will be more to come.)

As an end consumer, you’ll get faster, cheaper, and definitely more secure application experiences, as well as the knowledge that only you have access to your data. The dApp creator will get value from the payments in creating the most valuable application for interfacing with the protocols below it.  So, if the dApp QuickTime version is the best, everyone can use it — regardless of the OS.

The challenge here, and why Tom labeled it as “volatile,” is because switching costs are basically zero. If I don’t like an app, I can pretty easily move to another one, use the same tokens that I already have, and just start paying the new dApp creator instead. For example, the other day, I moved one of my Bitcoin addresses (the interface to the Bitcoin blockchain) from one wallet provider to another (just to see if I could do it), and I did it in 40 seconds.

Imagine moving your bank account from Citi to CapitalOne in 40 seconds. That’s what we’re talking about and why the UX of these dApps will be the killer differentiator.

So, there’s revenue opportunity and value creation at this layer as well. The person(s) who built the great user experiences will be freed from platforms to focus on utility for the end user and they will be created for it.

The Decentralized Economy Future on the Blockchain Tech Stack

The marketing challenges for this new paradigm are immense. As you can see though, it’s much more than simply a marketing challenge.  It’s a huge opportunity to re-think entire industries and functions and how value will be created and distributed.

Hopefully, this helps all of us think about it a bit more deeply and broadly. I look forward to your comments, feedback, and criticism.
Thanks, Jeremy!

Reminder: Jeremy will be speaking at the MarTech Conference in San Francisco, May 9-11, with a fantastic presentation on Marketing in a Blockchain World. Register now for the “beta” rate discount on tickets to guarantee your seat.

The post The potential of blockchain technology: what every marketer should know appeared first on Chief Marketing Technologist.

Want to get acquired in the future? Build a “Dream 100 acquirer” list and start building relationships now.

I’m helping a client prepare to sell his agency in 4-5 years. He asked, “What is the process to find the ideal acquirer?”

For finding acquirers, I’d start with your building a “Dream 100” list of acquirers.

“Dream 100” is primarily a sales concept, created by sales strategist Chet Holmes—a list of the prospects you most want as clients. Once you make the list, you dedicate your sales efforts to focus on those [100] firms. Here’s a snapshot on Dream 100 clients.

You can extend the “Dream 100” concept to getting acquired, too—what are [100] firms that might be a match to acquire your agency? To start, shoot for ~30 prospective acquirers.

Companies that might acquire your agency

To help you get started, here are ideas of types of companies to put on your list:

1. Agency holding company (e.g., Omnicom or Publicis)
2. Consulting arm of a big accounting firm (e.g., Accenture or Deloitte)
3. Traditional advertising or PR agency that wants digital skills
4. Digital agency that wants your specific technical skills
5. Agency that wants to broaden their client footprint in your geographic region
6. Company that targets your clients
7. VC firm who specialize in your client-industry vertical
8. Large company that would want to bring your capabilities in-house

Start building relationships today to get acquired tomorrow

Once you have your list, work to build relationships with the firms on your Dream 100 acquirer list. This includes following them on social media, subscribing to their newsletter, setting up Google Alerts, and checking LinkedIn to see if you know people who know people at the company.

This approach won’t produce overnight results—but it’ll put you in a stronger negotiating position when it’s time to sell in the future.

Investing time to build that lineup of Dream 100 acquirers (and building relationships with them over the next few years) would likely produce motivated buyers that want to buy your agency. It creates more competition, versus someone buying your agency solely for financial reasons. The emotional attachment (by buyers) to your agency would give you more-favorable terms (including a relatively higher multiple).

Question: What might your ideal acquirer look like?

Two thirds of employees don’t believe senior leadership supports recognition programs. Unsurprisingly, 83 percent report their organization’s culture doesn’t support recognition.

While many members of the C-suite have personally benefited from recognition, their priorities now are operational and financial. They are accountable primarily for the bottom line, sometimes to the detriment of indirect influences on the bottom line.

“Manage the top line, which is your strategy, your people and your products, and the bottom line will follow.” – Steve Jobs

In order to successfully launch employee engagement initiatives like recognition programs, it is important to gain active buy-in by speaking to impact on revenue and costs. The evidence here will help recognition champions address the most common skepticism in the C-suite.

Below are some of the most common misconceptions among senior leadership regarding recognition, and the hard data you’ll need to dispel those myths.

Employees want money, not praise.

Tens of thousands of employees disagree: 82 percent think it’s better to give someone praise than a gift.

Millennials want more than a paycheck, and a big part of that is frequent recognition and feedback. They are not alone: the more employees of any age are recognized, the more satisfied they are with their jobs – even the difference between weekly and daily recognition increases the number of satisfied employees from 85 to 94 percent.

A 2016 survey of over 1,000 employees showed 30 percent would rather be recognized in a company-wide email from an executive than receive a bonus of $500. In fact, within that 30 percent, over ¾ would only choose the bonus over recognition if it was $2,000 or more.

Quality of course matters a great deal. Empty praise and meaningless trinkets can do more damage than nothing at all. Modern recognition programs often empower employees to choose a gift that is meaningful to them personally, leaving the power of the appreciation to come from thoughtful words emphasizing the intrinsic value of their performance.

Values-based recognition programs are also more effective. Beyond acknowledging how employees exemplify corporate values, and signaling to others how that looks, rewards like days off and donations reinforce Employee Value Propositions (EVP) that include work-life balance, community, and social responsibility.

Appreciation has little financial benefit.

For skeptical executives, return on investment must be proven for immediate and long-term benefit to the organization.

Revenue

Willis Towers Watson reported that recognizing performance increases engagement by almost 60 percent. Likewise, Bersin by Deloitte found employee engagement, productivity, and performance are 14 percent higher in workplaces with recognition programs. And organizations at the 99th percentile of employee engagement have four times the success rate as those at the 1st.

Recognition satisfies the human needs of approval, esteem, and affiliation, which triggers the norm of reciprocity to give back to supportive employers. So, when employees perceive the organization values their contributions, they are less stressed; return to work sooner after injury; and, their performance improves: traffic patrol officers make more DUI arrests, and steel company staff make more creative suggestions for improving operations.

A 2017 study of nine organizations confirmed that increased recognition leads employees to predict desired outcomes and therefore invest more into in-role and extra-role work behaviors:

• Conscientiousness in performing job tasks
• Amelioration efforts to improve job tasks
• Collaboration to maximize group efficiency
• Personal initiative to improve group efficiency
• Involvement at the organizational level

Cost

Gallup found that only three in ten employees strongly agree they received recognition in the past seven days. Raising that to six in ten could reduce absenteeism by 27 percent; reduce shrinkage by 10 percent; and, raise quality by 24 percent.

Furthermore, employees who don’t feel recognized are twice as likely to quit within a year. Twenty-nine percent of departing employees cite recognition specifically as a key reason they quit. Turnover costs add up quickly: lost knowledge, lower productivity, overworked remaining staff, recruitment and training… it can cost you twice the salary of each employee who leaves.

Investment

HR usually administers recognition programs, while the budget can be department-specific, centralized, or both. Most organizations (42 percent of those surveyed by WorldatWork in 2015) budget 0.3 percent or less of payroll toward recognition. Bersin by Deloitte reported spending was closer to one percent in 2012.

While there are more intensive options, it doesn’t have to be cumbersome. How does $3/user/month sound for a ready-to-use platform that integrates with your current tools?

We already do recognition.

Your organization, like 89 percent of North American organizations, may have a recognition program already; However, only 24 percent of employees are satisfied with management’s recognition of job performance.

This may have something to do with the fact that years of service remains the most common recognition program, which alone is unlikely to impact employee engagement or retention. If these programs don’t improve business performance, it can lead to doubt in the value of all recognition.

In TINYpulse’s analysis of surveys from 1,000 organizations across the world, they found just 26 percent of employees felt strongly valued at work. Since infrequent and untimely recognition were the main obstacles, they recommend peer-to-peer recognition for job satisfaction and above-and-beyond performance.

Other unintentional barriers include: unclear criteria; limited capabilities to distribute rewards fairly; and, time-consuming forms and approvals process. Senior leaders assume employees are recognized more than annually, but 70 percent of employees report recognition once a year or not at all.

It is not enough to implement any recognition program – it also needs to align with the values and needs of the organization and its people.

Our business is different.

Research consistently proves the power of recognition in the workplace across countries, industries, and demographics. Still, there is nothing more convincing to the C-suite than hard data on exactly how recognition in their own organization leads to measurable profits.

For a comprehensive organizational dashboard, track at least one metric from each of Donald Kirkpatrick’s four levels of evaluation:

Reaction

Pulse surveys and focus groups can be strategically timed and targeted to show an association between employee perceptions of recognition and measures of employee engagement, especially as recognition efforts grow over time.

Learning

Survey employees to gauge their knowledge and beliefs align with the intended culture of recognition. Questions can include how important they find recognition, how to praise publicly, and which kind of recognition is ideal for different scenarios.

Behavior

Use recognition platform data to analyze who is giving and receiving recognition across time, location, team, and demographics. You can also compare how different corporate values are being recognized.

Results

The most direct goal of recognition is to increase incidence of the behavior being recognized. Ultimately, however, those behaviors and recognition culture overall are evaluated by the C-suite in terms of impact on the bottom line. So, look for results in your organization that mirror those in research:

• Improved performance, i.e. quality, innovation, safety, and customer satisfaction
• Increased productivity, i.e. work output, task turnaround, project deadlines, and sales
• Decreased costs, i.e. process improvements and reduced absenteeism
• Turnover statistics, exit interviews, and survey questions on intentions to leave

Quantify all relevant results in financial terms based on information as specific to your organization as possible.

In Conclusion

There are some key facts to take away to your next presentation to gain C-suite buy-in:

• 76 percent of employees are unsatisfied with recognition of job performance.
• Employees who don’t feel recognized are twice as likely to quit within a year.
• 82 percent of employees think it’s better to give someone praise than a gift.
• Recognition increases employee engagement between 14 and 60 percent.
• Employees who feel valued are more present, productive, and innovative.
• Administration and costs are not as cumbersome as you may think.

If you’re ready to take the next step toward building a recognition-rich organizational culture, check out our latest guide:

This is a guest post by Claudio Santori, who’s doing Business Development at Smartly.io.

Smartly.io is a fast-growing Facebook ad optimization solution for agencies and performance marketers. I joined them as employee #32 in the summer of 2015. A few months later, our team had grown to double that size. Now, we’re almost 120 people, and we’re looking to hire 80 more.

We’ve made $15.2 million in revenue in 2016 and there are plenty of opportunities to grow. We’re incredibly proud of what we’ve achieved as a team. But we’ve also made—and learned from—plenty of mistakes along the way.

Product demos that put prospects to sleep

When I first joined as a Business Developer, a big part of my job was demoing our tool to potential customers. The challenge was that there was no formal onboarding process in place when I joined, and my assigned mentor was on holiday. I basically had to onboard myself. Welcome to the startup world.

Back then our typical product demo was an extensive one-hour product training session. Our reps were spending an hour telling the prospect how to use all the different features of our product … without qualifying the prospect or asking what they wanted to learn.

We’re all very proud of the product, and we just loved to talk about how amazing our platform was and all the cool features it had. I remember when once I asked a question in the middle of a demo and the assistant told me that her boss had left to take another phone call ... oops!

Fortunately, our product has always created a lot of value for our customers, and most of our leads came through referrals. Typically, they were experienced Facebook marketers that could easily recognize the benefits (despite our terrible demos). This meant it was relatively easy to close new customers, no matter how bad our demos were.

However, that would soon change. By the end of 2015, our headcount had doubled. We now had offices in Europe, Asia, and North America, and we were expanding into new verticals.

Our demo close rates went down, and we realized something needed to change.

Product demos that sell

I remembered a training session I had with Steli while working at another startup. I knew he had written a book on product demos and was now properly motivated to read it.

I started with Chapter 1: The Seven Deadly Sins of Demoing.

We committed every single one of them. Literally. We made every mistake he laid out in the first chapter of that book. It’s as if it was written for us.

I kept reading and started changing the way I conducted my product demos. I asked more questions, qualified properly, made the demos shorter, focused on value instead of features, ended with a strong close and followed the other advice from the book.

My demo close rates skyrocketed. Other reps got their hands on the book. Their close rates also went up, up, up. But that’s just the beginning.

Our 10X sales hiring & onboarding hack

One of the challenges we faced now was scaling the team. We were growing fast, and we needed a lot more people. But recruiting all these people, screening all these applications and interviewing all these prospects took a lot of time.

Oftentimes, we had a candidate go through a lengthy recruiting process, only to fail at the final stage: they had to give us a demo of Smartly. Many otherwise promising candidates failed at this, after both we and they had invested a substantial amount of time into the recruiting process.

Here’s what our hiring process looks like:

1. An initial discussion to understand values and culture fit.
2. A homework assignment, where we ask you to give advice to a fictional German e-commerce website. We’ll give you an excel file with the e-commerce’s current results and you need to tell us what and how to improve.
3. If the homework is good, we go deeper into Facebook marketing, asking questions about bidding, lookalike audiences, the mobile app, tracking and so on.
4. If everything goes well, we want to see a Smartly demo, during which you (the recruitment candidate) simulate a sales call where we are the German e-commerce website and you try to sell us our tool.

It’s phase four where many candidates faltered.

One day, a promising recruit was giving us a demo of the platform and we had to stop him halfway. The demo wasn’t just bad. It was terrible. He committed all the 7 deadly demo sins. “Stop right there. This is a waste of time, this demo is not going well. But I’d hate to lose you. You seem to be a great fit, but you need to learn how to give a great demo. There’s a book that I can recommend for you. If you’re still interested in working with us, you can read it and then try to demo us again.”

He was interested and read the book. We got on another call and he absolutely nailed it! We hired him on the spot. Next thing we did? We ordered 60 copies of Product Demos That Sell from Amazon and gave away free copies to all our promising new candidates.

We’re now giving the book to all new candidates. Our recruiting process is much more effective, and we’re able to grow the team faster. New hires get onboarded much better than when I joined. Even the ones we don’t hire often thank us for the things they learned in the recruiting process.

Interested in joining us?

To work at Smartly.io you don't need to have a deep background in online advertising or Facebook marketing. All we want to see is that you are a fast learner. Being Humble Hungry Hunters is part of our culture, and a big part of that is learning. So we’re curious to see how fast you go from where you are to 10x. And then to 10x again.

Right now, we’re hiring across all departments: sales, engineering, marketing and so on. Check out our open positions.

Bonus: Free copy of Product Demos That Sell

Get a free copy of Product Demos That Sell on Amazon today and read it on your favorite ebook reader. (If you already have the PDF version, here's your chance to get the ebook version).

To claim your free copy, click on the book below and select the Kindle version.

How many times have you salvaged a crummy day by catching up on your favorite show or diving into the latest series from Amazon or Netflix? Adorned in your favorite pair of sweats and armed with your snack and beverage of choice, you get comfortable and prepare yourself for a major entertainment moment.

“Just one episode,” you say.

One hour passes, then two, then three.

Similar to an old-timey film, you see the sun through your window as it slowly sets. You blink and feel like it’s immediately replaced by the moon. Yep, you spent your whole day bingeing on content.

I find the term “bingeing” to be a bit cringe-worthy. (My guess is because it sounds very similar to “belch.”) But the reality is that we’re seeing more people adapt bingeing behaviors in their personal lives — that’s why it’s aptly called “The Netflix Model.” But B2B buyers are adapting this behavior in their professional lives, too.

B2B marketers are capitalizing on this movement by creating content hubs, assembling tailored toolkits and even embedding myriad callouts promoting supplementary content within their static assets. But before you determine the best way for your organization to embrace content bingeing, you need to understand why this movement is happening. Here are a few key reasons why content bingeing may be the future of the B2B buyer experience:

1. Attention spans are shortening, and they’re overwhelmed with options: Yes, this is the all-too-common fact that articles call out, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the fact that your buyers are time-starved and often inundated by the amount of information at their disposal. This is kind of a “well, duh” fact, so I’ll just close this point out with this: 77% of buyers who participated in Demand Gen Report’s 2017 Content Preferences Survey say they have less time to devote to reading and researching, while 88% say they’re overwhelmed by the amount of content available. Content toolkits, hubs and other experiences that enable them to binge, and can help make the content discovery and consumption experience a lot less daunting.
2. No two buyers are alike: This point actually ties closely to the preceding one. You have to accept and adapt to the fact that your audience is hopping between tasks and likely has at least 10 web page tabs open at a time. At the same time, though, you need to understand that your audience is extremely different. (Another “well, duh” point, I’m sure.) What drives Emily to open a marketing email may be vastly different than what captures David’s attention. One of your leads may want to read one really detailed, foundational piece of content, while another person may only have time to skim through a series of short, more visual pieces that get to the point quickly. You not only need to have a diverse content library that addresses all of these preferences, you need to give them the power to access as much or as little content as they want at a time.
3. Relevance trumps entertainment value: Of course, creating relevant content that’s also entertaining is always the ultimate goal. But how many times have we toiled over how we can make an asset edgier and make it “go viral”? (I absolutely abhor the term “go viral,” but that’s a topic for another day.) Because we have such a narrow view of the content and experiences we want to create, we end up focusing on gotcha-marketing tactics like click-bait headlines and leveraging influencers just for the hell of it. Really, though, your buyers are just looking for more relevant content experiences. In fact, 58% of buyers want related content packaged together, according to the 2017 Content Preferences Survey. They also want vendors to organize content by more personal parameters — for example, by business role (67%) and industry (64%). These preferences play well into the bingeing concept. Just like Netflix organizes film and TV recommendations based on past behaviors, preferences and top genre/theme categories, your brand has the opportunity to tailor content experiences based on buyer-focused parameters.That’s why many folks are saying content bingeing is critical for successful account-based marketing (ABM) strategies.
4. Buyers don’t want barriers: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve stopped engaging with a brand because it was too difficult to access their content or they kept throwing forms in my face. This is an ongoing reality for your buyers as they research pressing business issues and potential solutions. They want brands to break down the gate and implement methods such as content packaging/bundling (58%) and single-click access (71%). By creating a content bingeing experience, you can group as many content assets together as you want, bundling them based on specific trends and topics, and incorporating a mixture of different formats and assets aligned to different buyer stages.

B2B buyers are becoming more empowered and have more options at their fingertips. Rather than fighting this, and their newfound media consumption habits, brands need to think of new and creative ways to publish and group their content. Has your marketing team embraced the content bingeing phenomenon? We’d love to hear your experiences in the comments section below!

By now, nearly everyone in B2B marketing has heard about account-based marketing. Heck, ABM has practically become synonymous with B2B. You probably know how it works, and how it can positively impact your business — but understanding the underlying principles of ABM is only half of the battle.

To facilitate this process, Terminus developed the ABM Strategies Framework. This strategic framework will help you select account-based marketing strategies based on your business goals and the level of sophistication of your ABM program.

Now it’s important to remember that account-based marketing is not about generating net new leads. Lead generation is easy, and demand generation is hard. The difference in the two is quality and knowing your best-fit accounts to go after.

That being said, ABM is an important part of any demand generation strategy and to create more velocity within your best-fit accounts to win more deals.

In this post, I want to focus on five ABM strategies that are essential for growing new revenue.

1. Pretargeting
2. Account Nurture
3. Lead-to-account nurture
4. Pipeline acceleration
5. “Wake the Dead”

1. Pretargeting

Pretargeting is “smarketing” at its finest. It’s a demand generation strategy designed to complement your outbound efforts. To generate demand and warm up net-new named accounts for sales, you can deploy relevant digital ads across social, video, mobile, and display.

By serving targeted ads to stakeholders at your best-fit accounts, you can drive greater engagement — and not just with a single lead, but with all key decision-makers at each company. The biggest benefit of a pretargeting strategy is the ROI. When you place your ads in front of only the people who you want to see them, you avoid wasting money on unqualified accounts. If you’re employing a 1:1 ABM strategy, your ads and marketing offers can even be highly personalized to each individual.

Tip: Pretargeting is a useful strategy for driving decision-makers to events. Use account-based advertising to generate awareness about the event, and then follow up with a personalized invitation from a sales rep.

2. Account Nurture

Account nurture campaigns aim to engage key stakeholders at target accounts that you already have in your database and convert them to sales pipeline. Because the B2B sales cycle is long and often complicated, many of the accounts you’re marketing to won’t be immediately ready to make a purchasing decision. Don’t make the mistake of letting these accounts go to waste just because they’re not going to turn into immediate sales.

Instead, use account-based nurturing to continue to present your messaging and content to those accounts over time, keeping your company top-of-mind until they are ready to convert into a sales opportunity.

3. Lead-to-account Nurture

If your goal is to generate demand while dipping your toes in the ABM water, this is the strategy for you. As you use inbound marketing strategies to generate leads, you can “bolt on” account-based marketing by expanding your reach at those leads’ companies. You can do this using digital ads to nurture the entire buying committee.

Lead-to-account nurturing and bolt-on ABM solve one of the basic challenges of lead-based marketing: being unable to reach the entire buying committee within a company. Bolt-on ABM is the fastest way to extend marketing’s reach to all of the influencers and decision-makers in an account while nurturing an individual lead. This type of ABM is easily automated and can be added to existing marketing automation flows.

If you already have a successful, high-converting lead generation program, this may be a good place to start with ABM. If you’re not generating lots of high-quality leads, we recommend starting with a pretargeting strategy to target net-new named accounts.

4. Pipeline Acceleration

Pipeline acceleration campaigns support sales efforts to engage more influencers and decision-makers at target accounts and move them to the next positive stage in the buying cycle more quickly. You can do this using digital advertisements, sales rep engagement, field marketing activities, and events to educate and build a relationship with your potential customers through each stage of the buying process.

At many companies, pipeline acceleration is a vastly underutilized strategy. That’s because traditional marketing methods — emails in particular — can feel intrusive during the sales process. Not only that, but they’re limited to the same contacts that your sales team is working.

With an account-based pipeline acceleration strategy, however, you can use tactics like digital ads to reach additional stakeholders, helping to build consensus at your target accounts and move your accounts through the pipeline more quickly.

5. “Wake the Dead”

At any given time, your database is full of “dead” accounts that aren’t actively participating in the sales cycle. But don’t be fooled; these accounts aren’t actually dead! To bring these inactive accounts back to life, you can target them with ABM campaigns and revive their interest.

Not only does this remind your target accounts about your solution, it also allows you to reach additional contacts at each account — contacts that may be more receptive to your messaging and more likely to engage with your brand.

Tyler Lessard, CMO at Vidyard and an “ABM Superhero” has an awesome use case about how his team used ABM to revive more than $1 million in pipeline for sales.

Using these strategies, you can ensure you’re nurturing your target accounts from “click-to-close”. Now you might be thinking, “Shouldn’t customer marketing campaigns be part of my ABM strategy?” And you’re absolutely right! Land and expand, cross-selling, upselling, etc. is a big part of ABM.

To learn more, download the full Blueprint to Account-Based Marketing. The worksheets in the back of this blueprint are extremely helpful for designing these campaigns across the entire account’s journey, going beyond the purchase decision to continue nurturing your customer accounts.

By downloading this eBook, you will also receive OpenView’s weekly newsletter with tips for building a SaaS business.

The post 5 Must Try Account-Based Marketing Campaigns appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Let’s face it: digital media marketing isn’t exactly straightforward.

A constantly shifting landscape, technology and marketing strategies with little definitive data. Whether you’ve been a part of this ecosystem for years or weeks, trying to decide exactly what kind of digital media marketing strategy you should recommend to small businesses can quickly become a frustrating experience.

And yet, no one is more susceptible to the confusion of the marketing world than the local small business owner. More often than not, they’ve spent most of their time and energy focusing on building a product/providing a service.

The unrelenting speed of the digital media marketing world makes it a challenge to keep up, especially when they have a business to run. That’s why they turn to digital/marketing agencies to choose the best tools for the job.

‘Tools’ being the operative word.

There’s no catch-all SaaS solution that will accomplish all of your client’s goals.

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To create an effective Marketing Stack every aspect of the customer experience needs to be accounted for and handled. Fortunately, there’s a SaaS solution to every step of the customer’s’ journey.

That’s where the Marketing Stack comes in. Designing a marketing strategy from the ground up to guide users from prospect to converted customer. Of course, there will be slight tweaks for a Local Marketing Stack (a focus on local SEO, for example), but the idea remains the same.

Inspired by the infographic below from Tidings, here’s some guidance to help identify the best tools that agencies can provide their clients. It’s worth mentioning that if a small business has just begun to develop an online presence, agencies will likely need to completely overhaul their digital presence.

Naturally, it’s important to conduct research whenever adding a new SaaS vendor, and where do consumers go to research software products?

Capterra.com

G2Crowd.com

Issues that agencies will have to resolve include:

-Have they already started Payroll/Accounting/Payments?

-Do they have a website? Is it optimized?

-Have they decided what type of Content they’ll be creating?

-Are they using Analytics on Social?

Considering the undeniable importance of having a healthy digital media presence (with 50% of local searches leading to store visits within a day), local business owners can’t afford to leave those kinds of questions unanswered.

Business Planning Software:

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Business planning, performance tracking, budgeting…there’s no getting around the fact that managing a business plan can be a complex, tedious process, even for the most seasoned of local small business owners.

LivePlan

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As one of the premier business plan SaaS products, LivePlan was designed from the ground up to support business owners trying to keep track of their business. Setting business goals and comparing performance using industry benchmarks, all from the comfort of a user-friendly dashboard, it’s no wonder that so many business owners use LivePlan.

Here’s what people are saying about LivePlan:

Pros:

• Straightforward User Interface
• Top-notch Guidance Notes
• Rich and Clean Output

Cons:

• Could offer more accounting platform integration

Accounting Software:

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Speaking of keeping track of the success of a business plan, having the right tools when it comes to accounting can make a world of difference for a local small business owner.

QuickBooks

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As one of the leading account software services for small businesses, QuickBooks lets business owners manage every aspect of their finances through this platform. With instant access to every aspect of your customer, vendor and employee information, QuickBooks covers every aspect of a business owner’s accounting needs.

Here’s what people are saying about QuickBooks:

Pros:

• Free Customer Support
• Billing and Invoicing
• Accounts Payable and Receivable

Cons:

• Occasionally confusing for first-time users

Customer Service Software:

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No matter what kind of business they’re dealing with, customers expect efficient, effortless service. They expect an experience that’s as frictionless as possible, with accurate, speedy answers to any questions they have. The modern consumer has high standards, and the key to meeting them lies within optimized operations and customer service.

Userlike Live Chat

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If you’re looking for speed and efficiency, there’s nothing live chat. The best thing business owners can do is make an effort to be there for their customers when they need them the most. Userlike Live Chat revolves around the idea that no matter where customers are, business owners can work with them to find a solution to their problem.

Here’s what people are saying about Userlike Live Chat:

Pros:

• Automated Routing
• Automatic Customer Notices
• Customer Database

Cons:

• Needs more intuitive website visitor metrics

Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) Software:

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Every local business owner knows that happy customers are the life force of any successful business. CRMs are essentially a form of software that simplifies the process of customer service.

Pipedrive

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The best CRM software helps local business owners properly take care of their customer relationships, something Pipedrive puts a premium on. As a user-friendly, intuitive solution for business owners, Pipedrive helps make sure that critical conversations and activities don’t get lost in the sea of the sales pipeline.

Here’s what people are saying about Pipedrive:

Pros:

• Contract Management
• Interaction Tracking
• Lead Management

Cons:

• Difficulty filtering more than one specific

Analytics Software:

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The keys to tracking web analytics work in two parts. First, businesses need to define their goals clearly. Once they understand which metrics matter the most to them, they’ll have a way to track traffic, click-through rate, time on page…you get the idea.

Agency Analytics

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When business owners need an analytics program, they should turn to software like Agency Analytics. Not only does it offer tools like rank tracking, audits and backlinks, but it also manages to integrate other services like social media and PPC.

Here’s what people are saying about Agency Analytics:

Pros:

• Rank Tracking
• Audits
• Backlinks

Cons:

• A bit too complex for some users

Paid Marketing Software:

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On the other end of the spectrum, paid marketing is certainly becoming more important, particularly when it comes to outreach on social media. Paid marketing is less about spending as much money as possible and more about spending more in the right places.

Allocadia

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What makes Allocadia such a useful tool for business owners is just how easy-to-use their user interface is. Not only does the software make tracking individual budgets easy, but it manages to ensure that business owners can keep track of multiple different budgets at once, if necessary.

Here’s what people are saying about Allocadia:

Pros:

• Intuitive User Interface
• Track multiple budgets at once
• Great customer service

Cons:

• Constantly updating User Interface can be a challenge for some

Content Marketing Software:

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Speaking of marketing, local small businesses can benefit massively once they understand the core principles of content marketing. If they want to produce engaging content, they need to resist the urge to shamelessly self-promote. There’s a difference between tastefully mentioning your own company when it’s relevant and turning every post into a thinly-veiled pat on the back.

Hubspot

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There’s a reason that HubSpot has been as successful as it’s been in the world of marketing software. While HubSpot offers quite a variety of services, one of the most underrated is their content marketing support.

Here’s what people are saying about HubSpot:

Pros:

• Personalized, dynamic content
• Phenomenal Metrics
• Create SEO-friendly blog posts

Cons:

• May be too expensive for some small business owners

Social Media Marketing Software:

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With social media marketing becoming more and more important every day, it’s no wonder that social analytics software has risen in popularity. Frankly, when most of your customers (potential and current) are all in one place, it’s in your best interest to understand what they’re trying to tell you. And while it might be nice to get a Like or a Retweet, how many of us know that actual worth of one?

Buffer

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What makes Buffer such a powerful tool is that it allows business owners to share their content throughout the day, automatically. Beyond that, Buffer offers some impressive analytic support, to give business owners a better idea of where they should be posting, and how often.

Here’s what people are saying about Buffer:

Pros:

• Affordable Pricing
• Easy to Use Interface
• Plenty of Customer Support

Cons:

• Limitations on free version

Sales Software:

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Something that most people don’t consider when they first look at the world of digital media marketing is that customers and members of your community are likely to be in different stages of the sales cycle.

Velocify

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To understand what makes Velocify so special, you need to understand the power of its versatility. While some may use it as a lead management tool, business owners can use this as an effective way to track and manage sales performance.

Here’s what people are saying about Velocify:

Pros:

• Easy Organization
• Tracking Multiple Pipelines
• Highly Versatile

Cons:

• Can become confusing without proper management

Lead Management Software:

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Even the most effective marketing strategy is useless without a reliable system that converts. But before business owners can start focusing on sales, they need a system that helps organize their leads.

Integrate

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This software actually works with a holistic focus on marketing and sales. Integrate is about automating top-of-funnel demand marketing efforts. By using marketing automation and predictive software, they can create efficient marketing organizations with cleaner, faster prospect data.

Here’s what people are saying about Integrate:

Pros:

• Activity Tracking
• Campaign Management
• Lead Capture

Cons:

• Metrics Precision could be improved (daily clicks instead of monthly)

Sales Enablement Software:

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Something that most people don’t consider when they first look at the world of digital media marketing is that customers and members of your community are likely to be in different stages of the sales cycle.

Ving

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If business owners are looking to qualify prospects more effectively (and more importantly, who to contact to convert), Ving will be their best bet. As a simple, trackable platform full of information, Ving gives business owners real-time notifications to help them uncover their best practices.

Here’s what people are saying about Ving:

Pros:

• User-Friendly Dashboard
• Collaborative System
• Ability to add Video, Audio, Text to Information

Cons:

• Video/Audio preparation can be an issue occasionally

Landing Page Software:

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Arguably one of the most important aspects of turning a prospect into a converted customer is having a landing page that enables conversions. Simply put, business owners need to create landing pages that people will love.

Instapage

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The easiest way to understand Instapage is to view it a vehicle for personalized digital advertising. It provides a top-to-bottom solution that quickly helps business owners build, integrate and optimize their landing pages.

Here’s what people are saying about Instapage:

Pros:

• A/B Testing
• Drag and Drop User Interface
• Templates Available

Cons:

• Customer Support suffers in lower packages

Review Management and Marketing Software:

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If you’re going to play the digital media marketing game, you might as well play it right. To stay ahead of the competition and maximize your search rankings, local business owners will need to understand how to integrate SEO into the rest of their marketing strategy.

We already touched on it earlier, but it’s worth mentioning again that the power of word-of-mouth marketing shouldn’t be underestimated. Most modern consumers have been bombarded with so many disingenuous ads that they’ve become numb to a business singing its own praises to them. That’s why referrals from another person are such a massive deal. That vote of confidence can convince more than 80% of consumers to give a particular business a shot.

Grade.us

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The software offered here at Grade.us helps businesses acquire, monitor, and amplify their 3rd party reviews. Not only is the dashboard easy to use, it’s intuitive enough that first-timers will be ready to navigate it almost instantly.

Here’s what people are saying about Grade.us:

Pros:

• Affordable
• In-depth, Comprehensive Marketing Coverage
• Unlimited Users/Clients/Locations

Cons:

• Entry level Marketer package may not be comprehensive enough to handle every aspect of your marketing strategy, depending on the size of your business

Advertising Software:

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Nearly every major social media network implements some type of content preferential system, designed to prioritize paid content.

But that’s far from the only form of paid advertising. For example, paid search marketing has had its ups and downs over the last few years. Some people have gone as far as to say that it’s dying or dead. While certain aspects of it are on their way out, campaigns like pay-per-click (PPC) can still help business owners convert more effectively.

Sizmek

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No matter which type of advertising business owners choose, they’re going to need the right tools for the job. Sizmek offers a personalized solution for end-to-end advertising. With a wide range of strategies and solutions, Sizmek lets local small business owners build impressive, cohesive campaigns that help connect businesses to their audiences easily and effectively.

Here’s what people are saying about Sizmek:

Pros:

• Efficient User Interface
• Testing Mode provides Massive Insight
• Fantastic Customer Support

Cons:

• Customization controls can be a bit stiff

Closing Thoughts

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It’s important to keep in mind that alone, none of these tools are comprehensive enough to handle every aspect of a small business Marketing Stack. These SaaS solutions shine as parts of a whole, each playing specific roles to support your client’s marketing strategy.

There’s nothing easy about developing (or maintaining) an online presence, but one thing is for sure: any small business armed with these SaaS solutions is going to be much better equipped to tackle the ever-changing digital media marketing landscape.

Artificial Intelligence will revolutionize B2B sales.

AI is rapidly creeping its way into the software we use on a daily basis. Everything from CRM to Account Based Marketing (ABM) to marketing automation is getting “smarter.” The promise of AI-powered systems to suggest qualified leads to a B2B sales person is very exciting.

One aspect of AI that is very exciting is its ability to tap into unstructured data to learn more about prospects as they engage with a brand’s digital channels. Examples of unstructured data include online engagement such as tweets, comments, likes, shares, etc.

Think about the potential for smarter systems to reduce much of the heavy lifting associated with identifying qualified sales opportunities.

Big Changes to B2B Sales Processes

As software continues to get smarter, we must also consider how the B2B sales person’s role and the sales process will change. The B2B sales professional must demonstrate in the long run that he/she can evolve and manage the new sales process, which will no longer be characterized as the sales process, but rather the buyer’s journey.

AI Will Flip the B2B Sales Process Upside Down

As AI technology becomes more readily available, it will change sales processes in mid to large enterprises. Consider that subject matter experts are employed throughout an organization. Traditionally, salespeople get assigned by geography, vertical industry or named accounts. As “leads” come in, they get assigned to a rep. However, in the future, AI will conduct “match making” by identifying internal SMEs who are “best fit” to follow up on leads.

This model will create a new sales culture that permeates across the entire business. SMEs across the company will “opt-in” to engage with prospective buyers. People who had not previously contributed directly to revenue producing activities will have the opportunity to participate. I anticipate a change in compensation plans to allow for more people across the business to participate in such revenue production activities.

The Role of the B2B Sales Person Will Change

The new B2B sales professional in an AI-powered world will be part data scientist and part manager. She will be responsible for managing engagement between multiple prospective buyers and multiple internal SMEs. She’ll leverage analytics delivered through a dashboard-like interface. She’ll also use her management skills to navigate the complex intercommunications between prospects and SMEs.

Internal SMEs whose full-time jobs can range from customer care to analyst to engineer will leverage system-generated messaging – powered by AI of course – to enable engagement with prospects rapidly. In just a click or two, a personalized message from an SME will be delivered to a prospect that demonstrates relevancy and helpfulness. Here’s a potential scenario in the AI-powered B2B selling eco-system.

An analyst is a member of a buying committee for a new enterprise system. He reads a technical blog post published by a vendor whose product is under consideration. He clicks on one of the links in the blog post to access more detail and opts in to download a spec sheet. The vendor’s system identifies two engineers who share common attributes with the analyst who downloaded the spec sheet. Such common attributes determined by the system might include recent activity on other blogs or social media, or an advanced degree from the same university as the two engineers, or any number of other common attributes, all of which are learned by the system.

One of the engineers accepts the “match” and reads a message that has been written by the AI powered system. Note, the message was not previously written by anyone. Deep learning and language processing technology is used to write a unique message by the system. The engineer accepts the message, but she chooses to make a minor edit before sending it. The highly-personalized message is sent to the analyst who downloaded the spec sheet.

Rather than getting a call or email from a sales person – who is far less likely to have something in common with this analyst – the system enabled a relevant match, followed by a highly-personalized message from someone who is far more relevant to the analyst.

Because the system is “smart” other possibilities include triggering yet another engagement from someone else that is like the analyst if the system doesn’t learn that a positive action occurred from the first outreach.

Meanwhile, the sales person is watching this through a dashboard-like interface. She is being told by the system where the buyer is in the journey – 27% or 39% or 78% – based on the productivity of the engagement activity.

The data science part of the sales person’s role is to monitor multiple scenarios like this. The management part is to orchestrate the process by making judgements on several variables. Similar to an airline pilot turning a nob to shift course, the sales person will make decisions to direct the system to engage other SMEs to aid the buyer’s journey.

The sales person must oversee the internal “match making” generated by AI powered systems, ultimately ensuring the prospect has a great experience which much emphasis on the buyer’s journey experience. She will also monitor the prospective buyer’s engagement with competitors and her management skills will enable her to determine next steps, including when she should insert herself into the conversation.

B2B AI Software in Action

The scenario described above is not sci-fi. It’s real. If it’s not available today, it’s months or quarters away, not years.

The following companies are a small sampling of those delivering AI-powered systems in B2B marketing and sales.

Available Today for B2B Marketing and Sales

Salesforce Einstein

In B2B, Salesforce Einstein is the closest to delivering an experience as described above. It learns from your data and makes predictions and recommendations for customer engagement that can lead to more sales.

IBM Watson Commerce

IBM Watson Commerce uses AI for cognitive learning to deliver personalized, omni-channel experiences to give customers what they want, where and when they want it.

Demandbase

Demandbase DemandGraph uses AI to identify business behavior and relationships by understanding the digital footprint of web activity by businesses, including unstructured data across the web.

Scoop.it

Scoop.it Content Director uses predictive insights to content that has a good probability of being useful to your buyer.

Ceralytics

Ceralytics uses AI-powered content intelligence to identify content that has performed well in the past from your brand and from your competitors, so you can make decisions on the content you should produce with a higher probability of performing well.

Nuance

The Nuance Customer Engagement platform provides conversion marketing through a smart live-chat agent to approach customers without being intrusive.

Lithium Technologies

When Lithium acquired Klout, the online community and social media technology company was well positioned to branch out from its community roots to build a workflow publishing product targeted at social networks. “We could do that with our investment over the years on AI and machine learning behind Klout. That’s been our biggest move so far and we’ve already helped some great brands,” Lithium Technologies CEO, Rob Tarkoff said.

AI Software Watch List

Facebook

While not considered a B2B force to reckon with, we cannot ignore the massive work underway on AI at Facebook through Facebook AI Research (FAIR). Facebook has been using AI in the user experience for some time. Look for Facebook to one day encroach on B2B tech leaders such as Salesforce.

Microsoft

At the time of this writing, Microsoft’s primary AI offering is focused on voice recognition via Cortana and chatbots. In September 2016, Microsoft announced creation of a new AI and Research Group. An excerpted quote from Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella says…”We are focused on empowering both people and organizations by democratizing access to intelligence to help solve our most pressing challenges. To do this, we are infusing AI into everything we deliver across our computing platforms and experiences.”

What About LinkedIn?

Likewise, at the time of this writing most of what is known about LinkedIn’s AI endeavors is tied to their Talent Solutions division which has delivered more than 60% of their revenues. LinkedIn’s Vice President of Engineering, Deepak Agarwal says “Data is our biggest asset. Without AI and machine learning, you’re not going to be able to surface the right insights to the right users and customers.” Considering that Microsoft now owns LinkedIn, I anticipate seeing more AI integrated into their offerings in the coming months and years to come.

A Crowded AI Sales and Marketing Tech Market

The list of technology companies harnessing AI is long. Oracle is in the game with Oracle Adaptive Intelligent Applications. SAP is also telling their AI story with SAP S/4HANA. The growing list of well-funded AI startups is also growing at a dizzying pace.

What You Should Do Now about AI in B2B Sales

If you’re focused on this quarter and next quarter, go ahead and ignore this blog post. However, if you’re focused on navigating the next two years, the advice we’re giving our clients is to dip your toe in the water with AI. No need to dive in head first. Start out by harnessing AI technology to develop a more effective content marketing plan that will deliver improved sales leads.

In the meantime, keep an eye on these companies and others that get on your radar with AI-powered marketing and sales technology. Ground yourself in the reality that AI is not going away. Many have said that AI is the biggest thing in technology EVER – even bigger than the Internet!

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