It's both appealing and disturbing to think that taking a pill could boost someone's brainpower to make them "smarter."

Films like "Limitless" and "Lucy" create fantasies of cognition-enhancing drugs that practically provide superpowers. In the real world, college students and finance workers have been known to cram while hopped up on medications like Adderall and Ritalin, pharmaceuticals normally used to treat attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

But data has historically been mixed when researchers investigated the impact of those drugs on mental capacity. Some studies have found so-called "smart drugs" to have cognitive benefits, but others have shown they don't make a difference for many people, especially those of average or above-average intelligence.

A new study that tested the effects of various cognitive enhancers on chess players might help clear up that mystery. Findings show that the drugs modafinil (commonly known as Provigil) and methyphenidate (frequently known as Ritalin or Concerta) can both improve the performance of chess players — those studied were better at performing the mental calculations needed to play chess after taking the drugs. However the study also revealed some of the limitations of these effects, since the drugs' enhancement came at a cost to time management, especially for players who already struggled to play quickly.

Better but slower chess players

The researchers selected 40 above-average chess players for the study. All were men, with an average age of 37 and an average IQ of 127.7. The group had an average Elo rating (a rating system for chess skill) in the 1670s, which puts them significantly above the novice level though not quite in the expert or master categories. 

The researchers then had the players take a dose of either caffeine, modafinil, methylphenidate, or a placebo before playing a series of timed 15-minute matches against a computer. They played one set of 10 games in the morning, then took another dose of whatever substance they had been randomly assigned to take in the afternoon, and played 10 more games. The participants would have at least a week off before coming back to do it again. In total, the researchers used data from 3,059 chess games.

In their first analysis, they found that the players on caffeine, modafinil, or methylphenidate did about 6-8% better than those on placebos — enough to see a trend but not enough to be statistically significant (to rule out the possibility, in other words, that their improved results were due to chance).

But in taking a closer look at the data, the researchers found that players spent significantly more time thinking about each move they made after taking the drugs. This seems to have made them worse at time management, especially the players who already struggled with timed games.

At the same time, the players seemed to be making better moves during that time. "This suggests that neuroenhancers ... improve the players' ability or willingness to spend more time on a decision and hence to perform more thorough calculations," the authors wrote.

The researchers then looked at the data in two other ways: they discounted the games lost because time ran out (for all players), and also removed the five players who struggled most with time management from the data set. These analyses significantly improved the results for modafinil and methylphenidate — the odds of winning while doping improved by five percentage points, enough to "bring a player from world rank 5000 to 3500 (+35 Elo points)," according to the researchers.

"In sum, these results suggest that most players will benefit from [cognitive enhancement], in particular from modafinil and methylphenidate, while those who tend to be rather slow thinkers may perform worse in time-restricted games," the authors wrote in the study. For people who don't play chess, the study also suggests that these sorts of improvements are likely to translate to other complex tasks.

What does 'smarter' really mean?

The key to figuring out whether smart drugs — also known as nootropics — can boost brainpower is to determine exactly what sort of "smarts" are being improved. And in many ways, this recent study is one of the most informative investigations of nootropics' effects.

Several prior tests of these drugs didn't find any brain-boosting effects, but those were measuring mental deficiencies — looking at just one component of cognition and assessing when something wasn't working. Those types of tests therefore aren't great at measuring improvement in a way that mirrors real-life problem-solving.

"Rarely in life do we spend an entire day using a sole cognitive sub-domain – attention, for example," Oxford researchers Ruairidh Battleday and Anna-Katherine Brem told Business Insider via email in a previous discussion about smart drugs. "Rather, we constantly plan, predict, and problem solve – all of which involve marshaling subdomains of cognition and integrating their output over varying tasks and difficulties."

A test that just measures attention might only highlight the instances in which someone isn't focusing, but might not be able to measure improvement beyond a certain point. 

"It is in this sense that complex tasks can approximate everyday functioning better than simple," Battleday and Brem wrote.

The thinking required of a chess match is therefore a fascinating measure of whether or not a cognitive boost is occurring.

To find out how effective these drugs are as cognitive enhancers more generally, however, research is still needed. According to Battleday and Brem, scientists have not spent much time analyzing how these drugs boost brainpower in healthy people, despite the fact that many people use them off-label for that purpose. But this study shows the drugs may indeed have a powerful effect on complex thought processes.

For chess, this means that the decision to start drug testing players is most likely a sound one. The rest of us might need to contemplate how we feel about pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement overall.

"[T]hese substances may be able to convert fast and shallow thinkers into deeper but somewhat slower thinkers," the study authors wrote.

SEE ALSO: There may be a 3rd pillar of physical fitness beyond diet and exercise

DON'T MISS: There is one drug in the world that can make you smarter — here's why you can't take it yet

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here’s what a computer is thinking when it plays chess against you

Tesla owners in Ohio are now eligible for an insurance discount — and the move speaks to a much larger shift in the insurance industry.

Root Insurance, a company based in Columbus, Ohio, announced in a March 9 blog post that Tesla owners are now eligible for a discount if they use Autosteer, a flagship feature of Autopilot that keeps the car in its lane even when approaching curves.

Root Insurance said the move is in response to a government report that found crash rates for Tesla vehicles have plummeted 40% since Autosteer was first installed in 2015.

Drivers must download the Root app and conduct a test drive with Autosteer activated. The insurance agency will then offer a tiered discount based on the number of miles driven. That discount will increase the more a Tesla owner drives with Autosteer activated.

Naturally, it's a smart way to encourage Tesla owners in Ohio to switch insurance companies. But it also speaks to a much larger disruption: as cars become safer with autonomous tech, insurance premiums will have to fall.

Tesla itself is already experimenting with that model in Hong Kong and Australia. The automaker has partnered with insurance companies to include insurance and maintenance into the final price of its vehicles.

New insurance models are expected to proliferate as other automakers advance their self-driving car efforts as well. The personal auto insurance sector could shrink to 40% of its current size within 25 years as insurance premiums fall due to self-driving tech, according to a report by the global accounting firm KPMG.

Root, for its part, said it plans to extend its Autosteer discount program to "drivers of all self-driving cars" later in 2017.

"We created Root to be the car insurance of the future," Root wrote in its blog post. "Artificial intelligence? Self-driving cars? We’re ready."

SEE ALSO: Tesla is already showing how the insurance industry will be disrupted by self-driving cars

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Tesla will begin selling its Solar Roof this year — here's everything you need to know

Big or small, decisions aren't as easy as they may seem.

Psychologists have found decision-making is fraught with hidden influences, tricky nuances, and the ability to make us happy in the short-term but unhappy in the long-term.

Some of my greatest insights into this aspect of human behavior have come from TED talks, which break down research findings into their most digestible form.

Here are the talks that have changed how I make decisions.

SEE ALSO: After watching over 50 TED talks, these are the insights that have stuck with me most

"How to make hard choices"

Philosopher Ruth Chang's 2013 talk explains that people often struggle to choose between two equally good options that are "on a par."

People tend to view hard choices as burdens, but Chang would prefer we see them as blessings that grant us agency. Hard choices make us confront our desire to live in the city over the country, for example, or to eat a healthy breakfast over sugary cereal.

The takeaway: Whenever I face a hard choice, I celebrate it as a way to cement an aspect of my identity.

"Grit: The power of passion and perseverance"

In 2013, UPenn psychologist Angela Duckworth presented the findings of her research on grit — or the ability to keep trucking when life gets hard.

Duckworth has found across numerous fields that grit is the single-biggest indicator of personal and professional success, even more than IQ. And the best way to cultivate grit is to build a "growth mindset" that sees circumstances are flexible, not rigid.

The takeaway: The moment when things start getting tough is the starting point for success, not a sign to call it quits.

"The paradox of choice"

In Barry Schwartz's 2005 talk, the Swarthmore College psychologist reviews research that says people are misled in thinking they should want as much choice as possible, whether it's the number of salad dressings at the supermarket or clothing styles at the mall.

It's actually possible to get worn out from making so many tiny choices throughout the day. It's called decision fatigue, and it can detract from the many important choices you need to make, whether at home or at work.

The takeaway: I limit my number of choices on purpose, because I know I'll be happier with my decision once I make it.

In 1986, a Japanese industrial engineer by the name of Shingeo Shingo published a book outlining a revolutionary approach to quality control in manufacturing. His approach included a concept called, “poka-yoke,” which roughly translates in English to “mistake-proofing.”

Your existence is scattered across the internet. You likely have accounts at forums you haven’t been to in a decade, and social media services so bereft of users they resemble graveyards. And each and every one of those accounts is a potential avenue into your private life for a hacker. So you need to secure them.

Read more...

B.C.’s revitalized innovation sector, as evidenced by the opening of the province’s Tech Summit on Tuesday with a record attendance of 5,000, is becoming a battleground in the coming provincial election.

Premier Christy Clark, delivering the keynote address at the gathering, unveiled a series of new initiatives aimed at boosting the tech sector, including a $10-million program to fund five research chairs at B.C. universities and an expansion of tax credits for virtual reality and augmented reality products.

The goal, Clark said, is to both step up development of homegrown talent and open doors to educated foreign developers.

“When others are turning inward, we are going to turn outward,” Clark said, while also announcing plans to open trade offices in Seattle and Silicon Valley to scope talent and sell B.C. tech products. “When others are withdrawing from free trade, we are going to reach out around the world and find new connections, for business and for people. … We are going to invite people into our country and welcome them here.”

The announcement came one day after NDP leader John Horgan unveiled his party’s plans for the tech sector. He criticized the Liberal government’s IT contracts and projects, which went largely to multi-national companies that are not required to reinvest directly in B.C. Horgan noted those projects were $350 million over budget.

“These monster contracts with big corporations have been riddled with waste and broken promises,” said Horgan in a statement. “Government IT projects should be building B.C. companies and creating B.C. jobs, not sent away to multi-national corporations that fail to deliver what they promise.”

The B.C. tech industry employs around 102,000, making up almost five per cent of the province’s workforce. Total wages amounted to $8.4 billion.

NDP MLA George Heyman, the party’s spokesman on technology, said his party would focus on education, promising an additional $100 million over three years for post-secondary training and co-op placement over what the Liberals proposed in last month’s budget.

Heyman added that many tech firms say the lack of affordability in the Lower Mainland has made it very difficult to retain talent — local or foreign — something that the Liberals have failed to address.

“(The Liberals) have barely talked about tech until the last 18 months, after their LNG plan bore no fruit,” he said. “We’re suppose to believe they’ve changed their stripes now? The tech sector in B.C. has done a great job of growing and innovating, but they will be the first to say we can do even better.”

B.C. Minister of Technology Amrik Virk said the province will announce a new program on Wednesday that would make it easier for small tech companies to get government procurements.

The B.C. Tech Summit continues Wednesday at the Vancouver Convention Centre.

chchiang@postmedia.com

With resource revenue in the tank and Donald Trump in the White House, Canada is trying to vacuum up the best and the brightest technology workers and entrepreneurs it can.

And why not? Technology industries are clean and green. Employees are well educated and well-paid and, chronically, in short supply worldwide.

The fact that because of Trump’s travel ban this economic opportunity is tinged with a humanitarian grace, is a bonus.

Vancouver is already a global animation hub with Sony Pictures Imageworks, DHX Media, Electronic Arts, Atomic Cartoons and others doing not only animation but virtual reality applications. Currently, there are more than 300 unfilled jobs in Vancouver’s animation industry.

Those 300-plus vacancies are nearly double the number of jobs being advertised last August, which gives some indication of just how much work is coming here. It also hints at how much work might be going to competitive hubs in Singapore, Manila and Mumbai as local companies are forced to turn down work.

But it’s not just animation jobs that are going begging. Other homegrown companies like Hootsuite, Sierra Wireless, STEMCELL Technologies and Vision Critical also face shortages.

After months of study, the federal government finally set a timeline to get its global skills strategy up and running. Starting June 12, work permits won’t be required for short-term work (30 days or less) and “brief academic stays.” Others with special skills will be fast-tracked into Canada with the government promising to issue work permits to companies within 10 days to two weeks. Companies will then have two weeks to issue them to employees.

That will help.

But the biggest hurdle for B.C. and Vancouver in particular has nothing to do with visas, permits or even subsidies.

The housing costs are simply too high, says Andrew Harries.

Harries is co-founder of Sierra Wireless and professor of practice in entrepreneurship and innovation at SFU’s business school.

“We should all hope for an orderly drop in house prices and encourage all levels of government to make that happen,” he says. “For the sake of a sustainable society, we need to find some kind of sustainable link between salaries and housing costs.”

Even for most tech workers earning a wage that’s 75 per cent higher than the provincial average, the housing they want is out of reach.

In 2015, the average annual income of British Columbia’s nearly 102,000 tech employees was slightly less than $83,000.

But Harries says that means tech workers still can’t afford much more than a cramped condo in Yaletown or a house that’s nearly an hour’s commute away.

Factor in being paid in Canadian dollars and Harries says many people aren’t willing to do that — including some of the estimated 300,000-plus Canadians working in California’s tech sector.

Harries lays the blame for the housing crisis on Premier Christy Clark.

“The housing market has gone completely mad. But [it] has become so economically dominant, developers so influential in our political apparatus, that it remained largely untouched until the level of citizen unrest finally reached Victoria last summer.”

Yet, even if housing affordability was addressed and thousands of tech workers flooded in, the more challenging question is how to create and sustain an indigenous technology sector that isn’t dependent on importing ideas and people.

Harries says the answer is simple: Immediately double the number of computer science and computing engineering spaces at B.C. universities.

Currently, British Columbia graduates only 1,200 a year. On Tuesday, one employment website listed 2,175 jobs for computer science. There were also more than 3,000 jobs for science graduates.

But it’s not just the STEM graduates — science, technology, engineering and mathematics software engineers — who are in short supply, there’s an equally crucial lack of people who know how to manage and expand companies beyond the startup phase.

On Tuesday, Premier Christy Clark promised at the B.C. Tech Summit that by 2022 there would be 1,000 more tech grads each year.

On Monday, NDP leader John Horgan promised an extra $100 million for post-secondary programs in digital media, entertainment, life sciences, IT and engineering.

So, by all means, let’s sweep off the welcome mat. But if Canada is to ever transition from a resource-based to a knowledge-based economy, it’s going to take more than that.

It’s going to take money to address both the housing affordability crisis and ensure that Canadian students have affordable access to the training they need to compete for these well-paid jobs.

dbramham@postmedia.com

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Even if your content is generally top notch, have you ever wondered what else you can do to make it just a little more actionable? Unfortunately, it’s rather easy to kill your blog posts without you even realizing it. We often get carried away with certain habits that can quickly hurt the content’s overall usefulness.

Let’s look at some common mistakes that are undoubtedly doing your articles more harm than good.

Not Writing for People

Many years ago, blogs were treated more like a personal journal as opposed to user-driven, semi-commercial platforms. That trend has gone away for the most part, but you can still spot the occasional post that overly focuses on its author and not the target audience.

Talking about yourself is fine and dandy, but focus primarily on your readers. That means not going overboard with keywords, not being too “salesy,” and certainly not being all about you.

Not Writing for Search Engines

This might contradict what I just said above, but the key here is to find that perfect balance. Provide the essentials to help your audience while naturally injecting appropriate keywords and phrases throughout.

Even if search engines are not your main source of traffic, there’s no reason to abandon that venue altogether. After all, it is said that Google now handles over 2 trillion searches every year. Wouldn’t you want a small piece of that pie?

Relying on Cutesy Wording

Look, I get it. Online magazines do this all the time and they’re exploding with traffic. But keep in mind they have deep marketing pockets along with an established audience. Simply put, their way of operating isn’t the way that we (average Joes) operate.

That being said, the occasional cryptic headline actually works well and it might drive curiosity and views. Just ask the likes of Thought Catalog, which is constantly relying on odd, yet intriguing blog post titles.

Consider this an art and a science; feel free to use cute and clever wording when suitable, but don’t be too ambiguous and don’t rely on this exclusively. Unless, of course, you’re actively looking to kill your blog posts in the process.

Not Linking to Other Sources

Linking to other related content provides several benefits: Internal articles get a chance to receive more traffic, and linking externally allows you to connect with fellow bloggers.

While this in itself won’t directly kill your blog posts, in the end it’s all about providing a greater user experience. Why give your readers the bare minimum when you can always go for that extra mile? Readers remember your actions over time and react accordingly. Don’t mistreat them.

Consistently Picking the Wrong Topics

It’s difficult to come up with a winning formula every single time. Sometimes I think a subject will be a hit and it isn’t. The same goes for you and every other blogger you have ever known.

That said, you can minimize these mistakes by intimately familiarizing yourself with your target market. Virtually every product/service’s goal is to address a problem. What are your audience’s main concerns? And what about the subtle ones they may not even be aware of yet?

This is where proper market research comes a long way. Stay informed through online communities such as niche forums, Reddit, Quora, and the good old Google Search Engine Planner.

Lacking a Main Goal

While your blog post should regularly have certain basic attributes – including links and multimedia – it’s also important to practice moderation.

What is the goal of your blog post? Is it to drive engagement? Build a list? Or perhaps to get more social media followers?

Don’t encourage readers to buy an affiliate product, click an ad, sign up to your newsletter, and subscribe to your YouTube channel in one post. Always have a centralized goal in mind.

Honorable Mentions:

Not breaking down your content: Want to instantly kill your blog posts? Don’t divide your content and make it easy on the eyes. Rely on walls of text, ignore bullet points, sub-headings, and keep your font tiny.

Inconsistency: Imagine if a new fan visits your site, eager to read the next blog post, but finds nothing at all. Then he comes back next week only to be met with the same result. Do you think he will be around when you finally decide to publish a new article?

Conclusion

Websites and blog posts are easy to pick up, but hard to master. What other methods do you rely on to ensure you don’t kill your blog posts?

Don’t Miss:

5 Content Marketing Hacks to Blow Up Your Blog Traffic

Infographic by Rachel Worthman.

Over the past several months, OpenView has surveyed more than 1,000 SaaS leaders to better understand how they price their products. What we’ve uncovered is a lack of maturity around product pricing in general. More specifically, we’ve found that all too often companies fail to designate a specific team member to head up pricing. Instead, many CEOs take on the burden. Moreover, our data shows that decisions around pricing are made far too late in the product launch cycle. The combination of these factors means that companies are missing out on much needed revenue by failing to properly set prices.

If you haven’t taken our interactive survey and want to see how you compare to your peers, you can fill out our Pricing Maturity Calculator here. In the meantime, check out the infographic below to gain a better understanding of the state of SaaS pricing.

View full size infographic here.

The post The State of SaaS Pricing [Infographic] appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Admit it.

You’d love to have a never-ending stream of positive online reviews. Being able to attract eager customers who value your work. To receive praise locally from the communities you’re a part of, and build an amazing reputation that attracts customers, sales and glowing reviews?

Most businesses won’t get it.

Not because they can’t get it, but because they don’t know how. They don’t know how to use local events to attract attention. They simply aren’t able to generate the results they need.

Can you use local events to attract attention?

Is there a way to use local events to attract customers and boost positive reviews for your business?

Absolutely. You do it by serving.

That sounds generic and really unhelpful doesn’t it? Let’s take a closer look.

You serve those with an audience. Individuals, businesses or organizations – it doesn’t really matter. You go on a quest to find ways to serve complementary partners, those who serve the same basic audience you do in a different, yet complementary way.

Here’s what that looks like.

If you’re a…

• Realtor looking for rave reviews you’d serve mortgage brokers, appraisers, home inspectors and title companies.

• Plumber, you reach out to general contractors, mechanical engineers, electricians, etc. Anyone who’s part of the building, development or maintenance process.

• Marketing agency, look for opportunities to help serve production houses, specialists like copywriters, graphic designers, marketers, etc.

See the connection?

You can’t serve everyone. You can’t be all things to all people. Instead, find the people whose business complements your own. These are the people you can make a difference for.

Your greatest impact comes from those you…

… Help the most. But how?

You probably want more customers and positive reviews, right? It’s not like you can walk into a random office and walk out with an address book full of happy customers and glowing reviews.

So, how do you do it?

How do you attract more customers who are eager to give you positive reviews? You figure out what they want. Every business has a list of desires, goals, fears, frustrations and problems.

Find out what they are.

Next, come up with a never-ending list of ways to serve each of your partners, helping them get what they want. This works best if you’re able to give at first without expectation.

This is both crucial and valuable.

That’s because giving initially, without expectation, is incredibly rare. You see this gross behavior at work on social networks. Follow other accounts on Twitter or LinkedIn, join a few groups and you’re bombarded with requests.

You see it with inexperienced sales people. Answer a cold call, express even the faintest interest and the sales person hounds you until you stop answering.

We’re all conditioned to be skeptical these days. It’s tough to get past gatekeepers. It’s tough to get in touch with real people.

How are we supposed to get potential partners to accept any of the local event ideas we have?

With a framework.

The right framework gives us a clear structure to follow, showing us when and how to approach potential partners with our event ideas. A framework gives us the ability to create new ideas at will, instead of becoming focused on the ideas we want to work.

The beautiful part about these frameworks is this: Handled properly they create the openings you need and methods you use to serve.

Let’s take a look.

Framework strategy #1: Teach or be taught

Education attracts customer attention. Use this strategy to approach complementary partners who have an audience but aren’t teaching them effectively.

Here’s a few examples:

• Restaurateurs can run cooking classes at the YMCA, specialty grocery stores, farmers markets, meetups, etc. Offer samples to your audience then, ask for feedback near the end of your presentation. Just be sure to record their feedback!

• Mortgage brokers looking for clientele can reach out to Realtors, offering to teach their customers about the dirty tricks dishonest brokers use to add thousands of dollars in interest payments to your loan. Ask for feedback and offer the next step.

• Marketing and PR firms can create a podcast, YouTube series or slide deck filled with interviews from influential players in the industry, getting inside scoops from search engines and ad networks, and customers. Get reviews for your series, attract customers to your firm, then get more feedback and reviews.

Framework strategy #2: Give what you have

If you’re short on time you can give complementary partners something they want. Just be sure it’s a desire, goal, fear, frustration or problem they want solved. Then give them what they want.

Your gift can be anything of value. You could…

• Sponsor an upcoming local event
• Make an in-kind donation
• Offer a giveaway, free product, service or extended trial
• Offer a relevant free gift to local event producers

Your gift should be something your partner (or their audience) wants very much. Handled well, you’ll save an incredible amount of time while maximizing goodwill, sales and reviews.

Framework strategy #3: Protect from harm

Are you a maven? Someone who has access to a vast amount of information others do not? Use it to protect potential partners (or their customers).

• Protect customers from being abused or hurt
• Expose people, events or circumstances that puts partners or customers at risk
• Show partners why they’re struggling to solve a particular problem
• Look at your partners customers; find those who are unsure, lost, confused or doing it wrong
• Find a cheap, unique or faster way to help them

Framework strategy #4: Be a connector

Becoming a talent broker gives you ready access to influential people, which makes you an influencer yourself. Connecting people who can help each other is one of the most useful skills an employee or entrepreneur can have.

The best part? There’s more than one way to do it.

• Introduce people who can provide value to others
• Introduce two influencers to each other
• Introduce two people, but seed the relationship with an idea
• Host an event (e.g. webinar, conference, speech, dinner) but invite influential and complementary partners
• Nurture the relationships you spark

This is a long term strategy. Introduce people and organizations that can help each other. Give people what they want, seed the relationships with your ideas then watch the positive results customers, sales, reviews, pour in.

This strategy isn’t as easy to control but the rewards are pretty significant. It just takes time.

Framework strategy #5: Provoke with Care

Find a problem affecting your community, a problem they want solved. Then, same as before, create ideas for solving them. Only this time, use fear, rebellion or the desire for fame and prestige as triggers to attract a dramatic amount of attention, like this:

Or this:

Or that:

Controversy is like fire, use it carelessly and you’ll get burned. Use it to attract a lot of attention to a mutually beneficial cause that the community cares about, and you’ll attract a lot of attention.

Do this on your own if the reaction you’ll provoke is too strong. Work with complementary partners if they have the stomach and emotional maturity for controversy and the backlash that follows.

This worked for others but it won’t work for you

Right?

That’s the fear we all have. But it’s entirely false. Over and over we see that it can and does work for a variety of businesses.

Botto Bistro partnered with Yelp (against their will) to generate an incredible amount of (negative) positive reviews.

AirBnB used Craigslist (again, against their will) to growth hack their business, driving revenue to $500 million.

Jason Sadler partnered with like-minded businesses, receiving $1,000,000 to wear business t-shirts for a living.

Jon Basso, owner of The Heart Attack Grill, abused these strategies, using his dead customer’s remains to promote his business.

There are hundreds of stories like these. Most entrepreneurs using these strategies take the honest route. Some are questionable, while a few take the dishonest route.

These strategies work like gangbusters and they’re used by the elites to attract customers, generate buzz and attract an incredible amount of positive reviews.

If they can do it, so can you.

Love your community, share the perks

Want glowing reviews from the community and local events? Want a never-ending stream of positive online reviews? Give everyone a reason to love, support and follow your business.

Serve.

Give complementary partners the tools they need to grow your business and you’ll grow yours. Create a framework of your own and you’ll discover you have the tools you need to attract customers and reviews on demand.

Did India just pull off a monetary and political miracle?

Consider the sequence of events in its demonetization saga. In November the government made a high-risk, high-stakes economic intervention in the world’s largest democracy, with an objective to reduce corruption. Overnight, 86% of cash in circulation was voided. In a country almost 90% cash reliant, chaos ensued. As I said at the time, it was a case study in poor policy and even poorer execution.

Four months passed. The country emerged with few obvious scars. Although the impact on corruption remains to be seen, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government was rewarded with victory in midterm state-level elections, seen as a referendum on its unprecedented action.

Short of any singing, dancing, and costume changes, this sequence could have been taken from Bollywood, a movie industry widely known for its fantastical flights of fancy.

India’s demonetization experiment has generated some important thinking about cash, corruption, data, and the digital economy. Let’s consider some new takeaways:

Demonetization Is Not the Best Tool to Root Out Corruption 

The original reason given for the drastic demonetization action was to expose the so-called “black” market, fueled by money that is illegally gained and undeclared for tax purposes. The existence of this parallel economy is a substantial drag on the Indian economy: According to recently released data, only about 1% of Indians paid taxes on their earnings in 2013. When the policy change was announced, people were given until December 30, 2016, to return 500- and 1,000-rupee notes to banks, or else risk losing the value of them.

According to a Bloomberg report, banks were estimated to have received 14.97 trillion rupees (around $220 billion) by the December 30 deadline, or 97% of the 15.4 trillion rupees’ worth of currency demonetized. While the actual value of the currency deposited is still to be formally accounted for, there is little doubt that most of the invalidated currency was returned. Sorting through the money deposited and figuring out its legitimacy will take time. These rates of deposits defied expectations that vast troves of undeclared wealth would not find their way back to the banks and that black marketeers would lose this money since they would not be able to deposit their undeclared cash without being found out. This didn’t happen, presumably in part because of people’s ingenuity: They found many ways to get their money back into banks, whether it was legitimate or not.

It would have been better to demonetize less-commonly-used large-denomination bank notes (Larry Summers wrote about the idea here). India invalidated the 500-rupee and 1,000-rupee banknotes (worth approximately $7.50 and $15, respectively), which represented 86% of all currency in use. These widely used currencies affected a very large swath of people, from all parts of the socioeconomic spectrum, including the poor.

Besides, when corrupt people need places to park their ill-gotten gains, cash normally is not at the top of their list. Only a tiny proportion of undeclared wealth is held in cash. In an analysis of income-tax probes, the highest level of illegal money detection in India was found to be in 2015–2016, and the cash component was only about 6%. The remaining was invested in business, stocks, real estate, jewelry, or “benami” assets, which are bought in someone else’s name.

Some legal experts have argued that demonetization violates the law. They say the sudden extinguishing of the public debt owed by the government to the holder of the bank note results in the government taking an individual’s “movable property” away without easy access to a replacement or compensation.

Public policy for rooting out corruption calls for a systemic approach, with carrots and sticks to motivate cultural, institutional, and behavioral change in the long term. Silver bullets, such as drastic demonetization, don’t work.

Innovation and Creativity Emerged Around Digital Payments

The unqualified winners of the demonetization period were the mobile wallet players, with the market leader, Paytm, claiming 170 million users, with a traffic increase of 435%, and a 250% increase in overall transactions and transaction value. Arguably, the surge in business for mobile wallets was natural, at least for the 17% of the population that owned a smartphone in early 2016.

Here, the government’s innovative capacity shone through. The government-backed payment app, BHIM, facilitated electronic transfers between bank accounts; users could enter their unique, 12-digit Aadhaar ID number to make payments. The easy-to-use system works on an ordinary flip phone — no internet-enabled smartphone required. In other words, it was an inclusive solution, and, if the service continues to improve, it stands a chance of scaling up to India’s large market.

Plus, there are plans to mandate digital payments at gas stations, hospitals, and universities, with cash transactions over $4,500 banned altogether. Indian Railways will no longer levy a service charge on tickets booked online, and the government is removing duties on point-of-sale devices and fingerprint readers.

Putting aside the policy missteps, these moves are a shot in the arm to the ecosystem around digital payments and consumer-and-context-friendly technology.

Data Quality and Context Still Matter — a Lot

Official estimates from India’s Central Statistics Office (CSO) on GDP growth have shown that the economy grew at 7% in the quarter ending December 2016. This was exactly what was predicted in the CSO’s advance estimate, before demonetization. That means demonetization had no impact whatsoever on the economy, which is surprising, given the widely reported experiences of the closings of small factories and businesses, workers losing their wages, and projects being postponed.

There are several problems with the CSO’s figures. First, there is a lag between the time when estimates are made and when actual data comes in. Much of this estimation is done on the basis of models relying on past data, which is much less reliable when an event such as demonetization occurs. Second, the informal sector plays a disproportionate role in the country’s economy; by one estimate it produces 45% of the output and employs 94% of the workforce. It is the sector on which it is hard to get reliable direct data. The informal sector is also primarily cash-reliant and bore the brunt of demonetization.

Finally, India does not have reliable national retail sales data, so statisticians have to use production figures to estimate consumer spending. To compound the estimation challenges, these production figures include data only for listed companies, thereby underrepresenting the unregistered companies and informal manufacturing producers — the ones that are directly affected by the cash ban.

Consider some additional data for the last quarter of 2016. Commercial vehicle output, rail freight, service tax receipts, and home appliance sales showed a slowdown, causing some economists to set the GDP growth forecast at 6.4% instead of 7%. Also:

• The fast-moving consumer goods industry reported around 1%–2% reduction in volumes. Hindustan Unilever Ltd (HUL) and Nestlé, two of the biggest names in the industry, reported drastic declines in profits and revenues. HUL experienced a 4% decline in sales volumes, according to BW Disrupt.
• Tractor sales to farmers flush with cash after a healthy rainy season were weaker: Volume rose only 18% in October–December, down from 28% gain the prior quarter, reports Nikkei Asian Review.
• Passenger car sales grew 1% on the year for October–December, down from 18% growth a quarter earlier. Maruti, India’s largest car manufacturer, had a 3.5% increase in car sale volumes, down from 18.4% growth in the previous quarter, according to a recap on Scroll.in.
• In the case of two-wheelers (think scooters), sales declined 22% in December 2016, compared to the prior December, marking the highest monthly contraction since 1997, as reported on Business Standard.

The official economy-wide data struggled to reflect the reality on the ground precisely because cash transactions are fragmented and defy accurate data capture.

The Rise of the “Big Narrative” Continues

Ultimately, the public did not judge the Modi government’s actions on the basis of arcane issues, such as the percentage of money deposited in banks, what percent of illegal assets are held in cash, or the intricacies of how GDP growth is calculated. Every person living in India had to experience some form of dislocation or inconvenience. Despite that, the message that carried the greatest weight was that the government was acting, and acting decisively, on behalf of ordinary people to fight corruption.

As for those questioning the wisdom of the policy, the prime minister’s comments at an election rally in the state of Uttar Pradesh said it all: “On the one hand are those [critics of the note ban], who talk of what people at Harvard say, and on the other is a poor man’s son, who through his hard work is trying to improve the economy.”

On March 11 Uttar Pradesh gave the prime minister’s party a landslide election victory. While we celebrate the age of big data, it may be “big narrative” that drives the most-profound decisions: We’ve witnessed it in the UK, in the U.S., and now in India. When people feel that you’re fighting for them, it seems even the most concrete evidence, be it data or history, wields less and less influence. The world will face another test of this theory soon with the French elections next month and the Dutch elections tomorrow.

Ultimately, the victory of narrative over data may be the takeaway from India’s demonetization saga. And that may qualify as a plot for a Bollywood blockbuster after all.

Can you imagine a world without email? It’s hard to believe we were there once, but the ease of access, speed, and widespread prevalence of email makes it one of the most popular ways for customers to interact with their favorite brands or engage customer support when they run into problems.

It’s easy to get bogged down and overwhelmed by the constant deluge of emails coming into your customer support team, particularly as your company gains momentum and scales its business upward. The good news is there are ways to approach email handling that will boost its impact and enhance your team’s efficiency.

Other customer support channels are gaining momentum, but email frequently ranks in customer surveys as the second most popular channels for support—next to the phone, which still commands the #1 spot. However, because many consumers will first turn to email to try to solve their issues before progressing to direct contact, it’s important to stay on top of the flow of incoming emails and adopt the right approach to get the most out of this critical support channel.

The challenges of email support

In order to harness the power of proper email handling, it’s worth first getting a feel for the main challenges that can arise from this particular channel.

For starters, the ongoing task of checking, responding to, tracking, and juggling a constant influx of day-to-day emails can be a major time sink for your customer service team. Depending on your volume of daily support request, it can take hours to get caught up and respond to emails each day. If you don’t have a dedicated team member tasked with fielding and directing emails, it can steal a lot of focus away from your agents’ other critical tasks and hamper productivity in other areas.

Email volume can fluctuate from one day to the next, but as your company grows it’s only likely to increase. Watch out for signs that email volume is outstripping your team’s capacity to keep up with it. If you have a small customer service team, it’s not hard to get behind and become stifled by a steady barrage. The potential for burnout and stress-induced error increases the more your team gets pushed to the edge.

Beyond keeping on top of the volume of emails, replying to inquiries in a speedy manner is equally critical. Delayed response time can be a deal-breaker for today’s plugged-in, fast-paced customers. People want a solution to their problems quickly, and the longer they have to wait, the greater their frustration can become.

With these potential problems in mind, let’s look at how to avoid common email handling pitfalls so your team can excel at keeping your valuable customers happy.

Organization and efficiency

When juggling a heavy volume of email support tickets, the value of maximizing your team’s levels of organization and efficiency cannot be overstated. Your ultimate goal should always be to wrap-up the workday with inbox zero and a slew of satisfied customers in your wake—not a pile of unanswered emails and disgruntled customers that threatens to spill over into tomorrow’s workload.

That’s why anything you can do as a team to tighten up your operation and streamline any tasks that can be whittled down to a more efficient approach will benefit your brand in a big way.

A small team that works well together and delegates duties effectively can handle email volume up to a certain point. But as your operation scales upward and the number of customers you service increases, you may see your daily email ticket volume spike dramatically. That’s when it will become vital to use helpful tools and software to further streamline the process, allowing your team to juggle more without having to throw more agents into the mix.

Your choice of email handling software, its email handling features, and how you make use of its functionality can have a major impact on optimizing your overall speed and effectiveness.

Getting the most out of your email handling software

There’s only so far a small support team can go before a growing company customer base becomes overwhelming to handle using just a bare-bones email account.

Switching to more robust CRM software solution and integrating your email before your company’s support ticket volume hits critical mass is vital. It gives your team an opportunity to really get to know the ins and outs of your program of choice, whether you choose Zendesk, Salesforce, or any other popular CRM program.

Knowing the quirks and perks of your company’s CRM software and how its special functions are best applied to email can be tremendously valuable to your team. If you don’t have an intimate knowledge of your software’s most powerful features, you’re potentially missing out on serious time and energy savings.

Automation, use of macros, and programmable triggers can help save time throughout the sales cycle, and many programs have added functions for collecting data, funneling tickets to the right team members, and centralizing the entire workflow to streamline how your team collaborates—all features that will help you scale.

Most good CRM software is packed with useful features that consolidate the number of steps it takes to track, respond, and log email tickets, so it’s worth getting everyone on your team properly trained and up to speed on the most helpful aspects of whatever toolset you prefer.

Tricks for getting the most out of email

Software isn’t everything, of course. The other key piece of the puzzle is your team’s overall approach to email. Here are some tips for optimizing your email support routine so your team can get the job done efficiently and effectively without getting sucked into a time vortex.

1. Schedule consistent times for checking

Unless you have a dedicated agent who’s focused on keeping up with support emails, it makes a lot of sense to set specific times of day to dig into the inbox. As a general rule, checking at 9:00 a.m., noon, and 4:00 p.m. works well because it keeps you on task in the downtime and ensures there aren’t more than a few hours between email responses. This helps prevent email tickets from spilling into other important time-sensitive tasks that are already on your team’s plate.

Alternately, you can also stagger email checking times and duties across a few team members, so the incoming stream is covered throughout the day without bogging down individual agents for their entire workday.

2. Limit each email checking session

Once team members dive into an email response session, it helps if they set a time limit to help move things along. When that time is up, they can shift gears to another task and return to unchecked emails during the next session. By limiting the amount of time dedicated to processing email in a given session, team members can stay focused and avoid getting burned out on days when inquiries are more challenging to deal with.

3. Short is the new long

It’s always a good idea keep responses tightly written and info packed. If you have pre-generated external troubleshooting resources—like a Q&A, forum, or video library—your team can dramatically shorten email length by including specific links, when applicable. The less time it takes to help a customer, as long as the job is being done well, the more time your team will have to get through other emails. It’s all about finding the right balance between effectiveness and speed.

4. Automate but add a human touch

Using pre-programmed text macros or drawing from a bank of pre-written answers can speed up email interactions significantly. If you use automated responses, however, write them up so they have personality—even including a touch of lightheartedness and humor if it’s appropriate. And, if you’re copy-and-pasting chunks of pre-created content to save time, take an extra few seconds to personalize the message or add a nice note to humanize the interaction.

5. Set a max inbox count benchmark

Another handy trick to help boost the email process and maintain forward momentum is to set a goal for the maximum number of emails to keep in the support ticket inbox at any given time. That benchmark could be as small as 20 or as big as 200, depending on the size of your company and your average ticket load—set a goal that fits your circumstances.

Setting up an optimized system to maximize your team’s email handling prowess takes a little time and effort, but implementing a few helpful strategies and looking closely at how your company approaches this important channel can help stop you from getting snagged on common challenges.

Get the Upwork guide for tips on building a world-class distributed customer support team. Then, get started and post a job today!

Your product is not so good that it sells itself. If it were, you would be unnecessary.

Your product may be far better than your competitors’ products. That improvement in quality may be felt by anyone who buys it. But that perception doesn’t happen on its own. Creating the perception of value and tying that value to someone’s needs doesn’t happen on its own.

Your product may be different from anything on the market now. Those differences may be very clear to you and the people who work in your company. You may even believe that those differences make a difference for your clients. But to everyone else, what you sell looks a lot like what your competitors sell. Your product isn’t capable of differentiating itself on its own.

Your product may produce better outcomes. Those better outcomes are almost certainly worth paying to obtain. But your prospective clients can’t see that, and they don’t know it to be true.

Your competitors believe their product is better than yours. Your competitors believe their product is different, too. Your competitors believe their outcomes are equal to—or better than—yours. Some of your prospects and your competitors believe their outcomes are equal to yours at a lower price. One or both of you are wrong.

If you go to the front for of the building where you work and there is a long line stretching around the building, then your product sells itself. If there is no one outside right now, it doesn’t.

The reason you want a product that is so good that it sells itself is so that you don’t have to sell. You want to make selling easy, and you believe—mistakenly—that your product, your service, and your solution is what is supposed to win deals. The very opposite is true: You are supposed to win deals.

The post So Good It Sells Itself appeared first on The Sales Blog.

There’s a lot to pay attention to when measuring the growth trajectory of your SaaS business. Are you increasing LTV while keeping CAC down? Is your customer acquisition rate greater than your customer churn rate? Do you distinguish between monthly recurring revenue and committed monthly recurring revenue?

Answering these questions is no easy task–SaaS metrics are extremely nuanced, and it can be hard to figure out exactly how to get the most complete and realistic understanding of your company’s growth, even if you have a few Harvard MBA’s on hand to model everything out.

Here’s why it’s important to bring SaaS reporting into your everyday operations, and how to do it in a way that will help accelerate growth and maximize retention.

The Need for New KPIs

The generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) used for many businesses don’t work well for SaaS. In fact, if you try to use them to calculate net income for SaaS businesses, the averages come out negative. This negative net income doesn’t change regardless of how old the company is (below).

Does this mean all SaaS businesses are slowly dying? Not at all. It just means that because of how the SaaS business model is built, often revenue and expenditures are misaligned. Companies have to spend money to acquire customers, but over time these customers will bring profit to the company and keep it growing. To understand how SaaS business metrics work, they need to be viewed using a slightly different lens.

Because of the subscription-based nature of SaaS, customers must choose to continue using the service after a pre-determined period of time. This means SaaS company leaders are focused not just on building software and selling it, but serving and supporting their customers over time.

As a result, SaaS businesses must:

1. Invest incredibly heavily in customer success
2. Invest in post-sales customer service

This greater focus on renewal and customer attention in SaaS means that SaaS businesses need a special set of KPIs to understand important questions like:

• How our business is doing?
• Is our business healthy?
• Are we growing too fast and are we retaining customers well?

What do we want out of these KPIs

SaaS companies run like a car: it’s easy to step on the gas and increase your growth, or step on the brakes and slow down, you just need to know when to do which.

That’s the importance of SaaS KPIs. They can give SaaS leaders an accurate look at how the company is doing. If capital is readily available, leaders know they have the resources to finance growth and can turn up the dial. But if the markets change or your company is not able to make up for losses, then it’s time to dial back on growth.

In this article we’ll answer the two most important questions of any SaaS business:

• How much money are you making? To answer this, we’ll look at how SaaS business measure revenue.
• How happy are your customers? Your customers are your source of revenue, so we need to look at ways to measure customer retention to determine happiness.

How SaaS Businesses Measure Revenue: MRR/ARR

Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) or annual recurring revenue (ARR) are the most widely used measures of revenue for SaaS businesses. Because most SaaS customers pay on a monthly or annual plan, businesses need to keep an eye on how much money they’re bringing in during each pay period.

MRR/ARR are widely used for a number of reasons:

• They’re a reliable, predictable measure of revenue. Each is easily calculated as a simple sum of how much customers are paying each pay period.
• They should be growing over time. Ideally you’re constantly making money, so your MRR/ARR is increasing every period. If it isn’t or it starts to go stagnant, then you know you need to look into why.
• They can be measured against a goal. Often companies will set themselves a goal to hit every year in terms of MRR or ARR. These goals can help make sure you’re on track and growing at a rate that is sustainable.

Your MRR/ARR Over Time report is an easy way to keep an eye on your revenue trend over time. You can see how much your MRR is growing in both revenue and number of accounts, as well as how close you are to reaching the goal you’ve set for the month. In this example, we can see that the company has an upward trend of MRR growth, but still needs to increase their MRR more to reach their goal.

Understand your MRR Better with Your Quick Ratio

Another crucial metric to monitor when considering MRR/ARR is the Quick Ratio. This ratio was introduced by venture capitalist Mamoon Hamid and is a measurement of how well a company can grow recurring revenue while taking into consideration account churn.

If a company can rapidly scale revenue, but also has a high customer churn rate, then their quick ratio will reflect that. This ratio is applicable regardless of size or age and provides a benchmark for companies to compare themselves to others. By comparing your quick ratio with other companies you can determine things like:

• What is the momentum of your business? If your quick ratio is on the rise or remaining stable, this means you’re keeping a good momentum.
• How well are you retaining revenue? How well are you upselling and expanding revenue? If the numerator of your quick ratio is growing that means your revenue is growing. It’s important to keep increasing revenue to counter any MRR that is lost to churn.
• How are you handling churn, and are you losing more customers can you can bring on? If your quick ratio starts to dip it may be due do a loss in revenue but even more likely it’s because you’re losing customers. By curbing churn, you can work on making the best of any new customers you bring on.

If a company can rapidly scale revenue, but also has a high customer churn rate, then their quick ratio will reflect that. This ratio is applicable regardless of size or age and provides a benchmark for companies to compare themselves to others. By comparing your quick ratio with other companies you can determine things like:

• What is the momentum of your business? If your quick ratio is on the rise or remaining stable, this means you’re keeping a good momentum.
• How well are you retaining revenue? How well are you upselling and expanding revenue? If the numerator of your quick ratio is growing that means your revenue is growing. It’s important to keep increasing revenue to counter any MRR that is lost to churn.
• How are you handling churn, and are you losing more customers can you can bring on? If your quick ratio starts to dip it may be due do a loss in revenue but even more likely it’s because you’re losing customers. By curbing churn, you can work on making the best of any new customers you bring on.

Your MRR/ARR Inflow/Outflow report shows your Quick Ratio over a specified period of time including how it’s changed and the average ratio over that period. Companies that can hit a 4.0 or better quick ratio, like the one in this example, are ones that Hamid feels comfortable investing in. This means they’re adding revenue at four times the rate they’re losing it, which makes for a very compelling growth story and shows clear mastery of the sales process.

One important thing to keep in mind about the quick ratio is that at first it’s easy to keep your ratio high by adding revenue. But once companies reach a certain size, it becomes less feasible to continue adding revenue at a rate that keeps their revenue at 4.0. That means the focus needs to shift from ramping new MRR growth to reducing churn.

To monitor your churn you’re going to need the right SaaS metrics to measure that. There are three different metrics that can help measure customer retention, and in turn customer churn, each that monitors a slightly different aspect of your business.

Retention Metric #1: Account Churn

Account churn, also called logo churn, is a measure of how many accounts your company holds.

Account churn is useful because it gives a very black-and-white number of what percentage of customers are leaving you. It takes away the bias from larger accounts so that you aren’t left with one large customer paying for all of your revenue — which is a dangerous situation to be in.

Your Churn Rate: Account Churn report can give you a monthly breakdown of your account churn over time. Ideally, you want to keep your account churn as close to 0% as possible. In this example, the company experienced 2.3% average churn in the past year. That means they lost 2.3 companies for every 100 they started with at the beginning of the period.

Dig Deeper Into Account Churn With Your Retention Heatmap

To give you an idea of why you might be losing customers to account churn, you can look at your Retention Heatmap which cohorts customers based on specific filters. By looking at where your customers dropoff, you can determine what areas need work.

If you notice a dropoff of a cohort horizontally, for example in the 01 Nov 2015 cohort at month 3, that means there’s likely a problem in your customer onboarding.

This can be caused by things like:

• A customer success manager still in training onboarding a big cohort
• Bringing in the wrong type of customer during a certain period

If you notice a dropoff along the vertical access, for example along month 13 for all cohorts up to 01 Jan 2016, this usually lines up with the end of a period.

This dropoff means that the year is up and these customers have not yet renewed their annual plans. Work with your customer success team as the end-of-period approaches to make sure they’re set up for renewal. Keeping an eye on your retention heatmap will alert you when problems arise so that you can fix them in a timely manner.

One downside to account churn is that it doesn’t take into account upgrades or upsells of accounts. This kind of expansion revenue is crucial for keeping larger businesses growing, but is not reflected in account churn numbers. To take that into account, you need to look at your revenue churn.

Retention Metric #2: Revenue Churn

The lowest account churn can go is 0%, which means you’re experiencing 100% account retention. While this is great, it really sets a limit on how much you can improve. With revenue churn, you can improve much more than 100%.

The magical thing about this revenue churn formula is that with the right amount of expansion revenue, you can achieve negative churn, which means you’re adding MRR at a faster pace than you’re losing it.

Your Churn Rate: Revenue Churn report will show you how your revenue churn has changed over time. In this example we can see that at some points the company dips into negative churn, but overall they still have a slightly positive average revenue churn at 0.1%.

Achieving the Best Kind of Revenue Churn: Negative Churn

So why exactly is negative churn such a big deal? We know that a lot of top performing SaaS companies are growing because of their negative churn rates but why?

The answer has to do with how your churn affects you over time. With even a small percentage of positive churn, eventually growing revenue won’t be enough to counter the effects of cancellations and downgrades. Soon your revenue will start to decrease because your churn continues to do just that — churn away at your revenue.

But if we take a look at this figure from pricing service ProfitWell, we can see that negative churn does the exact opposite. Negative churn will outpace whatever revenue you’re losing and your business will continue to grow. Having this buffer of average negative churn means that your company can survive any periods where churn dips back into the positive numbers.

So how do you achieve negative churn? There are three main strategies according to VC Tom Tunguz:

• Usage expansion. This means increasing the account sizes of your current customers. Pricing by unit is a great way to have customers increase their accounts when they buy more seats.
• Feature expansion. Also known as up-selling. This means selling your customers on higher plans than the one they currently have.
• Product expansion. Which is also called cross-selling. This means selling customers on other products you provide so that there are more of what you have to offer.

A great way to identify potential expansion revenue opportunities is to look for high-grade companies during the initial selling process. These are companies that you can likely that you can upsell multiple products to, because they’re more likely to have an interest in using multiple aspects of what your product can offer. Upselling helps you bring in more revenue, without having to spend the time and money necessary to onboard a completely new customer.

Retention Metric #3: Renewal Rate

Renewal rate helps you determine how much of your revenue you’re successfully renewing each period.

Something to take into account when calculating renewal rate is how long that you set the length of each contract will affect how many accounts are up for renewal in a given period. That means, if you make substantial improvements to customer onboarding or product features, it may take a while before those are reflected in renewal rates if your contracts are a year or longer.

Your Renewal Rate report can show how your renewal rate is changing over time. For each period you can see how many accounts renewed successfully, how many failed, and how many are still up for renewal. In this example 52.3% of accounts have renewed in the past year. That means the company has lost almost 50% of their customers in a year — not great! If your renewal rate starts falling, you will need to look into what’s causing so many accounts to cancel so that you don’t continue to lose more.

Understand How Renewal Rate Affects Customer Lifetime Value

The importance of renewal rate relates to each customer’s lifetime value (LTV). Each customer costs a certain amount of money to acquire and onboard, which is called the Customer Acquisition Cost. Over time, each customer should pay back this CAC in while building up their LTV.

This equation takes how much you’re earning from each customer on average and divides it by how many of your customers churn on average each month. It calculates the amount each current customer can be expected to pay during the remainder of their lifetime with the company.

Making sure that customers renew means that they will continue to add to their LTV and make up for the CAC needed to bring them in as a customer. If a customer churns out before their LTV can exceed the CAC, that means you’re losing money and something needs to change.

Your LTV report will show how your customer LTV is changing over time in relation to average lifetime. This report depends on the amount of bookings you have in a period and it automatically adjusts so you don’t have to do the calculation of what your churn rate looks like over time, while also automatically adjusting for your churn rates. In this example the company has a customer LTV of $39,308 during a 52.6 month lifetime. That means on average, each customer will give them $39,308 over 52.6 months at the company.

By comparing your LTV with what your average CAC is, you can see if you’re losing or earning money over time and make changes if necessary.

The Importance of SaaS Metrics

SaaS companies run a unique business model that is much more customer-focused than more traditional business models. This means they need a unique set of metrics to make sure that their business is on track and growing in a sustainable way.

Now that you understand how SaaS companies calculate revenue and retention, you can start seeing how your company compares to these benchmarks and set your company up for success.

For a business to thrive, it must have a great reputation. The number of new clients you get is entirely dependent on that.

Even moreso, the volume of repeat customers heavily relies on the overall reputation of your business / brand.

In a society driven by social media and other online platforms, your online reputation is everything. Every business needs to be conscious of its online reputation.

An excellent track record gives you a competitive advantage over your rivals. The good news is, you can use social media to achieve exactly this and much more. So how is this possible?

Design a Workable Social Media Strategy

If you are to manage your reputation and make your business soar to greater heights, you need to develop an all-inclusive social media strategy. Regardless of the social media platform you are using to engage your clients, take great care to follow these three important rules:

1. Stay Focused

After defining your niche, you need to focus your social media activities on topics that are relevant to that audience.

It is easy to stray when you lose focus, and to start doing things that are not in line with your initial goals. Doing so will prove detrimental to your business success, as you will be going against the same audience that took your brand to where it is. Undoubtedly, that will be the beginning of your reputation woes.

2. Keep it Authentic

Stop the madness of social media being a marketing platform where you can do and say anything. Stop for a moment and remember that these are real people.

Would you say what you are about to post to one of them in person? If not, reconsider posting it altogether.

3. Be as Informative as Possible

The content you share with the target audience should be meaningful. Why else would they spend time going through your posts?

You must strive to remain relevant and informative right from the beginning. Every post should reflect your desire to influence your target audience in the best of ways. Otherwise, you will lose respect among your clients.

Enhance Customer Relationships

Communication with customers can make or break your reputation. Social media provides the right platform to engage and build healthy relationships with your customers directly.

For a start, you need to find out what customers are saying about your brand. What are their opinions about your latest product in the market?

Keeping in touch with your customers will help you not only know their thoughts, but also help build meaningful relationships with them. Even more, it will show your target audience that you care.

What influence has your product had on customers? If you were to do things differently, how would they prefer it?

Such questions are critical to building relationships with customers. Soon enough, they will be free to share their thoughts with you, voicing their concerns more responsibly instead of using review platforms to taint your image.

Customers that feel attached to your brand and are better engaged are less likely to spill the beans on open review platforms. Even if they do, it will be easy to win them over, given the healthy relationship you have enjoyed in the past.

Otherwise, nothing will stop them from tainting your reputation at the slightest provocation.

Set yourself apart as an expert in the industry

I recommend that you keep sharing information about your product or industry with your target audience.

Well-researched posts can help you establish your authority as an expert in the field. The original posts can be on your site and you can then share them across various social media platforms. Your posts should remain relevant to the area of interest.

Over time, you will be able to command a huge following. Most importantly, you will gain massive respect from your clients.

Customers are less likely to explode when they have complaints against established brands like http://www.media-minded.co.uk/ because they fear facing criticism from a huge network of satisfied customers.

Create and Control Conversations

If there is one perfect medium for exchanging ideas with your target audience, it is social media. Instead of going rogue with promotional messages, you can choose to post engaging content that will trigger a response from readers.

Go for interesting topics, especially on arising matters affecting your industry. It is even better if you can find something controversial and ‘contain it’ within your post.

Just in case you are out of ideas, the following tips can help:

• Always put your audience first. What is likely to trigger their reactions? People love things they can easily identify with. It might be as simple as an approaching holiday.
• Try success stories. It opens your world to that of customers. Clients will be able to understand your journey even as they appreciate the value you have been able to offer them over the years. You can even ask for their opinions and contributions at the end.
• Let them into your business by providing behind-the-scenes information. People are curious. What happens behind the scenes increases that curiosity instead of quenching it. You can garner some great attention by telling them something they never expected, or sharing something that is otherwise unknown among the public at large.

The real task isn’t starting a conversation with your audience; controlling it is. Clients will always have something to say about your brand.

If left uncontrolled, it can be explosive, tainting the hard-earned reputation of your brand in the process. Respond to their comments. Instead of avoiding or discouraging criticism, create comic relief out of them.

Most importantly, take lessons from them. And apply those lessons to continual improvement of your offering, messaging, and customer service efforts.

Drive Sales

Everyone is in business to increase their revenue and boost profits. If used appropriately, social media can help you realise that dream and give you a deserving reputation in the process.

No matter how perfect your product is, it will never bring in profits unless someone knows about it. Word-of-mouth referrals have worked magic since time immemorial.

If you can get your clients to like and associate with your product via the social media, they will build your brand for you. Most importantly, they will take the word out to anyone who is willing to listen, enhancing your reputation in the process.

Conclusion

Online reputation management has established itself as the trend for businesses that want to succeed. Social media provides such a perfect launching pad for achieving that.

When social media is used appropriately, you can reap great benefits from it and tremendously improve your company’s reputation!

Author: Mike Madden

“She loves me….she loves me not….she loves me! SHE REALLY LOVES MEEEEEEEEEE!!!”

We’ve all been there. As children, we left it up to flower petals to determine if our crush liked us back. Simpler times, am I right? But as marketers, we know that our subscribers’ emotions aren’t so black and white. We’re challenged with engaging thousands, hundreds of thousands, and sometimes even millions of subscribers in a way that makes them love us and want to buy our products or services.

Unfortunately, you can’t please everyone. In every email database, there’s a portion of subscribers who you might refer to as the “love me nots.” These inactive subscribers haven’t engaged with your emails in a very long time, which could be because their interests or jobs changed, they received too many emails, or they’re just too busy to respond. Either way, they’ve stopped engaging with your emails and that makes your heart hurt.

To create a database that’s full of subscribers who love you, you need to have a reactivation strategy to recover the “love me nots” as well as the proper opt-in/opt-out processes in place. To learn best practices for building and reactivating a healthy database, join me and Stacey Thornberry at The Marketing Nation Summit at our session, They Love Me, They Love Me Not: Create an Email Database that Loves You! In the meantime, I’ll share five powerful reactivation campaigns for inspiration:

1. LOVEFiLM.com: Come Back Today

LOVEFiLM.com really hits you with the feels in their reactivation email. First off, who doesn’t love Antonio Banderas as Puss in Boots? I’m moved to tears. The headline “COME BACK TO LOVEFiLM TODAY” is short, simple, and clear. I know immediately that I haven’t engaged with them in a while and they want me back. Who knew I was so valuable to them? On top of that, they use directional cues to bring my eyes to the big “Reactivate now” button. And quite honestly, those big eyes are just begging me to hit the button. But if that wasn’t enough, they’ve listed different benefits of being a subscriber.

2. Crocs: It’s Been a While!

You’ll notice a reoccurring theme in reactivation emails. Most of them tend to use dating language. Language like “It’s been a while,” “Come back to us,” and “We miss you” stands out to inactive subscribers because it’s drastically different from a brand’s standard messaging. Here, Crocs tells you it’s been a while since you’ve engaged, explains the value of their emails, and then entices a new purchase with a 20% off discount code in exchange for verifying the email subscription. I’m feeling the love, Crocs! I’d come back to you any day!

3. Teespring: Come Back?

Oh boy, here we go again with the cute animals. Teespring really nailed it with their reactivation email. First off, show me a cute puppy and you have my undivided attention. While this might seem silly, it’s actually the perfect strategy for captivating your inactive subscribers. Show them something they can’t look away from, and you’ll get more inactive subscribers to engage. The headline “Come Back?” is simple yet actionable. The copy is lighthearted and leverages powerful personalization to prove the impact of their product for each individual subscriber. Well done, teespring!

4. Chipotle: Should You Stay or Should You Go?

No puppies here, but would you look at that headline! Should I stay or should I go? What do you mean, Chipotle? Beneath the headline, the email reads “At some point you either signed up on our promotions list or you’ve been a customer of our Online Ordering, or both.” Immediately, I have context for why they are emailing me. This doesn’t feel unsolicited.

Chiptotle explains,“We’re cleaning up our list and want to be certain as to whether or not you still want to be on it.” As an email marketer, list hygiene is critically important to your database health. Chipotle sets a great example, creating context and then prompting the subscriber to decide what happens next. Those who want to stay in touch will continue to engage, and those who click to opt-out get unsubscribed—which means Chipotle doesn’t send irrelevant emails anymore and the subscriber parts ways without marking Chipotle as spam, ultimately improving email deliverability. Overall, this email is extremely effective for maintaining a healthy database, re-engaging inactive subscribers, and identifying subscribers who want to opt-out.

5. Marketo: Moving On is Hard

Lastly, here’s an example from our reactivation nurture program. Similar to the emails above, we write our emails in a light-hearted, fun tone. We tell our subscribers how it’s breaking our hearts that they haven’t engaged with Marketo emails in over a year. Then, we give them a clear Yes/No option using directional colors (green for go and red for stop) to illicit a response. We’ve found that by making it convenient for subscribers to take action, they were more likely to say “Yes” and remain opted in. It’s important here to note that when you’re trying to recover the “love me nots,” be sure to call out a link to your unsubscribe page or preference center. The last thing you want to do is upset folks, which might urge them to mark you as spam.

And that’s it! I can’t wait to see you at my session at The Marketing Nation Summit, but until then what are your favorite examples of reactivation campaigns? Do you use them yourself? I’d love to hear in the comments below.

5 Email Reactivation Campaigns That Win Subscribers Back was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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There’s none better than David Ogilvy. He literally wrote the book that defined an entire profession, and it’s as relevant today as it was thirty years ago when first published.

Not bad for a guy who first entered the business at the tender age of 38!

Ogilvy practiced his craft in the Golden Age decades ago. Yet his principles still apply. His sales tips still work. His quotes are still poignant.

Here are 10 of David Ogilvy’s best advertising secrets that can still increase your results today, whether you apply them to your ads or your landing pages.

Advertising Secret #1. Research

Ogilvy once said, “Advertising people who ignore research are as dangerous as generals who ignore decodes of enemy signals.”

And yet, that’s what we do. Isn’t it?

In efforts to hit another deadline, we Command + C / Command + V some advertising formulas and call it a day. Without always thinking through the proper context and tweaking as needed.

Here’s why that’s a problem. Most companies will give you their “buyer personas.” That’s in air quotes because what they’ve barely scratched the surface on is their customer demographics.

Y’all know this stuff. No prob.

But this information is mostly completely useless when it’s time to compel them to buy if we don’t know what motivates them.

That’s where good old-fashioned psychographics from the 1960s comes into play.

This is the good stuff. The stuff that uncovers what people are struggling with, why they’re struggling with it, and how to move forward (despite it).

Only when we establish answers to these questions (What are your prospects’ goals? What are their pain points and common objections? How can you help them?) can we understand where to begin with an ad.

Ogilvy elaborated on his views of why research is so important:

“If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular.”

Years ago, the brilliant Joanna of Copyhackers worked with a rehab center. Not for a broken arm or leg. Like rehab rehab. (So good luck getting interviews with their customers.)

Instead, she went to Amazon. Pulled up six best-selling books and started to read “500 reviews in 2 or 3 hours” across, copying the phrasing and terminology directly from people who’ve struggled with addiction.

Joanna placed those phrases into a chart liked so:

(image source)

This was painstaking. Incredibly boring I’m sure. Yet she studied them all, analyzing this background information before finally settling on what would become this landing page headline and value proposition:

The results?

• 400% more CTA clicks
• 20% more lead gen submissions

Not through magic. Or innate brilliance. But by simply going straight to her customers’ vernacular.

Do your research!

Advertising Secret #2. Headlines with Immediate Impact

“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”

You’ve heard it everywhere. Haven’t you?

Now you know the source.

And it’s just as true today (if not more so) because of the way our world shapes up.

The “media business” might be dying. But media has never been bigger. We’ve never been faced with the same onslaught of information (both good and bad).

Technology companies, in their infinite wisdom (sarcasm) have pared down to just the essential to help us cope. See: Twitter’s character limit. An even shorter email subject line.

So you’ve only got one shot. Five to ten measly words to get your point across. Quickly. In the blink of an eye, before they scan down to the next one.

The only way to cut through the clutter? Clarity. (And a few power words don’t hurt, either.)

“Never use tricky or irrelevant headlines… People read too fast to figure out what you are trying to say.”

Or, my favorite quote of Ogilvy’s that says the same thing from a different perspective:

“Our business is infested with idiots who try to impress by using pretentious jargon.”

Let’s not belabor the point. You’ve heard this time and time again. All that Neuromarketing stuff.

(image source)

When in doubt, keep it simple stupid. Not, “100GB of Bandwidth.” Don’t know, don’t care. Not clicking.

Customers wanna know, “How many songs can they fit in their pocket?”

I.e., what are they gonna get, or what will they miss out on if they don’t read/click/buy?

Decisions happen subconsciously. Not always rationally or emotionally. Don’t underestimate processing time. Because by the time it clicks, it might already be too late to click.

Advertising Secret #3. Images First

You’d have a better shot getting an image rejected on one of your Facebook ads than approved sometimes.

No, seriously.

Beyond the basic prohibited stuff, there is a laundry list of sensitive subjects and restricted content that extends beyond the usual vices and into the exciting world of intellectual property infringements, violence of any kind, dating, supplements, and anything else remotely “suggestive” (so basically, nothing fun).

Oh. Then there’s that whole 20% text thing that severely cuts down on the word count you can use.

This puts you in a bind. How do you get your point across and use a captivating image that captures attention in milliseconds when there’s SO MANY rules?

Let’s rewind the clock a few decades and see what Ogilvy had to say:

“Most readers look at the photograph first. If you put it in the middle of the page, the reader will start by looking in the middle. Then her eye must go up to read the headline; this doesn’t work, because people have a habit of scanning downwards. However, suppose a few readers do read the headline after seeing the photograph below it. After that, you require them to jump down past the photograph which they have already seen. Not bloody likely.”

Huh. Positioning.

Illustrative image first, because that’s what people see first. Then the headline, to add context about what you’re leaving out in the image.

Let’s see how this works in some Facebook ads. Here’s an easy one:

Attractive people in their underwear. Attention, captivated.

Headline adds context though. There’s a reason they’re in undies. And now it all clicks.

Showing a product is easy though, right? ‘Specially when you hire the aforementioned attractive people to pose in their skivvies. (How many other corny old sayings can you think of for underwear?)

So take two:

Slightly cheesy, sure. The color contrasts are good though. And “Conquering” now lends a little explanation.

This literal hero image just needs some help from supporting copy to fall into place.

Advertising Secret #4. Testing

Facebook ads don’t work. Right?

(Maybe if you don’t understand how they work. *Cough*. GM.)

No. It just takes a bit more effort.

There’s no intent to help you convert single visits (like in AdWords). That’s rare. It happens nowhere else. And it’s why their ad business IS their business.

Instead, you gotta understand how people buy your stuff. That whole customer journey thing. Figure out how they shop, using different channels, bouncing around to piece together clues, before eventually taking the plunge.

Then re-create it inside Facebook.

So. Why is this so complicated? Why do so many fail (and then blame Facebook for their troubles)?

Because there’s no script. There’s no “Step 1, Step 2, Step 3” instructions that you can paste into your business.

The only way to figure it out is through iteration. Testing. Not just A/B testing CTAs. But entire campaigns, audiences, and creative ideas. Think macro, not micro.

This process isn’t new. At least, it shouldn’t be. Here’s Ogilvy:

“The most important word in the vocabulary of advertising is TEST. Test your promise. Test your media. Test your headlines and your illustrations. Test the size of your advertisements. Test your frequency. Test your level of expenditure. Test your commercials. Never stop testing, and your advertising will never stop improving.”

Oh. Ok. But where to start?

“If you pretest your product with consumers, and pretest your advertising, you will do well in the marketplace.”

Ah. That’s right. The audience!

Audience already big enough? (And well targeted enough)? Then go straight for the sale. Too complex? Try a tripwire.

People aren’t buying? Perhaps they need more nurturing. More trust. So re-engage them and retarget them. Loop in dynamic product ads or marketing automation to follow up about what they just saw, researched, or investigated.

Still nothing? Go bigger. That is, in audience size.

Frequency (or the number of times you’ve shown ads to those same people) isn’t the problem (generally speaking). Not today when your customers are already seeing thousands of other competing messages.

Most conversion problems can be fixed through increasing reach (you just need more unique people at the top of your funnel).

Testing and iterating at each of these steps is the only way to figure out what’s not working, why, and how to fix it.

Advertising Secret #5. Preview Your Layout

Concision creates compelling copy.

(Alliteration is the worst.)

Take a page from Isla and Ronnell from Moz next time you’re about to write an ad (or its landing page):

• Write a one-sentence description of the post you wish to write (this is basically the headline)
• Think of the number one thing you’d like readers to take away from the post
• Highlight at least three facts (authoritative, supportive evidence) that support this main point
• Jot down notes that help you tell the story using these facts
• Spend a few days letting the elements “breathe”

Unless you’re writing a long spammy sales page, fewer words win. (There it goes again.)

Why is this important? From Ogilvy’s day:

“Most headlines are set too big to be legible in the magazines or newspaper. Never approve a layout until you have seen it pasted into the magazine or newspaper for which it was destined. If you pin up the layouts on a bulletin board and appraise them from fifteen feet, you will produce posters.”

You know what happens online, today, if you don’t test layout?

This:

Train wreck of an ad.

Also, this:

A little better, but still pretty bad.

Let’s look at a pretty good one to see how concision can help:

Ok. Good image. Lots of muddled value props though, and just too much text overall. And when it goes live, it doesn’t translate well (as you can see).

So let’s cut:

• “Our Super… is back!”
• “for one low price.”
• “Available in 2 sizes… in hair”
• “Very high quality!”
• “Don’t miss your chance… every outfit”

And the final result?

“Create your little lady’s boutique bow collection instantly, starting at just 90 cents per bow! Only comes around twice a year.”

That’s infinitely more understandable, and more scannable.

Advertising Secret #6. Knowing What You’re Selling

“In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.”

Which is important, because:

“Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn’t sell much of anything.”

You know ads sell. This isn’t your first rodeo.

But the key point is to think about what you’re selling. And if it’s the right thing (or not).

Consider it this way:

People don’t buy drills. They buy holes.

That means when appropriate, you gotta explain the reason why someone should care about your software. Or insurance. Or drill.

Because let’s be honest: Nobody cares about “onboarding” or “onboarding software.” They don’t. They care about keeping the company running smoothly during a period of growth and avoiding the costly bad hire.

Expanded headlines let you fit that long value prop into an ad now and watch CTR jump 400%.

Nobody cares about downloading a whitepaper. That act, in and of itself, isn’t compelling. They’re a dime a dozen. So it’s not enough.

But a “Price Guide”?

That little change is good enough for a 620.9% lift.

Advertising Secret #7. Positioning

“The most important decision is how to position your product.”

There have never been truer words spoken.

Marketing is positioning. Sales is positioning.

Let me ask you something. Have you ever worked with a commoditized product or service? Like, really commoditized? (Because you can make the case that almost every popular product or service is commoditized at some point.)

What was the hook you used in the ad? There was none. It was a discount. A coupon. ‘Cause you had no other choice!

Commoditization means a lack of positioning. It places you in square competition with dozens (if not hundreds) of people who do the same thing the exact same way (and therefore all charge more-or-less the same).

In other words, a “Red Ocean.? A fierce competitive landscape where everyone goes for each other’s neck.

Instead of, say, a nice, wide open Blue Ocean. One that creates a new market. Paves a new road. Thereby capturing new demand and making the competition irrelevant.

Call it specialization or whatever you want. But it’s how Yellowtail intoxicated non-wine drinkers to become wine drinkers.

The Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus is on its last lap. And yet you can’t visit a major city or Vegas hotel without seeing a Cirque du Soleil poster.

(image source)

Point is, advertising is like the tip of a spear. It helps, to a point. (Ha!)

But your ads and landing pages are largely at the mercy of how your widget is being positioned.

Let’s say you’re looking at targeting options for an ad on Facebook. Would a Chevy Volt ad appeal to Tesla owners? Why not, they’re both electric cars, right?

Wrong. The positioning is totally different (because the Tesla costs more than twice as much … that matters). And it’s your job to know that.

Advertising Secret #8. Personality

The label says, “You’re Not Worthy.”

They warn you. Straight away. “You probably won’t like it.”

And yet, people do. Certain people, that is.

Stone Beer is considered “world class” by the most critical beer geek hipsters on RateBeer and BeerAdvocate.

They openly mock the “tasteless fizzy yellow” stuff pumped out by Bud, Coors, and Miller. And they openly mock the people who drink them.

It works, because those people would never like Stone in the first place. They’re the antithesis of each other. It’s Apple vs. Microsoft. Jobs vs. Gates.

Look at Noah:

WTF is he doing? Seriously. And yet, you either just laughed or cringed when you looked at that.

Which mean it either caught your eye and you clicked when it came across your news feed. Or you didn’t.

What is that elusive X factor?

The one thing that can possibly make up for a completely commoditized product?

Personality.

“There isn’t any significant difference between the various brands of whiskey, or cigarettes or beer. They are all about the same. And so are the cake mixes and the detergents, and the margarines… The manufacturer who dedicates his advertising to building the most sharply defined personality for his brand will get the largest share of the market at the highest profit.”

Advertising Secret #9. Consistency

Us tech geeks are enamored with shiny new things.

New platforms. New channels. New hacks. New ad options.

Years ago, when social was first becoming “a thing,” the average large company had 178 social media accounts!

And yet, the unifying factor of most great campaigns is execution. Which requires discipline.

“It takes uncommon guts to stick to one style in the face of all the pressures to ‘come up with something new’ every six months. It is tragically easy to be stampeded into change. But golden rewards await the advertiser who has the brains to create a coherent image, and the stability to stick with it over a long period.”

Nike’s still Just Doin’ It. The Most Interesting Man in the Universe ran for about a decade.

Why? Because creativity is a myth. And formulas can be liberating. For instance:

“Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote sonatas within an equally rigid discipline – exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?”

Not a bad metaphor from an ad man.

Here’s a perfect example:

(image source)

Look around and you’ll see more of the same.

Or how about the “No [Objection]” formula?

From email marketing:

All the way over to tax relief:

Local biz? Even easier. You should almost never deviate from “[Location] + [Keyword]”. Ever.

There’s no reason, because it works. It gets more clicks. And more clicks means you win more and get paid more.

Advertising Secret #10. People

Ah 2007. The good old days.

When SEO was easy. And blog posts meant 300 odd words.

Easy, right? Maybe 20-30 minutes of work and you could get on with your day.

Things change.

The average blog post today takes 26% longer to write than just a year ago (or 3 hours 16 minutes instead compared with 2 hours 35 minutes.)

(image source)

So… why? Are we getting dumber? (The answer’s no, of course not. That wasn’t supposed to be a trick question.)

The short answer is competition. The longer explanation is Skyscrapers.

Even a couple years ago, 500 words would cut it (and only set you back 1-2 hours).

Not today.

Not when blog posts average ~2000 words (and getting longer), incorporate images every ~150 words or so, and require a little bit of, well, you know, writing.

In other words, when the bar raises, there ain’t no shortcuts.

We’ve been focusing on the tactics for the most part here. The little tricks and hints and strategies employed to eke out better results.

And those are important. They are. Except when you consider one thing: the people implementing them.

“In most agencies, account executives outnumber the copywriters two to one. If you were a dairy farmer, would you employ twice as many milkers as you had cows?”

Too poetic? This one’s a little more blunt:

“Advertising is a business of words, but advertising agencies are infested with men and women who cannot write. They are as helpless as deaf mutes on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.”

Technology moves quick. People get hired and thrown into the deep end. Many times, before they’re ready. Capable or able even.

Ogilvy again:

“Training should not be confined to trainees. It should be a continuous process, and should include the entire professional staff of the agency. The more our people learn, the more useful they can be to our clients.”

Someone who did AdWords ten years ago? Obsolete. Same goes for SEO. And now, simply creating a blog post.

What works today (and another decade down the line)? Knowledge. Insight. Experience.

“I had a friend who was the King’s surgeon in England. One day I asked him what makes a great surgeon. He replied, ‘What distinguishes a great surgeon is his knowledge. He knows more than other surgeons. During an operation he finds something which he wasn’t expecting, recognizes it and knows what to do about it.’ It’s the same thing with advertising people. The good ones know more. How do you get to know more? By reading books about advertising. By picking the brains of people who know more than you do. From the Magic Lanterns. And from experience.”

In Closing

It’s (unbelievably) 2017.

Soon it’ll be 2020. And then… what?

New advertising channels. New ways of doing things. New “best practices” that expire 12 months later.

You can’t prepare for that. There’s nothing you can do when machine learning upheaves our industry (because not even the machines know what will happen yet).

You know what you can do, though?

Study the fundamentals. Refine the principles that have worked for the last thirty years (and the thirty before that too).

Consumer behavior has evolved. But consumers haven’t that much. We just want more. Faster and better.

And if you’re still having trouble, just follow this last bit of Ogilvy advertising wisdom and you’ll soon feel better:

“Many people – and I think I am one of them – are more productive when they’ve had a little to drink. I find if I drink two or three brandies, I’m far better able to write.”

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

I was having a second coffee with an ex student, now the head of a marketing inside a rapidly growing startup.  His company had marched through customer discovery, learning about the customer problem, validated solutions and was now scaling sales and marketing.  All good news.

But he was getting uneasy that as his headcount was growing the productivity of his marketing department seemed to be rapidly declining.

I wasn’t surprised. When organizations are small (startups, small teams in companies and government agencies) early employees share a mission (why they come to work, what they need to do while they are at work, and how they will know they have succeeded). But as these organizations grow large, what was once a shared mission and intent gets buried under HR process and Key Performance Indicators.

I told him that I had learned long ago that to keep that from happening, you need to on-board/train your team about mission and intent.

—-

Why Do You Work Here?
I had taken the job of VP of Marketing in a company emerging from bankruptcy. We’d managed to secure another infusion of cash, but it wasn’t going to last long.

During my first week on the job, I asked each of my department heads what they did for marketing and the company. When I asked our trade show manager, she looked surprised and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to take our booth to trade shows and set it up?” The other departments gave the same type of logistical answers; the product-marketing department, for example, said their job was to get the product specs from engineering and write data sheets. But my favorite was when the public relations manager told me, “We’re here to summarize the data sheets and put them in press releases and then answer the phone in case the press calls.”

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup, update your resume.

Titles Are Not Your Job
When I pressed my staff to explain why marketing did trade shows or wrote press releases or penned data sheets, the best response I could get was, “Why that’s our job.” In their heads their titles were a link back to a Human Resources job spec that came from a 10,000-person company (ie. listing duties and responsibilities, skills and competencies, reporting relationships…)

It dawned on me that we had a department full of people with titles describing process-centric execution while we were in environment that required relentless agility and speed with urgency. While their titles might be what their business cards said, titles were not their job – and being a slave to process lost the sight of the forest for the trees.  This was the last thing we needed in a company where every day could be our last.

Titles in a startup are not the same as what your job is. This is a big idea.

Department Mission Statements – What am I Supposed to Do Today?
It wasn’t that I had somehow inherited dumb employees. What I was hearing was a failure of management.

No one had on-boarded these people. No one had differentiated a startup job description from a large company job. They were all doing what they thought they were supposed to.

But most importantly, no one had sat the marketing department down and defined our department Mission (with a capital “M”).

Most startups put together a corporate mission statement because the CEO remembered seeing one at his last job or the investors said they needed one. Most companies spend an inordinate amount of time crafting a finely honed corporate mission statement for external consumption and then do nothing internally to make it happen. What I’m about to describe here is quite different.

What our marketing department was missing was anything that gave the marketing staff daily guidance about what they should be doing. The first reaction from my CEO was, “That’s why you’re running the department.” And yes, we could have built a top-down, command-and-control hierarchy. But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction.

We needed to craft a Departmental Mission statement that told everyone why they came to work, what they needed to do while they were at work, and how they would know they had succeeded. And it was going to mention the two words that marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit.

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission
After a few months of talking to customers and working with sales, we defined the marketing Mission (our job) as:

Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.), competitive analyses, channel and customer collateral (white papers, data sheets, product reviews), customer surveys, and customer discovery findings.

This year, marketing needs to provide sales with 40,000 active and accepted leads, company and product name recognition over 65% in our target market, and five positive product reviews per quarter. We will reach 35% market share in year one of sales with a headcount of twenty people, spending less than $4,000,000.

• Generate end-user demand (to match our revenue goals)
• Drive that demand into our sales channels
• Value price our products to achieve our revenue and margin goals (create high-value)
• Educate our sales channel(s)
• Help Engineering understand customer needs

That was it. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Building a Mission-focused Team
Having the mission in place meant that our team could see that what mattered wasn’t what was on their business card, but how much closer their work moved our department to completing the mission. Period.
It wasn’t an easy concept for everyone to understand.

My new Director of Marketing Communications turned the Marcom departments into a mission-focused organization. Her new tradeshow manager quickly came to understand that his job was not to set up booths. We hired union laborers to do that. A trade show was where our company went to create awareness and/or leads. And if you ran the tradeshow department, you owned the responsibility for awareness and leads. The booth was incidental. I couldn’t care less if we had a booth or not if we could generate the same amount of leads and awareness by skydiving naked into a coffee cup.

The same was true for PR. My new head of Public Relations quickly learned that my admin could answer calls from the press. The job of Public Relations wasn’t a passive “write a press release and wait for something to happen” activity. It wasn’t measured by how busy you were, it was measured by results. And the results weren’t the traditional PR metrics of number of articles or inches of ink. I couldn’t care less about those. I wanted our PR department to map the sales process, figure out where getting awareness and interest could be done with PR, then get close and personal with the press and use it to generate end-user demand and then drive that demand into our sales channel. We were constantly doing internal and external audits and creating metrics to see the effects of different PR messages, channels and audiences on customer awareness, purchase intent and end-user sales.

The same was true for the Product Marketing group. I hired a Director of Product Marketing who in his last company had ran its marketing and then went out into the field and became its national sales director. He got the job when I asked him how much of his own marketing material his sales team actually used in the field. When he said, “about ten percent,” I knew by the embarrassed look on his face I had found the right guy. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to Engineering.

Mission Intent – What’s Really Important
With a great team in place, the next step was recognizing that our Mission statement might change on the fly. “Hey, we just all bought into this Mission idea and now you’re telling us it can change?!”  (The mission might change if we pivot, competitors might announce new products, we might learn something new about our customers, etc.)

So we introduced the notion of Mission Intent. Intent answered the question, “What is the company thinking and goal behind the mission?” In our case, the mission of the company was to sell $25 million of product with 45% gross margin. The idea of teaching intention is that if employees understand what we intended  behind the mission, they can work collaboratively to achieve it.

We recognized that there would be a time marketing would screw up or something out of our control would happen, making the marketing mission obsolete (i.e. we might fail to deliver 40,000 leads.) Think of intention as the answer to the adage, “When you are up to your neck in alligators it’s hard to remember you were supposed to drain the swamp.” For example, our mission intent said that the reason why marketing needed to deliver 40,000 leads and 35% market share, etc., was so that Sales could sell $25 million of products at 45% gross margin.

What we taught everyone is that the intention is more enduring than the mission. (“Let’s see, the company is trying to sell $25 million in product with 45% gross margin. If marketing can’t deliver the 40,000 leads, what else can we do for sales to still achieve our revenue and profitability?”) The mission was our goal, but based on circumstances, it might change. However, the Intent was immovable.

When faced with the time pressures of a startup, too many demands and too few people, we began to teach our staff to refer back to the five Mission goals and the Intent of the department. When stuff started piling up on their desks, they learned to ask themselves, “Is what I’m working on furthering these goals? If so, which one? If not, why am I doing it?”

They understood the mission intent was our corporate revenue and profit goals.

Why Do It
By the end of the first year, our team had jelled. (Over time, we added the No Excuses culture to solve accountability.) It was a department willing to exercise initiative, with the judgment to act wisely and an eagerness to accept responsibility.

I remember at the end of a hard week my direct reports came into my office just to talk about the week’s little victories. And there was a moment as they shared their stories when they all began to realize that our company (one that had just come off of life support) was beginning to kick the rear of our better-funded and bigger competitors.  We all marveled in the moment.

Lessons Learned

• Push independent execution of tasks down to the lowest possible level
• Give everyone a shared Mission Statement: why they come to work, what they need to do, and how they will know they have succeeded.
• Share Mission Intent for the big picture for the Mission Statement
• Build a team comfortable with independent Mission execution
• Add a No Excuses Culture
• Agree on Core Values to define your culture

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence "Digital Media Briefing" subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

On Tuesday, Nasdaq announced that the The New York Interactive Exchange (NYIAX) would run on its technology and leverage the Nasdaq Financial Framework architecture.

NYIAX is a cloud-based ad exchange powered by blockchain technology that incorporates techniques from financial trading.

NYIAX is a marketplace where participants can transact on future advertising inventory. The platform enables the buying and selling of ad inventory via forward contracts, where media inventory assets are sold at predetermined future date and price. The use of blockchain and derivative instruments for digital advertising are two bright hopes for the industry.

The implications of blockchain and financial trading processes in ad media-buying are manifold, including the following market benefits: 

• Transparency. Blockchain acts as database where transactions are recorded for everyone participating in that database see. It can take account of any number of actions on both the buy and sell side of digital advertising, such as timing and parties of a transaction, the performance of that media asset bought, where it was delivered and the impressions it received. Ad fraud and quality assurance are areas where this technology is likely to help.
• Efficiency. Blockchain increases accounting and data-sharing efficiencies, and the ability to trade media inventory on a futures basis expands and lubricates the digital ad market with new ways to transact. In a way, they operate much like TV upfronts, which share a common advantage in their ability to lock up revenue and therefore reduce risk and exposure to price fluctuations. Futures contracts could be the start of wider derivative trading in ad tech.

NYIAX is currently onboarding clients for a pilot program which it aims to complete in late September, Reuters reports. The exchange’s initial focus is to sign on participants within the digital advertising ecosystem. Once it reaches critical mass within digital, it plans to expand into legacy advertising markets, including TV, print, radio, and out-of-home.

There's no question that consumers are increasing the amount of time they spend consuming digital media, while advertisers are increasing their ad budgets into digital channels. What may come as a surprise, however, is the complexity of the interconnected web of companies involved in the process of delivering digital advertisements to end users. Collectively, these companies are known as “advertising technology,” or “ad tech” for short.

Ad tech companies are intermediaries between advertisers and publishers, and add value to the ad delivery process by consolidating inventory, automating workflows, and offering precise targeting capabilities at scale. The automation of ad buying is also known as “programmatic advertising” — that is, using technology and software to buy digital ads. Programmatic ad spend in the US is quickly ramping up: It will top $20 billion this year and reach $38.5 billion by year-end 2020. 

But ad tech's ascendancy isn’t without its drawbacks. The advertising industry in the US is dominated by two main players: Facebook and Google. As a result, ad tech players are fighting for a pretty small piece of revenue pie, one of the many drivers of increased consolidation in the space.

Kevin Gallagher, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on ad tech that examines the different players involved in the process of delivering ads, the formats that are driving growth (notably mobile and video), and the factors that are driving increased consolidation over the coming years.

Here are some key points from the report:

• By 2020, mobile will be the biggest online advertising market, and video the fastest growing.
• So-called "walled gardens" Google and Facebook lead a relatively small group of players that attract the vast majority of digital-ad spending in the US today. 
• Growth can be challenging for players outside the walled-garden duopoly, and many companies are reaching a level of maturity that may prompt investors to push for an exit.
• Ad tech is poised for consolidation, and the number of companies in the industry will decline significantly over the next few years.
• Companies specializing in certain ad formats like mobile, video, and TV are attractive targets. They are well positioned to take advantage of the fastest growing segments of digital media.

In full, the report:

• Forecasts US programmatic revenue through 2020.
• Highlights the factors driving consolidation, and identifies new acquirers and attractive targets.
• Explores the challenges ad tech companies face including the dominance of walled gardens, ad blocking and measurement.
• Outlines emerging technologies that will help propel ad growth in the next decade.

Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

1. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. » START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase & download the full report from our research store.» BUY THE REPORT

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According to Korn Ferry unpublished data, there has been a 74% increase in the number of CIOs serving on Fortune 100 boards in the past two years.

It’s no wonder CIOs are the fastest-growing addition to the boardroom: They can help address a host of issues of crucial importance to boards, including using technologies to create operational efficiencies and competitive advantage; identifying opportunities related to cloud computing, digitization, and data; addressing threats and risks associated with information security; and using their experience and judgment to oversee, question, and provide input on technology budgets.

But there’s room for growth. Only 31% of Fortune 100 boards currently have a director who is a CIO, even though technology is at the core of every business today. As Sheila Jordan, CIO at Symantec and director at FactSet, put it, “All companies are technology companies today. Technology is a lever to run the business, but also to change and grow.”

How should boards incorporate a CIO director? What role should a CIO play on the board, and what’s the profile of a CIO who can add real value? Based on our experience in recruiting CIO directors for Fortune 100 companies, here are a few guiding principles.

Update your mindset about the role of technology on the board. CEOs and boards still generally view technology as a cost. But “more boards are waking up to the power of leveraging technology as a competitive weapon,” according to Tim Theriault, former CIO of Walgreens Boots Alliance and current board member of Alliance Data, The Vitamin Shoppe, and Wellmark Blue Cross and Blue Shield.

While boards may define their need for a technology director somewhat differently, “every board should have access to someone who knows what technology can do for the business and what the trends are,” says Theriault. “Boards need to gain an appreciation for what the possibilities are, including how technology can help established successful companies with needed transformation. To do that, they should surround themselves with people who can be helpful. Some CEOs are still in denial, and time is against them — the longer it takes, the more dramatic the needed transformation and the higher the risk.”

“Most companies measure their technology spend as a percentage of revenue,” says Frank Modruson, former CIO of Accenture and currently on the boards of Zebra Technologies, First Midwest Bancorp, and Forsythe Technology, so “having someone on the board with the relevant expertise and an understanding of what’s needed can be invaluable.” Often, says Modruson, that sophisticated expertise comes down to one fundamental skill, which is to ask the right questions of the internal CIO: Are we spending enough? Are we aligned on the critical business priorities? Did we get the desired results? How old are the core systems or platforms? The latter question is crucial and can easily be overlooked by directors who lack a technology background, because once technology starts working, it generally keeps working, although it may be far from optimal.

Define the role as an interface between the board and the internal CIO. The CIO on the board is often a valuable translator between the board, the internal CIO, and other technology-related functions. In this regard, a CIO director can play a pivotal role in educating other board members and the CEO, giving them the ability to knowledgeably probe on technology matters. Based on the demands of budget dollars, an experienced, informed board member should be able to ensure priorities are identified to address issues related to digital transformation. “Companies that don’t recognize that they need to invest in new technology end up with more and more legacy systems,” says Jordan, “which are a breeding ground for risk.”

This engagement between directors and management starts with the permission and knowledge of the CEO. “The savvier CEO wants someone on the board who can connect appropriately with management on technology-related issues and make recommendations,” says Charlie Feld, founder of The Feld Group Institute, which works with global corporations to develop next-generation business and IT leaders, and former CIO at Frito-Lay, BNSF Railway, and Delta Air Lines. “Traditionally, boards have tended to stay out of operational functions, but technology is so pervasive that the best practice is to have direct board engagement in technology through active committees, just as they would with audit, compensation, and other key areas.”

“On the FactSet board, I’ve been encouraged to meet with the management team and to give advice to the CEO and the CIO,” says Jordan. “It’s important that the board understand the management team, and that interaction helps. I’m constantly asking myself, what experience can I bring to the board and the management team that they can leverage? I can guide them by saying, let’s look at this trend or here’s a new technology to consider. It’s not about managing the day-to-day, but about the experience and knowledge I can share to open their eyes to the future.”

Look for hybrids and cast a wide net. CIO directors should be capable of straddling business and technical worlds at the highest levels and acting as a connecting rod between the board and internal technical functions. “I would push for someone who has deep technical skills and who is business-savvy and a good storyteller,” says Feld. “But every business leader has to speak the language of business: P&L.”

CIOs who can bring this hybrid combination of skills to the board are invaluable, says Feld: “No one sees all the functions except the CEO and the CIO. The CIO is a system integrator, so he or she envisions all the critical connections.”

Generally speaking, CIO director prospects will have served as a CIO or CTO of a large organization whose market sector is relevant to the company of the board doing the recruiting. Ideal candidates will have faced similar systems and technology challenges to those the board is facing and be able to provide valuable insights. He or she will also have achieved sufficient professional stature to be able to interact on a peer-to-peer level with those already on the board.

In addition to assessing the skills and experience CIOs bring as hybrid experts, there can be a cultural hurdle to clear. “Boards can initially be hesitant about less-traditional directors,” says Theriault. “They want to make sure any new directors will be a good fit with the rest of the board and that they will be able to participate and contribute value to board discussions beyond their functional area. There is a fallacy that CIOs are tech geeks; successful CIOs understand people, technology, and business strategy.”

Boards should not fall into the trap of adhering to rigid criteria that may unnecessarily screen out CIO director candidates and impede chances of recruiting a CIO to the board. In particular, requiring previous board experience will severely narrow the universe of potential candidates, eliminating many CIOs who could make effective directors. There are reliable methods of assessing candidates’ fit for the board, including intensive referencing of those who have worked closely with the candidate and have a keen sense of competencies and behavior-related traits that speak to the individual’s desirability, or not, as a team member. Moreover, there are ways of compensating for experience gaps, if all else looks favorable, in the onboarding process. They may include an external director education program, if the person is a novice board member, and mentoring by a senior director.

From Korn Ferry’s perspective, in recruiting directors for a wide range of industry and functional areas, CIOs are the most sought-after directors. With many CIOs able to serve on only one external board, if any, with the consent of their CEO, demand should soon outstrip supply. And because technology is now of strategic importance, we are beginning to see boards create technology committees, further accelerating demand for CIO directors. Much like now-required audit and compensation committees, technology committees comprise directors with specific expertise, who meet as a group and then make recommendations to the board.

Even with access to the best CIO directors, there are no guarantees that a company will not face unforeseen challenges arising from technology-related risk. But having an accomplished CIO director is the most effective way to make sure the board identifies the most-pressing technology priorities, establishes greater importance for the technology functions, and plays an active role in attracting top technology leaders. Perhaps most important of all, the CIO director can constructively challenge plans for the technology functions, which are the backbone of every successful enterprise today.

Due to the proliferation of marketing materials on the internet, the modern buyer is no longer dependent on salespeople for necessary purchasing decision information. Inbound salespeople see the need to personalize the sales experience to the buyer's context. 

Meanwhile, inbound sales teams recognize they must transform their entire sales strategy so they're serving the buyer.

Inbound Sales Methodology

Inbound sales organizations use a sales process that is personalized, helpful, and directly focused on prospects' pain points throughout their buyers journey. 

During inbound sales, buyers move through three key phases: awareness, consideration, and decision (which we’ll discuss further below). While buyers go through these three phases, sales teams go through four different actions that will help them support qualified leads into becoming opportunities and eventually customers: identify, connect, explore, and advise. 

It may be helpful to have a thorough understanding of how inbound sales differs from traditional sales, so we’ll discuss this below. 

Comparing Legacy Salespeople to Inbound Salespeople

Legacy Salespeople

• Are unaware of which buyers are active in a buying journey
• Use cold outreach and lead with a generic elevator pitch to qualify on budget
• Transition into presentation mode when a buyer expresses interest
• Deliver the same presentation every time and offer discounts to motivate buyers to purchase on their timeline

Inbound Salespeople

• Prioritize buyers that are active in a buying journey
• Build trust by participating in the buyer's online conversations and lead with personalized messaging and advice
• Transition into exploration mode when a buyer expresses interest
• Personalize the presentation to each buyer and adjust the sales process to the buyer's timeline

Building a Sales Process Around the Buyer's Journey

To implement an inbound sales methodology, you need to build a sales process centered around the buyer’s journey and its three key phases.

What are the stages in the Inbound Sales model?

Buyers move through three stages during inbound sales: awareness, consideration, and decision. 

Awareness

During the awareness phase, clients identify a challenge or pain point that they are currently experiencing in their day-to-day lives that they want to find a solution for and what it might look like.

It’s essential to have a well-rounded understanding of your buyer persona when interacting with buyers in the awareness phase so you understand how what you offer addresses their needs. 

Consideration

In consideration, buyers understand their issue and want to find a solution. They pursue different avenues or offers that will solve their unique challenge. 

As a salesperson, speaking to buyers in the consideration stage involves understanding the types of solutions a prospect may be looking to and the pros and cons they’ll weigh. In addition, you should understand how your offer sets you apart from competitors. Having this information makes it easier for you to present a value proposition when you connect with buyers.

Decision

The decision stage is the final stage, as a buyer has chosen a solution to their pain point that they believe is the best possible option for meeting their needs. If they choose your product, it’s because you’ve successfully connected with them, presented a value proposition, and shown them that your offer is the best fit solution. 

As buyers go through the three stages of inbound sales, salespeople have four distinct actions that mirror the buyer's journey: identify, connect, explore, and advise. Below we’ll give a brief overview of each action and discuss what salespeople should do during each stage. 

The 4 Inbound Sales Actions

1. Identify 

Identifying the right business opportunities from the start is often the difference between a thriving business and a failing one. Knowing what to look for helps you create a predictable, scalable sales funnel, which is why it’s imperative to have a thorough understanding of your buyer's journey. 

2. Connect

Inbound salespeople connect with leads to help them decide whether they should prioritize the goal or challenge they’re facing. If the buyer chooses to do so, these leads become qualified leads. 

3. Explore

When exploring, inbound salespeople aim to learn more about their qualified leads’ goals or challenges to assess whether their offer is a good fit. During this stage, it can also be helpful to learn the other solutions a prospect is browsing so you can better present a value proposition that sets you apart. 

4. Advise

When advising, your end goal is to convey to the prospect that your solution is uniquely positioned to address the buyer’s needs and help them solve their pain points. 

Let’s discuss how the different inbound actions relate to the inbound buyer's journey stages.

What to Do During Each Stage of the Buyer's Journey

1. Identify: Awareness Stage

As a sales rep, being successful in this stage begins with acknowledging that most prospects are already in the awareness stage of the buyer's journey before they engage with you.

Given this, it’s important to:

• Conduct research: Leverage technology to help you understand more about your buyers, like setting up Google alerts or asking for introductions on LinkedIn. It’s also important to focus your efforts on active buyers. 
• Prioritize active buyers: Active buyers should fit your ideal buyer persona and take action like providing contact information via conversion form, opening a sales email, or viewing product pages.  

2. Connect: Consideration Stage

Inbound Sales leaves behind the tradition of cold calling and leaving voicemails with generic elevator pitches. Instead, when connecting with prospects in the consideration stage, you want to lead with messaging personalized to the buyer's context and what you’ve learned about them during the awareness stage, like their industry, role, interest, shared connections, etc.

When connecting, you should:

• Define personas: Understand the unique perspective of the individuals you’re attempting to reach. A valuable way to do so is to segment your market by the types of companies you regularly target and define the different personas of the different types of people you target. 
• Define sequences for each persona: How will you reach out to prospects? Does your persona prefer being contacted by phone or email? How many times will you reach out before you give up? You want to develop a communication strategy for each of your prospects based on your understanding of who they are. 
• Define content for each sequence: Buyers in the connection stage are fresh out of the awareness stage where they’ve just decided to pursue a solution to their needs. Given this, your goal isn’t to immediately sell them on your product or provide a demo. Instead, your goal when connecting should be to deliver the right educational content that will help them learn more about their issue and how it relates to your offer. 

When you’re ready to initiate outreach, begin with advice or a surprising insight that directly relates to your buyer and is likely to capture their attention. 

3. Explore: Consideration Stage

When exploring, you want to learn more about your leads, their challenges, and the solutions they’re exploring. After you’ve initiated a connection, guide an exploratory conversation that gives you more information about your prospect. You can: 

• Tailor your focus to the prospects' challenge: People usually don’t make changes unless something impedes their process. Use the small yet powerful wording adjustment of “challenges” instead of saying “problems.”

• Connect goals with challenges: Ask prospects about their goals and what is standing in the way of them. Listen for an acknowledgment that they don’t have a good solution and are afraid they won't achieve their goals. 
• Share plans that fit the prospect’s timeline: Introduce your product and clearly show how it can help the buyer solve their challenge and meet their goal. Ideally, you’ll have a value proposition that uniquely positions your solution against competitors. 
• Discuss budget: The final aspect to understand is how much your prospect will invest in a new solution. Aim to get a well-rounded understanding of their budget and desired timeline.  

4. Advise: Decision Stage

Traditional salespeople stick to a generic script and can fail to represent their offer as a solution to their prospects' specific needs. 

Inbound salespeople speak to the prospect's desire to understand how your offerings will specifically help them with their pain points, not a general pitch. As an inbound salesperson, you bridge the bag between the generic messaging on your company’s website and the unique needs of your buyer. Here are some additional tips: 

• Provide a recap of what you’ve learned: When advising, your conversations should begin by restating where the prospect is now and the insights you’ve gained from your earlier discussions, such as a challenge your prospect has or a goal they want to achieve. 
• Suggest ways to achieve their goals: Craft a customized presentation that connects their goals and challenges to your offering and shows exactly how they’ll benefit from your service.
• Confirm budget, authority, and timeline: Based on what it takes to set up their account and implement your solution, work backward to determine when they need to sign your contract. Outline a timeline that meets the buyer’s deadline.

After advising your prospects, they should be successfully on their way to making a final decision. 

A New Sales Methodology

The Inbound Sales Methodology covers every step of the buyer’s journey traveled on the road from stranger to customer and each corresponding salesperson action. The new methodology acknowledges that Inbound Sales doesn’t just happen -- you do it. And, you do it using tools that help you personalize the sales process to appeal to precisely the right leads, in the right places, at just the right time in their buying journey.

So, what happens when someone clicks through to your website? Do you persuade them to stay and find out more...

The post 5 Content Optimization Mistakes You’ll Wish You Fixed Sooner appeared first on Copyblogger.

Transcript of The Impact of Dynamic Communication written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Transcript provided by Verbatim Transcription Services

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Transcript:

John: Want to know the secret to growing, leading, managing? Whether it’s your life, or a business? It is dynamic communication. That’s what we’re going to talk about today on this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, check it out.

John: This week’s episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is truly a game changer. Unlike traditional email service providers or marketing automation platforms, Klaviyo offers powerful functionality without long implementation or execution cycles. It gives ecommerce marketers access to all the relevant data from a variety of tools and it makes it available to power smarter, more personalized campaigns. Bottom line, Klaviyo helps ecommerce marketers make more money through super-targeted, highly relevant email and advertising campaigns. Learn more at klaviyo.com.
Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Jill Schiefelbein. She is an entrepreneur, a former college professor, professional speaker and communication expert and also an author of a book we’re going to talk about today called Dynamic Communication, 27 strategies to grow, lead and manage your business. So Jill, thanks for joining me.

Jill: John, thanks so much for having me!

John: So you’re book which is out in March of 2017 dependent on when you’re listening to this. It’s coming out on Entrepreneur Press, I wonder if you could talk a little bit — I know I have a lot of aspiring authors, I have a lot of authors that listen to this show. I interview a lot of authors. But, I don’t know that I’ve specifically spoken to anybody who has gone through the process with Entrepreneur Press, so I’d love to hear how that experience was.

Jill: Honestly it’s been better than I expected it to be John. I have done the publishing — the self publishing route, the academic publishing route back when I was doing my professor thing. But for this one I had heard from so many people that going with a traditional publisher is just complicated and there’s going to be so much push-back on ideas and content and formatting, and honestly? That wasn’t my experience at all. So I feel incredibly grateful to have been picked up by Entrepreneur Press because they’re a smaller publishing arm, they don’t choose as many books. But the books they choose they genuinely do believe in and what was great for me in choosing them over a couple of other publishers that I looked at, is that with them they have a whole marketing arm and a whole marketing enterprise behind them that they lend to the book and that was really my deciding factor.

John: And they are still very tied to the magazine right?

Jill: Very much so. It’s all the same. Entrepreneur media is a parent company and then there’s the magazine, Entreprenuer.com, Entrepreneur Press and now Entrepreneur network which is their video arm.

John: And they will likely get you maybe some speaking gigs at some of their events I’m guessing?

Jill: Yep. That’s a plan. They got me a full page ad in the print magazine in the March issue which was probably one of the most surreal moments I’ve had in my life where I’m flipping through the magazine and I’m like, “Oh my gosh! That’s my book in there! This is so incredible!” And they’re doing lots of promos on the website, we’re doing stuff together in collaboration with video etcetera. It’s just a lot of stuff going on but again to have that support infrastructure behind me really distinguished them in my mind from any of the other presses that I could have gone with.

John: So maybe I want to back up a little bit. How did it differ from writing a book in — that was a textbook in academia. Did you just kind of — I mean do they do the same thing where you have an advance and you get royalties or do you mind sharing that?

Jill: Oh not a problem at all. So in the academic world it is very different because there’s a certain amount of credentialing that goes on that other, you know in the trade press or the commercial press where all your credentialing is tied to your ability to market and have an audience. And in the academic world it’s largely tied to your name and your academic accolades. So for me, when I came in on the text book I was actually a co-author and I was chosen by the original authors because I actually taught the class using a version of a text book and I went to them and proactively told them why this book didn’t work in reality for students. And they were, you know a little shocked at my candour but they realised I was right and they needed to bring in that perspective. So doing that, you know there’s advance, there’s royalties, there’s all those things too but you don’t have to worry about marketing at all, there was never a single marketing conversation that I ever had being part of the academic press route. Whereas from day one, even before day one when you’re putting together your proposal for a more traditional or commercial press, your proposal is about half of 50-some pages I submit are on marketing.

John: Yeah. You know I sound a little cynical when I say this but I think sometimes the traditional publishers care less about what you had to say and more about your platform.

Jill: No I actually don’t think you should sound cynical at all because I think that’s pretty factual.

John: So you are you know… kind of heading now into the next phase of the book and you had mentioned you wanted to talk a little bit about this. What has been your approach now to you know, coming full face knowing that I’ve got this book now I have to market it and I’ve committed to marketing it. What are some of the things you have done that you — obviously you don’t know the ultimate results at this recording. But what are some of the things you have done that you think are going to set you up for success?

Jill: There’s a number of things that if I may John, can I kind of give everyone a back-story in context so this makes a little more sense?

John: Totally.

Jill: I think a lot of people and this is myself included so it’s  pot calling kettle black? 6:04 and then I finally realised what I was doing and changed it mid-course. But when you are thinking about writing a book, you’re thinking about what ideas you want to get out, what IP you have, what methodologies you have and you want to get out there because you know it’s good information. And it’s great to have confidence in that. And that’s what I did with the proposal and it ended up being picked up. But mid way through it, in fact about 45 days from the manuscript due date for the entire book I had this ah ha! Moment. And this moment came to me because I thought how am I even in this position in the first place? And if you rewind the very long story short, is I launched a YouTube series, 52 videos back in September of 2012, a year later it wasn’t doing what I wanted so I really got geeky with YouTube analytics and figured things out. Now that thing is at about three quarters of a million views for that series and it keeps growing, it got picked up by Entrepreneur’s video network where I was one of their original partners, which spawned then me writing for the magazine and for the column, and doing live stream personality and ultimately, them asking if they could have an opportunity to view my next book proposal. And when I go back to the roots of what attracted them to me in the first place – it wasn’t some fancy model, it wasn’t some methodology or some IP or me pushing ideas out, it was me giving bite-sized pieces of information that people could easily digest. And when I got back to those roots about what attracted people to me in the first place, not exactly what I was pushing out but what attracted people to me, I realized I need to scrap the entire book and start over. And my editor thought I was nuts, but she loved the idea so instead of writing about this one major concept within business communication and making a whole book about that, I decided to scratch that and instead put together a book of 27 strategies across 8 different areas of business communication that can really be more of a reference guide for people. So you pick it up, you know where you’re having a problem, you find that chapter, you read it maybe five to ten pages and boom, you’re done. And it’s so much more impactful that way, when I go back to the roots of how my customers, how my audience wants to access that information. And I think a lot of us lose sight of that when we’re so stuck in our own heads with our ideas.

John: So that’s where it became the 27 strategies as part of the subtitle. So quite frankly that sounds a little scary to me too, going back and rewriting because you know, I know those last 45 days on the books I’ve written you know, I’m just trying to get the darn thing done. And so the idea of starting from scratch must have been a little scary.

Jill: It was a bit intimidating. And at the same time once I realized that I had already written or presented on so many of these ideas, I ended up going to my recordings, going through past articles, sent old speeches off to get transcribed and started going through to see what content I already had that was valuable. So it was starting from scratch in terms of the pure sense, but it wasn’t because I’ve done this teaching before, I’ve done these presentations, I’ve done these keynote speeches. And it was really fleshing them out and then what I did was every day to try and have some semblance of health because let me be honest, I was very unhealthy and staying up late and eating food I shouldn’t have been eating during this process because you just need to crank it out. But every day I’d go take a walk, I live right by central park and I’d get up, I’d take a walk in the park and I would voice dictate a chapter during that hour walk almost every single day, and then come back and edit and fine-tune it.

John: That’s funny my — I’ve written five books now. My first book was actually the easiest to write and I think that’s because of that same thing. I — It took my 10 years sort of to write it but all I was really doing was just doing the stuff that I put in the book. The actual writing I think I did in about 90 days, because it was just what I had been living.

So should everyone write a book?
Jill: No. Absolutely not.

John: I love asking everybody that question because everybody is writing a book. So why do you say no?

Jill: There are… if you feel the need to write a book for you, that’s great do it. But that’s not a need for a consumer, that’s your own personal need and when you’re thinking about the marketability of a book, what happens I think so often is that everybody who is a business owner, who’s into entrepreneurship, or who wants to be a thought leader or a speaker, or anything like that you’re told you need to have a book, it’s creditability, you need to have a book, it’s creditability. But people put out these books which are quite frankly complete crap. They’re not professional edited, they’re not professionally formatted and they sell next to no copies. So it’s really not doing you much of a service to have that. If you’re in business, and you’re not thinking in your gut that I know a book is the right thing for me, I think it is much more impactful from a marketing perspective to have a lot of short-form content out there that is more engaging to help you build that audience and then maybe after you’ve been in it for a while that book that you need to write – not just for you but for your audience as well will come about.

John: It’s funny I actually received an email a copy of days ago from somebody who had written a book and that book had actually been out for about 30 days and they were now inquiring whether I could help them market that book. And I felt like saying you’re about six years too late, no. Really the marketing of a book starts just as you described there. In many cases, most of the best selling business books took years to write because the marketing was building community and as you said, doing the videos and finding out what resonates with people and in a lot of ways kind of having the built in audience before you even start writing the book – I mean what’s your take on sort of, now that you’ve kind of gone into it head long, how do you start that marketing process?

Jill: I think it’s essential. And again for me you heard my short story just about the video content. Well alongside that video content there was short-form content, there were other videos, webinars, blogs, whitepapers, e-books, blah blah blah. All those things that let me gain an audience over time. Which I think is important and it also tells you how your audience likes to best consume your information. Again, what I was doing wrong with the initial book proposal was I was doing it the way I wanted explain it, but not the way that my audience necessarily wanted to hear it. And the other thing you can do to kind of — I don’t want to say shortcut the process because there’s really no shortcuts. I mean, I’ve been studying what I’ve been studying for, you know a decade and a half and then some. And I’ve been doing my own business for over five years and in the grand scheme of things that’s not that long, but I’ve built up a good critical mass. But one of the things I did for this book that is a strategy that anyone can replicate, either before they write a book and put it into the book or doing it afterwards, was for me once I identified these 27 strategies that I knew I wanted to write about, I reached out to 27 people who I think are brilliant in different ways and had them add commentary to that. And I got 20 – 30-minute interviews from all these people, I put those as excerpts which I think put on my YouTube which then got syndicated on entrepreneurs video network. And you can see the snowball impact that would have. But it’s also getting other people that aren’t your client community but are your peer community, or people who would attract a slightly different audience to contribute, to make the idea bigger than just you.

John: Yeah and that works on so many levels too because I mean in a lot of ways you’re helping create an asset for them, you’re helping promote them. Obviously, they’re going to extend their community to some extent to you. So it works on so many levels and it really has a kind of amplification element to it, doesn’t it?

Jill: It does and I want to be clear that I know that with the press that I have chosen and being affiliated with a major business publication like Entrepreneur magazine I have a bit of a different way to go about it when I was going and talking to the people who have you know, very very internationally known names in business, I had an ask for them that wasn’t just hey can I interview you but in exchange this will also be released on Entrepreneur’s video network that would be something on Entreprenuer.com. I had something that I could give back. And I realized a lot of people listening are not going to be in that same situation where you have this long-term relationship with a media company. But what I would challenge you do think is even if you’ve already written your book, and maybe you’re just thinking about marketing now or you’re thinking about how you may want to do it in the future is this interview approach is money in my opinion. Even if you already have a book out and maybe you want to breathe new life into it, interview people who speak, think, serve, produce, have a product in the same area in different aspects of your book and have a conversation with them. Where you agree, where you disagree, what are tips and have that really collegial conversation and view them not as competition but as collaborators. Because then you can post a nice quality video asset, you can get that transcribed, repurpose it into blog posts, into mini audio columns etcetera. That will spread the love for both of you and give your book new life.

John: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by Active Campaign. This is really my new go-to CRM, ESP, marketing automation, really low cost, any sized because can get into starting at like $19,00 a month. You can keep track of your clients, you can see who’s visiting your website, you can follow up based on behavior. Check out Active Campaign there will be a link in the show notes but it’s ducttape.me/dtmactive.

So are you doing anything to — in the actual launch window, some of the promotional you know, premium content things, joint ventures, anything along those lines to really give it that kick in the pants?

Jill: Yeah I mean I’m doing the what seems to be pretty standard now, the thunderclap campaigns and then I have a small — not even a small — a list of about 100 some really dedicated advocates who are doing things on their own end to push words out with personal emails, personal videos, that type of thing. But what I also have done is with all of these interviews for anybody who pre-buys the book and of course, anyone who purchases it after the fact, pre-buying just gets you this content immediately. All 12+ hours of interviews are uploaded with links and additional resources in a master members site for anyone who pre-buys the book and the benefit of that is you get access to that right now instead of having to wait until later. And then for anyone who buys the book one of my big things you know, my heart is an educators heart, I just don’t do it in a traditional education setting and so I’ve created a workbook resource that you can use alongside you to actually help implement strategies. So whether you’re facing a sales or presentation strategy or maybe a teamwork challenge or something with really cultivating feedback for your teams that actually gets followed through on whatever those challenges are that you’re facing in your business capacity, there’s actionable worksheets to help guide you through for those who need that additional step-by-step implementation.

John: Awesome. Let’s talk a little bit about the content of the book, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about marketing. But — so let’s break the title down first. What is the definition of dynamic communication as opposed to good communication?

Jill: When I think of communication and I think well most people think of it, we think of the words and maybe we think of the delivery of the words, but good communication doesn’t just mean your ability to put together a grammatically correct sentence or to speak without saying the words umm or uhh. To me, good, great communication is communication that delivers results so I pause at dynamic communication as something that is communication aimed towards to being proactive to delivery action orientated results and we judge the efficacy of our communication based on outcomes instead of the input. So many times we think oh look I have this very beautifully crafted message so the input is great but you’re not getting the outcomes you desire so to me, that’s not impactful or affective.

John: So you tying – since we’re talking about results — you’re tying dynamic communication to leading and managing and growing a business. So how does somebody take that leap — I think a lot of times people think of communication like they see it in a sales environment, you know pretty easy to measure that you’re getting the sale or you’re not getting the sale, that might be the measure of result. But how about leading and management? How do you measure the effectiveness of communication there?

Jill: There’s so many different ways. Depending again on what the venue and what the goal is. But for example in the book, it’s 27 strategies divided into eight different topic areas. Eight different areas that you will face at different points in time in your business. So yeah, there’s the basics, there’s sales, there’s customers service, there’s marketing generating materials, videos, webinars, all that type of stuff. But then there’s also public communication. So we’re talking about communication during a crisis, we’re talking about communication to public audiences, communication in bigger speeches to mass audiences, internal, external and consumer. And then you’re look at how internally do you communicate? How are you managing your globally dispersed teams? The virtual teams that we have, how are you giving feedback to employees when you’re having those sessions when you’re wanting to create change, are people actually following through? Are they buying into your ideas? Are you seeing those things developed and of course are your employee’s staying around?

John: Sure. Yeah I think a lot of people underestimate the communication, the storytelling that is a big part of leadership and building a culture where everybody feels a part of it. So great. We often think in terms of communication as the you know, what I said. But you present in the book that one of the biggest skills in communication is how you listen. In fact you have something called the four stage listening matrix, so you want to dive into that one?

Jill: Yeah sure. The listening matrix. So this is an example though. I could write a whole book on the listening matrix right? But let’s be honest, me fleshing that out for 250 pages is way more than needs to be done which is why doing in my opinion, this more short form content that as a book was a strategy shift that I made. So just for people out there who are fussing with ideas in your head you can think of it in that way. But the listening matrix to me is all about really understanding the current sales economy that we are in John and to me that is an information economy. We have more access to information than ever before. But there is a growing gap from my perspective between information and knowledge. And the gap itself isn’t necessarily the problem but it’s when your consumers, your employees or people are mistaking information for knowledge when a problem arises. So the listening matrix is a way to understand how other people are listening to you. So for example, if you’re in a sales conversation, are people listening to you for information? Or are people listening to you for knowledge? And the different is between action and inaction. People don’t make decisions based on information, people making buying decisions based on knowledge. But our sales teams are overwhelmingly trained to give out information and not to help the consumer co-create knowledge. And so the matrix walks you through four different stages so you not only can identify how someone’s listening to you, but the questions that you can use to transition them from information to knowledge listening.

John: Yeah I think that is so crucial for salespeople, you’re right. I even think about my own buying experiences anymore, I have all the information already, I just need somebody to put some insight into it or to help me figure out how it might actually work in my particular situation and I think that’s the job of sales people today it’s — because everyone is going online and getting the basic information.

Jill: It’s absolutely true yet so many companies are still hiring based on the old definition of an old sales person, to me it’s not a sales person anymore. I would call the role a product integrator for example or a service integrator. These people are actively helping you gain the knowledge of how a company’s product or service would integrate within your business, would integrate in your needs. It’s not about sales, it’s showing how something would actually work in your world.

John: Yeah I’m seeing more and more companies, particularly if they have anything that does take — it’s not an off the shelf kind of product. I mean there are almost engineers or almost… some of the best sales people because they’re designing a solution based on what’s there as opposed to a sales script, that they were taught to deliver.

Jill: It’s so true. And I think I’ve worked with a couple of sales engineering teams for software products and a lot of the challenge there is then getting them to communication with what I call common communication denominators, another chapter in the book. And get out of their jargon, get out of their acronyms and figure out how to explain these more technical processes to people who are not IT based people. Customer service for the IT world used to be I’m a customer service person and I’m talking to an IT person because we provide a hosted solution. With cloud based solutions that’s no longer the case, your end user the person you talk to is typically a marketer or a salesperson, it’s very different.

John: Yeah and nine times out of ten they’re trying to figure out how to integrate what you have with the three other things they have —

Jill: Exactly.

John: So it’s a whole matrix every time you go into it. So you actually proposed since we’re on the topic of sales that throughout your  you use a call outline, what’s a call outline look like?

Jill: A call outline to me is where you have the key objectives that you want to accomplish during the call itself, if you’re doing a sales call. So many times you know, I had a call earlier today actually you know, hi is this the owner of DynamicAcceletator.com? Yes it is. Hi, we’re a website designing company — and they’re just going through this list instead of just right off the bat saying you’re the owner of a new domain, do you already have a web development solution? Just get right to the point and asses the information that you need because for me, I do all my own site development. I am a programming geek in the background, that’s something I like to do for fun. So you’re wasting my time going through a script. Same thing goes for — I’m sure most people out there have had this experience when you fill out a form online because you want some more detailed knowledge about a product. You’ve gotten the information but now you need a free demo, a free trial. You get on the line for that demo and they walk you step by step through ever little feature of their product, not even taking the time to understand how it goes for you. Well that’s done based on a call sheet. Instead using a call outline, you can divide your product or service into different you know, silos or parts and ascertain right at the beginning if that customer or potential customer needs information or better yet, knowledge on that portion. And if not, address their immediate needs first before going into any type of additional features and benefits. Because when people have questions, they want answers and if you’re a person who doesn’t waste their time and provide them with the answers, they’re more likely to let you spend time explaining some other features or benefits that you have. But if you waste their time in the beginning going through things that aren’t relevant to their situation you’re going to lose them. And so then an outline is way more beneficial than a script.

John: Yeah and I love that idea of an outline but boy does it also — you shake your head and think commonsense would be nice too.

Jill: It would be but unfortunately as we know common sense is not all that well, common.

John: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done that where I’ll have the pre-call, I’ll tell them exactly what I do, what my level of knowledge is, what I’m looking for and then you get on the call and just as you said and it’s just basically okay, first you turn it on, then you’re like seriously? We just went through this.

Jill: It’s unbelievable but you know what? Again it’s part of the institutional training that’s happening in these companies and again, companies are you going to need to start shifting how they hire sales people, it’s not anymore your ability to follow a script word for word, but the ability to improvise, the ability to anticipate, the ability to be proactive, all those things in my opinion are way more important now and in the future.

John: I’ve actually seen — there was a little bit of a trend about a year ago that people were sending their sales teams to do improv.

Jill: Yes.

John: And I think that’s — so there are people that are getting that I guess. I want to end on one last topic. First off, before we get to it, where can people find out more about dynamic communication and about your work?

Jill: The Dynamic Communication book is the absolute best place to go to find out information about the book and of course it links to all my other stuff as well but dynamiccommunicationbook.com and you can find me anywhere on social @dynamicJill I would love if you’ve been listening, love to hear your favourite take-away or any questions that you have.

John: So I want to end on public speaking. A lot of people are doing that more and more. I think it’s a tremendous way to generate leads in the right environment, certainly a great way to enhance your thought leadership or your perceived expertise. So how do you make your presenting, I don’t know if you have a model for this but how do you make your — what do you tell people as kind of a strategy for making your presentations more dynamic?

Jill: When you think about making a presentation, again it’s the same thing I’ll go back to the same philosophy, it’s not about you and your ideas, it’s about what your audience needs and wants to hear. So I like to think of presentations in a couple of different ways but the first thing I would say to someone just starting out is, reverse engineer it. Think about what you want your audience to leave the room with or doing or what action you want them to take, and then go backwards and really start to understand what your audiences wants to hear the information or the knowledge they need to take that action step. And then figure out how you can best match what you know with what your audience knows and wants to hear. I mean there’s a lot of different frameworks for organizing it but I think the most important is, especially if you’re doing a presentation with a sales objective or an immediate action objective, which most of us are if we’re giving a presentation, especially if it’s for lead generation, is going in there and making sure it’s very clear in your presentation what the need is. Establishing the need in a very clear way and not in a way that’s jargony to your product but in a way that’s more universal that’s related to the human element. You know for example, if you were talking about trolling on the internet, so let’s say you wanted to get into that and how people view all of these people who post negative comments online as trolls and as evil people well, you know what let’s back up a little bit, let’s contextualize that so people can actually be in the minds of these people. So I could say John, have you ever been in a situation where you were stuck in traffic and you either laid on your horn or showed a certain finger, or yelled in some way that you know what? Is really not indicative of who you are as a person, it was just that situation. You give some kind of analogy that gets everyone understanding the bigger concept on a personal level and then once they do that you have them hooked into this idea in a way that they understand it. And then you can deliver satisfaction steps and more.

John: Awesome. So we’re out of time for today but I’m visiting with Jill Schiefelbein, she’s the author of Dynamic Communication, 27 Strategies to Grow, Lead and Manage your Business. I really appreciate you taking the time to stop by today and next time I’m in New York hopefully we can bump into each other.

Jill: Absolutely. Thank you John and thank you Duct Tape Marketing audience.

Due to the proliferation of marketing materials on the internet, the modern buyer is no longer dependent on salespeople for necessary purchasing decision information. Inbound salespeople see the need to personalize the sales experience to the buyer's context. 

Meanwhile, inbound sales teams recognize they must transform their entire sales strategy so they're serving the buyer.

Inbound Sales Methodology

Inbound sales organizations use a sales process that is personalized, helpful, and directly focused on prospects' pain points throughout their buyers journey. 

During inbound sales, buyers move through three key phases: awareness, consideration, and decision (which we’ll discuss further below). While buyers go through these three phases, sales teams go through four different actions that will help them support qualified leads into becoming opportunities and eventually customers: identify, connect, explore, and advise. 

It may be helpful to have a thorough understanding of how inbound sales differs from traditional sales, so we’ll discuss this below. 

Comparing Legacy Salespeople to Inbound Salespeople

Legacy Salespeople

• Are unaware of which buyers are active in a buying journey
• Use cold outreach and lead with a generic elevator pitch to qualify on budget
• Transition into presentation mode when a buyer expresses interest
• Deliver the same presentation every time and offer discounts to motivate buyers to purchase on their timeline

Inbound Salespeople

• Prioritize buyers that are active in a buying journey
• Build trust by participating in the buyer's online conversations and lead with personalized messaging and advice
• Transition into exploration mode when a buyer expresses interest
• Personalize the presentation to each buyer and adjust the sales process to the buyer's timeline

Building a Sales Process Around the Buyer's Journey

To implement an inbound sales methodology, you need to build a sales process centered around the buyer’s journey and its three key phases.

What are the stages in the Inbound Sales model?

Buyers move through three stages during inbound sales: awareness, consideration, and decision. 

Awareness

During the awareness phase, clients identify a challenge or pain point that they are currently experiencing in their day-to-day lives that they want to find a solution for and what it might look like.

It’s essential to have a well-rounded understanding of your buyer persona when interacting with buyers in the awareness phase so you understand how what you offer addresses their needs. 

Consideration

In consideration, buyers understand their issue and want to find a solution. They pursue different avenues or offers that will solve their unique challenge. 

As a salesperson, speaking to buyers in the consideration stage involves understanding the types of solutions a prospect may be looking to and the pros and cons they’ll weigh. In addition, you should understand how your offer sets you apart from competitors. Having this information makes it easier for you to present a value proposition when you connect with buyers.

Decision

The decision stage is the final stage, as a buyer has chosen a solution to their pain point that they believe is the best possible option for meeting their needs. If they choose your product, it’s because you’ve successfully connected with them, presented a value proposition, and shown them that your offer is the best fit solution. 

As buyers go through the three stages of inbound sales, salespeople have four distinct actions that mirror the buyer's journey: identify, connect, explore, and advise. Below we’ll give a brief overview of each action and discuss what salespeople should do during each stage. 

The 4 Inbound Sales Actions

1. Identify 

Identifying the right business opportunities from the start is often the difference between a thriving business and a failing one. Knowing what to look for helps you create a predictable, scalable sales funnel, which is why it’s imperative to have a thorough understanding of your buyer's journey. 

2. Connect

Inbound salespeople connect with leads to help them decide whether they should prioritize the goal or challenge they’re facing. If the buyer chooses to do so, these leads become qualified leads. 

3. Explore

When exploring, inbound salespeople aim to learn more about their qualified leads’ goals or challenges to assess whether their offer is a good fit. During this stage, it can also be helpful to learn the other solutions a prospect is browsing so you can better present a value proposition that sets you apart. 

4. Advise

When advising, your end goal is to convey to the prospect that your solution is uniquely positioned to address the buyer’s needs and help them solve their pain points. 

Let’s discuss how the different inbound actions relate to the inbound buyer's journey stages.

What to Do During Each Stage of the Buyer's Journey

1. Identify: Awareness Stage

As a sales rep, being successful in this stage begins with acknowledging that most prospects are already in the awareness stage of the buyer's journey before they engage with you.

Given this, it’s important to:

• Conduct research: Leverage technology to help you understand more about your buyers, like setting up Google alerts or asking for introductions on LinkedIn. It’s also important to focus your efforts on active buyers. 
• Prioritize active buyers: Active buyers should fit your ideal buyer persona and take action like providing contact information via conversion form, opening a sales email, or viewing product pages.  

2. Connect: Consideration Stage

Inbound Sales leaves behind the tradition of cold calling and leaving voicemails with generic elevator pitches. Instead, when connecting with prospects in the consideration stage, you want to lead with messaging personalized to the buyer's context and what you’ve learned about them during the awareness stage, like their industry, role, interest, shared connections, etc.

When connecting, you should:

• Define personas: Understand the unique perspective of the individuals you’re attempting to reach. A valuable way to do so is to segment your market by the types of companies you regularly target and define the different personas of the different types of people you target. 
• Define sequences for each persona: How will you reach out to prospects? Does your persona prefer being contacted by phone or email? How many times will you reach out before you give up? You want to develop a communication strategy for each of your prospects based on your understanding of who they are. 
• Define content for each sequence: Buyers in the connection stage are fresh out of the awareness stage where they’ve just decided to pursue a solution to their needs. Given this, your goal isn’t to immediately sell them on your product or provide a demo. Instead, your goal when connecting should be to deliver the right educational content that will help them learn more about their issue and how it relates to your offer. 

When you’re ready to initiate outreach, begin with advice or a surprising insight that directly relates to your buyer and is likely to capture their attention. 

3. Explore: Consideration Stage

When exploring, you want to learn more about your leads, their challenges, and the solutions they’re exploring. After you’ve initiated a connection, guide an exploratory conversation that gives you more information about your prospect. You can: 

• Tailor your focus to the prospects' challenge: People usually don’t make changes unless something impedes their process. Use the small yet powerful wording adjustment of “challenges” instead of saying “problems.”

• Connect goals with challenges: Ask prospects about their goals and what is standing in the way of them. Listen for an acknowledgment that they don’t have a good solution and are afraid they won't achieve their goals. 
• Share plans that fit the prospect’s timeline: Introduce your product and clearly show how it can help the buyer solve their challenge and meet their goal. Ideally, you’ll have a value proposition that uniquely positions your solution against competitors. 
• Discuss budget: The final aspect to understand is how much your prospect will invest in a new solution. Aim to get a well-rounded understanding of their budget and desired timeline.  

4. Advise: Decision Stage

Traditional salespeople stick to a generic script and can fail to represent their offer as a solution to their prospects' specific needs. 

Inbound salespeople speak to the prospect's desire to understand how your offerings will specifically help them with their pain points, not a general pitch. As an inbound salesperson, you bridge the bag between the generic messaging on your company’s website and the unique needs of your buyer. Here are some additional tips: 

• Provide a recap of what you’ve learned: When advising, your conversations should begin by restating where the prospect is now and the insights you’ve gained from your earlier discussions, such as a challenge your prospect has or a goal they want to achieve. 
• Suggest ways to achieve their goals: Craft a customized presentation that connects their goals and challenges to your offering and shows exactly how they’ll benefit from your service.
• Confirm budget, authority, and timeline: Based on what it takes to set up their account and implement your solution, work backward to determine when they need to sign your contract. Outline a timeline that meets the buyer’s deadline.

After advising your prospects, they should be successfully on their way to making a final decision. 

A New Sales Methodology

The Inbound Sales Methodology covers every step of the buyer’s journey traveled on the road from stranger to customer and each corresponding salesperson action. The new methodology acknowledges that Inbound Sales doesn’t just happen -- you do it. And, you do it using tools that help you personalize the sales process to appeal to precisely the right leads, in the right places, at just the right time in their buying journey.

After over ten years in sales and marketing, I know the value of cold calling. But predicting the best time to cold call prospects isn’t easy.

I’ve had to change up my tactics over the past few years, because let’s face it, we’ve all changed how — and where — many of us work and engage with potential clients. Additional factors like remote global teams, flexible work locations, and wide-ranging schedules make it even more difficult to pinpoint cold-calling trends.

But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible! I’ve got some great cold calling tips and research for boosting your cold calling success, even in 2024. Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents:

• Understanding the Right Time for Cold Calling
• Strategies for Cold Calls
• Cold Outreach Statistics in 2024

Understanding the Right Time for Cold Calling

It might seem like a magic formula, but coming up with the best time to cold call takes work. I’ve looked over several studies and spoken to sales experts to get their tips for when to make your cold calls so your sales convert.

Best Day for Sales Calls

A recent study by CallHippo analyzed over 15,000sales calls to determine the days in which cold calls are more likely to connect. According to the study, the best day of the week for sales calls was Wednesday, by a long shot.

On average, sales reps were able to strike up conversations in 195 of the calls made on Wednesday first-try, compared to only 90 of the calls on Monday and a paltry 60 calls placed on Friday.

If you like percentages, this means that 33.9% of calls placed on Wednesday connected, while only 15.7% of calls on Monday and 10.4% of the calls made on Friday made it through.

That makes Monday and Friday the worst days to reach your target market.

And when you think about it, the results make sense. On Monday, I’m usually still getting ready for the work week ahead, so reaching me won’t be as easy. Likewise, by Friday afternoon, I know tons of people who are just looking forward to the weekend and can’t (or don’t want to, honestly) focus on closing a deal.

But by the middle of the week, most people (including me) have had enough time to settle into the week’s work and take care of their pressing needs, so a cold call would be much less likely to feel like an interruption.

The Best Time of Day for Sales Calls

We now know Wednesday is the sweet spot where your calls are more likely to get through on the first try. But if you want to increase the odds of that happening, you’ll also want to consider the time at which you’re making the call.

The same study conducted by CallHippo suggests the best times to cold call are 10–11 AM and 4–5 PM. At first, that may seem counterintuitive. After all, you’d either expect someone to be preparing for lunch or leaving work during these hours.

But based on my experience, these are the exact reasons why these are the best times of the day to get a successful cold call.

Just think about your typical office day. In most cases, I’m wrapping up tasks in the late morning, right before lunch, which means I’m available and more willing to take a sales call than earlier in the day when I’m just starting to tackle the morning’s must-do tasks.

After lunch, things get busy again, and I don’t really have much time to spare until the late afternoon when my workday is pretty much over or I leave the office altogether. So, it’s harder to pick up the phone.

Cassie Fields, president of AutoLeap, a Canadian auto software company, likes to refer to these times as “shoulders.”

She states, “My connect rate was always highest during these times of the day. If you think about a typical executive's workday, they don't start meetings until after 10 AM, and they typically end meetings by 4 PM.”

The Worst Time of Day for Sales Calls

If there’s a best time for cold calls, there’s also a worst time to make a sales call.

Like me, you probably aren’t surprised at all to see that 7 AM is the worst time to connect with a prospect, according to CallHippo. Compared to the 3,000+ first-attempt conversations achieved at 4–5 PM, calls at 7 AM. only managed to spike first-attempt conversations with 500 people.

Making a cold call before 10 AM is tricky. You don’t know whether prospects are ready, and more importantly, willing, to answer. And that’s putting aside the fact that so many of us are still working remotely, making work schedules and start times more unpredictable.

I’ve also learned that calling super early or really late doesn’t mean I’ll actually reach a decision-maker either. While 64% of CEOs wake up before 6 AM, they tend to wake up early to focus on their work without any distractions.

That said, there’s one big exception to these early morning calls — being in a different time zone than your prospects. For example, if I’m staying in Los Angeles and intend on reaching out to someone in Boston, my 7 AM would be 10 AM on the East Coast. So, reaching out is worth a shot even if it cuts into my beauty sleep from time to time.

Strategies for Cold Calls

As any good sales person will tell you, to make effective cold calls, you’ll have to do more than call any random phone number on a Wednesday at 4 PM.

Here are a few things you can account for when preparing and iterating on your cold call strategy.

Mind your response time.

If you don't follow up with new leads within the first hour of qualifying them, you could be missing out on successful sales.

Now, first-hour follow-ups aren‘t as common of a practice as you may think, at least judging from Revenuehero’s most recent study. In it, the company requested demos from 1,000 B2B websites, and the results were somewhat worrying.

Out of the 1,000 requests, Revenuehero received only 365 responses. That means a whopping 63.5% of the demo requests fell into the void. And out of the companies that responded, 162 of them took a day, week, or even more than a week to respond. Talk about letting a hot lead cool off.

But it wasn't all doom and gloom, as 203 of the companies in the same group responded within the hour. And if you ask me, that’s the category you want to fall into.

After all, 78% of buyers purchase from the first company to respond to their inquiry, meaning the faster you reach out to an inbound lead, the better.

Personally, I always try to follow up with new leads within the first hour they become qualified. Otherwise, I know I could be leaving valuable opportunities on the table.

Take it from Marty Bauer, director of sales at Omnisend, who takes a similar stance.

“If someone is showing intent or submits a lead form on your channels, speed is critical. The best time to contact them is now because that’s when the customer has a need and is attentive to your solution. If you wait until 8 AM or 2PM the next day — you have likely missed the best window of opportunity.”

The moral of this story? When in doubt, call immediately.

Be persistent.

Do you quit calling a lead after your second or third voicemail? If so, you might be selling yourself short. Sometimes, it really does pay to keep trying.

CallHippo found that 40% ofsales repsgive up on a prospect after the first call, even though it often takes up to six follow-up phone calls before you convert a lead.

I don’t use only calls in my sales process either. I always take advantage of multiple touchpoints and channels. HubSpot found that 68% ofsales professionals used three or more channels to close their sales too, so I’m in good company.

Generally, I like to follow up calls with an email, and I even use email as part of my cold outreach efforts if reaching the lead via phone proves difficult.

Use the right tools.

Using the right tools can definitely help you close sales, but finding the right balance with your software stack can take time.

HubSpot found that 45% ofsales reps felt overwhelmed by the number of tools in their tech stack. And it’s not hard to see why, either. I frequently use multiple email accounts, marketing tools, sales platforms, social media, and a CRM on any given day.

While I find my CRM to be vital for sales activities — and 91% of sales professionals agree with that sentiment — that doesn’t change the fact that most of my peers often deal with a lengthy list of non-integrated tools to get the job done.

My honest thoughts? Sales reps should leverage software with AI.

Using software that provides AI-driven insights is an excellent way to cut down the amount of work and planning you have to do.

And that’s why more and more salespeople are hopping on the AI trend — at least based on the results of the survey driving HubSpot’s latest Sales Trends Report.

Here are how some of the ways 1,477 sales professionals are using AI today:

• 83% of sellers said AI was effective at recognizing and responding to buyer sentiment.
• 17% of sales reps use AI to help them pick the best time to upsell.
• 26% of sales reps use AI to help pinpoint their timing for cross-selling.

I also use AI for everyday tasks, like drafting emails or getting the timing for sales calls right. And considering HubSpot’s report also found that AI is making it easier for customers to help themselves, there’s no doubt reps will find more creative uses for AI in sales as their role adapts to the current market.

Increase your close rate with scripts.

HubSpot found 20% of sales people rely on call scripts to help them with their sales process. I know scripts have definitely helped my success rate, and I always like to have at least two or three options nearby to fall back on.

What’s more, 15% of the sales pros surveyed by HubSpot said that call scripts are one of their most effective strategies for helping them close deals.

I’ve found that creating scripts that allow for a variety of responses often makes it easier to talk with prospects. Plus, if I have a few paths laid out right in front of me, it's easier to figure out how to redirect them without turning them away if one solution doesn’t work for their needs.

If you need a starting point for a cold call script, check out HubSpot’s cold call script template.

Cold Outreach Statistics in 2024

With our Sales Trends Report, HubSpot recently released insights worth keeping in mind as sales professionals revise their cold call and sales strategies for 2024 and beyond.

Here are a couple of highlights I think will motivate sales reps to keep investing time and effort into cold calling.

First, let’s look at how cold calling stacks up to other channels. HubSpot asked sales pros what channels they tend to use for cold outreach.

And although the survey allowed participants to select multiple channels, phone calls still came on top as the preferred method, with 38% of the surveyed sales pros favoring this channel. Email (36%) and social media (34%) were the next two on the list.

These results show that much like me, sales pros are keen on using a multichannel approach. That said, I know plenty of salespeople who prefer sending emails over making a phone call. But while I’d rather skip working on my opening lines most days, it’s also important to look at what’s most effective at converting leads.

When it came down to the effectiveness of these channels according to sales pros, the numbers weren’t much different. Up to 37% of allsales reps reported that phone calls are the most effective channels for cold outreach. Conversely, 23% said email was most effective, and 30% said social media worked best.

The takeaway? Sales teams should still focus on cold calls as part of their outreach. Email, in particular, has a wide gap between popularity and conversion rate, so while I might prefer to send out a few dozen emails, deep down I know putting in that effort and making a call is much more likely to work.

Choosing the Best Time to Cold Call

Ultimately, picking the right time to make your sales calls is essential to sales success. I’ve been working on lead generation and cold calling for over a decade now, and even then, when I get in a rut, I try changing the time or day I make most of my cold calls. Alternatively, I ask a colleague to take a look at the script I’ve been working from to see if there are any changes they’d make to it.

Test these approaches and adopt the ones that work for you. You might be surprised to find how many more prospects you can reach with a few simple tweaks.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2015 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

In the age of the internet, a single bad customer experience can spread like wildfire. Thankfully, a great experience can do so, too. Regardless of what your product or service is, consumer reviews are one of the most important building blocks of your brand’s reputation. Since research indicates that 90 percent of purchasing decisions are influenced by online reviews, you simply can’t underestimate the power of social proof and client testimonials.

But what makes ratings and reviews so powerful? First off, they don’t come off as a sales pitch. They are not written in the voice of the brand. Instead, they act as candid, unbiased accounts of the product or service in question.

Second, they work to reinforce positive or negative thoughts regarding a brand. If a hundred people have already had great experiences with a given product, chances are a potential customer will be more open to try out the product.

Last, and most importantly, they can do wonders to build trust between businesses and consumers. Reviews offer third-party insight into your business model, processes, and quality, right from concept through to delivery. Let’s examine how you can influence reviews to your advantage.

90% of purchasing decisions are influenced by online reviews.
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Give Customers a Reason to Love Your Brand

The age of the customer is upon us, and e-commerce retailers are quickly realizing that customer loyalty is central to the growth of their online following. If you want to use customer reviews as a tool to build your reputation, obviously, you must provide a reason for them to give you a high rating. One of the best things you can do to encourage stellar reviews is to go the extra mile in providing excellent customer service.

According to a study by Aspect Software, 76 percent of consumers say they view customer service as the true test of how much a company values them. Take Virgin America, for example. They make a conscientious effort to make their customer experience fun, memorable, and of course, informative. In addition to their commitment to provide customers with prompt information regarding delays, cancellations, and diversions, they take a light-hearted approach to the in-flight customer experience with entertaining videos, amusing light displays, and sociable staff.

Virgin’s efforts have got them to the top of the Airline Quality Rating report for the fourth consecutive year. Their lively approach proves that the customer experience can be uplifting and serious at the same time.

Don’t be afraid to get creative. Innovative attitudes and practices in customer service tend to be highly effective and memorable.

Establish a Presence on Big-Name Reviews Sites

More often than not, the buying process begins with customers doing their homework on brands before even considering interaction. In a world full of e-commerce retailers that claim to outdo each other in price, quality, and service, reviews are a telltale sign of validity.

One of your first goals should be getting your brand on the radar. Websites such as Angie’s List, TripAdvisor, and Yelp are a few of the most popular websites for customer reviews in different sectors. Yelp alone has around 145 million unique visitors every month.

Social media is also an extremely powerful tool for customer testimonials and brand advocacy. According to eMarketer, 9 in 10 organizations in the US use social media in their marketing efforts. With around three billion worldwide users, incorporating social media into your company’s interactive review process is a must.

Encourage Customers to Leave Reviews After the Fact

Without being too aggressive, don’t miss out on opportunities to get brand reviews or feedback from your customers.

Amazon sets a great example of how to reach out to consumers for reviews proceeding a purchase. In the days following a transaction, Amazon will send a follow-up email to the customer asking for their input on a specific item or the shopping process in general.

Offering rewards or monthly prizes to the best brand advocates is a great way to get customers talking about your product. However, note that most of the top review sites categorically forbid businesses to incentivize customers to review them on their platforms.

Hold Customers’ Hangs Along the Way

While reviews are powerful, not all of them are worth your (or anybody’s) time. According to this article on Forbes, most reviews are useless to the customer. That’s because so many of them just miss the point of a review entirely, or spread wrong or incomplete information.

If reviews of your product don’t help potential customers make an informed decision, they’re a burden on your sales cycle. In a nutshell, you must make sure your existing reviews have the kind of information that can help them decide whether they ought to pick your business or not. And since your average customer isn’t a trained copywriter, you need to explicitly tell them how to write a review. Think of this as additional legalese or marketing brochure material, à la an “About Us.”

Here is a template and a couple of quick pointers you can pass on to your customers.

Try Not to Be Emotional

We are all easily outraged when a product we paid for malfunctions or when a service is not to our expectations. The question is, does this feeling of outrage entitle you to exaggerated criticism of a business? Similarly, gushing when we are pleased is also normal. But when you are feeling strong emotion (positive or negative) is not a good time to pen a review. Take a break, and return to it the next day.

When in the grip of emotions, our thinking is clouded. If we are unhappy with our experience, we are in no mood to give the other person even the slightest benefit of the doubt. This leads to exaggerated statements like, “You’re the worst service provider out there! I wouldn’t recommend you to my worst enemy!” which may or may not be true, but often isn’t.

Being temporarily enthralled by a positive experience also leads to exaggeration of its own kind: “They are the best dressmaker EVER. My search for the perfect dress has finally ended. Soooo happy!!”

Don’t make it all about you. Yes, your experience is at the heart of the review but the review is for the benefit of others. You need to write something that would help them see things clearly.

Be Specific in Your Praise or Criticism

“The food was crap,” does not mean anything except that you were not happy with it. Instead, the following points out what exactly was bad while also conveying your displeasure with it:

“The food didn’t seem to be fresh, and the chicken was overcooked. The mushrooms were burnt in places, and the sauce was too citric for my taste. The prices were high compared to other Chinese restaurants in the area and the service not as good. Overall, not impressed.”

The above works because it allows the readers to take into consideration both the reviewer’s experience as well as his personal taste, so that they know which bit to pay more attention to.

Similarly, this isn’t too helpful either: “Awesome. Loved it! Definitely going back!” What was so good about your experience that you loved? The food, the ambiance, the prices, the service, or all of them Once again, being specific will help your readers understand why you rate this place so highly, and they will be better-equipped to decide if they’ll have a similar experience if they visit.

“The menu didn’t have a lot of variety in it, but the food was cooked to perfection. The ingredients—the herbs, the seafood, as well as the pasta—all seemed fresh, and the flavors were a delight. Prices were a little on the higher side, but in the end none of us minded because we were all happy with what we got. We went there on a Saturday evening so unsurprisingly the place was a little crowded, but we didn’t have to wait long to receive our order. I’d, however, recommend calling them in advance if you are planning to visit. Overall, we had a great experience and look forward to going there again.

P.S. Not a great place for dessert lovers. They hardly serve anything, and the taste was underwhelming. But we had been there for the main course, so not complaining.”

This review is not as detailed as it could have been, but it does describe to a significant extent what the reviewer loved about their visit and how they felt about it.

The bottom line is this: Don’t gush or rant in your reviews. Don’t be cryptic, either. Whatever criteria by which you judge companies or restaurants, break them down for your readers, so that they understand where you are coming from.

Quickly Respond to Reviews, Good or Bad

Customer reviews should be approached as a two-way street. The name of the game is being receptive. Set aside time every day to monitor the platforms where your company is listed.

Regardless of the customer input, do not procrastinate on your responses. A quick reply indicates that you value customer input and are committed to resolving any grievances. Following a review, be sure to thank them for their input.

Attentiveness to both the good and bad reviews shows you are truly dedicated to improvement based on customers’ opinions and reactions. Responding to a negative review is not always an easy task. However, the way you phrase your message is very important in demonstrating your brand value.

Here, the business owner does a good job of handling this clearly upset customer. The owner keeps her cool and phrases her response in a way that resembles a face-to-face interaction. Her tone and wording are professional, she begins with an apology, and she politely reminds the user of their policies. She also leaves the door open to further conversation in the last paragraph. However, as the example shows, there are some customers you just can’t please! Just know when to end it.

Spread the Word and Stick to It

As previously stated, feedback is extremely influential in converting new customers and is often their first step in the research process. Whether it be on your website, email newsletters, or social networks, sharing customer reviews is a great vehicle for word-of-mouth advertising. Here’s an example of how to reinforce your brand message using your customers’ words.

Image via Jazz HR

Posting both the good and bad testimonials can be valuable. Customers aren’t stupid—if they see nothing but positive reviews on your website, they naturally get skeptical. Posting both sides of the coin on your web properties shows your brand is transparent and that you are constantly working to solve issues.

At the end of the day, you can only do so much to define your brand before leaving it to your customers. In a customer-centric market, developing relationships through reviews is one of the most effective ways to build trust and credibility. Your reputation as a business is a constantly evolving entity. Always keep your eyes and ears open, and weave your (loud and clear) message around the most important piece of the business puzzle: the customer.

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