When your startup is first launching, the pressure to “be everywhere” online is significant. “You’ll fail without investing in Facebook Ads,” one article claims. “The most engaged buyers are on Instagram,” argues another.

Given this onslaught of conflicting advice, it’s no surprise that the average B2B marketer creates eight types of content and is active on six different social networks, according to data from the Content Marketing Institute:

(B2C marketers share similar numbers.)

Especially when you’re new, expanding your reach in this way might sound appealing. After all, you’ll reach more people if you’re available on more platforms, right?

Well, maybe not.

Attempting to drive growth on multiple user acquisition channels divides your resources and dilutes your focus.

It’s better to do one channel well than to do several poorly – especially when you’re first starting out. To do that, begin by mapping your existing user acquisition channels (if any) so that you can proceed with an approach that’s right for your audience, your resources and your business’s current stage.

Why You Need to Map Your User Acquisition Channels

A lot of young businesses wing it when it comes to choosing user acquisition channels. They go by gut feel, or by what worked well for a buddy of theirs or another startup in their space.

And I’m not throwing shade here – I’ve been there, and done that.

But let me give you an example that demonstrates why it’s so important to run the numbers before executing on anything.

A while back, a friend of mine had a startup, and he swore up and down that doing integrations and partnerships was going to be his growth channel. His goal was to get his company’s first 1,000 customers, but I ran the numbers and figured out that even the best-case scenario would only drive a few hundred.

His first partner was going to promote his company and their integration to their email list of 1 million people.

Sounds great, right?

The email goes out to 1 million people, and let’s estimate that 50% open the email and 10% click on the link. That’d put 50,000 visitors on his website. Now, let’s assume that 3% of those visitors took him up on his SaaS product’s 30-day free trial. That results in 1,500 new trials, and assuming he managed a 40% conversion rate to paid subscriptions (which is pretty generous, and assumes he’s figured out his activation and onboarding processes), that’d leave him with just 600 customers.

Let’s do another example… Suppose you have a product or service that’s a bit more expensive and that requires human contact from your sales team to close the deal. Since you don’t have dozens of salespeople on hand, you decide to drive people to a webinar that’ll be able to handle a big audience in a short period of time.

You reach 50,000 with your webinar advertisement, and 10% of these people sign up to participate. On the day of your event, only 50% of your sign-ups actually show, so you wind up with 2,500 attendees. At the end of the webinar, you do an amazing job selling your offering and get 10% of attendees to do a sales demo or trial your service. This gives you 250 leads. Now let’s say your salespeople are awesome and actually convert 50% of them. Your total? 125 new customers.

In neither one of these scenarios did we hit that “1,000 new customers” target, but we’ve got bigger problems:

• None of these numbers are realistic. Most partners don’t have a 1 million-person email list, and the hypothetical open rates, click-through rates and conversion rates I used aren’t going to be that high in the real world (at least, they won’t all be that high).
• In the first example, you’ve burned your dev resources to work on integrations that won’t help you meet your goals.
• In the second, you’ve taken up critical marketing and sales resources to create assets, run webinars and conduct sales demos. These people could have all been working on something more productive – and that goes double if you’re the founder and doing all of this.

Finding Your User Acquisition Channels

So, if you can’t go off your gut feel, what should you do? Check out the process below that I use to identify user acquisition channels.

Step #1 – Understand common growth channels

There are tons of different marketing and growth channels out there, but the following are the strategies I use most commonly:

• Cold email or cold calling. Cold messaging is pretty cheap to execute, but you need to put some time into ensuring you’re reaching out to the right people. If possible, warm your leads up by connecting via social engagements in advance of your message.
• Viral referral loops. This can include word-of-mouth referrals, structured referral schemes and viral loops that enable existing customers to bring on more new customers. The cost associated with this strategy varies based on the program you implement, but this is how Uber, Airbnb and Dropbox all got big.
• Paid advertising. You can use AdWords for this, but I’m loving Facebook ads lately as a starting place. Keep a careful eye on your costs. You can get new customers very quickly with paid ads, but if you aren’t tracking ROI, you can blow your budget.
• Content marketing and SEO. These strategies work VERY well, but they take a long time to show results (usually 6-12 months). They can be cheap to run, but if you’re using them for growth, expect to wait a while.
• Influencer marketing. Get a few big names to love your product and scream it from the rooftops. If you do it well, you can be very successful, very quickly. But, unfortunately, that means everyone wants to use this approach. Getting influencer attention can be tough without a major competitive advantage.
• Microtool or epic content piece creation. Release a free tool or ebook to build an audience and get traffic. At Linktexting.com, we use this ebook https://www.linktexting.com/playbook/ to generate leads.

Step #2 – Identify your competitive advantages

Consider what you do well and what your competitors do poorly. Look for gaps in the channels your competitors are winning and use these weaknesses to plan your strategy.

Don’t forget, you can also win on price by starting low to gain traction.

At Mailshake, we’re currently priced at $9/user, while our competitors are between $29-$120/user. We plan to increase our price down the road, but for now, we’ve set our prices low to enter the market.

Step #3 – Run the numbers

Take a look at the examples I shared above and run your own predictions based on whatever data you can find. Look at the numbers on your current channels and estimate the numbers for possible channels you could try. Compare your results against the resources you have available in terms of cash, time, etc.

For reference, at Mailshake, every 10 customers we acquire results in one new referral customer. That means each new customer is worth 1.1 customers to us and informs how much we can spend to acquire new users.

Step #4 – Pick your top 1-3 channels

This shouldn’t come as a surprise based on what I said earlier in this article, but my recommendation is always that businesses begin by finding one single effective channel first. Then, as that’s working, work on another while you continue to optimize your first channel.

Take it from marketer Neil Patel:

“Jumping in head first and attempting to manage, say, four or five different channels can be overwhelming, and you’re unlikely to kill it at any strategy. Even if you’re a savvy marketer who knows the ins and outs of the process, you simply can’t devote the necessary time to extract the full potential of any single channel.”

Step #5 – Evolve your approach over time

Most channels are doomed from the start. That’s not your fault, unless you fail to iterate and embrace constant change in growth. According to Brian Balfour of Coelevate:

“Any great growth team is ready for and responsive to change, nimble, and always, always adapting. They go beyond adapting, and truly embrace change building their team and process around it.”

If you’re early in your business, finding growth channels is about traction – not scale. Now isn’t the time to think about long-term growth – it’s about figuring out what’ll get your first customers in the door. In their book, From 0 to 1,000 Customers & Beyond, Hiten Shah and Steli Efti recommend balancing short-term and long-term growth strategies according to the following breakdown:

• 0–10 customers: 90% short-term tactics | 10% long-term tactics
• 10–100 customers: 80% short-term tactics | 20% long-term tactics
• 100+ customers: 20% short-term tactics | 80% long-term tactics

Don’t Mistake Growth Hacks for Growth Channels

Too many marketers confuse growth hacks and growth channels, leading them to invest significant resources into strategies that’ll never move the needle.

Approach growth from a smarter place. Do the research, and run your numbers. Make educated decisions, and then focus your energy on a single growth channel that’ll help you reach your early customer acquisition goals. Never be afraid to toss a campaign that’s performing poorly, and you’ll never have to worry about overinvesting in channels that won’t support your growth.

How did you decide on the user acquisition channels you’re using right now? Leave me a note below with your approach to this process:

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

On Tuesday, anti-secrecy group WikiLeaks dumped a cache of files claiming to expose a war chest of tools the CIA used to hack devices running operating systems (OS) like iOS, Android, and Windows.

The CIA allegedly exploited “zero-day” flaws — vulnerabilities in software that are unknown to the vendor — to gain access to a multitude of functions on phones, connected TVs, and routers. WikiLeaks has shared these vulnerabilities online, meaning that the tools are available to any user globally. The CIA has yet to confirm the accuracy of the documents. 

The zero-day exploits can supposedly be used to break into devices' operating systems, making the devices vulnerable to direct hacks. While the documents indicate there’s no way for hackers to penetrate end-to-end encryption — one of the most secure and popular methods of securing digital data while it’s in transit — hackers can access the text or audio messages on a user’s phone before encryption is applied. End-to-end encryption is particularly popular with messaging platforms, including Apple’s iOS, Signal, WhatsApp, and Telegram.

WikiLeaks’ findings could negatively impact the way mobile and connected devices are used. Data privacy is a major concern for both consumers and businesses, and the exposure of such robust vulnerabilities serve as a stark reminder that digital security is never ensured.

• Tasks that require sensitive information on mobile devices today could take a downturn. The threat of third parties having access to a growing volume of sensitive data stored on smartphones could make consumers and businesses more reluctant to use these devices for everyday tasks such as mobile purchases, B2B communication, or talking to family and friends.
• The introduction of new mobile tasks that rely on even more sensitive information could see diminished traction. Digital health and connected homes both necessitate connecting previously analogue parts of a consumer’s life to digital formats. If mobile and connected environments aren’t reliably secure, consumers may shy away from using them.
• Connected speakers and voice assistants may not be as readily welcomed into homes. One segment of the WikiLeaks dump stated that the CIA was able to trigger the listening mode in connected TVs, speakers, and smartphones, enabling it to eavesdrop on conversations.

Companies will respond by patching the vulnerabilities that were brought to light. For its part, Apple argues that many of the CIA vulnerabilities aren’t effective on its devices. The company states that it's patched most of the holes already and is working on fixing new vulnerabilities, according to TechCrunch. The security of iPhones is of particular importance to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Apple spent a large portion of 2016 combatting efforts by the FBI to gain access into an iPhone involved in the San Bernardino shooting. Meanwhile, Android's heavily fragmented ecosystem will likely make it much more difficult to roll out patches for any existing vulnerabilities. 

It's no surprise that companies are more worried than ever about the looming threat of hackers penetrating their networks. In the last year, the number of records exposed in data breaches rose 97%, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center.

The frequency and sophistication of cyber attacks are at an all-time high, and the costs associated with data breaches continue to rise. While companies are investing more in cybersecurity to ward off attacks, they know they won’t be able to spend their way to absolute security. A cybersecurity team of more than 1,000 staffers with a budget of $250 million wasn’t enough to save JPMorgan Chase from getting hacked in 2014. As a result, companies are turning to cyber insurance to help mitigate the costs of a potential breach.

However, insurers have been slow to extend cyber insurance to many businesses, as they have yet to develop proven tools to help them assess the risks and costs associated with cyber attacks. Cyber insurance policies also often have high premiums and low coverage limits to help protect insurers from incurring too much exposure to a cyber attack.

BI Intelligence, has compiled a detailed report on cyber insurance that examines the growth of this market and identifies the key factors driving that growth. It also identifies the commercial sectors that are underserved in the cyber insurance market, which present a unique opportunity to insurers. Finally, it explains how insurers can find creative ways to cover these underserved markets while still limiting their overall exposure.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Cyber insurance plans cover a variety of costs related to cyber attacks, including revenue lost from downtime, notifying customers impacted by a data breach, and providing identity theft protection for such customers.
• Annual cyber insurance premiums will more than double over the next four years, growing from to ~$8 billion in 2020.
• However, many insurance companies have been hesitant to offer cyber insurance because of the high frequency of cyber attacks and their steep costs. For example, Target’s notorious data breach cost the company more than $260 million.
• Insurers also don’t have enough historical data about cyber attacks to help them fully understand their risks and exposures.
• There are large underserved markets with very low cyber insurance adoption rates such as the manufacturing sector, where less than 5% of businesses have cyber insurance coverage.

In full, the report:

• Projects the growing demand and premiums for cyber insurance in comparison to other common forms of commercial insurance.
• Illustrates how cyber attacks are growing more sophisticated and more costly, which is driving more companies to consider cyber insurance.
• Explains the obstacles that insurers face in extending cyber insurance coverage to different types of businesses.
• Provides insights on how insurers can overcome these challenges to grow their cyber insurance business without incurring too much risk.

To get your copy of this invaluable guide to cyber insurance, choose one of these options:

1. Purchase an ALL-ACCESS Membership that entitles you to immediate access to not only this report, but also dozens of other research reports, subscriptions to all 5 of the BI Intelligence daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT

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

Join the conversation about this story »

A large percentage of new B2B technology startups fail when it comes to marketing. Here’s how to avoid common pitfalls and rise to the top of your niche.

Technology startups are great at creating useful innovations. What they aren’t so great at is marketing those innovations to customers. Study after study shows that between 50 percent and 60 percent of all ventures will fail because of reasons that have nothing to do with putting out an inferior product. These ventures will close their doors because of non-targeted and poorly planned marketing efforts. The reality is that only 37 percent of IT startups will master marketing in ways that allow them to stay in business for longer than four years. The common reason why B2B technology startups fail is because they lack one or all of these three resources:

• Time
• Money
• Knowledge

How can a new company avoid the common mistake of failing to communicate the value of its product to a targeted audience if it lacks any of these three resources? Stretching what you do have by using the most efficient marketing practices possible can help you to remain competitive.

Know Your Target Audience

Putting forth a marketing initiative without identifying your marketing base ahead of time is like shooting very expensive darts into an abyss. You’ll have no way of knowing where your efforts land or if they’re picked up by others. In fact, many companies are able to spend less money on marketing if they put a little bit of time and money into creating a targeted base. The reality is that bigger is not necessarily better when it comes to marketing for B2B technology companies. You don’t actually have to get millions of eyes on your product to be successful. In fact, getting the eyes of just a few hundred decision makers in the tech world is far more beneficial than reaching millions of people in the general population. The process of marketing a tech product should follow this pattern:

• Get the attention of relevant people
• Convert views to leads
• Convert leads to customers
• Stretch your resources

The beauty of tech startups is that they operate on small budgets while bringing forth big ideas. Having limited resources doesn’t mean a startup can’t make a marketing plan. The goal is to use your startup’s unique value to get attention. Focus all of your marketing efforts of demonstrating why your product delivers a superior solution for an important problem in the niche market you’re focused on serving. You can use blogs or newsletters to discuss the issue your product solves. Customers in the tech world are more likely to glance at the content you provide if you present it as a means to a solution.

Execution Matters

Not having a marketing plan isn’t the only way to ensure that a startup will fail. Many startups fail to get off the ground because they don’t properly and fully execute the marketing plans they do have. It’s important to have a very detailed marketing plan that leaves room for changing course because the odds that you’ll get outsmarted by competitors is very high. You can’t be competitive if you aren’t up to speed on the latest marketing trends. This is why it’s important for startups to consult marketing firms even if they don’t have the budgetary means to employ an official marketing person.

The Perfect Plan

How can the average startup company with a limited budget create a marketing plan that actually works? There are some essential steps that can help you stay competitive. The three basic principles that need to be at the core of your marketing efforts include:

• Knowing your current position in the market
• Identifying and answering the needs of your target audience
• Pricing your product to be competitive in the market while emphasizing its unique value

One of the most cost-effective uses of your resources is to create buyer personas. A buyer persona is a profile that helps brands create very specific marketing plans. You can use relevant data to create a detailed profile around the habits, motivations, opinions and desires of the demographic you’re targeting. 80 percent of your marketing resources should go toward addressing your primary persona. The other 20 percent of your resources should go toward addressing a secondary persona.

Think About the Future

The one constant in the tech world is that something bigger and better is always just a few months away from full development. This is why tech startups can’t just remain focused on what they’re doing today. There must always be a futuristic plan on the back burner to ensure that a path is being paved for success in the coming months and years. It’s important for a startup company to establish a sense of value in its product that will be recognized for the foreseeable future. The key to longevity is to make sure you have a differentiator built into your product that makes it stand apart from competitors without veering too far away from your target audience.

Readjustments Are Necessary

Stubbornness is a liability in the technology sector. A startup company needs to be willing and able to change course and make adjustments at the drop of a hat. One thing that will become clear once you develop buyer personas is that customer behaviors shift over time. It’s important to constantly revisit your company’s core beliefs and products as you grow. You may be out of touch with what the tech world needs if you can’t clearly answer the following questions:

• What am I selling?
• Who am I selling to?
• Why am I different than my competitors?
• How can I gain a lasting competitive advantage?

Content Can Bridge Many Gaps

Content is proving to be the great equalizer in the marketing world. Crafting and delivering relevant, easy-to-read content can do the following:

• Establish your startup’s authority as an expert in your niche
• Inform and inspire
• Prompt audiences to take action
• Reinforce relevancy

What are some of the things a tech startup company should be releasing into the wild? Content that’s original and useful is what people are more likely to view and share online. Blogs, videos and user polls should all deployed as part of a comprehensive strategy for providing content. It’s important to avoid being generic. Every piece of content should offer your brand’s unique points and perspective if you want to successfully reinforce your brand’s value and build familiarity.

Much of what makes content successful rests on the proper use of keywords. Even the most amazing and persuasive content in the world won’t be seen unless proper SEO has been implemented to get eyes on your brand. In the B2B world, the content you put out will be used by decision makers to judge whether or not your startup is relevant and influential. The reality is that anyone researching products and solutions has probably already decided that they will be making a purchase at some point. What they land on when they conduct an Internet search will determine whether or not they close a deal with you or one of your competitors. The average close rate from an SEO lead is over 14 percent. This is why it’s essential to cautiously pick keywords that will connect your target audience with your message. Your SEO strategy should constantly be revisited and revised. Don’t be afraid to adjust your keywords as industry needs change or when Google reworks its algorithms.

Use Technology to Sell Technology

One of the biggest mistakes startup companies in the tech sector make is to not embrace automation as part of the marketing process. Attempting to constantly update and monitor all of your online marketing initiatives will quickly drain all of your time and energy. The good news is that the large-scale marketing automation that all the major enterprises are using is also available to small businesses. Be sure to search for automation marketing tools that cover everything from email blasts to posts on social media. In addition to providing you with easy platforms for deploying marketing materials, these tools typically provide reports and feedback regarding user engagement and post effectiveness.

A Final Word on Making a B2B Startup Succeed

While it can be daunting to know that between 50 percent and 60 percent of all startups will fail, you should also use this information as motivation. Proper marketing should be the most important topic on a startup leader’s mind after developing a viable and marketable product.

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Chuck E. Cheese’s: Where a Kid Can Learn Price Theory.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

The pizza-and-gaming emporium prides itself on affordability, which means its arcade games are really cheap to play. Does that lead to kids hogging the best games — and parents starting those infamous YouTube brawls?

Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. And you’ll find credits for the music in the episode noted at the end of the transcript.

*      *      *

[MUSIC: Eric Bolvin, “Nostalgic Love”]

Stephen DUBNER: Hey Levitt, you ever go to Chuck E. Cheese with your kids or maybe on your own?

Steve LEVITT: Well, you can’t go on your own. They won’t let you in if you don’t have kids.

DUBNER: Is that true?

LEVITT: It is true. I’m happy to say I didn’t find that out the hard way. I didn’t actually show up at a Chuck E. Cheese without my kids, but I have heard that they will not let you in without children.

DUBNER: So you’ve been with children?

LEVITT: I haven’t been in a long time, but in the day I used to take my kids there. And you know me, I like the simple things in life, and that means I love places like Chuck E. Cheese. I just love arcade games. They’re fun. They’re a great mix of manual dexterity and little bit thinking.

DUBNER: And have you ever become violent at a Chuck E. Cheese because someone else’s kid wouldn’t, you know, get off the Skee-Ball?

LEVITT: I can proudly say I have never become violent at Chuck E. Cheese; never been tempted towards violence at Chuck E. Cheese.

That’s Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author. He’s an economist at the University of Chicago. Chuck E. Cheese, if you’re not familiar with it, is a popular family-entertainment spot with pizza and arcade games …

Chuck E. Cheese Commercial: Chuck E. Cheese’s. Where a kid can be a kid.

I was asking Levitt about the potential for violence at Chuck E. Cheese – which officially is Chuck E. Cheese’s, possessive, but most people shorten it to Chuck E. Cheese or Chuckee-Cheese –  because that’s what a Freakonomics listener had asked us about.

Nathan CORROY: Well, I’m not the type of guy to hit somebody and certainly not a child. But it led me to think it did seem plausible.

[MUSIC: Binary, “Cheeky Motives”]

Today on Freakonomics Radio, we ask a simple question. How does the price of a good or a service effect consumer behavior? Our cast of characters include: our economist…

LEVITT: OK, so the one thing I want to get across is the idea about rivalry.

Our listener …

CORROY: Do I personally feel OK with that? No.

We hear from the founder of Chuck E. Cheese …

Nolan BUSHNELL: It’s an interesting theory.

The current administration of Chuck E. Cheese …

Michael HARTMAN: The first thing I’ll say is incidents at Chuck E. Cheese’s are very rare.

We hear what happens when things go wrong at Chuck E. Cheese:

Larry DEETJEN: What happened is they began pushing and shoving the police officer.

We ask: what’s price got to do with it?

CORROY: I mean, I think it certainly could be.

And we hear Steve Levitt’s brilliant idea for testing this theory:

LEVITT: Maybe I could dress up as a child, you could be the adult. And then we can see how many other parents, if I monopolize a game, end up attempting to beat you into a pulp.

*      *      *

DUBNER: Levitt, I’ve often heard you say that the one thing that economists are reliably good at doing is setting the appropriate price of a good or service. Can you explain briefly in your economist-speak how you do that?

LEVITT: So essentially the art of setting prices is simply figuring out what price to set so that you have the marginal cost of providing that good equal to the marginal revenue generated by the sale of that good.

DUBNER: So the danger of setting a price too high if you’re selling would seem to be obvious, right? People don’t buy what you’re selling. But what’s the danger of setting a price too low?

LEVITT: The danger of setting a price too low of course is that too many people want to consume the good. If it’s a kind of good where someone takes it and walks out of the store, then you’ll find that the shelves are empty. In the case where it’s not something we actually take out of the store but instead something you experience then what you end up having are long lines of people, all of whom want access to that same good but only a few of whom can actually consume the good.

We’ve talked a lot on this program about how price affects behavior. For instance, one of the most effective tools to cut smoking? Price and tax hikes:

Kenneth WARNER: What we know is that if you increase the price by 10% you will decrease total cigarette consumption by 3 to 4%.

But what about when prices fall? The price of food has generally fallen over the past few decades – which makes it easier for people to eat too much. When the price of gasoline drops, people tend to drive more, which leads to more congestion, pollution, and crashes. If you own a bar and you suddenly drop the price of all beverages from five dollars to five cents – how do you think that’s going to work out? So the relationship between price and behavior, especially bad behavior, can be pretty strong. And that’s what led one Freakonomics Radio listener to put two and two together and come up with a theory.

CORROY: My name is Nathan Corroy and I’m a financial adviser in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Corroy used to go to Chuck E. Cheese when he was a kid. His experiences were always very positive.

CORROY: Oh yeah, very positive, yeah. Absolutely.

Now he’s got kids of his own …

CORROY: I’ve got two sons. One is about three-and-a-half and the other’s four months.

So he thought about taking his older son to Chuck E. Cheese. But he was also a little wary. Because of something he’d seen on the news.

CORROY: Certainly in the Milwaukee area for the past few years there’s been reports of violence always coming up in the news at Chuck E. Cheese locations.

Violence at a restaurant chain that caters to little kids and their families? Yes indeed. If you just Google “Chuck E. Cheese” and “fight,” you’ll find plenty of videos like this one …

And like this one …

Now, we should point out: it’s the adults fighting, not the kids. We should also point out that the adults may have been drinking. Because most Chuck E. Cheese’s serve wine and beer.

CORROY: Yeah, it strikes me as pretty odd. Now granted, we’re in Wisconsin, where we would drink beer at church if we could.

Anyway, when Nathan Corroy decided to bring his young son to Chuck E. Cheese for the first time, he wanted to minimize the chance that he would encounter any violence.

CORROY: We went right when it opened in the morning. So we were literally the only people in the whole place.

They had a good time playing the arcade games.

CORROY: And what I noticed after playing a couple of games with my son was that every machine in Chuck E. Cheese costs just one token.

Chuck E Cheese token from 2011. (Photo credit: outletpro/flickr)

Even the games that lasted the longest, that seemed like they should have been more expensive.

CORROY: And that really struck me as being kind of odd that there was no price variance between the games.

Nolan BUSHNELL: You know, this was a subject to debate.

That’s Nolan Bushnell, who founded Chuck E. Cheese 40 years ago in San Diego. The debate was whether to make some games more expensive than others.

BUSHNELL: We felt that since most of most of our revenue really came from kids under eight, I felt that it would be confusing. And we tested a few things and we found that it really didn’t change the revenue that much. What you’re assuming is that we’d make more money if we charge more. It turns out that that isn’t the factor.

Before Chuck E. Cheese, Bushnell co-founded the video-game company Atari. Chuck E. Cheese was a way to maximize his profits from popular games like Pong.

BUSHNELL: In the case of Pong, it was such a hit that you’d sell it for a $1,000. And in its lifetime, it’d make $30,000. It didn’t take rocket science to say, “Hey, I’m on the wrong side of this equation. I shouldn’t just be selling the machines. I should be operating the machines.”

Michael HARTMAN: So we were basically a Silicon Valley startup and we’re going to be celebrating our 40th anniversary in May of 2017.

That’s Michael Hartman.

HARTMAN: And I’m the chief marketing officer at CEC Entertainment.

CEC Entertainment being the parent company of Chuck E. Cheese; today CEC is owned by a private-equity firm called Apollo Global Management. It’s planning an IPO for Chuck E. Cheese later this year.

DUBNER: And was Chuck E. Cheese one of the first what are now known as family-entertainment concept companies, where kids and parents come together to do stuff, have fun, play games and eat?

HARTMAN: Absolutely, we were definitely one of the first family-entertainment concepts. If you look back in terms of what the competition and the landscape was in 1977, it was bowling alleys, dingy arcades, and movie theaters. And what Nolan wanted to do was to make video games more accessible to families and to younger children.

Part of that accessibility is affordability.

HARTMAN: Our guest is very price-conscious. We want to make sure that they can have an excellent experience for a family of four starting at about $30.

Which means keeping the price of games low. The price varies a bit depending on what kind of package you buy but, rule of thumb: each token costs only about 20 cents. Which, believe it or not, is what it cost to buy one Chuck E. Cheese token 30 or 40 years ago! So if you’re ever looking for a part of the modern world that’s somehow untouched by inflation – there you go, Chuck E. Cheese game tokens! And, as Nathan Corroy saw when he took his young son there …

CORROY: Every machine in Chuck E. Cheese costs just one token.

Now that’s not quite accurate – and, as we’ll hear later, change is afoot. But here’s what happened the next time Corroy took his son to Chuck E. Cheese:

CORROY: It was a Saturday. So as we were there it started to get more and more crowded and we didn’t have that free rein of being able to go and play any game we wanted to without waiting. And I was in line with my son, we were going to play one of the smaller basketball hoop shooting games. And there were two kids in front of us that were playing that game. And they were just feeding tokens and not giving up their turn. As I’m seeing them then feed tokens in the machine, I’m thinking, “Wow, it’s costing nothing to do that.” And that was kind of the a-ha moment of “this is the problem with the pricing model and this could be one of the unintended consequences.

The “unintended consequences” Corroy was thinking about were the fights he’d heard about on the news …

Nathan Corroy wondered if the fights he’d heard about were perhaps the unintended consequence of Chuck E. Cheese’s pricing structure: the games were so cheap to play that you could just camp out for hours at your favorite game and choke off access to everybody else. Which could lead to trouble.

CORROY: Well, I’m not the type of guy to hit somebody and certainly not a child. But it did seem plausible that somebody might start talking to the kids and the kids maybe go get their parents and an altercation would start that way. Or certainly if it was among just adults, if you were there later on a Saturday and everybody’s drinking beer and you’re trying to play the basketball game and there’s a line of adults waiting.

I asked Steve Levitt if he could imagine that the Chuck E. Cheese pricing scenario encouraged violence.

LEVITT: Well, I absolutely could imagine it because when it comes to Chuck E. Cheese, and the product they deliver, they suffer from a very intense form of what economists call rivalry, meaning that exactly one person can play a particular game at a time. And when people all want the same thing there are lots of different dimensions on which they can compete for that thing. And certainly physical violence is one we see. I mean, I’ve studied drug dealing a lot, and indeed, when it comes to the pursuit of property rights in drug markets, violence is the strategy of choice. Now, I have to say I’m a little bit skeptical in thinking that when it comes to queues at the Chuck E. Cheese that violence is usually the likely weapon to which rival parents might turn.

DUBNER: So you’re saying that Chuck E. Cheese customers are probably not as prone to resort to violence as crack dealers?

LEVITT: Well, I think if the stakes were as high, they probably would resort to violence in the same way that crack dealers do. But when you have something inherently low-stakes like whether your kid can play game A or game B at Chuck E. Cheese, I would think that most parents, even most inebriated parents, wouldn’t come to blows.

[MUSIC: Johnny Fiasco, “I’ve Lost My Floppy”]

Coming up on Freakonomics Radio: who’s right: our economist Steve Levitt, or our listener, Nathan Corroy? And how are we going to figure it out? But first, a few fun facts about Chuck E. Cheese, courtesy of chief marketing officer Michael Hartman:

KID VOICE: One!

MICHAEL HARTMAN: Ninety percent of families with a kid 3 to 8 within 15 miles of a Chuck E. Cheese has come, and approximately half of those have come in the last year.

KID VOICE: Two!

HARTMAN: On average, a kid requests to come to Chuck E. Cheese’s 11 times a year, and the parents let them come about three times a year.

KID VOICE: Three!

HARTMAN: When you look at a Chuck E. Cheese consumer, we are definitely middle America. We are a $50,000 to $75,000 income, but we have more people below $50,000 into our stores than above $75,000.

One more thing before the break: I’d like to give a quick shout-out to all the public-radio stations around the country who now play Freakonomics Radio . We realize your airtime is incredibly valuable, and we’re delighted you share it with us. So … thanks!

*      *      *

It’s an interesting theory, is it not? That Chuck E. Cheese, the pizza-and-gaming emporium, prices its games so affordably that it’s easy to hog any one game for hours, potentially leading to arguments that could potentially lead to  violence. That, at least, is what Nathan Corroy, a financial adviser in Milwaukee, was thinking.

CORROY: There certainly is evidence of violence at Chuck E. Cheese and I was actually aware of that before we ever went with my son.

Now, given what we know about priming, and how the human mind works, you might suspect that if a guy like Nathan Corroy took his son to a Chuck E. Cheese thinking about the potential for violence, he might have been more inclined to look for a causal explanation for the violence he’d heard about – as he told us earlier:

CORROY: Certainly in the Milwaukee area there’s been reports of violence always coming up at Chuck E. Cheese locations.

There are three Chuck E. Cheeses in the Milwaukee area. About a decade ago, after pressure from city officials, they all stopped serving alcohol to cut down on violence. Even so, the disturbances continued. Which led Corroy to think that maybe the pricing strategy, even more than the alcohol, was the culprit. Sometimes, the violence can really get out of hand. Consider the Chuck E. Cheese in Oak Lawn, Illinois, just outside of Chicago.

Larry DEETJEN: I personally with my children and family have never experienced what I’ve seen has occurred here in Oak Lawn.

That’s Larry Deetjen, the village manager of Oak Lawn. Over the past five years, the police responded to more than 300 calls at the local Chuck E. Cheese, and made dozens of arrests. In one case, there was a shooting in the parking lot. In another, an Oak Lawn cop got dragged into a fight.

DEETJEN: Our officer observed a fight in progress, identified himself as a police officer and gave them the command to stop the fight. Instead, what happened is they began pushing and shoving the police officer, resulting in a call for an officer in trouble.

Deetjen says he spoke with Chuck E. Cheese executives and that the president of its parent company, CEC Entertainment, even flew out to attend an Oak Lawn village board meeting to come up with solutions.

DEETJEN: There was a series of progressive, proactive steps taken.

The company paid to have two off-duty police officers at the Oak Lawn Chuck E. Cheese on weekends. And they tried some other things.

DEETJEN: They re-positioned the games, actually removed some of the games to provide less crowding conditions. We were going to revoke their liquor license, and they voluntarily decided to forego their liquor license.

So was that the end of the trouble?

DEETJEN: Well unfortunately, the disturbances did not end.

After another shooting late last year – this one involved a family that had just driven away from the Oak Lawn Chuck E. Cheese – CEC Entertainment announced that it would close that location. So if you pay attention to these reports of violence at Chuck E. Cheese – as Nathan Corroy did – you might get the impression that violence at Chuck E. Cheese is a common thing. But is it really?

HARTMAN: The first thing I’ll say is incidents at Chuck E. Cheese’s are very rare.

Michael Hartman again, the chief marketing officer for CEC Entertainment.

HARTMAN: We believe that it makes for a greater sound bite to talk about an incident at Chuck E. Cheese’s versus anywhere else just because of what our name connotes to folks. But if you think about ball fields and anywhere else where parents and kids are, you’ll hear a lot of talk about those kinds of things as opposed to anywhere else.

That makes sense, doesn’t it? A fight at a family-entertainment place is just incongruous enough that when it does happen, it’s more likely to show up on the news or in your Facebook feed than a fight in a ballpark, or in a bar. On the other hand, Nathan Corroy’s theory – that Chuck E. Cheese’s pricing strategy could be a contributing factor to the fights that do happen – well, even Chuck E. Cheese founder Nolan Bushnell wouldn’t rule it out.

BUSHNELL: It’s an interesting theory. I think it’s something that should be tested because –  is in fact the hogging of a game causal? Many of the games are two minutes and so if somebody has got 10 tokens, it’s 25 minutes. That’s probably too long and that could be a problem. But I didn’t necessarily get that as the causal nature of fights.

Okay, so how should the theory be tested?

LEVITT: You could try to run some experiments.

Steve Levitt again.

LEVITT: You know, you and I, Dubner, could go down and figure out what the most popular games are. And maybe I could dress up as a child, you could be the adult, and then we can see how many other parents, if I monopolize a game, end up attempting to beat you into a pulp.

DUBNER: I appreciate your making me the one that gets beaten. But on the other hand I think the likelihood of me being beaten is low enough to enjoy the novelty of seeing you dressed up as a child, whatever that means. So I’m okay with that experiment.

[MUSIC: Steve Rice, “Broad Street Bebop”]

In the end, we opted for something a little less dramatic. Here’s our senior producer, Christopher Werth:

Christopher WERTH: If Nathan Corroy’s theory is true — that prices may contribute to some of the violence at Chuck E. Cheese — then theoretically we should see less violence at similar entertainment chains that do charge more for more advanced games. For example, Corroy suggested Dave & Buster’s, a chain that is more oriented for adults than kids, but does serve food and beer and wine. And it has a big arcade area, where the games do not all cost the same.

CORROY: Each of the games has a different price that it costs to play. So from what I could tell anyways, seems to control the demand for the games because you’re not going to just keep playing the best games over and over again because you’d go broke.

WERTH: I went to Dave & Buster’s just to check it out.

WERTH: They’ve got Jurassic Park. They’ve got Kung Fu Panda. They’ve got Ghostbusters.

WERTH: Instead of tokens, customers purchase electronic payment cards. Those are then loaded up with “chips” that are used to play games. Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Chuck E. Cheese, has paid close attention to this industry. He advised Apollo on its purchase of Chuck E. Cheese. And he says Dave & Buster’s payment cards allow the company to observe player behavior and make small, incremental changes to game prices. Some games cost 2.6 chips, for example, or about 50 cents. Some games cost 13.6 chips, close to $3.

BUSHNELL: Dave and Buster’s. They implement variable pricing extremely scientifically. I have a lot of respect for their analytical ability.

WERTH: What we decided to do is collect police data on the number of violent incidents at Chuck E. Cheeses, and then compare them with Dave & Buster’s. And we should say from the start, the method we’re using here is highly imperfect. For one, we’re not controlling for neighborhood characteristics or anything else. This is just raw data – and spotty data, at that. We focused on three large metropolitan areas: Chicago, Phoenix and Dallas/Fort Worth.

WERTH: Oh hi, I’m trying to reach a media relations person for the police department in Grapevine, Texas… with you regarding a records request for the Phoenix Police Department… we’d like to obtain a list of calls for service to a specific business address, the Chuck E. Cheese in Chandler, Arizona…

[MUSIC: Tango Alpha Tango, “All Mine Blues” (from Black Cloud)]

WERTH: Let’s start with the Chicago area. There we looked at the 13 Chuck E. Cheeses and 4 Dave & Buster’s located within the broad boundary that we drew around the city. We asked for five years’ worth of data on what are known as “calls for service.” Which are these long lists that catalogue each time a call came in, whether it’s a fight or a false burglar alarm. We tallied up all the assaults, disturbances, battery charges etc. And what we found is — as a monthly average — there are slightly more violent incidents at Dave & Buster’s than at Chuck E. Cheese. The data showed one incident occurred at a Dave & Buster’s roughly every two months versus one incident every three months at a Chuck E. Cheese.  And we found similar results in Dallas/Fort Worth. On average, the rate of violent altercations and similar types of incidents was higher at Dave & Buster’s. In Phoenix, they were roughly the same. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Nathan Corroy’s theory is wrong. As Nolan Bushnell points out — and as we freely admit — this evidence is far from definitive.

BUSHNELL: I think that you’re almost comparing cheese and chalk.

WERTH: Not only does Dave & Buster’s clientele tend to be older. It stays open later. And while some Chuck E. Cheeses serve beer and wine, Dave & Buster’s has a full bar.

BUSHNELL: The amount of alcohol all by itself changes things tremendously.

WERTH: We wanted to find a company that’s a closer match to Chuck E. Cheese. And that’s when we discovered another pizza chain for kids called Peter Piper Pizza.

Anthony CAVOLO (Clip from 1980s Peter Piper Pizza commercial): At Peter Piper Pizza, you don’t need a lot of dough to afford a pizza. A large cheese pizza is only $3.50…

WERTH: Peter Piper Pizza was founded in Phoenix. And like Chuck E. Cheese, tokens there cost just 20 cents each if you have a coupon. But unlike Chuck E. Cheese, it prices its games from one to four tokens according to how advanced the games are. Plus, Chuck E. Cheese’s parent company, CEC Entertainment, acquired the chain in 2014.

BUSHNELL: The demographic is almost identical with the exception that Peter Piper Pizza tends to skew a little bit lower demographically in terms of income.

WERTH: We collected ten years’ worth of police data. In the Phoenix area, we looked at 11 Peter Piper Pizzas and 5 Chuck E. Cheeses. But again, the numbers just did not support Nathan Corroy’s theory. The rate of violent incidents at Peter Piper Pizza was about 64 percent higher than it was at Chuck E. Cheese.  But then, compare that with Dallas/Fort Worth, where we pretty much found the opposite. There we looked at 16 Chuck E. Cheeses, four Peter Piper Pizzas. And as a monthly average, the rate of disturbances and violent incidents was 70 percent higher at Chuck E. Cheese than at Peter Piper Pizza. Although, we should say, we’re talking about fairly low rates of violence overall. In the Dallas/Fort Worth area, Chuck E. Cheese averages a little more than one incident every four months. And 22 percent of those were cataloged in the police data as domestic disputes, which is something we heard from a number of the police departments we contacted.

ROBERT MARTIN: A lot of times, when there’s a large family gatherings at a Chuck E. Cheese, it’s for a birthday or a celebration or something.

WERTH: That is Chief Robert Martin of the Susquehanna Township Police Department in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The Chuck E. Cheese there had its share of fights, although he says things have quieted down as of late. But what you had are situations where the parents might be divorced. Maybe a new boyfriend or girlfriend shows up.

MARTIN: And all of a sudden, some tensions arise that are already present before the celebration within the family dynamic, and it escalates to the point where we were called.

WERTH: So after filing all those records requests, the data that we have just don’t suggest that prices have anything to do with the violence at Chuck E. Cheese. In fact, what they show is that, even though the fight videos are shocking and dramatic, the rates of violence at most Chuck E. Cheese is actually fairly low.

[MUSIC: Paul Avgerinos, “One Fat Hour”]

That was Christopher Werth. Admittedly, the data were spotty; the analysis more impressionistic than empirical. That said, there was no compelling evidence for the Chuck E. Cheese Theory of Customer Violence Caused by Low Game Prices. A more rigorous way to address the question would be simply to ask Chuck E. Cheese to help us with a big randomized controlled trial. For instance: what if they randomly divided their 500-plus locations, varied the prices in some and left the others low, and then measured how that affects customers’ behavior, including fights? That’s not going to happen – but, as it turns out, there are some related changes already underway at Chuck E. Cheese.

Mahesh SADARANGANI: In late 2014 we started testing an RFID card program to see how our guests and our consumers would like moving over to the card system.

That’s Mahesh Sadarangani.

SADARANGANI: I’m the senior vice president of strategic initiatives at CEC Entertainment.

Since it began, Chuck E. Cheese has used tokens for game-play. But, Sadarangani says, they’ve started the conversion to plastic cards:

SADARANGANI: And the switch over to cards was much smoother than we anticipated. And we’re happy to say that as of the end of 2016 we’ve completed roughly 268 of our stores on the play pass card reader system and we look forward to completing the entire network of our 512 U.S. stores by the end of 2017.

An RFID card allows for a lot of options that old-fashioned metal tokens don’t. Chuck E. Cheese will have better data on what its customers like and don’t like. And it gives pricing flexibility too. While most games and activities at Chuck E. Cheese have historically cost just one token, some longer or more involved games cost two tokens.

SADARANGANI: When you take a game from one token to two tokens that’s a pretty large price increase, 100 percent. And if you if you take it to three points it’s a 200 percent price increase, right?

The new card system allows for more incremental increases.

SADARANGANI: We’ll actually start to test these where we can move to a multi-point strategy and instead of a game being one point or a game being two points or three points, a game can be 1.2 points.

A card system also allows for dynamic pricing, like airlines and hotels do: raising the price during peak demand, or offering discounts at other times. All of which could help alleviate the potential for disagreements among Chuck E. Cheese customers – if, indeed, there are many disagreements among Chuck E. Cheese customers. Which, as we heard earlier from Christopher Werth, it doesn’t seem as if there are that many. We shared the police data with Steve Levitt, asked him what he made of it, especially the data from Chicago, where he lives.

DUBNER: Now, Levitt, you’ve looked at the data. Does roughly one police call every three months to the Chuck E. Cheese universe of Chicago strike you as noteworthy?

LEVITT: No, not really. I think if the police get called to a Chuck E. Cheese once every few months, not that much. And many of the calls are for things like domestic-custody disputes and things, which I don’t think the parents are…

DUBNER: Hard to blame Chuck E. Cheese for that?

LEVITT: Yeah, the parents aren’t fighting over the over the games. They’re fighting over the kids. So I don’t know, it doesn’t seem that bad to me.

One thing did stand out in the data we sent over to Levitt. It wasn’t a Chuck E. Cheese location. It was one Dave & Buster’s location that got way more police calls than any other place in the Chicago data.

DUBNER: Is that really the one where you go?

LEVITT: Yeah, that’s the one I go to all the time.

DUBNER: You go there for the violence, or it’s just coincidence?

LEVITT: Maybe I’m part of the violence. So far I have escaped official statistics, but the Dave & Buster’s to which I go with my kids now turns out to be roughly about four to five times as likely to elicit a police call as a Chuck E. Cheese. And I think that makes sense because it’s not inhabited by five-to-nine-year-olds. It’s inhabited by a bunch of 15-to-24-year-olds. And as we all know if you want to get the police involved, 15-to-24-year-olds are that age group you want to interact with.

 

[MUSIC: Christopher Norman, “Can’t Let Go” (from Ep 1)]

Coming up next time on Freakonomics Radio : research shows that being grateful is really good for you:

DAVIDAI: It’s just amazing how many positive correlates there are to gratitude .

Research also shows that most of us aren’t very grateful:

Tom GILOVICH: It’s so easy for people to feel resentful, to feel that life has made things harder for them than it has for other people.

Why the headwinds of life feel so much stronger than the tailwinds — and what to do about it. That’s next time on Freakonomics Radio .

*      *      *

FREAKONOMICS RADIO is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Christopher Werth. Our staff also includes Shelley Lewis, Greg Rosalsky, Stephanie Tam, Merritt Jacob , Eliza Lambert, Alison Hockenberry , Emma Morgenstern , Harry Huggins , and Brian Gutierrez . This week we had help from Matt Fidler. Thanks to Captain Scott Haynes of the Lewisville Police Department in Lewisville, Texas, for providing insights that helped advance our reporting. Thanks also to all the police departments that responded to our records requests. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on iTunes , Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The post Chuck E. Cheese’s: Where a Kid Can Learn Price Theory appeared first on Freakonomics.

For years, restaurant owners have argued that higher minimum wages would mean pricier meals.

Now, restaurants in states that recently raised the minimum wage — including Arizona, California, and Colorado — are putting the proof in customers' checks. 

Surcharges of 3% to 4% to pay for higher labor costs are "the emerging new norm," a spokesperson for the California Restaurant Association told The Wall Street Journal. 

Restaurateurs say that they're adding the surcharge because increasing prices of individual menu items can convince customers to pick a less expensive option or simply ditch the restaurant all together.

The surcharge also allows restaurants that opposed minimum wage increases to highlight its consequences. 

"We want people to understand there is a cost," David Cohn, the owner of 15 restaurants in San Diego, told The Wall Street Journal. "How do we stay in business with margins shrinking and competition increasing?"

However, many customers don't typically react well to surcharges — especially if they believe them to be politically motivated. In 2015, a Buffalo Wild Wings franchisee was forced to drop an Obamacare surcharge after angry diners protested the fee. 

People have taken to social media to protest the rise of surcharges. 

In February, the Seattle W Hotel was forced to drop its minimum wage surcharge after a tweet complaining about it went viral. 

"Rather than just raising prices naturally, these restaurant managers are making an overtly political statement when they add minimum wage surcharges to their menus," Paul Constant wrote in Seattle-based blog Civic Skunk Works in February. "They are protesting the fact that they have to pay their workers a living wage."

SEE ALSO: Fast-food CEO says he's investing in machines because the government is making it difficult to afford employees

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's the massive gap in average income between the top 1% and the bottom 99% in every state

Recently, my friend Carol Luong from Leadfeeder reached out to get some of my top tips on how to improve your business networking, lead generation, and sales skills. It was an excellent interview, and Carol wrote a fantastic article about it that includes great tips sales managers can use when coaching their sales teams.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the article that you can share with your sales team to help them find leads and develop new contacts into lasting relationships and business.

Reach out to your entire network for leads

Prospecting is essential to any sales teams. If your reps are struggling to find leads, suggest they try tapping into these sources:

Friends and family: Often overlooked, these people can make introductions to people who can buy from your company.

Referrals from happy clients: Leverage your existing customers to meet prospects. Ask your team to reach out to their trusted clients, ask who they know and if they can make an introduction. Or be more specific and share some company names with these clients to see if they have connections they would be willing to share. LinkedIn is another great resource to find out to whom your clients are connected.

Referral partners: Who else knows your target prospects as well as you do? Find referral partners that sell to the same crowd—but do not compete. Develop a plan to make introductions. Be very intentional about it and don’t leave it to chance.

Multi-platform, Multi-touch campaigns: Make a list or buy a list of ideal customers and plan a multi-faceted approach. Develop 8 to 12 touches with great customer-focused messaging and use many channels to deliver it. I like a combination of email, voicemail, phone, and social media—especially LinkedIn. Do this in a very account-focused way. Find several potential influencers at each company you target. Some people call this Account Based Marketing or Prospecting.

Events: You can either hold events and draw your ideal prospects to you or attend events where your prospects will be. Bonus points if you can be a speaker! If you’re planning to attend a tradeshow or conference and maybe exhibit, make sure have a great plan for before, during and after. For more tips on that, check out my free guide “Exhibitors Guide to Trade Show Success.”

Once you have these leads, do your research

Coach your team on how approaching someone to whom you have been introduced can be similar to approaching someone out of the blue, but with one primary difference. In the first case, your reps have been transferred some credibility, while the second scenario requires them to establish credibility quickly—this can be difficult, especially over the phone.

The best approach is always to come informed and with ideas to share. Your team should do their homework and learn everything they can about the business and the people they will be calling. If they weren’t introduced, use the internet to research. If they were introduced, ask the person who made the introduction for more information. It’s important to know the industry, the business, the challenges, and the people.

While on the call, your reps should ask questions and make statements that show they understand the prospect’s business. But, be careful not to assume. When your reps make a statement about what they learned about the prospect’s business or industry, they should check to see if the contact agrees. Coach your team to approach each person as if they were making a new business friend for life. Your account managers should care more about helping these new contacts reach their goals than making the sale.

Instead of presenting, make sure to tell a story

Presenting always needs to be in the context of the learner. Your team should always begin a meeting or pitch with the audience in mind. Who are they? What do they need? Why will they listen? What will get them excited? No one wants to hear about your business or your products—until they ask. Your rep’s job is to get prospects curious by telling their story. If your team builds presentations with that in mind, they will win.

Expect objections and be prepared to handle them

Price objections come up when the buyer doesn’t see the value or they want what you’re offering but can’t afford it. Don’t discount! When a price objection arises, coach your team to confirm the concern and ask some questions to learn more before offering a solution. Some prospects can’t afford what your business sells. That’s OK. Don’t spend any more time. Acknowledge that it’s not a good fit because the price doesn’t work with their budget or help them figure out how to get the budget.

To read more of my interview with Carol, check out the original blog post here: leadfeeder.com. For personalized coaching to help you push your sales team to find more leads and land more clients, call me at 775-852-5020 or schedule time to chat about it.

The post How To Turn New Prospects Into Lasting Clients appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

There are two things that make working with social media (and marketing in general!) so interesting and challenging. The first is that “social media” looks completely different for almost every type of business.

The challenges around recruiting and engaging a prospective customer audience, and then “nudging” them to take action, are going to be utterly different if you’re promoting a wedding venue versus selling funeral insurance.

The second is that the devil is always, always, always in the detail – which is why generic advice can often seem so plausible and yet be so frustratingly unhelpful when you try to apply it to your specific business.

This is beautifully illustrated by this recent post: You can’t buy love: stop wasting money on Google Adwords. It’s a great article, the kind I wish there were more of on marketing blogs these days – specific, detailed and honest. Matthew says

Over the course of two years I spent more than £25,000 on AdWords…but I never managed to get a cost of customer acquisition below the average first year’s revenue per customer.

Believe me, I tried to make it work. I optimised my ads, tweaked my landing pages and redesigned my website. Even after reading countless articles and a 500-page book on how to ‘do’ AdWords, I resorted to hiring an AdWords ‘consultant’. None of it made any difference.

Many of us have been there. Putting in hours and hours of work and significant amounts of budget, only for the ultimate measure (revenue vs cost of acquisition) to keep failing. Plus, the actual process is painful:

Most online advice about AdWords will tell you spend more time or money making it work. But Google AdWords is so complicated, wrapped in a geeky illusion of data and control, that it takes a long time to realise you’re lost.

Yes. Ouch. The data blindness is real!

And while some of that rang very very true for me personally, some of it didn’t, and Google Adwords absolutely has worked for my business and for *some* of our clients.

So that got me thinking about what the difference was. And guess where that devil is? yeah. The detail that leapt out to me is that for Adwords to work, there has to be a link between the customer’s search behaviour and a buying intent. There are things that, I would speculate, people just don’t know they want to buy so never go searching for them on Google. A gorgeous piece of furniture, say – you might not *need* it, but if you saw it pop up on a social media feed, you might be tempted. (Conversely not too many people get tempted into a new car batttery because it pops up on Facebook – you either need it or you don’t, and if you do, you want the best value option!)

Then there are things that prospective customers do know they want, but Google just isn’t their chosen research option, for whatever reason (example: builders, plumbers, SEO providers. Google search results are so awful / manipulated for those things that I’d not bother with it at all, which also knocks out the advertising opportunity. I’d always and only go for personal recommendations for those things. Might be just me, but you see what I mean!).

Then there are products and services that, for whatever reason, people do tend to check out on Google. Social Media training is one of those things, so in the early days we benefitted very much from being able to have a “quick win” of paying to get in front of those buyers. We don’t use it much these days (the data pain got really old, as did the arbitrary “trademark” restrictions – suddenly we can’t use “Facebook” in our ads, but our competitors somehow still could! – and the escalating costs) but it was effective for a particular task at a particular time. I have similar stories from other clients.

The wider point here is, that when you’re planning your marketing, you absolutely have to question the details and the reality for YOUR specific business.

This is even more true with social media marketing, where nuances around the type of product, market positioning, price point, target market demographics, how mature the company is, and many other elements, can make a huge difference as to whether a strategy works or not.

When you’re making calls about how to allocate your budget, a working knowledge of how those factors interact with the characteristics of the main social media platforms is hugely helpful. And finally: you’re allowed to ignore the generic “Ten No Fail Ways to Skyrocket your Twitter sales” articles and not feel bad about it, either.

Platinum Winners

Platinum-winning companies have earned the honour of a spot on the list of Canada’s Best Managed Companies for seven or more straight years. These were the Platinum Winners in 2016. See the most up to date list here.

See also: New Winners, Requalified Winners, and Gold Winners

Company Name	Industry Sector	Location
A&W Food Services of Canada Inc.	Consumer Business	North Vancouver, BC
Acadian Seaplants Limited	Manufacturing	Dartmouth, NS
Adastra Corporation	Technology, Media, Telecommunications	Markham, ON
ADI Group Inc.	Real Estate	Fredericton, NB
All Weather Windows	Manufacturing	Edmonton, AB
Alliance Energy Ltd.	Real Estate	Regina, SK
Allied Global Holdings Inc.	Contact Centre Solutions Provider	Newmarket, ON
altis.excelHR	Staffing Industry	Ottawa, ON
Ames Tile & Stone Ltd.	Consumer Business	Burnaby, BC
Apollo Health and Beauty Care	Manufacturing	Toronto, ON
Armour Transportation Systems	Truckload and LTL For Hire Carrier, Warehousing & Logistics	Moncton, NB
Armstrong Fluid Technology	Manufacturing	Toronto, ON
Artopex inc.	Manufacturing	Granby, QC
ASL Distribution Services Limited	Transportation, Value-Added Warehousing and Logistics	Oakville, ON
Associated Engineering	Consulting Professional Services	Edmonton, AB
ATRAHAN Transformation	Manufacturing	Yamachiche, QC
B. A. Robinson Co. Ltd.	Consumer Business	Winnipeg, MB
Bayshore HealthCare	Health Care	Mississauga, ON
BBA	Genie-conseil	Mont-Saint-Hilaire, QC
BCF s.e.n.c.r.l. / LLP	Services juridiques	Montréal, QC
Bison Transport	Consumer Business	Winnipeg, MB
Bodtker Group	Consumer Business	Calgary, AB
Boston Pizza International Inc.	Consumer Business	Richmond, BC
Brandt Group of Companies	Distributionand Manufacturing	Regina, SK
Brock Solutions Inc.	Consumer Business	Kitchener, ON
Cactus Restaurants Ltd.	Restaurant / Hospitality	Vancouver, BC
CANA Group of Companies	Real Estate	Calgary, AB
Canad Inns	Hospitality	Winnipeg, MB
CBI Health Group	Health Care	Toronto, ON
CCI Thermal Technologies Inc.	Manufacturing	Edmonton, AB
Challenger Motor Freight Inc.	Consumer Business	Cambridge, ON
Charm Diamond Centres	Consumer Business	Dartmouth, NS
Clark Builders	General Contracting and Construction Services	Edmonton, AB
Coast Capital Savings Credit Union	Banking	Surrey, BC
Colemans Food Centres	Consumer Business	Corner Brook, NL
Concentra Financial	Finance/Banking	Saskatoon, SK
Conestoga Cold Storage	Consumer Business	Kitchener, ON
Connect First Credit Union	Financial Services	Calgary, AB
Cooke Aquaculture Inc.	Aquaculture	Blacks Harbour, NB
Day & Ross Transportation Group	Consumer Business	Hartland, NB
Deca Cables	Manufacturing	Trenton, ON
Design Group Staffing Inc	Staffing Services	Edmonton, AB
Diamond Schmitt Architects	Real Estate	Toronto, ON
Dilawri Automotive Group	Consumer Business	Winnipeg, MB
Dillon Consulting	Professional, scientific and technical services	Toronto, ON
DLGL Technologies Corporation	Technology, Media, Telecommunications	Blainville, QC
E.B. Horsman & Son	Consumer Business	Surrey, BC
Eagle Professional Resources Inc.	Technology, Media, Telecommunications	Ottawa, ON
Eastlink	Technology, Media, Telecommunications	Halifax, NS
EllisDon Corporation	Real Estate	Mississauga, ON
Engineered Air	Manufacturing	Calgary, AB
Evans Consoles Corporation	Manufacturing	Calgary, AB
Evertz Technologies Limited	Technology, Media, Telecommunications	Burlington, ON
Farrow	International Logistics - Customs Brokerage	Windsor, ON
Fengate Capital Management	Financial services	Toronto, ON
FirstEnergy Capital	Investment Banking	Calgary, AB
Flynn Group of Companies	Real Estate	Mississauga, ON
Fountain Tire	Consumer Business	Edmonton, AB
Friesens Corporation	Manufacturing	Altona, MB
G Adventures	Consumer Business	Toronto, ON
Genesis Hospitality Inc.	Consumer Business	Brandon, MB
Gentec International	Consumer Business	Markham, ON
Geo. A. Kelson Company Limited	Mechanical Contractor	Sharon, ON
GHY International	Transportation and Warehousing	Winnipeg, MB
Giampaolo Group	Recycling & Manufacturing	Brampton, ON
GJ Cahill & Company Ltd	Real Estate	St. John's, NL
Globalive Capital Inc.	Technology, Media, Telecommunications	Toronto, ON
Golder Associates Ltd.	Consulting, Design and Construction Services	Calgary, AB
GoodLife Fitness	Fitness, Health and Wellness; Corporate & Workplace Wellness	London, ON
Govan Brown Construction Managers	Real Estate	Toronto, ON
Graham Group Ltd.	Construction	Calgary, AB
Great Little Box Company Ltd.	Manufacturing	Richmond, BC
Groupe Deschênes Inc.	Consumer Business	Montréal, QC
Groupe Germain inc.	Hôtellerie	Québec, QC
Groupe Montoni Division Construction Inc.	Real Estate	Laval, QC
Groupe Savoie - Les Résidences Soleil	Real Estate	Boucherville, QC
Groupe Sportscene inc.	Consumer Business	Boucherville, QC
Harbour Air Seaplanes	Consumer Business	Richmond, BC
Harry Rosen Inc.	Consumer Business	Toronto, ON
Hatch	Professional Services	Mississauga, ON
Holt Renfrew	Consumer Business	Toronto, ON
HyLife Ltd.	Manufacturing	LaBroquerie, MB
I.M.P. Group International Inc.	Manufacturing	Halifax, NS
Ideal Supply	Consumer Business	Listowel, ON
ITC Construction Group	Real Estate	Vancouver, BC
Jayman BUILT Group of Companies	Construction	Calgary, AB
Johnston Group Inc.	Insurance	Winnipeg, MB
Johnvince Foods	Consumer Business	Toronto, ON
JV Driver Group	Real Estate	Leduc, AB
Klick Inc.	Technology, Media, Telecommunications	Toronto, ON
Klohn Crippen Berger Ltd.	Engineering	Vancouver, BC
Kriska Transportation Group Limited	Consumer Business	Prescott, ON
Lakeside Group of Companies	Process Automation	Mississauga, ON
LASIK MD	Healthcare	Montreal, QC
Location d'outils Simplex s.e.c.	Location d'équipement	Montréal, QC
Longo Brothers Fruit Markets Inc.	Consumer Business	Vaughan, ON
Losani Homes	Real Estate	Stoney Creek, ON
M. Sullivan & Son Limited	Real Estate	Arnprior, ON
M&M Meat Shops Ltd	Consumer Business	Kitchener, ON
Magnotta Winery Corporation	Manufacturing	Vaughan, ON
Maison Laprise Inc.	Real Estate	Montmagny, QC
Maritime Travel Inc.	Consumer Business	Halifax, NS
Maritime-Ontario Freight Lines Limited	Consumer Business	Brampton, ON
Mastronardi Produce Limited	Consumer Business	Kingsville, ON
McCain Foods	Manufacturing	Florenceville-Bristol, NB
Medical Pharmacies Group Limited	Health Care	Markham, ON
Mega Group Inc.	Consumer Business	Saskatoon, SK
Modern Niagara Group Inc.	Real Estate	Ottawa, ON
Morrison Homes	Real Estate	Calgary, AB
newterra ltd	Manufacturing	Brockville, ON
Nienkämper	Manufacturing	Toronto, ON
NRT Technology Corp	Technology, Media, Telecommunications	Toronto, ON
O'Regan's	Consumer Business	Dartmouth, NS
Odlum Brown Limited	Finance - Investment Management	Vancouver, BC
Omicron Canada Inc.	Real Estate	Vancouver, BC
Partner Technologies Incorporated	Manufacturing	Regina, SK
Paterson GlobalFoods Inc.	Agriculture	Winnipeg, MB
PCL Construction Group of Companies	construction	Edmonton, AB
Pelmorex Media Inc.	Technology, Media, Telecommunications	Oakville, ON
PolyCello	Manufacturing	Amherst, NS
Pomerleau Inc.	Real Estate	Saint-Georges, QC
Procom	Technology, Media, Telecommunications	Toronto, ON
Quadra Chemicals Ltd. / Quadra Chimie Ltee.	Consumer Business	Vaudreuil-Dorion, QC
Quality Foods	Consumer Business	Qualicum Beach, BC
R.V. Anderson Associates Limited	Real Estate	Toronto, ON
Richardson International Limited	Agriculture	Winnipeg, MB
Ronald A. Chisholm Limited	International Food Merchants	Toronto, ON
Running Room	Consumer Business	Edmonton, AB
RWDI Group of Companies Consulting Engineers & Scientists	Consulting Engineering	Guelph, ON
Saskatchewan Mining and Minerals Inc.	Manufacturing	Chaplin , SK
Servus Credit Union	Financial Services	Edmonton, AB
Sifton Properties Limited	Real Estate	London, ON
SiriusXM Canada	Technology, Media, Telecommunications	Toronto, ON
Solutions 2 GO Inc.	Consumer Business	Mississauga, ON
Southmedic Inc.	Manufacturing	Barrie, ON
Spartan Controls Ltd.	Process Industry Controls / Technology	Calgary, AB
Spin Master Ltd.	 	Toronto, ON
St. Joseph Communications	Technology, Media, Telecommunications	Concord, ON
Standard Products Inc.	Consumer Business	St. Laurent, QC
Steam Whistle Brewing	Manufacturing	Toronto, ON
Summer Fresh Salads Incorporated	Manufacturing	Woodbridge, ON
Tallman Truck Centre Limited	Consumer Business	Mississauga, ON
Tarpon Energy Services Ltd.	Oil and Gas	Calgary, AB
Tenaquip Limited	Consumer Business	Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, QC
The Dufresne Group Inc.	Consumer Business	Winnipeg, MB
The Murray Automotive Group	Consumer Business	Winnipeg, MB
The Oppenheimer Group	Consumer Business	Coquitlam, BC
The Shaw Group Limited	Manufacturing	Halifax, NS
TransX Group of Companies	Consumer Business	Winnipeg, MB
Trico Homes	Real Estate	Calgary, AB
uniPHARM Wholesale Drugs Ltd.	Consumer Business	Richmond, BC
United Van Lines Ltd.	Truck Transportation and Warehousing	Mississauga, ON
Veritaaq	Professional Services - IT Staffing	Ottawa, ON
Waiward Steel LP	Fabrication	Edmonton, AB
Wakefield Canada Inc.	Consumer Business	Toronto, ON
West Wind Aviation	Consumer Business	Saskatoon, SK
WGI Westman Group Inc.	 	Winnipeg, MB
Wilsons	Consumer Business	Halifax, NS

The post Canada’s Best Managed Companies 2016: Platinum Winners appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Designing an email is not all about making it fancy. Good email designs have looks that kill and at the same time are simple, practical, and fulfil the purpose of the campaign in the most efficient way. These are the email designs that make news.

So it’s a good balance of both you should be looking for.

Flat email design has its roots in minimalism; it is simplistic to the core. No no no! It’s not at all drab. It’s awesome. But before we tell you what it is all about, let us tell you what it isn’t.

It’s not skeuomorphic. Styling elements like embossing, drop shadows, gradients, reflections, textures, beveling, etc. that provide the 3D effect and are the basis of skeuomorphism, have nothing to do with it. It focuses on bright colors and unique typography.

Skeuomorphism, of course, has its advantages but flat design is a move towards making things easier for designers as well as marketers. Designers, yes. But marketers? How? Flat design works in tandem with the purpose of the email. The bright colors can help to make important buttons prominent against the backdrop, grab attention, and guide the user’s eye to the most important part of the email.

So let’s discuss in detail about the two factors on which the concept of this trend is based:

The prodigious palette

It’s said that a color is as strong as the impression it creates. And we can thank flat style for bringing bright colors into emails. It’s a canvas for designers, who bring life to emails through vibrant hues. The long overused monochromatic palette is now taking the backseat to make room for shades of green, red and purple!

The right use of colors can be the difference between an enticing email design and a design that puts off your email subscribers.

Throwing the old color pairing rules out of the window, flat design is scripting a new story and so is Fitbit, an ardent fan of this style. Look at the array of bright colors they have used to make their flat email template look stunning.

Tantalizing Typography

Typography has never got the attention it deserves. The truth is that good typography has the power to set the tone of your email campaign. From font type and size to color and subtleties like whitespace around the text, typography is everything to do with the look of the email text. Sans all the flare, good typography has great scope in a flat design. Email safe selected fonts are the best bet but you can always experiment a little with Google or custom fonts to create really awesome emails; you have the fallback option, don’t you?

This email by Kate Spade is a perfect blend of flat style and awesome and varied typography. They’ve used vibrant colors as well.

Take a look at this email from RueLaLa. It’s a perfect example of how you can blend an awesome animation into a flat design. The GIF takes away the cake. But there is one glitch. The email heavily depends on the GIF image and the ideal text: image ratio is not maintained.

Best of both the worlds

The simplicity of flat email design is what makes it nice and unique. Flat is good but too flat can sometimes be a spoiler. With no visual clues to guide the user move through an interface, an email campaign can miss its target. This drawback gave birth to a concept called ‘Flat 2.0’.

Flat 2.0 is a perfect medley of flat style and art. On one hand, the design is kept flat and on the other hand, there is a subtle use of layers, shadows, textures, etc. to give the email depth. These elements not only give the design an aesthetic worth but also have functional value.

Making a smart choice

Although flat design in email has all the positives we’ve discussed above, it might not be the right choice for every email campaign. For campaigns that demand portrayal of realism or need an artistic effect to demonstrate something, it is better to stick to skeuomorphic designs. So you need to know what exactly you want to convey through a campaign and nattily make the right choice.

Why you should use flat email design in your campaigns

• It is easy to create and loved by email recipients.
• With websites going the flat way, a flat email design will be consistent with your web design.
• It makes use of one color from your brand guidelines. This makes it easy for designers to customize and use different shades of the brand color or other colors in combination with the brand color to create diverse campaigns for your brand.
• Usage of one color helps to render your email well in most email clients; even when forwarded, the responsive email design appears undisturbed. Problems like white line appearing between colors, customizing in editor, etc. can be kept at bay.
• Use of background image can be minimized by using a color in the backdrop.

Flat email design is a brilliant concept. What is your opinion about this trend? Do you think it is here to stay? Let us know in the comments below.

We’ve all seen it: the many tactics that some marketers employ to gain the upperhand – only to see penalties and problems with what they did. These most questionable marketing tactics won’t get you the advantage you seek. Instead, they’ll give your audience reason not to trust you and even complain publicly about you.

The 15 tactics included in this article revolve around three main areas: content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing. Each item explains the reasons why they’re frowned upon and what you could consider doing instead. It’s time we stop these tactics for good.

— — —

6 Questionable Content Marketing Tactics

Not doing your research

First and foremost, why are you creating your content? If you don’t know who you’re writing it for, you’re not going to get anywhere. You’re going to waste a lot of time and effort by publishing without a target. This is why you need reader personas for your blog and other content types. The key is to have established personas that are highly researched, analyzed, and tested. If you’re looking for assistance with this, CoSchedule has a handy article listing some great tools for creating your personas.

Next, how are you going to know that your topic will resonate? Choosing a content topic requires researching both your readership’s needs as well as the keywords that they’re searching for in search engines (and on social media). One of the most highly-recommended keyword research tools is SEMrush. You can find the best keyword with that tool and then use a headline crafter to see what you can create out of your selected keyword.

Misplaced focus on self-serving content

Yes, you want to create content that ultimately brings in business, but that shouldn’t be your primary focus when designing and creating blog articles and other resources for your audience. Instead of being overly self-promotional and sales-oriented, your content should educate and help your readers. Its readability, usefulness, and relevance will then lead them to click on your call-to-action and convert on your offer.

Writing content for the heck of it whenever you feel like it

One of your biggest mistakes in blogging may be that you don’t maintain a proper strategy. You shouldn’t follow the heading here as a plan: writing content for the heck of it whenever you feel like it. You need to know what you’re creating, why, how, when and more. Your strategy development process may require time and effort that you would normally spend on your content creation, but there are so many benefits. For example: you’ll see what’s working and what’s not. Your strategy will help you plan ahead to avoid last-minute stress. It will help you coordinate as a team when needed. A strategy is a must for your content marketing.

Focusing more on SEO than reader quality

To create content that helps you achieve your end goal, which is likely lead generation, you should be focusing on the right priorities. You’ll benefit from being found in search results, absolutely, but don’t let that affect your content’s readability. As an example, keywords will help your content’s SEO, but avoid keyword stuffing or using your keywords unnaturally within your content. Focus on readability first, SEO second. Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin is very helpful with this because it offers both an SEO and readability score. The first score that matters is readability, then SEO. Google is smart enough to tell whether your content is reader-focused or if you’re trying too hard to rank.

Not linking out to other credible sources

Sometimes, when a business is creating content for their blog, they focus entirely on internal linking. This means only including links to other pages on their own website. They don’t want to link out for whatever reason. However, if you truly want to optimize your blog content for reader value and even SEO, you should be including outbound links to other sources. Make sure your links lead to another resource that’s credible and valuable to your readers. While you want to avoid adding links to your competitors or low-value sites, you’re not without websites to choose from. Find industry influencers and their blogs. Along with reader benefits, linking to influential sources will help your site’s authority and also give you an opportunity to build relationships with those site owners.

Expecting immediate results

Content marketing is one piece of the Inbound Marketing process, so it falls under a similar timeline. It’s not going to bring you immediate conversions and sales, especially if your activity is brand new. Content marketing takes patience and commitment. Take a look at this timeline to see what you can expect and when. Give your content marketing time. When you commit to creating high-value content on a regular, dependable basis, you’ll see qualified leads start pouring in.

3 Questionable Email Marketing Tactics

Buying lists or otherwise adding contacts without their permission

When you’re just starting out with email marketing and don’t have a subscriber list yet, what do you do? Too many times, businesses use their sales list or even buy a list to get the ball rolling right away. What they may not realize is: that’s only going to hurt their business. If you don’t grow an organic email list, you’re taking serious and unnecessary risks.

Your unsubscribe rate will be high. Your engagement rate will be low. Anyone who does engage will likely be doing so to report your email as spam. On a similar front, if you add contacts manually from a search engine or contact information collection tool, you have the same risks. Your contacts must absolutely opt-in to receive emails from you. It’s with only that way that it’ll bring you real, positive results.

Sending one generic email to everyone

Email list segmentation is key to any email marketing program. This applies no matter how big or small your list is at the time. When you send one generic email to your entire list, you hurt your email campaign’s engagement potential. On the other hand, when you create segmented lists, you’re able to send more relevant, personalized emails to your recipients. This will then improve your engagement rate. People will be more likely to open your email. They’ll click-through on your email’s call-to-action, and they more than likely will follow-through on its purpose.

Sending irrelevant emails they didn’t sign up to receive

If a subscriber signs up for your blog newsletter, they’re expecting emails relating to your blog content. They expect to see new content announcements, not emails about other departments in your business, especially sales. You need to nurture your contacts with emails that they want to see. When they’re ready to learn more about your offerings, they’ll tell you by filling out a related landing page form.

If you have plans on sending emails about topics that go beyond your blog’s scope, tell your subscribers upfront. Even better, give them a way to choose what email types they want to receive. This will lower your unsubscribe rate and complaints considerably because your recipients will receive what they want.

6 Questionable Social Media Marketing Tactics

Buying followers

If someone visits your Twitter profile and sees that you started your account less than a year ago and have less than 1,000 tweets but over 20,000 followers, they’ll know you bought those followers. You may think that matching your following to your followers will help convince people. However, there’s no way you can build an audience that quickly unless you cheated.

Instead of taking the unethical, quick-and-easy approach to Twitter followers, do what you can to build your audience with time, effort, engagement, and value. It’s only through natural effort that you’ll see the return on investment you’re seeking out of social media. You want engagement to get people to get interested in your business and even convert on your website. If your following is full of fake accounts, you won’t see this necessary engagement.

No real-time engagement

Social media has engagement in its own name: social. Are you using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or any other platform without engaging with your community in real-time? You’re not using social media how it is meant to be used. It’s not a broadcasting platform, such as what you’d see in public relations. You need to reserve time and resources to engage with your audience if you want to achieve your social media purpose and goals.

You have options for how to make the most of real-time engagement. On Twitter, participate in the real-time chats where your target audience may be active. On Facebook and Instagram, host a contest for your audience to participate in. Are you worried about getting your large-scale following to engage, or whether you can keep up? Use these best practices to help you manage your engagement. Regardless of your audience size or the status of your accounts, you need to have room for real-time engagement to see your social media marketing lead anywhere.

Sending spam and automated direct messages

On social media platforms, especially Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, you have the option to communicate with another account privately. The problem with this is that some people abuse this feature. They send sales pitches as soon as you follow them or even out of nowhere. You’ll get automated messages sent from tools like Crowdfire where the message is often generic, useless, and irrelevant.

The purpose of direct messaging is meant as an opportunity for people to build relationships with the other user. It can also be a huge customer service feature. When you use private messages to resolve customer issues, you prevent the potential virality of any public complaint. Use this feature wisely by skipping the automation and sales pitches. Instead, be human and communicate with genuine interest and value through private communications.

No live customer service offering

Many businesses still don’t see why they need to offer customer support on social media. They don’t want to spare the resources, or they don’t see the benefits of it. Some businesses have adopted chatbots to automate their customer service, but they ignore the need for human interactions. They don’t monitor mentions or respond naturally to either praise or criticism. This is a big mistake.

While services such as chatbots can be helpful after hours, you still need to have people responding to mentions for social customer service purposes. If you ignore or improperly handle complaints, you can make the problem worse. It’s imperative that a trained customer support specialist responds promptly to these users to help calm the situation and prevent virality.

To make the most of customer service on social, you might want to maintain dialogue in the public space. It’ll show other users that you’re paying attention. If you take all conversations to a private messaging feature, your other users might think you’re ignoring people. Regardless of how and where you engage, be sure you are there for your prospects and customers in real-time.

Too salesy

While it’s okay and even recommended that you promote your offerings on social media, there’s a difference between social selling and sales pitching. When you want to get people’s attention on your products and services, remember the 80/20 rule.

80% of your activity on social media should revolve around providing value to your audience. This can come in the form of blog content and downloadable resources. It can be your own content or curated content. This is the time for real-time engagement, such as in Twitter chats, where you have conversations with other users.

It’s that 20% where you can be more promotional of your offerings. This can include outreach to specific users who might be asking for help – mentioning a selected keyword you’re monitoring. This can be posts talking about your product’s features. It can be a sale or discount announcement. The one thing to keep in mind is that your posts should always be focused on expressing how your offering can help your audience. Otherwise, why would they want to click through?

Trying too hard to go viral

You’ve seen it before. Brands post content that ultimately gets shared and talked about to the point where it’s trending and viral. Yes, this is often a sound strategy, but it has strong drawbacks. Forcing virality can cause the opposite effect of what you intended, especially if your message is controversial or misunderstood.

Another key reason why you shouldn’t seek virality is: you want to focus your efforts on reaching users who might be interested in your offerings – users who are more likely to convert. If your efforts are directed at too broad an audience, you’ll waste a lot of time and effort. You’ll miss opportunities to create custom, personalized posts for the users who’ll buy from you. If you want to create brand advocates (loyalists), always provide value that they can appreciate and share. Don’t focus on viral content but rather put your resources toward a targeted audience.

— — —

How many of these questionable marketing tactics are you guilty of using? Some of them are clearly wrong and unethical, but others may be lesser known. Now that you’re aware of them, it’s time for you to prevent them from being a part of your marketing activity.

What other marketing tactics should be on this list? If you have any input on marketing best practices, leave a comment! Share your knowledge and experience so that others can learn from your mistakes and successes!

Most B2B companies ignore the easiest business they can deliver to their company.

The problem I see, all the time, is that very few B2B companies drive the most business they can, out of their existing accounts.

The real mistake is that you can drive more business out of existing accounts, because they already trust your company.

And you can drive more business out of your existing accounts, even if you only sell one product or service right now.

Let me show you how.

And this is the easiest and fastest business you can get.

Since we haven’t talked, I am unsure whether this is a problem with your business, and whether you want to find a way to build your current client base more than it is now.

You should, because it is the easiest and most effective way to grow your business, and of course your shareholder value.

It also allows you to laser focus your marketing and sales efforts into the best prospects for your company, because now you know how and why these companies bought from you.

By focusing initially on your current accounts, you will gain more business from new accounts, because your sales and marketing efforts won’t waste time with companies that won’t buy from your company.

Let me show you how to do that.

If you do want to learn more about how to drive more business out of your existing accounts, and grow them into Strategic Accounts, let’s set up a time to discuss how this can be done with your current accounts.

Let me show you how to turn “named clients” into Strategic Accounts.

By converting some of your named clients to Strategic Accounts, you will then get a number of benefits from them.

1. You will become their only vendor for your services and products.
2. You will get higher fees/revenues from these accounts.
3. They will make you part of their business planning process, so you will know what they want to accomplish, and direct them how you can help them get there.

On order to find out how to drive more business out of your current clients, I have just finished a short (22 pages) eBook about Strategic Account Management (SAM).

See how you can drive more business faster and more effectively, by selling more to your current clients.

Sellers sell AND buy. Buyers buy, but most don't sell on a regular basis. 

This alone ought to give sellers an advantage, an opportunity to relate to buyers and bridge the divide between buyer/seller. Because sellers are buyers, they have a heightened ability to understand buyers. Why, then, do we miss the mark when it comes to delivering on buyer expectations?   

Marketers have spent the better part of the last five years trying to figure out how to market to millennials. After all, this is the largest cohort since the Baby Boomers—in fact now larger—and therefore hold a tremendous amount of spending power. It’s important to note, however, that while millennials may have tremendous spending power due to the size of the cohort, Generation X has greater spending power still.

With 29% of estimated net worth dollars and 31% of total income dollars, Generation X has more spending power than any other generation. Not only do they have that power to spend, they use it. By far, more dollars are spent each year by Generation X than any other cohort.

That reason alone should remind you that marketing to Generation X is a good investment of your time and dollars. There are several other reasons to keep this particular generation in mind.

Generation X Is Powerful

Right now, Gen Xers are the managers, entrepreneurs, heads of household, and even politicians. Several companies have recently tapped people under 50 to serve as CEO, including Microsoft, McDonalds, and Harley Davidson. They’re coming into their power and discovering the influence that comes with that power.

This generation is both supporting their children and their parents. They’re starting their own businesses. They’re spending for their own households, all the while. That’s a lot of money on the table, yet marketers still consider them the “forgotten generation.”

Generation X Is On Facebook

While the general consensus seems to be that millennials spend too much time on their phones and in their social networks, the latest data proves that Generation X is actually the Facebook addict. If you’re spending your marketing budget on reaching millennials on social media, you may just be targeting the wrong age bracket. Marketing to Generation X might be the better bet.

Generation X Loves Ecommerce

Millennials may love their online shopping, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only ones happy with ecommerce. In fact, 7 out of 10 Generation Xers shop online, for an average of $1,900 per person spent online each year.

Not only are they shopping online, but they’re also engaging with brands online, too. They research, check reviews, and watch for new products through various online channels. This generation will be wherever you are online, and often with their wallets at the ready.

Generation X Is Loyal

These buyers have been through some financial crises, with multiple recessions knocking the wind out of them. While they have tremendous spending power, they’re more savvy with their money. These buyers often join rewards programs, with 88.6% looking to save money through their loyalty.

Once a Gen Xer becomes a customer, 86% are more likely to remain a customer. They’re more likely to spend more for better quality, and if the brand they choose provides that quality, they will probably remain long-term customers.

If you’d like to explore marketing to Generation X, we can help. Give us a call to discuss your current campaigns and what you could do to reach the “middle child” consumers in the US.

Have you recently taken on your company’s B2B public relations, and find yourself a little overwhelmed? Or are you an old-timer to B2B PR, but wish you could be more effective. It’s only natural. After all, B2B PR is an intricate specialty with many moving parts that can’t be learned in a weekend. It’s also changing so fast it’s tough to keep up.

So what can you do to get your B2B PR under control and moving in the right direction?

We’ll do you one better. Let’s look at the basic concerns that every B2B PR professional should address, and how you can handle each one like a pro.

The 5 Pivotal Concerns of B2B Public Relations

1. Segmentation

You need to learn what makes your customers tick. Who are you aiming your message at? Once you have a clear profile of your audience, you’re more likely to hit the mark and strike their pain points.

You should have at least three basic segments — partners, customers, and suppliers. Build your profiles with the help of these basic questions.

• What is each segment’s basic demographic? (This includes average age, location, education, and income level).
• What is each segment’s values and interests?
• What features and benefits shape a segments view of your company?
• What emotions drive their interaction with your company?

Dive into the psyche of your customesr and learn as much as you possibly can about them. You can never have too much information to successfully guide your PR efforts.

Done right, a successful lead generation strategy will fill your sales funnel with quality leads that ultimately convert and reward your company with their business –Michael Brenner

 

2. Content

In this day and age, the majority of people do their own research before making a purchase. In B2B, where purchases carry a higher price tag, this trend is even more prominent. Instead of waiting by the phone for questions, be proactive. Prepare content with your buyers’ questions in mind, making it easy for them to find answers.

There are no set rules when it comes to content creation. Every industry has its own content cocktail that works for them. In general, content creation can include:

• FAQ section
• Interviews
• Blogs
• White papers
• eBooks
• SlideShares
• Images
• Infographics
• Videos

Find out what content formats work best for your particular audience, and focus your energy on those. How do you discover them? Look on social media and forums to learn what types of content people like and share, and what other companies in your industry have used successfully.

Don’t underestimate the power of content. It is a powerful way to show your expertise and build your credibility among your audience. Keep those content fires burning with frequent creation. Use tools like BuzzSumo and Alltop to see what’s trending so you can be in the forefront with pertinent content. Try to be first to address a new trend or answer an important question as soon as it comes up.

An important part of content that sometimes gets overlooked is a call to action. It helps your prospect and customer know the next step to take. Whether it’s an eBbook, whitepaper, or a sales call, they know where they can go. Include one in all of your content to effectively convert your audience into leads.

 

3. Measurement

You’ll never know if you’ve hit the mark without measurement. Nowadays, just about everything that goes into B2B PR can be measured. A good and affordable (aka free) program like Google Analytics can give you number of readers, click through rates, and bounce rates so you can get the otherwise hidden results of your hard work.

Another way that you can tie specific results to your PR efforts is through surveys. A well-placed survey can let you know what specific tactic motivated a client to make a purchase decision or to view you as a contender in his or her decision-making process.

Quality marketing metrics can have a direct and measurable impact on business outcomes such as sales, revenue and customer acquisition. –Robert Caruso

4. Marketing

This term really ties together everything that we’ve talked about so far. Marketing is the guidance system that helps your content reach the desired mark — your buyers’ personas — and allows you to easily change direction based on given metrics.

This term also encompasses more than it ever has in its history. Since the integration of digital and social media, marketing has become a mega-pronged tool.

Social media is undoubtedly a major component of successful marketing. Such social networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter are great venues to share your content and encourage conversations around industry topics. It can also be a great way to engage with your audience, answer questions, and even field complaints.

B2B marketers who have a documented strategy are more effective and less challenged with every aspect of content marketing. –Joe Pulizzi

5. Full Engagement

Engagement seems to the buzzword for B2B PR, and may often be misunderstood. Let’s take a fresh look at what this term means in your personal PR efforts. It’s not just a comment here or a retweet there. It goes much, much deeper.

In fact, the term “relationship,” may in fact fit better. Why do we use that word? Because the ties that you create and cultivate with your prospects are iust that. When you make a sale, a link is created between your company and the buyer. It’s a relationship that needs attention and nurturing in order to thrive — and overarches every experience you have going forward.

When a customer is fully engaged and happy, it creates even more positive PR and brand loyalty. It’s worth the investment of your time and effort to nurture these relationships.

Some Pro Tips to Get Your Foot in the Door of B2B Media Relations

How do you decide which publications to pursue for media coverage? Where would your content get the best results? Here are a few tips that will help you find media placements as well as how to prepare for any media interviews.

Talk to Your Clients

The question you need to ask is, where is my audience? This is not a physical location. We’re talking about what they read, as well as where they go for advice and trusted business insights.

Do Your Research…Thoroughly

Know your industry inside and out. Industry publications will expect you to know your stuff, so be sure you prep for an interview. If you want to be viewed as an industry expert, you need to know all the ins and outs — the terminology, the acronyms, the issues, and even have insights on the future of the industry.

Observe Your Competitors

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. This adage rings true even in the realm of B2B media relations. Always keep an eye out for what content your competitors create and which publications publish their pieces. This knowledge is power in your pocket.

Fielding Media Coverage

Once you’ve chosen the publications to pitch to and have a solid base of knowledge from which to draw, you’re ready to present yourself to the media.

Because you’ve taken the time to learn your industry inside and out, you should be ready to have a solid conversation and make an interesting pitch. Yet, keep in mind that no one can know everything, so don’t be afraid to say, “I’m not an expert in that area, but I can put you in contact with someone who is.”

Also, recognize that many journalists in the B2B sector are under a major time crunch and may be spread rather thin. Respect the time that they give you, and be ready to get to the point quickly. It should be relevant, interesting, and should center on the issues rather than your company.

 

A Few Points to Keep in Mind…

• Create buyer personas to more strategically target your B2B PR efforts.
• Create killer content, and measure its effects on your PR to see what works and what doesn’t.
• Integrate social media into your marketing strategy to reach the maximum amount of people.
• Talking to clients and observing competitors are great ways to know which publications to publish your content in.

B2B public relations doesn’t have to be rocket science. With these basic principles in hand, you should be ready to skillfully wield your PR tactics and get real results.

Industrial manufacturers have a long sales cycles due to RFPs, product design, feedback, testing and more. The need to nurture sales leads becomes critical to success due to the length of these sales cycles. How do you stay in front of the prospect during long product sales time? Answer: marketing automation.

Late night infomercials try to sell you on the pitch of “set it and forget it!”. That same concept informs what is called an “advanced nurture program”. With longer sales cycles a nurturing strategy allows for customer engagement over an extended time frame. With marketing automation, you can begin leveraging the engagement engine within systems like Marketo. You can configure nurture programs to stay in front of customers for up to one year in advance! This means that with proper planning and implementation you are guaranteed to stay top-of-mind with your leads as your product comes to market.

This doesn’t mean you should exclude your normal avenues of prospective engagement. Developing a relationship with your leads on a personal level is important and will never be replaced by automation. However, using automation to assist in the dissemination of whitepapers, infographics, sales sheets, etc. is a great way to build value into your current practices.

Here are some examples of an advanced nurture program:

• Product specific: A bi-weekly communication surrounding a product that provides information and helpful resources.
  • Time frame: Twice a month for 6 months
  • Total pieces of content needed: 12

• Company credibility: A communication that affirms the credibility of a company via communication of certifications, past history, happy clients.
  • Time frame: Once a month for 6 months
  • Total pieces of content needed 6

• The webinar’s of the past and future: Provide recordings of past webinars and advertise upcoming webinars.
  • Time frame: once a month for 12 months
  • Total pieces of content: 12

A great feature of this program is the ability to pause and reset as needed. For example, if current communication with the sales team is tense we can request specific users or all users to be paused. If you maintain a consistent schedule your prospect is less likely to be negatively impacted by a single absence.

Work together with your sales team to identify nurture campaigns and when to utilize them to improve your long-term conversation with your customers and prospects.

Measuring sales velocity (aka, how long your sales process takes) is a fundamental aspect of business planning.

Sales velocity helps us forecast, work backward from our goals, and troubleshoot our process

What is Sales Velocity?

Essentially sales velocity is the speed at which leads and opportunities move down and out of your funnel.

Sales velocity can be measured in a few ways:

• The age in stage before moving to the next stage
• The total age in all stages, leading to an exit (Closed Won or Closed Lost)
• The time that passes from an action (i.e. lead assigned) to a reaction (i.e. sales outreach) or a sequence of events (demo, pilot signup, purchase).

Measuring velocity gives you a benchmark you can use to track which parts of your sales and marketing process drive acceleration or put deals at a standstill.

Measure What Influences Sales Velocity

Velocity can be incredibly variable throughout your business. I prefer to look at velocity in a few different ways, to get a sense of what levers are influencing the speed of your pipeline.

Won, Lost, and Open

Won deals should be your benchmark for velocity. Separating Won, Lost, and Open can help you with pipeline analysis:

• Have we ever won a deal that’s spent this long in this stage?
• Do we always lose deals after a certain age in stage?
• How far over the average can an opportunity be before give it a red flag
• Can we build an SLA around each stage of our funnel?

One of our customers built a top-of-funnel SLA based on lead velocity. They had never won a deal with a prospect who spent more than 14 days in Pre-Qualified. This insight led to a new process — automatically marking opportunities Closed Lost if the SDR didn’t move the deal to Qualified within 14 days.

This process keeps the SDRs on top of their leads and ensured pipeline coverage was always accurate.

New vs Renewal vs Upsell

New Business, Renewal, and Upsell have completely different timelines. While New Business and Upsell will vary by company, Renewal velocity should be the value of the contract term. If you store the contract term in your CRM, you can build your velocity reports for each type of deal length.

For example, if you primarily have 1-year contracts and start to see average renewal velocity beyond 365 days, this is an early indicator for churn risk with multiple customers delaying their renewal (such as renegotiating their terms or evaluating other vendors).

Market Segments

The same is true for market segments — deal cycles might vary wildly. You could have a 30-day SMB sale and a 90-day SME sale. Deal velocity could also vary by industry, such as healthcare customers taking longer to buy than technology companies.

Digging into the distribution of velocity for these segments can help you understand if you have undiscovered segments in your business model.

Lead Source

Lead source can have a dramatic impact on deal velocity and help you understand if you’re reaching the right buyers. You can explore this in a few ways:

• How does velocity change by Marketing sourced leads compared to Sales sourced leads?
• How do specific marketing channels change lead velocity?
• Does lead velocity change within a channel over time?

Buyer Roles

Buyer roles can impact on deal velocity, and these insights can change your approach to new deals. Here are a few examples:

• Does engaging a new prospect with the CXO create a faster sale than through a Director-level contact?
• Do groups of deals have different buying teams?
• Do specific roles or titles get involved at different stages of these deal?
• Do these buying teams move through the funnel at different speeds?

This is a great way measure experiments with targeted messaging at each stage of your funnel.

Sales Messaging & Sales Assets

The right Sales messaging motivates buyers through the funnel, the wrong messaging makes them to go cold—velocity helps you determine which effect you’re creating.

So far we’ve looked at stage velocity. Messaging is more tactical, so you may consider activity velocity instead:

• How long does it take for a cold lead to respond to outbound efforts?
• After we engage the first contact in an account, how long does it take to engage additional engaged?
• Do specific messages or assets help move these activities closer together?

At FunnelCake, we’ve found that sending our implementation deck with the proposal helps accelerate deals substantially. This deck provides a workback schedule from a prospects ideal launch date and a list of team members we need involved at each stage. We believe this works by helping the deal feel concrete and guides the buyer to involving more members of their team.

Grow Faster

You can close more deals by increasing headcount, or you can close more deals by giving your reps more capacity. Accelerating deal velocity helps you build capacity in your existing team.

Deal velocity has compounding returns for everyone on your team, new and existing. That’s effort worth investing in.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Let’s be clear, no white flags here, just a reminder that the most crucial thing to control in a winning sales career is time. As I have stated here in the past, “leads are recyclable, time is not”, if what you are doing now is not moving the opportunity or sale forward, you need to ask if it is time to move on to something that will. In my experience, this is most pronounced during the early stages of the cycle, prospecting.

Given that most sales people do not like to prospect, they should be thinking about how to optimize the dreaded task, so they can engage better with more prospects, and move on to what they really seem to like, building relationships. To optimize prospecting time there a number of things they can do, we’ll look at two here.

First is their prep for the time they have set aside for prospecting, in this case telephone prospecting (one of a number of methods they should use). Your call lists should be grouped or clustered around specific themes. This can be vertical, geographical, target size/type, or even role based. This allows you to develop a single talk track that can be leveraged across a number of calls. Allow you to highlight outcomes that are common to that day’s list, 3rd party referrals for voice mail, and more. Rather than having gaps between calls, taking away from momentum, and drastically limiting the number of calls you can make in say an hour, you can make one call after the other, building momentum, increasing your confidence, and achieving more in a given period of time. It has been shown that when you are going back and forth between two tasks, making the call, and readying for the call, you end up executing both less effectively. At the same time if you can focus on a specific task, uninterrupted, for about 52 minutes, you build efficiency. Separate the tasks, do your background work in low energy times, and do your prospecting during peak Prime Time hours.

The other area is the length of the call. A good prospecting call, where the goal is to get the prospect to agree to a formal meeting, be that phone, web, or face to face, really should not take any more than two minutes, three out the outside. In most instances, anything longer than that moves into the “diminishing return” zone.

Assuming your intro and Engage Statement (think of it as an effective value statement), capped off with an Impact Question, takes us to about 45 seconds; their answer which tees up the request for the appointment takes us to the minute mark, and now comes the fun part the objections. Each objection given – and then taken away by you, is about 20 or so seconds, remember the goal here is engagement, not an intellectual exchange. If you have read the Objection Handling Handbook, you know the first objection is a conditioned response, and by the time you get to the third one, the fate of the call is usually sealed, at times it takes four. So, we are looking at another minute to a minute and a half.

Anything after that is working against you. If they don’t want to play, all they’ll take away is how unprofessional you were, not only wasting and disrespecting their time, but your own, and no one wants to deal with that kind of rep, even when the time is right. Or worse, you are trying to sell them when your goal at the outset was to schedule a time for the actual discovery and sale.

I see so many sales people stay on the phone with someone for 10, 15 minutes, and have nothing when the call ends; well frustration, but you can’t cash that. Others achieve their goal, a prospect who agrees to engage, and then they stay on and talk themselves out of that appointment in the same call. If you do have someone agree, you should expect they may have questions, and you want to answer that question in a way that best moves the opportunity forward, and if that is a formal meeting, that’s what you should move towards. Next time you have someone agree to an appointment, and they start asking those “good” questions, simply say “That’s a great question Jim/Jill (I’m so PC), why don’t we make that first item on the agenda and give it full justice; look forward to our call Thursday, let me grab your e-mail and I’ll send an invite.” This sets you up for a great start to the discovery call, and allows you to move on to set the next appointment.

Remember, leads are recyclable – time is not – guard your time!

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The post Time – To Let Go appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

In his 2003 book Moneyball, Michael Lewis recounts how the management of the Oakland Athletics revolutionized baseball by relying on statistical analyses rather than intuition to choose new players. Before General Manager Billy Beane turned a single metric — on-base plus slugging (OPS) — into his North Star for every decision, team managers preferred strategies that were unlikely to fail rather than those that seemed most efficient. “The pain of looking bad,” Lewis writes, “is worse than the gain of making the best move.”

As a content marketing manager tasked with delivering my quota of MQLs (marketing-qualified leads) and hitting publication dates, I get it. Picking an approach that seems unlikely to fail is safe. Proposing a radical new management system seems not only bad, but foolhardy. “Why,” managers the world over ask every day, “should we try to fix something that isn’t broken?”

Unfortunately for status-quo fans everywhere, visionaries and innovators understand that what counts as “broken” is constantly in flux. In 2001, before Beane began his quiet revolution inside Major League Baseball, no other team’s decision-making style appeared broken. Yet Beane would soon overtake them because his success depended on breaking things.

Likewise, in the increasingly noisy and densely populated online world, the success of our content relies on its ability to break things. We have to break through to audiences underwhelmed by mediocre marketing. We have to break the habits of consumers who have always used a competing product or read a competitor’s newsletter. And, most importantly, we have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams.

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We have to break the way we manage and structure our content teams, says @andreafryrear.
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Although, really, it’s just the last part, the management part, that we have to break — and by break, I mean teams must decide on their own structure without heavy-handed interference from management. Before the accusations of marketing communism begin to fly, let me be clear: I’m not advocating the dissolution of management altogether. I’m proposing that on a modern content marketing team (whose goals, obstacles, and workloads are typically so huge that it’s a wonder they don’t all sleep under their desks), a manager’s job is to hire amazing people, empower them using Agile principles and processes, and then work like hell to keep anyone else from interfering.

That’s a lot to do, so let’s start from the top.

Agile marketing team – what is it?

Some teams are naturally adaptive and data-driven, and could technically be considered agile (lowercase “a”). To qualify as Agile (capital “A”), a marketing team needs a structure that enables it to adapt and iterate.

This structure could take various forms, including Scrum (the classic Agile process based around sprints), Kanban (a pull-based system that uses work-in-progress limits), or a hybrid of the team’s invention. Most Agile teams work in sprints — set periods during which team members aim to complete a set amount of work that’s connected to a long-term plan. Each sprint lasts between one week and one month, with two weeks being the most common duration.

A mainstay of the Agile approach is the stand-up — a 15-minute meeting, usually held at the beginning of every work day, during which team members stay on their feet. They take turns updating everyone on what they did yesterday, what they plan to do today, and what obstacles they need help to overcome.

Whatever form the structure takes, some kind of systematic foundation is needed to keep an Agile team from descending into frenetic reactions disconnected from a long-term plan.

Changing your mind all the time does not make you Agile.

Step 1 – Hire amazing people

Much has been written (some of it on this blog and in CCO magazine) about the growing talent crunch plaguing content marketing, so we don’t need to go into a lot of depth on this topic. The harsh truth is, it’s hard to find good content help these days. But the interviews, networking, and early-morning coffee meetings more than pay off when you consider the impact that truly passionate and skilled content creators have on your organization.

In an interconnected, digital world, great marketing can spread at the speed of a click. It doesn’t matter if it came from a team with a multimillion-dollar budget or a solopreneur doing it all on her own. The internet is nothing if not democratic.

That means finding — and retaining — creators who can consistently produce legitimately awesome work that gives you a regular shot at hitting the digital jackpot. There is no greater source of competitive advantage in content marketing than a talented team.

But those teams need the space and freedom to create or the legitimately awesome will rapidly devolve into lethargic and yawn-inducing.

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#Content teams need space to create or the legitimately awesome will devolve into lethargy. @AndreaFryrear
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Step 2 – Empower teams with agility

Whether it’s through an Agile iteration or sprint (set length of time during which a team commits to producing a set amount of content) or work-in-progress limits (inflexible limit on how much content can be in any given state such as research, writing, editing, review at one time), Agile teams are governed by limitations on their workflow. This isn’t because they’re lazy or can’t handle the workload. It’s because when people have a split focus, they do terrible work (and it takes them longer to do it).

For example, let’s imagine that your current content plans include creating a new webinar, whose launch you will support with an e-book and a series of blog posts. You plan each piece, make assignments, and send the team off to work. A week passes and you check on progress. It turns out that one person got derailed when sales asked for lead-generation collateral, another lost a day to responding to angry customer tweets, and your CEO wanted a home-page rewrite that took precedence over the blog posts.

Now you’ve got three half-finished content items, which is like having none at all.

You can’t give a webinar that ends abruptly halfway through. Nobody wants to download an e-book that’s just an outline. And blog posts just don’t work if they’re composed entirely of headlines, header tags, and target keywords.

An Agile content team, on the other hand, would have focused on finishing one piece before starting something else. Its members could have told sales and the CEO that their requests would be added to content’s Agile backlog (a prioritized to-do list that serves as the source of all work done by the team), not to the top of the list of immediate to-do’s.

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An #Agile content team focuses on finishing one piece before starting something else, says @AndreaFryrear.
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As a bonus, not only do Agile teams produce more content in less time, they also make team members happier and more engaged. And that means team members stick around longer, are easier to recruit, and help solve that thorny talent problem we talked about earlier.

Step 3 – Get in other people’s way

You might have expected me to close by telling you to get out of the way so your team can work their Agile magic, but that’s not the final step. On our hypothetical content team, we had external requests being thrown in from all sides and derailing our content creators. Even on an Agile team, not everybody will happily chirp, “Nope,” when an executive tries to interrupt their work. Agile teams are empowered, but that doesn’t mean they have super powers.

Managers need to act like an offensive line, getting in the way of people who are trying to disrupt their team while they’re executing a beautiful play. They attend daily stand-up meetings, listening attentively and volunteering to help remove roadblocks (and then doing it). They genuinely value the creative force that their team can wield, and they actively work to create a situation where it can do its thing.

Respect tradition … or profit from it

Marketing, like baseball, has ways it’s always been done. We can choose to adhere to traditional ways of managing and creating content, or we can look outside our own typical way of thinking to gain the upper hand. Someone in your niche will be using an Agile approach to start breaking things very soon. Imagine what would happen if it was you.

Hear Andrea Fryrear explain user-story mapping at the Intelligent Content Conference March 28-30 in Las Vegas. Register today and use BLOG100 to save $100.

This article originally appeared in the February issue of CCO magazine. Subscribe for your free print copy today.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

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Sales qualification streamlines the process of turning potential buyers into serious prospects.

When done well, sales qualification reduces the time required to determine if you’re talking to the right person. Are they interested in what you’re offering? Is there a specific business challenge your product could help them overcome?

I’ve had my fair share of practice — and I’ve learned that great sales qualification is more than worth the effort. Ready to get started? I’ve got you covered with our ultimate guide to finding and keeping qualified sales leads.

Table of Contents

• What is Sales Qualification?
• Why is Sales Qualification Important?
• Sales Qualification Stages
• The Lead Qualification Process
• What is a Qualified Prospect?
• Levels of Prospect Qualification
• When and Why to Disqualify Prospects
• How to Qualify a Lead with Lead Qualification Frameworks
• Sales Qualifying: Good Signs and Red Flags

Without sales qualification, you’d probably talk to hundreds of leads a day — only to wind up with just one or two closed deals to show for your effort.

Sales qualification is essential for working smarter, not harder. But why is it so crucial? Let’s take a look.

Why is Sales Qualification Important?

Sales qualification significantly improves close ratios. Otherwise, you risk pursuing leads who aren’t a good fit. They may have incompatible budgetary constraints or organizational challenges.

B2B buying groups spend 27% of their time conducting independent online research. With buyers doing so much self-education, effective sales qualification becomes even more critical to engage prospects at the right time with the right information.

There are a ton more reasons sales qualification is important. You can:

• Prioritize qualified prospects
• Deliver personalized selling experiences (our research even shows 75% of marketers believe personalized experiences drive sales and repeat business.)
• Maximize revenue impact
• Tailor processes for different verticals

I once tried to sell my content strategy service to a lead I hadn’t qualified. The partnership was a poor fit, and we had to cancel the agreement prematurely.

What does the sales qualification process look like as a whole? Let’s walk through that below.

Sales Qualification Stages

Stage 1: Create an ICP.

The first stage of sales qualification is creating an ideal customer profile (ICP). You identify the type of customers best suited to your product or solution.

For example, since I offer content writing and strategy service to B2B SaaS companies, my ideal market might consist of brands with enough funding to spend on my services.

Within an ICP, it’s also worth developing buyer personas that describe specific individuals within target organizations. These individuals have the experience and authority to address business pain points and make purchasing decisions.

Creating an ICP is a collaborative process between sales, marketing, and product development teams. However, the end result streamlines sales qualification, making the exercise time well spent.

Stage 2: Identify key criteria.

Next, identify criteria for sales leads before they’re placed in the qualification pipe. This process helps eliminate leads who are less likely to convert from interest to investment.

Key qualification criteria:

• Business budget.
• Buying authority.
• Urgency to deploy a new solution.
• Fit with existing company frameworks.

For example, a prospect with urgency and authority but no budget isn't worth pursuing, despite their interest.

Pro tip: Create a checklist for these criteria you can distribute to salespeople to ensure all employees use the same method to evaluate sales potential.

Stage 3: Put technology in place.

The amount of sales, research, and prospect data required for successful sales qualification is substantial. Even experienced teams can get overwhelmed.

Deploy customer relationship management (CRM) solutions to capture and centralize data for sales and marketing teams. Your team can also track emerging trends in customer behavior to help create more effective sales strategies.

Stage 4: Do your homework.

The more you know about your leads, the better.

The sales process is about creating relationships, and even the best product won't sell if your team fails to build reciprocal connections.

Research is crucial for building relationships. Before contacting leads, learn about their role, company, and any public insights they've shared.

It’s also a good idea to track down any relevant company information. This might take the form of a recent news article or a report posted on their corporate site. You can gain more context to the conversation.

Stage 5: Make contact.

Finally, reach out to set up a qualifying call.

With lead data in hand, connect via phone, email, or social media sites and set up a qualifying call. Use this call to understand the lead's decision-making process, pain points, budgets, and needs — not to make an immediate sale.

More importantly, you’re looking to kick-start a relationship. If you go all-in on sales tactics during the first call and this approach doesn’t work, you’ve burned a bridge.

The Lead Qualification Process

Step 1: Lead Generation

The lead qualification process begins with a pool of leads generated through various channels. These typically come from marketing efforts, sales activities, acquisition campaigns, and product teams. For smaller organizations, leads may primarily originate from website form submissions.

Step 2: Initial Lead Classification

As leads enter the system, they’re classified into different categories based on their current status and level of engagement:

• Unqualified leads haven’t been nurtured enough in the flywheel to be forwarded to a sales team.
• Marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are suitable for marketing communications.
• Sales qualified leads (SQLs) are ready to connect with a sales representative.
• Product qualified leads (PQLs) have shown strong interest through freemium subscriptions or free trials.
• Conversion qualified leads (CQLs) have taken a specific action on your website, such as submitting a form or using a click-to-call button.

[Video: How to Qualifying Your Leads | Ask These 4 Questions to Generate Quality Leads online marketing]

Step 3: Lead Qualification Framework Application

Once classified, leads are evaluated using a lead qualification framework. This involves asking a series of qualifying questions to see if they're a good fit for your product or service.

A qualifying question helps the salesperson determine their prospect's fit for one criterion. That might be need, budget, authority, sense of urgency, or another factor.

A good qualifying question is typically open-ended. Instead of close-ended questions, like “Is this a priority right now?” the better version would be "Where does this fall on your list of business priorities?" to not lead the prospect to an answer.

Here are some strong qualifying questions that I like:

• What business challenge can this product help you solve?

• What has prevented you from trying to solve the problem until now?

• What does your budget look like for this project?

• Are you using any solutions to solve this problem? If so, why are you switching?

• What is your principal priority in terms of solving this problem? Which functionality would be most important?

The framework helps sales teams focus their efforts on the most promising prospects.

Step 4: Lead Segmentation and Next Steps

Based on the qualification process, leads are segmented into two main groups.

• Qualified leads proceed to the next stage of the sales process, where they'll receive more personalized attention from the sales team.
• Disqualified leads are placed into a nurturing sequence. Here, they receive targeted content and communications aimed at warming them up to the product, with the goal of converting them into qualified leads over time.

Step 5: Refine Process

The lead screening process is not static. It requires ongoing evaluation and optimization. Continuously refine the lead screening process. Optimize questions, identify successful prospect traits, and adjust frameworks to improve sales efficiency and conversion rates.

Eddie Reynolds, host of the RevOps Corner podcast, dials down on how important it is to constantly iterate on your lead qualification process.

“You set that account score, and then you surface all these leads, and you hand them to salespeople, and then salespeople say, I call these leads, and these were worthless,” Reynolds says. “This isn‘t set, and forget it. You keep iterating until you get to the point that salespeople are saying, ‘Yeah, we’re calling these leads, and they‘re converting, and everybody’s happy.'"

What is a Qualified Prospect?

A qualified prospect has passed the initial screening and is now ready to enter the sales pipeline.

You’ll typically do the bulk of your qualification during a discovery call, but it certainly isn’t where qualification starts or ends. At every step of the sales process, you’ll continuously evaluate prospects for more and more specific characteristics.

Attributes of a Qualified Prospect

1. Clear Pain Points

PQLs need specific business challenges, not vague statements. Vague prospects are harder to nurture and close. Ask discovery questions to uncover specific pain points. Prospects aware of their challenges are more likely to qualify.

What to Look For

• Detailed answers to probing questions about pain points
• Specific issues with current solutions, indicating the need for change

2. A Budget (or a Willingness to Make One)

Have you ever had several calls with your prospect, only for the deal to die because they can’t afford your product? Discuss budget early to avoid wasting time on prospects who can't afford your product.

Ask directly about their budget for your type of solution. This upfront approach saves time and helps focus on viable prospects. Qualified prospects have clear budgets, often evidenced by current spending on similar solutions or costly problems.

What to Look For

• Budget range aligning with or exceeding your prices
• Clear commitment to purchasing a solution

3. Purchase Power

A qualified prospect will be able to either make the final buying decision or sway the stakeholders who make the decision. Identify early if your prospect is a gatekeeper, decision-maker, influencer, or blocker.

Most often, they’ll be an influencer, but they must be the right type of influencer.

Focus on upper-level influencers who can present solutions to decision-makers. Entry-level influencers like coordinators or interns are often not qualified prospects.

The decision-maker will likely be a leader and usually not the person you’ll talk to during the prospect qualification process. Research the company‘s size and structure to understand your prospect’s proximity to decision-makers. In larger companies, managers may be further from final decisions.

What to Look For

• Mid-level job title with influence
• Track record of successful product recommendations or purchases (ask for examples)

4. A Deadline or Strict Timeline

Qualified prospects have urgent needs with specific timelines (like before next quarter or year) for purchasing solutions.

Another way to tell? I like to look for prospects citing declining business performance or ROI from current solutions.

What to Look For

• Specific timeline for purchasing decision
• Clear urgency driven by business needs

5. A Mutually Beneficial Relationship

Qualified prospects understand the mutual benefits of the relationship. They trust you to provide a solution that helps them succeed in their role and impress leadership.

Remember: You’ll likely be speaking to an influencer. The influencer, in the end, wants to shine in front of leadership.

What to Look For

• Prospects who engage actively and show clear trust in the selling process

Levels of Prospect Qualification

Sales reps must qualify prospects at three different levels — organization-level, opportunity-level, and stakeholder-level qualification. I’ll discuss each below.

Organization-Level Prospect Qualification

This is the most basic level of qualification. Here, you’ll determine whether you should do more research. If your company has buyer personas, reference them when qualifying a prospect. Does the buyer match the demographics of a given persona?

Questions you should ask at this stage include:

• Is the prospect in your territory?

• Do you sell to their industry?

• What’s the company size?

Opportunity-Level Prospect Qualification

Opportunity-level qualification determines if a prospect has a specific need you can meet and if they can implement your solution.

Opportunity-level characteristics reveal if a prospect can benefit from your offering.

To determine whether your prospect is qualified on an opportunity level, ask the following:

• Is the prospect familiar with the type of product you sell?

• Do they have a challenge that your product can help them solve?

• Do they have a team or a person who’ll be using the product?

Stakeholder-Level Prospect Qualification

After confirming company fit, assess your contact's decision-making power with these questions:

• Is this purchase within your budget?
• Who else influences the decision?
• What are the purchase criteria, and who defined them?

When and Why to Disqualify Prospects

Disqualify prospects in this order: company fit, business pain, decision-making power. Don‘t force your offering where it doesn’t fit.

You could be speaking with the CEO of an organization with complete budget authority who passes stakeholder-level qualification with flying colors. But if there’s no problem, there’s no need for your solution. Qualify for business pain first.

Prospects must qualify at all three levels to advance. Disqualify if they lack knowledge of strategic goals, even if they pass other levels.

Disqualifying prospects isn't negative — it helps focus on quality leads. Prioritize your time on the best prospects rather than spreading yourself thin across many leads.

How to Qualify a Lead with Lead Qualification Frameworks

A lead qualification framework is essentially a rubric that salespeople can use to determine whether a prospect is likely to become a successful customer.

Every customer and every sale is different, but all closed-won deals share commonalities. Sales qualification frameworks and methodologies help you qualify leads by distilling those shared characteristics into general traits reps can look for when qualifying.

The BANT Qualification Framework

BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timeline), the Old Faithful of sales qualification frameworks, is a widely used sales qualification framework covering key opportunity and stakeholder aspects.

BANT uncovers:

• Budget. Prospect's buying capability
• Authority. Contact's decision-making power
• Need. Business pain you can solve
• Timeline. Planned purchase date

[Video: B2B Sales Prospecting - Qualify Prospects with BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, & Time)]

Here are a few examples of BANT questions in the context of a prospect conversation:

Budget

• Do you have a budget set aside for this purchase? What is it?
• What other initiatives are you spending money on?
• Does seasonality affect your funding?

Authority

• Whose budget does this purchase come out of?
• Who else will be involved in the purchasing decision?
• How have you made purchasing decisions for products similar to ours in the past?

Need

• What challenges are you struggling with?
• Why hasn’t it been addressed before?
• What do you think could solve this problem? Why?

Timeline

• How quickly do you need to solve your problem?
• What else is a priority for you?
• Are you evaluating any other similar products or services?
• Do you have the capacity to implement this product right now?

BANT Limitations

While BANT addresses many opportunity-level requirements, it misses the mark on others.

The “ultimate” buying authority could be more than one person. Make sure you engage all relevant stakeholders early on in the process and secure each individual’s buy-in.

“Timeline” is another area where BANT falls short today. A strict BANT qualification might tell you to cycle a lead who won’t be ready to buy until next year.

MEDDIC Qualification Methodology

MEDDIC, developed by Jack Napoli at PTC, stands for Metrics, Economic Buyer, Decision Criteria, Decision Process, Identify Pain, and Champion.

MEDDIC helps sales reps understand a company's entire purchase process, improving forecasting accuracy for high-value enterprise sales.

Source

“From $0 to $100 million, [PTC was] successful because we sold a better widget,” HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan says. “From $100 million to $1 billion, we sold a shift in technology. MEDDIC became important because it‘s not just any old purchase — it’s a transformation of the business.”

MEDDIC is ideal for high-value products or those requiring business transformation. It helps understand how and why prospects buy and who champions your product internally. This information is crucial for maintaining an accurate pipeline.

CHAMP Sales Qualification Framework

The CHAMP Qualification Framework (Challenges, Authority, Money, Prioritization) prioritizes Challenges over Authority. It views authority as an opportunity to map organizational hierarchy, not a roadblock.

If your initial contact is a low-level employee, you can safely assume they won’t be the decision-maker. That doesn’t mean you should hang up the phone. Instead, ask questions that help you map the company’s organizational hierarchy to determine who to reach out to next.

GPCTBA/C&I Framework

GPCTBA/C&I (Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget, Authority/Negative Consequences, and Positive Implications), developed at HubSpot, responds to informed buyers by exploring prospects' strategic goals and business models beyond the immediate problem.

This means understanding a prospect’s strategic goals, their business model, and how the specific issue you’re discussing fits into the larger picture of their professional life.

Source

Here are some of the questions you should ask at each step.

Goals

The purpose of the following questions is to find out your prospect’s quantitative goals. You can help clarify or set goals with your prospect if their response isn’t well-defined.

• What is your top priority this year?

• Do you have specific company goals?

• Do you have published revenue goals for this quarter/year?

Plans

Once you understand your prospect’s goals, find out what work they’ve already done to achieve them. Determine what’s worked and what hasn’t, and make suggestions for improvement.

• What are you planning to do to achieve your goals?

• Do you think XYZ might make it hard to implement your plan?

• Do you have the right resources available to implement this plan?

Challenges

Defining your prospect’s challenges — and reinforcing that what they’ve already tried isn’t working — is crucial. Unless they understand that they need help, a prospect won’t become a customer.

• Why do you think you’ll be able to eliminate this challenge now, even though you’ve tried in the past and you’re still dealing with it?

• Do you think you have the internal expertise to deal with these challenges?

• If you realize early enough in the year that this plan isn’t fixing this challenge, how will you shift gears?

Timeline

Your most important asset is your time. So, while a prospect that doesn’t want to buy now or in the near future isn’t necessarily a lost cause, they should move down your priority list.

• When will you begin implementing this plan?

• Do you have the bandwidth and resources to implement this plan now?

• Would you like help thinking through the steps involved in executing this plan, so you can figure out when you should implement each piece?

Budget

Just asking “What’s your budget?” isn’t a question likely to get you valuable insight, according to HubSpot sales director Dan Tyre.

Instead, try asking:

• Are we in agreement on the potential ROI of [product or service]?

• Are you spending money on another product to solve the problem we’ve discussed?

Then, go in for the kill. Databox CEO and former HubSpot VP of Sales Pete Caputa suggests phrasing the budget question this way:

“We've established that your goal is X and that you're spending Y now to try and achieve X. But it's not working. In order to hire us, you will need to invest Z. Since Z is pretty similar to Y and you're more confident that our solution will get you to your goal, do you believe it makes sense to invest Z to hire us?”

Authority

Unlike in BANT, qualifying for authority under this framework doesn’t necessarily mean trying to determine whether your contact is a decision-maker. Your contact might be an influencer or a coach, two types of internal champions who can give you insight into the decision-maker’s thought process.

If your contact isn’t the economic buyer, ask them:

• Are the goals we’ve discussed important to [the economic buyer]?

• Amongst their priorities, where does this fall?

• What concerns do you anticipate they’ll raise?

• How should we go about getting [the economic buyer] on board?

Negative Consequences and Positive Implications

This part of the qualification process is about finding out what happens if your prospect fails.

“If your product can significantly help them avoid consequences and further aid in achieving even bigger follow-up goals, you’ve got a very strong value proposition,” Caputa says.

Here are some C&I questions to ask prospects:

• What happens if you do or don’t reach your goals? Does the outcome affect you on a personal level?

• When you overcome this challenge, what will you do next?

• Do you stand to get promoted or get more resources if you can hit your goal? Would you lose responsibility or be demoted if you don’t?

GPCTBA/C&I provides valuable insights for complex, differentiated products integral to a prospect's strategy. But its thoroughness may not suit all sales processes.

ANUM Sales Framework

ANUM (Authority, Need, Urgency, Money) is an alternative spin on BANT. When qualifying using ANUM, a sales rep’s first priority should be to determine whether they’re speaking with a decision-maker.

FAINT Sales Framework

The RAIN Group advocates using FAINT (Funds, Authority, Interest, Need, Timing) to qualify sales leads. FAINT reflects the fact that many purchase decisions are unplanned and thus won’t be associated with a set budget.

Like ANUM, reps using FAINT should look for organizations with the capacity to buy, regardless of whether a discrete budget has been set aside. FAINT also adds Interest into the mix.

Source

According to RAIN Group’s John Doerr and Mike Schultz, Interest is defined as “[generating] interest from the buyer in learning what’s possible and how to achieve a new and better reality than the one they have today.”

Sales Qualifying: Good Signs and Red Flags

According to Sarah Casdorph, a demand automation manager at HubSpot, if your lead qualification framework is doing its job, the vast majority of your leads actually will not be qualified.

This isn’t a loss though.

“That nurture experience is what‘s going to keep your leads warm, so that maybe when the next budget cycle rolls around, or maybe when they’re more educated on the business problem or kind of their opportunity, then your brand will be the first one to come to mind,” Casdorph says.

In fact, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.

At the same time, there are some telltale signs that scream “good” or “bad” leads. Here are some tip-offs (both good and bad) to listen for when qualifying a prospect that can help you determine whether to upgrade a lead or disqualify ASAP.

Good signs to move a prospect forward:

• Excuses — Indicate real pain, either through legitimate reasons or attempts to rationalize inaction.
• Specificity — Detailed answers show careful consideration of the problem. Look for sequential plans and statistics.
• Knowledge — Decision-makers show intimate understanding of company goals, challenges, and needs.

Red flags in the sales process:

• Inconsistency — Contradictory answers may indicate lack of knowledge. Consider qualifying with another contact.
• Short answers — One-word responses suggest the problem isn't pressing or the contact lacks insight. Evaluate whether to disqualify or reach out to others in the organization.
• Personal email addresses — The lead is using a personal email address (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo) rather than a business email. This may indicate they are not an actual decision-maker.

Sales Success Depends on Effective Qualification

Trust me: Your ability to find good-fit prospects will make or break your business. Prospects who turn into happy customers mean not only revenue, but increased word-of-mouth, referrals, and the possibility of cross- or upselling.

This guide can help you streamline your qualification process to find better leads, get them interested in what you’re offering, and put them on the path to ongoing purchases.

“Account Based Marketing” is all the rage these days.

You’ll want to pay attention if any of these questions ring true:

• Are you trying to find B2B clients from just about any industry that has even an inkling of a use for your products?
• If so, are your conversion rates surprisingly low?
• And you’re probably burning through leads like nobody’s business, right?

If you’re nodding your head in agreement right now, keep reading.

We’ve determined the problem and are determined to share with you a better way to sell your stuff. It’s through this process Account Based Marketing (ABM).

The traditional way of getting clients includes sending out thousands of emails or advertising to broad audiences. Whatever lead comes through the door are then given (typically) a pretty rigid pitch.

If they buy, great! If not, there are thousands more leads where that came from.

Let’s take a deep look at ABM and see if it could increase the workload on the front-end (prospecting leads) and significantly raise conversions.

What Is Account Based Marketing?

We’ve laid out the “traditional” methods for a lot of sales organizations. Now it’s time to go over exactly how account based marketing is defined.

Account Based Marketing: is an alternative B2B strategy that concentrates sales and marketing resources on a clearly defined set of target accounts within a market and employs personalized campaigns designed to resonate with each account. (Source)

“Concentrates sales…clearly defined set of target accounts…personalized campaigns…resonate with each account.”

Sounds terrifying to anyone using the old methods—but it’s not really.

Imagine what you could do with a little analysis and data on the front end that gave you some real indications that a contact would be an ideal prospect for your products. It’s possible, but will (obviously) take some adjustment.

In all reality, it may not be for you (but probably is).

Who Account Based Marketing is For (and Not For)

If you are a rep, lead, or owner of a B2B; this method could almost certainly be used at your organization.

Higher ticketed items in the B2C world may be included, to some degree, but you’ll strictly use demographic and psychographic data to determine your leads.

As far as who ABM is not for?

Every B2C can benefit from using things like buyer personas and data to better target and appeal to their narrowed down audience, but you won’t try to hunt down high-quality specific names of consumers.

Ideally, you are creating personal campaigns to individual accounts.

If that doesn’t sound like it would have a good ROI, depending on your business model or commission structure—account based management may not be for you.

You’ll have to determine that for yourself (or your company). If you’re still interested, let’s break down the process.

Down to Brass Tacks

If you’ve been in sales for any length of time, you’ve probably seen various sales funnels.

In order to best explain how ABM works for B2B sales, we’ll use a very simple funnel to help you sort it out.

Stage One: Identify Companies

In a traditional sales environment, this stage is easy. You just open up the list and start trying to get someone to buy.

In account based management, identifying companies is actually a critical part of the process.

Before you can move toward creating that custom campaign, you have to understand who you’d like to speak with. For starters, you’ll need to look at your client list and ask yourself a few questions:

• Which brands really resonated with our solution?
• What was their pain point that really drove it home?
• What was their structure and the titles/positions of decision makers?
• What objections did they have before making a final decision?
• Was there any material they wanted that wasn’t available (e.g. whitepapers, webinars)?

You may have heard of “buyer personas” and this is a similar process. What you are trying to create are “ideal prospect personas”.

When you’re looking for leads, it will be obvious which contacts seem like a close fit.

Bonus Tip: The best place to learn the answers to the questions above is to call your great clients and ask them.

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Stage Two: Find Influencers/Decision Maker

At a certain level, there are multiple people involved in the buying decision (the average right now is 5.4).

That said, there is typically only one person in charge of signing the contract and loosening the purse strings (i.e. decision maker).

But don’t just search for this one person. The “others” in this scenario are called influencers.

They can be either direct or indirect.

• Direct Influencers: These are people who are closely involved and specifically a part of the buying process. For instance, the decision maker is the V.P. of marketing, but the marketing manager downloads your lead magnet. Makes sense? There may be a few people learning about solutions for their pain.
• Indirect Influencers: This influencer isn’t directly involved in the buying process (per se), but does have the ear of the decision maker. This could be direct reports, supervisors, or colleagues in an unrelated department (like other VPs).

It’s important to find out who would be involved in the process while also figuring out who is in charge of the whole thing. Searching with tools that allow you to find multiple roles in a single company would be ideal.

Stage Three: Engage All Key Players

You’ve been more involved with these leads through the entire process, but now it’s time to engage with them directly.

There are three primary things that you want to find out during your engagements.

1. The Decision Maker: Emailing and cold calling to find the person who is in charge of purchasing products (like yours) is vital to the process. Try sending an email asking (just a few) of your contacts that says, “Can you point me in the right direction?” It works.
2. Are They a Fit: Your goal in sales is to have meaningful conversations that either move the lead closer to buying or tell you to stop wasting time (or possibly wait a few months). Figuring out how strong their need is versus how much they realize it, needs to happen during your engagement.
3. Needed Resources: B2B sales don’t happen quickly (most of the time). The buying team needs resources, and if you’ve done a good job of picking out the right leads—you should develop what they need.

A Word on Resources: The content and other elements that your target accounts need are critical tools that need to be developed. In this style of marketing you are developing tailor-made resources to help the specific markets you’ll reach out to.

These are the things that you need in order to weed out suspects and get leads into a position where they are ready for a demo/pitch.

If you do this process right, get ready for your conversions to exponentially increase.

Depending on how your commission structure works, there is an incredible benefit to sending hundreds of more personalized emails a week as opposed to thousands of mass communications.

This level of care also gives you the ability to develop relationships so much better, which will lead to more referrals.

Stage Four: Create Advocates

Again, the whole system of account-based management creates the environment of knowing your leads and taking better care of them. Put those two things together and you have a relationship.

Just contacting those in the “closed-won” category every now and again with helpful tips, or just a genuine sense of care will help you develop “brand advocates”.

Doing so, benefits both the company (if you’re the owner or lead) and the reps.

• Company: The benefits here are straightforward. You have a lower churn rate (if you’re in recurring revenue), better client satisfaction, fewer returns, higher referrals, and an overall solid foundation for growth.
• Sale Reps: Once you hit ten or so of these higher caliber accounts, you’ll be able to realize a steady stream of referrals coming your way. If you develop a system of reaching out regularly followed by a quick “ask” for anyone they may know of who’d like to talk with you, your efforts will pay off.

To help you continue your research, here are a few great guides we enjoyed.

• HubSpot: Account Based Marketing Guide
• Marketo: Account Based Marketing
• Forbes: Align Your Sales and Marketing Team with Account Based Marketing
• KissMetrics: Best Resources for Account Based Marketing

Doing It Well

The biggest difference between the traditional sales model and account based management is all in the name.

You’re not trying to plug in leads to a rigid formula. You’re trying to find ideal clients and manage their account—even before they’re your customer.

It’s the way things in business are turning.

Emails that even smell of spam are quickly thrown into the trash without any remorse whatsoever.

The days of ripping through leads is almost over. Now reps are required to take care of their customers from the very conception of the sales funnel all the way through the life of the account.

I recently had the honor of speaking at SalesLoft’s Rainmaker conference, a sales engagement event for modern sales leaders. Over the course of three days, speakers and attendees focused on sales technology, best practices and new philosophies and ideas in sales. At the event I was asked to share collective thoughts on market segmentation and account-based sales from OpenView. Here, I’ve provided a sampling of the most insightful feedback gathered from across our firm.

1. What’s the goal of a market segmentation effort? When is it really necessary?

You’ve identified a massive TAM (total addressable market) for your product. That’s great, but how much marketing budget do you have? How many sales reps have you hired to call on prospects in your target market? In all likelihood, not nearly enough. Without focusing on a subset of your target market, you risk wasting resources and failing to gain traction at all. A segmentation effort helps you find where you have the best opportunity for success, which makes you much more efficient with your sales and marketing dollars. It also helps your company attain a leadership position in a specific market segment, which has the benefits of virality and pricing power that go along with being the market leader. It’s never the wrong time to do a market segmentation exercise. What changes are the level of rigor and data that go into your segmentation. Make sure to do a rich, analytical segmentation when you’ve hit the expansion stage – you’re north of $1 million in ARR, you’ve found product-market fit and your team is intently focused on scaling but hasn’t built a repeatable go-to-market motion. – Kyle Poyar, Director of Market Strategy, OpenView
Market segmentation is all about smart prioritization of resources. No matter the size of your company, one thing we can all relate to is limited resources – whether that’s time, people, capacity, tools…the list goes on and on. At OpenView, we help our portfolio companies with market segmentation with the end goal of maximizing impact through focus. Market segmentation provides a data driven approach to understanding your total addressable market and helps you to identify the segments or accounts that are the best fit based on key factors like size, growth rate, CAC, win rate, average LTV and competitive intensity. Once established, your key segments should not only guide marketing and sales activities, but also inform your product roadmap. In my opinion, market segmentation is always necessary. So often we hear “the best thing about our product is it’s for everyone, the worst part about our product is it’s for everyone.” Without taking the time to conduct a market segmentation exercise, you run the risk of messaging so broad that you’re actually speaking to no one and sales and marketing end up swinging in different directions. Marketing may have a bias towards segments where leads are easy to capture, but where the win rate is low. Sales may just be after big logos, even if your company isn’t ready to best serve their industry. – Ashley Minogue, Market Strategist, OpenView
Market segmentation is the practice of identifying the best one or two segments of a market that you can dominate to deliver the best results to your company and customers. Well defined customer segments inform your entire business, allowing you to 1) create winning product features that appeal to customers within a given segment and 2) create and execute efficient sales and marketing strategies that can be effective for all participants in that market. Resources are scarce, especially for startups, but the better you’re able to hone in on a market, the farther your dollars and efforts will take you. Said differently, segmentation is critical in finding and enhancing product/market fit. The defining characteristics of companies with strong product/market fit include an efficient customer acquisition model and strong customer retention and upsell on the back end. Market segmentation, to some degree, is an exercise that can and should be done at any point in a company’s lifetime, but it’s especially important as you transition from an early to expansion stage GTM model and begin to step on the gas. The unfortunate truth is that segmentation isn’t a one-time activity. Your segment of choice will often be a moving target and will need constant refinement. – Arsham Memarzadeh, Associate, OpenView

2. Where do you start? Who do you put in charge for this effort and what kind of skills do they need?

Like any scientific process, start by listing out your hypotheses. Without looking at any data, what do you think are the most attractive customer segments? What characteristics might influence what makes a good prospect – industry, size of the company, the buyer’s role, company growth rate, something else?

Next it’s time to test your hypotheses and dive into your Salesforce opportunities data. Pull all of your opportunities from the past year and clean the data as needed. Look for the expected LTV per opportunity versus the CAC across different characteristics, such as industry, company size, buyer persona and use case. The expected LTV incorporates your win rate (the percent of opportunities that become closed won customers), the average deal size and your dollar retention achieved among closed won customers. The CAC represents how long the sales cycle is with those segments and what sales resources you put against different deals.

– Kyle Poyar, Director of Market Strategy, OpenView

First, identify an owner of this effort, backed by a cross-functional team. You’ll likely want to appoint a data-driven marketing (or product) person who is comfortable rolling up their sleeves with the data, but is also creative – not all of the analysis will be black and white.

The effort should be a combination of quantitative data analysis and qualitative interviews. If you’re fortunate enough to have some seasoned sales folks, talk to them! Listen to their opinions and use them as a sounding board for potential hypotheses. Also be sure to talk to the market – customers and prospects included. These market interviews are often overlooked, but can unlock unique perspectives on willingness to pay, brand reputation, competitive landscape and more. This is crucial information that can’t be gleaned from data alone.

– Ashley Minogue, Market Strategist, OpenView

First, set out to understand the entire addressable market, followed by the segments that make up that market. Then, follow a framework to help you land on the optimal segment around which to build your company’s GTM strategy.

The last task is the most challenging. We’ve found that the most effective framework to start with is the practice of answering a set of questions that leverage a mix of team insights, customer data and market research. These include but are not limited to the following:

• What are the most important criteria for selecting the best segment to target?
• What is the market value of each segment?
• What is the expected success rate in each segment? What has it been historically?
• What is the cost of targeting each segment?
• What are major trends relevant to your product in each segment?

– Arsham Memarzadeh, Associate, OpenView

3. What other resources are needed, such as tools?

There are several routes you could take and the corresponding resources vary for each of them: 1) investigating the market opportunity, 2) enriching your data and 3) conducting customer discovery to really get to know your key segments.

1. To understand your market opportunity with potential segments, the Bureau of Labor Statistics is your best friend. This is the go-to source to learn the number of companies and total employment by industry and by company size.

2. Data enrichment allows you to test even more segmentation hypotheses, which could provide leading indicators about what makes an attractive customer. For example, many companies target prospects based on their existing tech stack, which you can find out from Datanyze or Clearbit.

3. Conduct a deep customer discovery with your prioritized segments to get to know their purchase triggers, pain points, value drivers and competitive alternatives. This will further help you hone your product and marketing to crisply speak to your targets’ specific needs, which resonates far better than a one-size-fits-all approach.

– Kyle Poyar, Director of Market Strategy, OpenView

The maturity of your business will warrant the amount of rigor and resources you put behind this effort. The biggest piece of advice I would give is no matter the maturity of your business, remember this isn’t a one and done exercise. This is something you’ll want to refine over time so keep that in mind as you set up the analysis and process.

Focus on ensuring that your data is tagged with all of the necessary key variables – data enrichment solutions can be useful here if your database is limited. If you’re on the sales side, make sure all of your team’s activity is logged in your CRM. Understanding length of deal, number of touchpoints to close a deal, loss reasons and so forth are all valuable data points to help you assess where you are winning and losing and why.

– Ashley Minogue, Market Strategist, OpenView

4. From the sales perspective, isn’t a market segmentation effort “marketing stuff”? How can it influence the composition of your organization or overall process?

The business development (BDR) team should be the front line of your segmentation. In an ideal world, 100% of the folks BDRs are calling have been prioritized through your segmentation effort, and the call scripts will look different for each segment. Tailor the pitch with customer references from that segment and messaging that’s in their language.

– Kyle Poyar, Director of Market Strategy, OpenView

It’s easy to get caught up on the internal implications of an exercise like this – how will this impact a sales reps activity, how will this impact how I spend my marketing budget, etc. But I’d encourage you to first think about what this segmentation effort will mean for the end customer. If executed properly, market segmentation should result in sales, marketing and product all trying to win in the same target segments/accounts and deprioritizing everything that falls outside of those targets. This laser focus inherently enables you to create a story that is more personalized. Every touchpoint a buyer has with your company, whether that’s through your website, a white paper, on a discovery call or through conversation at an event, will be more relevant and consistent – and at the end of that day that will help you close deals.

– Ashley Minogue, Market Strategist, OpenView

It’s no more “marketing stuff” than it is “sales stuff.” As a sales leader, how will you know which prospects to focus your team’s time and effort on without having a sense of the optimal segment? Your sales leaders and reps should all have an understanding of your product’s buyers and the language they use, the stakeholders involved in the buying journey, the time-to-success of each channel, and the makeup of direct verse channel sales. That information and the resulting sales process can have massive variations from segment to segment.

– Arsham Memarzadeh, Associate, OpenView

5. What are the practical applications or output of a market segmentation effort? How can it be used to accelerate the deployment of account-based engagement in an organization?

Market segmentation efforts should result in prioritized customer segments that have buy-in from sales, marketing and product on where you’re going to focus and win. This shouldn’t just be something you present to your board, but should inform the activities across sales, marketing and product:

• Sales: The first actionable step for sales should be determining your territory structure based on prioritized segments. There are so many ways to slice and dice territories when you factor in product lines, geos, industry, size and so on – market segmentation is the first step in using data to drive your team structure. From there, every rep should determine their target account list within their universe. The goal of a target account list is to make sure you are spending your proactive time engaging with the right account. There’s so many things that come up over the course of a day, without it it’s easy to lose focus.

• Marketing: Your budget should be focused on acquiring, retargeting and retaining your target customers. Everything from your digital marketing assets to your content should be designed with these customers in mind. To hold yourself accountable and track results, you should create specific goals around each of your targets.

• Product: Market segmentation isn’t just for sales and marketing. It’s equally important for prioritizing product enhancements. Your product can’t be everything to everyone – there will need to be trade-offs. With a deeper understanding of the size of your segment and the LTV potential, product leaders should be able to make more informed decisions on how to drive their roadmaps.

– Ashley Minogue, Market Strategist, OpenView

The post VCs Weigh In: How, Why & When Startups Need to Conduct Market Segmentation appeared first on OpenView Labs.

MIT's Graviky Labs has come up with a way to make ink out of carbon soot from car exhaust. Who knew pollution could create art?

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Would you like to see higher returns and more engagement from email marketing?

Email is a powerful marketing channel. Sixty-three percent of marketers cited email as the channel that offers the best ROI and it’s considered the most trusted form of online communication with 77 percent of consumers trusting email over other online channels.

One simple adjustment could improve your conversion rates up to 355 percent and increase revenues by 781 percent: segmenting your email list to appropriately target your subscribers. However, as we discussed in “1 Avoidable Email Marketing Mistake Everyone Makes”, many marketers still do not segment their email lists. If you’re ready to maximize your marketing budget, generate conversions, and deliver more relevant messages to your audience, segmenting your mailing list is an excellent starting point.

To help you get started with basic segmentation and increase your email marketing engagement, here are ten recommendations.

10 Proven Ways to Segment Your Email List

1. Age

While not true for every business, many will have a relatively wide gamut of age ranges among their customer base. This makes age a primary – and some would say essential – segmentation method. By categorizing your list by age, you can tailor the messaging, imagery and offers you send via email to be uniquely tuned to the generation in question, without inadvertently alienating anyone.

2. Gender

Another devilishly simple way to segment an email subscriber list is to do so by gender. Your products and services may have different lines or models for each sex, and if that’s the case, you’ll want all corners of the emails you send to be uniquely tuned to the right audience.

3. Job role

Will an account executive really be interested in your new line of productivity tools for marketers? Probably not. If you’ve captured the job role of your subscribers, you have a golden opportunity to segment your database based on job function and assumed responsibility.

4. Industry

If you primarily operate within the B2B realm, you may offer products that span several industries. And, if you’re lumping all of your subscribers into one big list and sending them every offer and news item, much of what is received will be hugely irrelevant. Avoid unnecessary unsubscribes with industry list segmentation.

5. Purchase history

If someone has demonstrated a penchant for buying your latest products as soon as they’re launched, they’ll be hot leads again next time around. Similarly, if Dave buys a coffee machine, he’s probably going to need some additional pods in the future. Such purchase history is a goldmine of information and enables you to segment your list based on buying habits.

6. Top customers

The people who buy from you most often deserve special attention. Whether that be a simple “thank you” or a more tangible token of appreciation in the form of a special offer, by creating a list segment that only includes the top spenders, you can easily treat your most loyal customers.

7. Survey respondents

If you conduct a survey that, as part of its questioning, asks if the respondent would be interested in a particular type of product, those that say “yes” should really be placed in their own email list. That way, when the specific product arrives, you can easily target them with an announcement message, safe in the knowledge that they’re almost certain to click the call-to-action button.

8. Choice of email client

We’ve all been there – you create a beautiful email only to find that it renders poorly in at least one email client. Designing for disparate clients has never been easy, but you can overcome the problem by segmenting your list by choice of email address. This requires a bit more work, but if you can tune your email uniquely for Gmail, Outlook and iOS Mail, and send each one separately, your hard work stands less chance of being undone at the other end.

9. Referrals

What better way to say “thank you” for a business referral than to send an email to the customers who have been kind enough to pass on your details? If you run a referral scheme, grab the segment of your email list that includes the referrers and acknowledge them with a nice message or special offer now and again – it’ll be appreciated, and they’ll continue to recommend your brand.

10. In-store vs online customers

If your business combines a brick-and-mortar store with an online equivalent, it’s essential that you separate the people who visit your building from those who only enter your digital doors. That way, you can tempt the latter to make an appearance and the former to head to your website for a more convenient shopping experience.

If you’re not getting a return on your email marketing campaigns, you may be making an avoidable email marketing mistake. Email marketing is complex enough, and the nitty gritty details of segmentation and targeting are rarely addressed by your marketing automation vendor or your email service provider. It’s the marketer’s job to follow email best practices, target audiences with highly relevant messages, only send emails to opted-in contacts, and remove invalid email addresses proactively. By following these basic segmentation tips and focusing on audience engagement, you’re on your way to email marketing success!

Photo credit: Flickr

There’s a lot of talk about the differences between transactional and complex selling, but Christopher Engman says that’s not granular enough. Beyond complex and account-based selling, there’s a world he calls the Mega Deal environment.

Special thanks to Laura Rosca for helping to compile this data.

The term Artificial Intelligence was originally coined by John McCarthy in 1955 who defined it as “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines.” More than half a century later, AI and machine learning are taking their places among tech’s most talked about trends.

Over the past few years, AI has made inroads in data mining, industrial robotics, speech recognition and much more. And its rise is only slated to continue. By 2022, the overall artificial intelligence market is expected to be worth more than $16 billion. That’s an expected compound annual growth rate of over 62% from 2016 to 2022. It’s not wonder then that tech giants and small startups alike are investing heavily in AI and machine learning. Here, we’ve compiled an in-depth guide to help you brush up on your AI knowledge.

Table of Contents

• Market Overview
• Major Players
• Current Use Cases
• Forecasts & Trends
• Risks & Limitations
• Miscellaneous

Market Overview

The road to artificial intelligence: A case of data over theory
In the summer of 1956, a collection of scientists gathered at Dartmouth College to invent a new field of science – artificial intelligence. This article takes a look at the six decades of AI research and where we’re headed.

Artificial Intelligence Industry – An Overview by Segment
A lay of the land of the AI industry, including its various segments and application areas.

The rise of artificial intelligence in 6 charts
A looking at AI funding, patent holders and more. Who do you think is in the lead?

Valuing the Artificial Intelligence Market, Graphs and Predictions
An overview of AI’s growth and market value in the coming decade.

The real risks of artificial intelligence
Is AI putting us on a path towards Singularity? Maybe not. But AI does have real risks (and benefits, of course). Those are explored here.

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work
How might AI impact the future of work? Startup advisor Steve Ardire weighs in.

Major Players

Google AI invents its own cryptographic algorithm; no one knows how it works
AI technology is developing, fast. The leading companies are pushing AI towards new horizons. A look at open-sourcing machine intelligence designs here.

IBM Gives Watson a New Challenge: Your Tax Return
In its broadest deployment to date, IBM’s Watson will assist H&R Block’s 70,000 tax professionals at 10,000 branch offices across the United States to help more than 11 million people file their taxes.

Current Use Cases

The Top 10 AI And Machine Learning Use Cases Everyone Should Know About
A look at some of the most important uses cases for AI and machine learning.

15 examples of artificial intelligence in marketing
An AI primer for marketers looking to capitalize on the trend.

Emotional intelligence is the future of artificial intelligence
Will emotionally intelligent AI emerge as the technology’s next phase? Seems likely according to this researcher.

Forecasts & Trends

Artificial Intelligence Market by Technology (Deep Learning, Robotics, Digital Personal Assistant, Querying Method, Natural Language Processing, Context Aware Processing), Offering, End-User Industry, and Geography – Global Forecast to 2022
What is the slated growth for AI and machine learning? Some estimates predict the market will be more more than $16 billion by 2022.

Artificial Intelligence: Trends to Watch in 2017
What trends in AI should be on the lookout for in 2017? Find out here.

The Future of Artificial Intelligence and Cybernetics
Might AI raise ethical questions and moral concerns? This research seems to think so. Find out how AI and Cybernetics are moving beyond the realm of science fiction and why that matters to you.

Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2017
A look at Gartner’s top 10 strategic tech trends for 2017 – intelligent, digital and mesh.

18 artificial intelligence researchers reveal the profound changes coming to our lives
How might AI significantly impact and improve our lives in the future? 18 AI researchers weigh in on everything from climate change to giving the elderly better lives.

Risks & Limitations

Benefits and Risks of Artificial Intelligence
Does AI threaten the future of humanity? If so, why, how and when can we expect such threats to take hold? Take a closer look here.

The rise of robots: forget evil AI – the real risk is far more insidious
Robots may not turn against us, but could the AI we program into our daily lives ultimately end up as a nuisance or worse?

These are three of the biggest problems facing today’s AI
Does AI lack humility? Signs point to yes. Here’s why that’s a problem and other issues we face with today’s artificial intelligence.

Miscellaneous

Artificial Intelligence Startups list
A comprehensive list of AI startups.

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning: Top 100 Influencers and Brands
Who are the individuals, brands and companies influencing AI now? Find out here.

AI concept/process historical perspective
A brief history of artificial intelligence from ancient history to today.

The post The Ultimate Artificial Intelligence Resources Guide appeared first on OpenView Labs.

By Kerry Gorgone, {grow} Contributing Columnist

Marketing isn’t a department. It needs to be a way of life throughout your organization.

• Human Resources needs to market the company to prospective applicants.
• Product development must make a quality deliverable or marketing will prove impossible.
• Operations (including finance and legal) impact which tools, channels, tactics, and campaigns are ultimately approved.
• Customer Service plays a huge role in retaining (or losing) existing customers.

To truly become a better marketer, you need to work with all of these departments and learn to speak the language of these disciplines.

Here are a few things to think about to be taken seriously and have an impact across your organization.

Human resources: promote the value—and values—of your company

Your company can’t be the best in your industry without the best team: attracting top talent is a key function of any organization.

• Understand your company mission. Every marketer must understand what drives their own company. Beyond marketing goals, ask yourself: what is your company trying to achieve? Armed with the answer…
• Promote your mission through content. Each piece you create should have heart to it. Even promotional emails or e-books can reinforce your mission to help your customers. Let this mission be heard in the words you choose and the copy you write.
• Create content about your culture and people. Not all content created by marketing has to be marketing content. Pull back the curtain and highlight your talented people, the events you’ve attended, the charities you support, and the beliefs that help drive your team.

By supporting HR this way, marketers help to attract talent, improve brand perception, and potentially even reduce the cost of recruitment by using content to expand the applicant pool. 

Legal: Respect others’ copyrights

I’ve written extensively on legal aspects of marketing on this site and on my blog, but there are a couple of basics that will make your relationship with legal more amicable.

Respect other people’s copyrights: don’t copy/paste other people’s content onto your company’s blog or use images you found on Google search to dress up the company website.

• Use your own images and videos. The best way to ensure that your content is cleared through legal is to create it yourself. Large enterprises have hundreds of employees who can contribute photos for company use, but even small teams can easily create images and video content with a smartphone or tablet and a couple of mobile apps for editing.
• Embrace user generated content (“UGC”). You could also let your audience help you to create content: this helps to ease your company’s content burden and also results in more effective marketing. According to one survey, eighty-five percent of users find visual UGC more influential than brand photos or videos, which is one more reason to welcome your audience’s content contributions.  Make sure to verify that the person who submitted the content actually owns it, and review the picture or video closely to screen out any submittals that include third-party content like copyrighted music or movie clips.
• Use stock photos (if you must). I’m not a big fan of stock photos, but if your only choices are searching Google or buying images through a service like iStockphoto, then by all means, use stock images. You can also use images released under a Creative Commons license (with commercial use allowed). Sites like Pixabay offer searchable databases of images you can use.

That’s a pretty good start, but you get bonus points if you work with the legal department to create a standard set of rules for giveaways and a template agreement for working with influencers.

Operations: Align marketing goals with financial/legal best practices

True confession time: finance was one of my worst subjects in business school. I’ve been known to say that my personal version of hell involves financial reports. But it really is necessary for marketers to understand some finance and refer to some of the same business metrics the finance team does.

• Don’t talk about clicks, talk about KPIs. Shared goals and a common vocabulary create a shared sense of purpose and enable everyone to row in the same direction.
• Get specific people authorized to post, act, or respond. Everyone at your company is a representative of the brand, but they can’t all have the authority to post on behalf of the company—your organization’s stakeholders want to ensure a cohesive brand voice. This means you need to choose one or two key people that all internal teams trust to approve campaigns, ad copy, social media posts, etc. If everything has to go through legal, you’ll be the very opposite of “agile,” but that doesn’t mean everyone on the marketing team should be able to make key decisions.
• Your finance team and CEO don’t care about Likes, email sign-ups, or share of voice. They care about return on marketing investment, revenue and sales, reduced costs, and improved cash flow. Speak their language and align marketing goals so they feed directly into these broader business goals.

For example, Ben Kaplan, director of mobile strategy and product at the American Cancer Society, championed the development of a new mobile app for the organization. The app streamlined the user experience, increased engagement, and brought the company plenty of social reach, but the key benefits were operational. The new mobile app increased revenue 80% over the previous year.

As if that wasn’t enough to cause a stir at the board meeting, the app also enabled users to scan checks, the most commonly used method of donation. By improving the app’s check scanning capability, American Red Cross saved money it would otherwise have spent on check scanning machines and personnel.

Customer service: Work to retain customers

One moment can make or break your relationship with a customer and create years of positive or negative buzz.

• Give employees flexibility on how they handle customer complaints. Appeal to the executives at your company to give all employees some leeway to appease unhappy customers. If they have a solution they know the customer will like, they should be able to take action instead of seeking approval from above.
• Encourage employees to surprise and delight customers. Empower employees to surprise customers now and then—upgrade someone’s subscription, give them VIP status, or send a handwritten thank-you note. Small gestures can make a big impact.

Great marketing isn’t just about copywriting and analytics—the best marketers take a more holistic view of their role in the business. So learn the lingo of your colleagues in other departments, focus on the way other teams impact marketing goals, and help them to help you achieve marketing success.

Kerry O’Shea Gorgone is a writer, lawyer, speaker and educator. She’s also Director of Product Strategy, Training, at MarketingProfs. Kerry hosts the weekly Marketing Smarts podcast. Find Kerry on Twitter.

The post 4 Non-Marketing Skills You Need to Become a Better Marketer appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Even years into the deployment of the internet, many believed that it was still a fad. Of course, the internet has since become a major influence on our lives, from how we buy goods and services, to the ways we socialize with friends, to the Arab Spring, to the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Yet, in the 1990s, the mainstream press scoffed when Nicholas Negroponte predicted that most of us would soon be reading our news online rather than from a newspaper.

Fast forward two decades: Will we soon be seeing a similar impact from cryptocurrencies and blockchains? There are certainly many parallels. Like the internet, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are driven by advances in core technologies along with a new, open architecture — the Bitcoin blockchain. Like the internet, this technology is designed to be decentralized, with “layers,” where each layer is defined by an interoperable open protocol on top of which companies, as well as individuals, can build products and services. Like the internet, in the early stages of development there are many competing technologies, so it’s important to specify which blockchain you’re talking about. And, like the internet, blockchain technology is strongest when everyone is using the same network, so in the future we might all be talking about “the” blockchain.

The internet and its layers took decades to develop, with each technical layer unlocking an explosion of creative and entrepreneurial activity. Early on, Ethernet standardized the way in which computers transmitted bits over wires, and companies such as 3Com were able to build empires on their network switching products. The TCP/IP protocol was used to address and control how packets of data were routed between computers. Cisco built products like network routers, capitalizing on that protocol, and by March 2000 Cisco was the most valuable company in the world. In 1989 Tim Berners-Lee developed HTTP, another open, permissionless protocol, and the web enabled businesses such as eBay, Google, and Amazon.

The Killer App for Blockchains

But here’s one major difference: The early internet was noncommercial, developed initially through defense funding and used primarily to connect research institutions and universities. It wasn’t designed to make money, but rather to develop the most robust and effective way to build a network. This initial lack of commercial players and interests was critical — it allowed the formation of a network architecture that shared resources in a way that would not have occurred in a market-driven system.

The “killer app” for the early internet was email; it’s what drove adoption and strengthened the network. Bitcoin is the killer app for the blockchain. Bitcoin drives adoption of its underlying blockchain, and its strong technical community and robust code review process make it the most secure and reliable of the various blockchains. Like email, it’s likely that some form of Bitcoin will persist. But the blockchain will also support a variety of other applications, including smart contracts, asset registries, and many new types of transactions that will go beyond financial and legal uses.

Insight Center

We might best understand Bitcoin as a microcosm of how a new, decentralized, and automated financial system could work. While its current capabilities are still limited (for example, there’s a low transaction volume when compared to conventional payment systems), it offers a compelling vision of a possible future because the code describes both a regulatory and an economic system. For example, transactions must satisfy certain rules before they can be accepted into the Bitcoin blockchain. Instead of writing rules and appointing a regulator to monitor for breaches, which is how the current financial system works, Bitcoin’s code sets the rules and the network checks for compliance. If a transaction breaks the rules (for example, if the digital signatures don’t tally), it is rejected by the network. Even Bitcoin’s “monetary policy” is written into its code: New money is issued every 10 minutes, and the supply is limited so there will only ever be 21 million Bitcoins, a hard money rule similar to the gold standard (i.e., a system in which the money supply is fixed to a commodity and not determined by government).

This is not to say the choices Bitcoin currently offers are perfect. In fact, many economists disagree with Bitcoin’s hard money rule, and lawyers argue that regulation through code alone is inflexible and doesn’t permit any role for useful discretion. What cannot be disputed, however, is that Bitcoin is real, and it works. People ascribe real economic value to Bitcoins. “Miners,” who maintain the Bitcoin blockchain, and “wallet providers,” who write the software people use to transact in Bitcoin, follow the rules without exception. Its blockchain has remained resilient to attack, and it supports a robust, if basic, payment system. This opportunity to extend the use of the blockchain to remake the financial system unnerves and enthralls in equal measure.

Too Much Too Soon?

Unfortunately, the exuberance of fintech investors is way ahead of the development of the technology. We’re often seeing so-called blockchains that are not really innovative, but instead are merely databases, which have existed for decades, calling themselves blockchains to jump on the buzzword bandwagon.

There were many “pre-internet” players, for example telecom operators and cable companies trying to provide interactive multimedia over their networks, but none could generate enough traction to create names that you would remember. We may be seeing a similar trend for blockchain technology. Currently, the landscape is a combination of incumbent financial institutions making incremental improvements and new startups building on top of rapidly changing infrastructure, hoping that the quicksand will harden before they run out of runway.

In the case of cryptocurrencies, we’re seeing far more aggressive investments of venture capital than we did for the internet during similar early stages of development. This excessive interest by investors and businesses makes cryptocurrencies fundamentally different from the internet because they haven’t had several decades of relative obscurity where noncommercial researchers could fiddle, experiment, iterate on, and rethink the architecture. This is one reason why the work that we’re doing at the Digital Currency Initiative at the MIT Media Lab is so important: It is one of the few places a substantial effort is being made to work on the technology and infrastructure clear of financial interests and motivations. This is critical.

The existing financial system is very complex at the moment, and that complexity creates risk. A new decentralized financial system made possible with cryptocurrencies could be much simpler by removing layers of intermediation. It could help insure against risk, and by moving money in different ways could open up the possibility for different types of financial products. Cryptocurrencies could open up the financial system to people who are currently excluded, lower barriers to entry, and enable greater competition. Regulators could remake the financial system by rethinking the best way to achieve policy goals, without diluting standards. We could also have an opportunity to reduce systemic risk: Like users, regulators suffer from opacity. Research shows that making the system more transparent reduces intermediation chains and costs to users of the financial system.

The Takeaway

The primary use and even the values of the people using new technologies and infrastructure tend to change drastically as these technologies mature. This will certainly be true for blockchain technology.

Bitcoin was first created as a response to the 2008 financial crisis. The originating community had a strong libertarian and antiestablishment spin that, in many ways, was similar to the free-software culture, with its strong anticommercial values. However, it is likely that, just as Linux is now embedded in almost every kind of commercial application or service, many of the ultimate use cases of the blockchain could become standard fare for established players like large companies, governments, and central banks.

Similarly, many view blockchain technology and fintech as merely a new technology for delivery — maybe something akin to CD-ROMs. In fact, it is more likely to do to the financial system and regulation what the internet has done to media companies and advertising firms. Such a fundamental restructuring of a core part of the economy is a big challenge to incumbent firms that make their living from it. Preparing for these changes means investing in research and experimentation. Those who do so will be well placed to thrive in the new, emerging financial system.

Editor’s Note: The headline on this article has been updated from its original version.

LinkedIn recently revealed some eye-opening stats about the immense amount of B2B traffic and sales leads it’s generating online.

If you are marketing your business online and you’re not active on LinkedIn, chances are you are missing 80% of your leads.

LinkedIn recently shared some eye-opening statistics that should give you serious pause to consider the time and effort you spend (or don’t spend) on the platform.

“Studies show that 80% of B2B leads come from LinkedIn, and 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content,” LinkedIn shared in a recent blog. “On average, 46% percent of social media traffic coming to B2B company sites is from LinkedIn.”

These statistics give substantial legitimacy to the platform, which has moved beyond its well-worn reputation as a site for job seekers and hiring managers. LinkedIn now has nearly 500 million users in 200 countries, and 2 new members join the network every second.

Even more, LinkedIn indexes, sorts and organizes every piece of content created and shared on the platform. The idea is simple: LinkedIn wants its users to use the site like a professional version of Google, finding answers to their questions in the form of blog posts, status updates, online courses, company pages, individual profiles and more.

The Key is Content Marketing

LinkedIn is the place where your ideal customers and clients in the B2B marketplace are hanging out, connecting and looking for news, training, vendors and resources. Your marketing strategy should be focused on creating valuable content that appeals to your target audience, and is easily “discoverable” on LinkedIn.

“Increasingly, B2B buyers are looking to LinkedIn for the content they need to move forward in their journey. More than half of them— 57%, to be exact — are on a mobile device. All told, there are 9 billion content impressions in LinkedIn feeds every week,” LinkedIn noted in its recent blog.

In today’s marketplace, content (meaning blog posts, podcasts, videos and so on) is the currency you must use to “buy” the time and attention of your prospects online.

More important, creating great content helps you demonstrate your authority and expertise instead of just claiming it.

The Riches are in the Niches

Realizing that there are 9 billion content impressions on LinkedIn every week means you must not try and be everything to everyone. Instead, be a big fish in a small pond by hyper-targeting some niche audiences with your content.

One of my favorite ways to do this on LinkedIn is to pick one target audience you want to sell to, then use that target audience’s name or job title in the headline of your blog post.

For example, say you want to get more coaching clients, and that you’ve already had some success helping entrepreneurs in recent months.

You could publish a blog post with this headline: “3 Daily Habits Every Successful Entrepreneur Adheres To.”

The content of the post could be three tips you share with your coaching clients on how to get the most out of their day, and you just tweak it to fit to Entrepreneurs.

Next, you use LinkedIn’s powerful search engine to identify all the entrepreneurs you’re already connected to, and you send them a 1-on-1 message that reads like this:

“Hi (Name) – hope this note finds you well!

Thought you might be interested in this, it’s a new post I just published here on LinkedIn called “3 Daily Habits Every Successful Entrepreneur Adheres To.”

Here’s a link if you’d like to read it: (link to post)

Hope you find it helpful, and can’t wait to hear what you think of it!”

See how simple this is?

You create free, valuable content for a target group of people, and (this is key!) you use their name or job title in your headline.

Turning Leads to Sales

Also, when people engage with your content on LinkedIn, it shows you who they are.

That means you can immediately, in real-time, connect and talk to the people who are liking, sharing and engaging with your content. This sparks personal, 1-on-1 conversations that can dive deeper into the topic you shared.

Plus, when someone comes into your sales funnel through your free content, they’re already warmed up. You’ve already proven to them that you know your stuff, and they’re already knowing, liking and trusting you as a result.

The best part of all is that there is no limit to the type of content you can create and share. So, the more quality content you create, and the more you hyper-focus that content on solving a problem for a niche audience, the more success you’ll have at winning new business.

Through technology and a desire for transparency, companies are finding it easier to get teams to work together. As the collective knowledge of a company moves from employee’s brains to collaboration software, an employee can effectively learn anything they want about the company and people they work with.

In addition to access of this information, growing teams are being built horizontally. Instead of building a hierarchy, modern teams are looking to recruit specialists to shore up weaknesses. It’s no longer odd for a new employee to work with the CEO just as often as their counterpart in another department.

If you have experience working at a growing startup, it’s easy to confirm this change in how modern sales, marketing, support, or executive teams work together.

Want more advice on how to build great teams? Get our free sales management toolkit!

Collaboration isn’t hard to solve for most teams, except product and sales

But there are still two teams that rarely work well together: product and sales.

As a technical salesperson, I’ve spent most of my career playing referee between product and sales teams. I believe it’s more of a dark art as opposed to something you easily fix or improve. I’ve experienced the challenging aspects of both jobs - so I naturally see both points of view.

Since most salespeople are not technical (yet), they don’t see the struggle of how the sausage gets made. Same goes for engineers. They only see when the deal gets closed, not the dozens of people that told the salesperson no before getting a yes.

We all need to appreciate that salespeople and product people are different creatures. Each of their crafts require a completely different set of skills in order to be successful.

For this post, let’s assume that the product and engineering team are the same group of people. I’ll refer to both as the “product team”. Let’s face it - it’s usually the case for early stage companies anyway.

First, let’s point out the reasons why this is hard on both sides:

[Sales] Sales has set working hours, product does not.

It happens all the time: The sales team is pushing hard to reach a goal, and they are in the office early to make things happen. Then they see some engineers strolling in around 11AM or Noon and leave the same time they do.

This is rarely spoken, because salespeople know this is a petty reason for causing animosity across teams. But it’s human nature. Salespeople have a set time to crush it (during business hours), while engineers and product people can work into the night and add value.

A lot of salespeople may not appreciate that the engineer was probably up late fixing a problem or working on a feature. A lot of their work doesn’t happen in the office.

[Product] The sales team sells features that don’t exist in the product and it leads to churn.

How many times have we seen this? The churn rate skyrockets because sales closed deals on features that haven’t launched or they misrepresented how the feature works. Engineers will often see this as lazy or sketchy. It’s not. These days, a great salesperson has to be able to communicate complex concepts in significantly less time. Sometimes things fall through the cracks.

[Sales] Every time I suggest a new feature, Product pushes back and makes me feel like I’m stupid.

Great engineers ask questions to fully understand why someone is requesting a feature. Just like great salespeople ask questions to fully grasp if a prospect is qualified.

The difference is that engineers may seem to be combative or pushing back to the salesperson when they suggest a feature. That isn’t their intent, but the salesperson takes it as criticism or condescending.

[Sales] + [Product] They don’t appreciate how hard the other team’s job is.

“Hey Engineer! Have you ever been hung up on or cursed out? Ever had a qualified opportunity disappear on you?”

“Hey Salesperson! Have you ever spent hours scouring through logs to figure out what’s causing something in the product to break?”

Both sides simply don’t appreciate the frustrating parts of each other’s jobs.

5 actionable ways to improve communication between your product and sales team

Here are some actionable steps we’ve implemented at past and present companies I’ve worked with:

1. Have the engineering team make calls + sit in closing calls.

Engineers need to feel the pain a salesperson may experience from time to time. Set up a team bonding day where the engineers make calls with the salespeople. The engineers call and qualify for the sales team. Give the engineers a script. The discomfort will give more context to the engineers of how hard their job can be.

2. Allow the team to submit product feature requests asynchronously.

How many times have you seen a salesperson go into the Product/Engineering Slack chat room and say “When or can we get X feature”? Then like a bunch of sharks, the engineers scrutinize the idea so much that the salesperson regrets saying something.

Set up a Feature Request Trello board or spreadsheet to allow anyone on the team to add cards or rows with product features. Instruct the team to include an example or quote from a customer requesting the feature.

People that want to request a feature can look at the existing requests and see if it’s already been requested before. People can add comments to existing requests to imply how much a certain feature is requested.

Then the Product team can set aside time to go through the requests and ask follow up questions.

3. Be aware of growing tension between the teams. Let each of them vent.

When things are good, you’ll be tricked into thinking that both teams are working smoothly. When features are delayed, sales is going poorly, or the product has downtime - the tension starts to bubble up until there’s a melting pot that blows up one day. Be aware of this, and attempt to diffuse the melting pot by communicating with each team lead by letting their teams vent out their frustrations.

4. On specific features or disagreements between teams: Hear both sides of the story and defend the side you agree with.

Both teams will be territorial and making decisions in the best interest of their own team. You can’t always be a neutral 3rd party. The sales team is sometimes right, but they may be feel alienated on a team full of technical people. If they have a point, defend them and attempt to make it a priority to remedy their frustration. The Product team needs cover from sales people bashing them internally and externally. Make it a point to communicate to sales on attempting to understand what’s so difficult about what Product is doing.

5. When each team suggests something, challenge them by asking the same question.

Steli recently shared how to achieve growth through alignment. In this context, any proactive sales and product team are going to push to do things. For sales, it could be offering a discount through a new promotion. For product, it could be spending time on fixing up some underlying backend infrastructure.

You should ask both of them the same question: How does this help us achieve our company’s #1 priority?

At our most recent company retreat, Steli opened the retreat by setting the priority for what we should be collectively thinking about during the retreat and for the next few months.

(Caption) Steli opens up our Santa Barbara team retreat with a simple question for the entire company.

He asked the team to always consider: “Will this make our current customers more successful OR bring us more successful customers? [ASAFP or “as soon as fucking possible”]

Since then, it’s common for him to chime in when a spirited debate opens up in chat or Asana:

As CEO, he’s the acting referee between sales and product always seeking alignment as a function of getting the two teams to work together successfully.

Look out for the warning signs

The interaction between sales and product isn’t always constant. Sales is busy selling, and product may be heads down working on features. Therefore, weeks could go by without you noticing any rift between salespeople and engineers.

It’s on you to poke the tiger and sniff out the warning signs, or at least work towards preventing a flare up. You should always be asking yourself these questions:

• Are the salespeople still communicating customer feedback you’ve already received?
• Is product actively asking sales for feedback on new features they are spec’ing out?
• When’s the last time I saw a salesperson and engineer have a positive interaction with one another?

This is not a situation where “no news is good news”. When either side is not talking to each other, that’s almost as bad as conflict. The less they communicate, the further they drift apart.

Always remember: In addition to resolving conflict, you’re also there to encourage healthy debate.

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