Rnordman

Poorly written collateral is costing you time. Time is money.

Today we catch up with Josh Bernoff, noted business writer, former Forrester Research analyst and author of the succinctly titled book Writing Without Bullshit: Boost Your Career by Saying What You Mean. I recently stumbled upon a piece Josh wrote for The Daily Beast, entitled Bad writing costs businesses billions. As you might imagine, the idea that quality of writing doesn’t just set businesses apart, but dramatically affects their bottom lines, piqued my interest.

“Quality of writing is how you distinguish yourself,” Josh says. “It’s how people communicate at work. Do it well and you’ll get ahead.”

In his article, Josh remarks on “emails from colleagues who fail to come to the point…”, “reports that don’t make clear what’s happening or what your management should do about it…” and “websites, marketing materials and press releases filled with jargon and meaningless superlatives”.

Your competitors are reaping the rewards of your oversights

Josh surveyed 547 business writers, and found eight out of 10 agreed that “poorly written material wastes a lot of my time.” Anecdotally obvious, perhaps, but he does the maths: workers are estimated to spend about 22% of their working day reading things, and it’s estimated that America spends 6% of its total wages on time wasted trying to decipher badly written content. That’s equivalent to nearly $400 billion a year.

If I were to make a UK market estimate, a back-of-a-napkin calculation makes that around £324 billion at the current exchange rate: if US GDP is roughly seven times that of the UK, then the cost of bad writing to the UK market is about £46 billion.

The cost of bad writing to the UK market is about £46 billion

A high price tag

These numbers all sound crazy high, but we can put them into context; it wasn’t an ice age ago that we reported Gallup’s estimate that the price of poor employee engagement in the US is somewhere between $450 and $500 billion, of which, of course, internal communications is major contributor.

“Businesses need to recognise that bad writing is a drain on productivity,” says Josh. “If you have nothing to say, say nothing. If you have something to say, say it as briefly as possible.”

However you look at it, bad standards of writing create an inefficiency with a high price tag. Apply the same logic to recruitment marketing fodder that advertises a job, but doesn’t sell the company enough, for example, and you could be talking about missing the very top candidates for a role. If your competitors are reaping the rewards of your oversights, it’s not hard to see there’s an issue there that will manifest on your bottom line.

If you have something to say, say it as briefly as possible

Get to the point

As any writer knows, when you’re too close to your own work it’s often hard to see the wood for the trees in terms of quality. So how do business leaders know if their company communications are perpetuating bad practice?

“There are telltale signs,” explains Josh. “You might often use twice as many words as you need, or you don’t get to the point quickly, or you tend to obscure your meaning with too many big words. The best thing to do is ask the people you work with: ‘Do you think the stuff I write is clear and succinct?’ Any answer other that a very quick ‘Yes’ means you have a problem.”

Admitting you have a problem is always the first step to a solution. Perhaps you seek the help of a comms agency or you choose to do things in-house.

You tend to obscure your meaning with too many big words

“Start corporate training, as you would with any other skill like running meetings or spreadsheet work,” says Josh. “It has to be a directive from the top, or it won’t spread very quickly.”

And like any skill to be developed, there should be processes in place to review the quality of written materials sent out.

Adapt-and-improve

Producing a piece of content doesn’t mean creating whatever you can and flinging it out into the virtual ocean to see what bites. Content strategy best practice always advocates an adapt-and-improve ethos to writing. What kind of messaging resonates with the intended audience? What actions do they take as a result? How can we refine that?

Interestingly, however, Josh finds that just under a third of the writers surveyed believe they have a robust system for reviewing their content. That’s leaving quite a lot of leeway for a deluge of throwaway, untargeted messages. If you want to get the best from your business writing, call on the specific skills of the reviewers at your disposal. Reviewers such as your partner agency.

“Some reviewers are better at helping you organise your content, others are better with words, others may have technical expertise,” says Josh. “The key is to tell each reviewer what you want from them, and get all the reviews back in time to address them in your writing.”

To maximise the value of your writing and ensure there’s no throwaway, particularly with marketing material, businesses need writers to hand that have the creative nous to produce something original and engaging, and the analytical nous to ensure that each piece of content works its hardest to reach the right eyes. The mantra from the Content Marketing Institute is to produce the minimum amount of content for the maximum amount of behaviour change. As a writer, that’s your sweet spot. People trained in journalism and reporting tend to be very good at this.

The minimum amount of content for the maximum amount of behaviour change

We’ve discussed the convergence of journalism and content marketing before and I think Josh’s findings uphold that business need. Indeed, I’ve said myself that journalists naturally make good copywriters, which is to some extent why many journalists like me have found themselves in this game. We’re trained fact-checkers, we have honed the art of turning the complex into the simple, and the mundane into the exciting.

“[Journalists] are succinct and direct, so I think they have the right instincts,” says Josh.

But we don’t even have to look to the journalists that turned their efforts to marketing for inspiration. There are of course many people, perhaps unsurprisingly dominating the business world, that are getting their writing right.

“Two people who express themselves very clearly are Tim Cook of Apple and Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway,” remarks Josh. “Elon Musk is good, too.”

Businesses need writers to hand that have the creative nous

And the notably bad?

“Well, I’m announcing the Bullshitty Awards winners on February 16 at 14:00 Eastern Time (19:00 GMT),” he continues. “People can hear about the worst offenders then. There are plenty of contenders.”

The reason so many good correspondents turn their efforts towards the agency world is because there is value they can add, and quite substantial value when you can actually put a figure on it. There’s an unmet need inherent in sub-standard business writing; it might be time to admit this to yourself and find better writers. Otherwise you’ll have a lot of Dear Johns that are costing you dear.

• Geologists have determined there's a new continent called "Zealandia."
• Recent satellite data and rock samples are behind the conclusion.
• New Zealand and New Caledonia are part of the new continent, which is about as big as greater India.
• The new continent could have economic and geopolitical implications.

Kids are frequently taught that seven continents exist: Africa, Asia, Antarctica, Australia, Europe, North America, and South America.

Geologists, who look at the rocks (and tend to ignore the humans), group Europe and Asia into its own supercontinent — Eurasia — making for a total of six geologic continents.

But according to a new study of Earth's crust, there's a seventh geologic continent called "Zealandia," and it has been hiding under our figurative noses for millennia.

The 11 researchers behind the study argue that New Zealand and New Caledonia aren't merely an island chain. Instead, they're both part of a single, 4.9-million-square kilometer (1.89 million-square-mile) slab of continental crust that's distinct from Australia.

"This is not a sudden discovery but a gradual realization; as recently as 10 years ago we would not have had the accumulated data or confidence in interpretation to write this paper," they wrote in GSA Today, a Geological Society of America journal.

Ten of the researchers work for institutions within the new continent; one works for a university in Australia. But other geologists are almost certain to accept the team's continent-size conclusions, says Bruce Luyendyk, a geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara who wasn't involved in the study.

"These people here are A-list earth scientists," Luyendyk tells Business Insider. "I think they've put together a solid collection of evidence that's really thorough. I don't see that there's going to be a lot of pushback, except maybe around the edges."

Why Zealandia is almost certainly a new continent

The concept of Zealandia isn't new. In fact, Luyendyk coined the word in 1995.

But Luyendyk says it was never intended to be a new continent. Rather, the name was used to describe New Zealand, New Caledonia, and a collection of submerged pieces and slices of crust that broke off a region of Gondwana, a 200 million-year-old supercontinent.

"The reason I came up with this term is out of convenience," Luyendyk says. "They're pieces of the same thing when you look at Gondwana. So I thought, 'why do you keep naming this collection of pieces as different things?'"

Researchers behind the new study took Luyendyk's idea a huge step further: They took decades' worth of new evidence and examined it using four criteria that geologists use to deem a slab of rock a continent:

1. Land that pokes up relatively high from the ocean floor
2. A diversity of three types of rocks: igneous (spewed by volcanoes), metamorphic (altered by heat/pressure), and sedimentary (made by erosion)
3. A thicker, less-dense section of crust compared to surrounding ocean floor
4. "Well-defined limits around a large enough area to be considered a continent rather than a microcontinent or continental fragment"

Geologists had already determined that New Zealand and New Caledonia fit the bill for items 1, 2, and 3. After all, they're large islands that poke up from the sea floor, are geologically diverse, and are made of thicker, less-dense crust.

This eventually led to Luyendyk's coining of Zealandia, and the description of the region as "continental," since it was considered a collection of microcontinents, or bits and pieces of former continents.

The authors say the last item on the list — a question of "is it big enough and unified enough to be its own thing?" — is one that other researchers skipped over in the past, though by no fault of their own. At a glance, Zealandia seemed broken-up.

However, the new study used recent and detailed satellite-based elevation and gravity maps of the ancient seafloor to show that Zealandia is indeed part of one unified region. The data also suggests Zealandia spans "approximately the area of greater India," or larger than Madagascar, New Guinea, Greenland, or other pieces of crust.

"If the elevation of Earth's solid surface had first been mapped in the same way as those of Mars and Venus (which lack [...] opaque liquid oceans)," they wrote, "we contend that Zealandia would, much earlier, have been investigated and identified as one of Earth's continents."

The geologic devils in the details

The authors point out that while India is big enough to be a continent, and probably used to be, it's now part of Eurasia because it collided and stuck to that continent millions of years ago.

Zealandia, meanwhile, has not yet smashed into Australia; a piece of seafloor called the Cato Trough still separates the two continents by 25 kilometers (15.5 miles).

One thing that makes the case for Zealandia tricky is its division into northern and southern segments by two tectonic plates: the Australian Plate and the Pacific Plate.

This split makes the region seem more like a bunch of continental fragments than a unified slab.

But the researchers point out that Arabia, India, and parts of Central America have similar divisions, yet are still considered parts of larger continents.

"I'm from California, and it has a plate boundary going through it," Luyendyk says. "In millions of years, the western part will be up near Alaska. Does that make it not part of North America? No."

What's more, the researchers wrote, rock samples suggest Zealandia is made of the same continental crust that used to be part of Gondwana, and that it migrated in ways similar to the continents Antarctica and Australia.

The samples and satellite data also show Zealandia is not broken up as a collection of microcontinents, but a unified slab.

Instead, plate tectonics has thinned, stretched, and submerged Zealandia over of millions of years. Today, only about 5% of it is visible as the islands of New Zealand and New Caledonia — which is part of the reason it took so long to discover.

"The scientific value of classifying Zealandia as a continent is much more than just an extra name on a list," the scientists wrote. "That a continent can be so submerged yet unfragmented makes it a useful and thought-provoking geodynamic end member in exploring the cohesion and breakup of continental crust."

Luyendyk believes the distinction won't likely end up as a scientific curiosity, however, and speculated that it may eventually have larger consequences.

"The economic implications are clear and come into play: What's part of New Zealand and what's not part of New Zealand?" he says.

Indeed, United Nations agreements make specific mentions of continental shelves as boundaries that determine where resources can be extracted — and New Zealand may have tens of billions of dollars' worth of fossil fuels and minerals lurking off its shores.

SEE ALSO: A geologist has found part of a lost ocean that existed long before the Atlantic

DON'T MISS: We may be overlooking a critical factor in our quest to find alien life

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: NASA just dashed our dreams of ever moving to this Earth-sized exoplanet

Drop the Ball: Achieving More by Doing Less by Tiffany Dufu, Flatiron Books, 304 pages, $28.99, Hardcover, February 2016, ISBN 9781250071736

Tiffany Dufu is a superstar. Currently Chief Leadership Officer at Levo, and former president of the White House Project, she was also named to Fast Company’s League of Extraordinary Women, and served as a launch team member for Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In organization. She is married with two children. She is an engaging and highly sought-after speaker. In every photograph, her Michelle Obama-esque biceps indicate the gym is not an infrequent part of her routine. She is the kind of person you read about, listen to, and mutter to yourself, “How does she do it all?” The secret is in her new book: She doesn’t.  

Drop the Ball: Achieving More By Doing Less lets the rest of us in on the strategy Dufu and her husband have very deliberately crafted to split the never-ending to-do list of life. Spoiler alert: there’s just a lot of stuff they agreed wouldn’t get done. They learned to drop the ball, and be very okay with that.

The book takes the reader through Dufu’s personal history, to demonstrate how she internalized the messages that inundate most of us women from an early age: we are responsible for the majority of the tasks at home, that these tasks must be done a certain way, and that any neglect of these rules is a poor reflection on our essential character. It is a familiar narrative for many women. Dufu describes how her upbringing in the church modeled for her gendered expectations at community gatherings:

I remember these feasts of my childhood with great affection, but I also remember the gendered division of labor; in our church, women were the caregivers who cooked for, set up for, and served the men. Even as a little girl, it was clear to me that while women were central to making the church community function, their role was to serve.

This internalization of gender norms by both sexes only grew more pronounced during her increased participation in high school, when she encountered her first struggles as a female CEO-to-be:

But even with the freedom leadership afforded me at school, just like in church, being a girl leader meant being a worker bee. The boys were great at brainstorming homecoming themes, but the girls largely managed the logistics and details.

Any woman who has been the only person in a work meeting prepared with a pen and notebook knows the feeling of being the defacto notetaker, project manager, and mental holder of all the details. The executor of another’s vision.

Years of household-based resentments in a two-career marriage can built up without discussion, until one day Dufu found herself yelling at her husband in front of their child’s caregiver. For a woman who lived through much heated arguments before her parents divorced, she had always prided herself on not being a yeller. In creating a different tone for her home. It became a turning point in her quest to live up to the perfect home standards imprinted on her at a young age. Knowing she needed to find a new way to approaching her frustration, she reached out to trusted members of her network for some honest advice. She heard from them in unison: Slow down and prioritize. Get clear about what matters most to you, and the rest will fall into place. 

With this in mind, she made time in her overflowing schedule to dedicate to that task. Stephen Covey's exercise of visualizing your own eulogy helped her clarify her life’s end point (“She was a true champion for women and girls.”), and another exercise to understand her “Reflected Best Self” helped her elicit insight from those who knew her best. Combining these two led her a crystal-clear set of priorities: loving Kojo (her husband), raising conscious global citizens, and advancing women and girls.

Armed with that clarity, she looked anew at all of the things on her to-do list. Which items fulfilled her “highest and best use” and aligned with those priorities? Some of them did, some of them didn’t. So what happens to those that didn’t? Does her husband do them? No one? The couple approached this by creating a master spreadsheet of tasks that needed to be done to keep the household functioning. Negotiating ownership of each one row by row led to many illuminating discussions about the work that we do that is hidden from those around us. The end result was clarity of ownership. And a lot of intentionally dropped balls; things they both agreed together that they were okay with not being a part of their daily concerns. No one can get mad at the other for something not being done, if you both agree you don’t care if it gets done. Communication is magic.

Dufu follows this up with chapters that outline the mentality of “delegating with joy” and creating an “all-in partnership”, along with advice for how to do all this in a way that builds mutual trust and accountability. The goal of this is for both partners to have the same time and ability to achieve their goals, and pursue their dreams. It is how we will have more women in more positions of leadership.

The upshot is that men who do laundry free women up to advance their leadership. Women who are freed from managing it all at home have more mental space to be strategic in their careers. They are healthier and have more stamina. They have more flexibility to travel and put in the hours required to achieve their next career milestones.

In addition to detailing the process her household went through to achieve their “all-in partnership” and chapters of trouble-shooting help, one of the undercurrents of the book (and indeed Dufu’s entire life work) is the value of a strong social network. Finding herself with two small children in New York and a husband who worked full time in Dubai meant she had to get creative about who helped her and how. Most of us are either too proud to ask for help or too stubborn to accept it. So it was doubly moving to read about her close friend who moved in for a year to help take up the slack. This generous and creative solution worked for both of them, and was only realized because Dufu had done the work (clarifying priorities, nurturing networks) to make it a reality. From older (“sage”) mentors and sponsors to peer mentors and mentees, her method of deliberately building and cultivating that network allowed her family to sustain a period of intense logistical hurdles.

We here at 800-CEO-READ talk a lot about gender issues within the business book genre, and advocate for an expanding of voices therein. One of the editorial goals we have set for ourselves is to not assume a male readership for our reviews or the books we judge in our awards process. While Drop the Ball is written most decidedly for a female audience, the book’s main message has value for all, regardless of gender, partnership, or parental status.

We talk about the demands on our time as if they are imposed on us and we have no choice [...] Every day, we let others dictate our experience. In small, subtle ways we give our time and our power over to others, when our time is the one thing we should protect and control.

If we all did the work to clarify what matters most to us, leveraged our highest and best use to achieve those goals, clearly negotiated task ownership, and regularly expressed gratitude to those around us, all of our relationships—at home or in the office—would be infinitely more sane.

FACT: The majority of digital experience projects fail

You read that right. A recent survey by Forrester Consulting reveals that more than 60 percent of all digital experience transformations do not succeed. An even more dire stat by Consultancy.UK pegs the shocking failure rate at two thirds.

ITToday published a meaty list of Early Warning Signs of IT Project Failure. Of 53 finger-pointing items, each with their own weighted score, lack of vendor due diligence ranked #22 – scoring 5.91 out of a possible 7 as most important.

“The common thread connecting these failures is lack of due diligence.”
Project Expert: Lack of Due Diligence Can Doom Project Implementation

Interestingly, due diligence isn’t an item you see included in the how-to lists for project success – it’s just assumed. But when not done to satisfaction, it becomes the scapegoat for all that went wrong.

Plenty of advice has been dispensed on how to set yourself up for digital transformation success. Among the collective wisdom are these common points:

• Lack of executive support
• Draw a complete technology blueprint
• Deliver comprehensive project requirements
• Align communication between IT and business teams
• Set and manage expectations
• Assign accountability
• Have an adoption plan
• Recognize risks

Due diligence on a simple digital upgrade

An increasingly common digital improvement project is the addition of e-signatures to business processes. It’s an easy way to up your user experience game – and save company time and money by avoiding the paper chase for physical signatures. But how do you prevent falling into the camp of failed digital projects?

Analysts at CEB Tower Group™ tout the benefits of e-signatures and instruct how to approach this IT project for successful outcome in Why Most E-signature Initiatives Fail Before They Start.
(Hint: Aiming for cost-savings alone is a mistake.)

Incorporate these two aspects in your due diligence:

1. Focus on elevating the customer experience

The main driver for the project should be enabling digital customers. Reducing hassles and meeting customers on their terms with convenient mobile options, improves the customer experience overall. E-signature technology also supports the case for streamlining internal processes, making it faster to close business, complete authorizations and service customers.

2. Start small, then scale

Implementing this digital technology in discrete processes is the best way to begin. Non-customer-facing operations that are not mission-critical are fertile proving ground for the many benefits of e-sign technology: reduce errors, increase efficiency, eliminate redundancy, and of course, cut costs. Early success drives adoption in other lines of business across the enterprise, as the platform expands to support your growing operations.

Want to be among the success stories?

Have a plan for the rollout for your first 100 days, recommends CMO.com.
It’s part of the necessary due diligence that demands questions like:

• How will the project be rolled out?
• When and who will be trained?
• How will success be measured?

Beyond technical requirements, it’s critical to anticipate other factors in your due diligence – and here’s where vendors may vary greatly. Consider these important benchmarks:

Customer service
A vendor must be responsive to your need for assistance or you will be endlessly frustrated. Your service provider should have a vested interest in the success of your implementation and convey that in concrete ways when you reach out. Check unbiased user reviews to see how vendors stack up.

Pricing
Is there a more unpleasant surprise than discovering that key product features you saw in the demo aren’t included in your price? “Gotcha” pricing, overbilling, and in particular, price gouging at contract renewal time are sure signs you should be looking hard at alternate vendors.

Functionality
If your business use case varies (even slightly) from the out-of-the box offering, make sure your vendor can provide the tools to get the job done (at a price you can afford). Maintaining your brand value may be another key factor in your decision; so be sure your customers have your brand experience – not your vendor’s. And what about growth? Will your chosen solution be able to scale and grow with you as your business grows?

Yes, there is uncertainty when implementing new digital tools. But career-limiting project failure can be avoided by doing thorough due diligence. Compare multiple vendors. Ask the hard questions. Make stakeholders accountable.

The act of installing software does not a digital transformation make!
A calculated vendor decision based on careful due diligence, deep user adoption, and finally realizing benefits across your organization are what create real business change.

An alternate version of this blog was originally published here

The idea of the customer experience is always evolving. There have been countless technological advances over the course of human history that have changed the way businesses interact with and serve their customers. Whether it’s the creation of the telegraph, the invention of the switchboard or the rise of the Internet, new technologies have shaped not only the way consumers interact with companies, but their expectations of those interactions.

For a long time, the idea of a personal relationship with the customer was the Holy Grail, and to an extent that’s still the case. But recently, the idea of convenience has crept into the discussion. The convenience and user experience delivered by smart, customer-focused consumer technology companies have given rise to greater expectations for convenience and personalization from traditional businesses.

The most recent technological development changing the customer experience is the dawn of the Big Data era in conjunction with advancements in mobile, personalization and real-time analytics and artificial intelligence. These changes and the digital transformations they enable are helping companies catch up and finally deliver on that powerful combination of personal touch, convenience and added value.

Never before have companies had the access and ability to analyze and draw insights from the massive amounts of data generated by their relationships with consumers. Put simply, it’s time to embrace the future of customer engagement. To be successful in today’s data-driven world, organizations need a customer-centric approach in order to build their business around the needs, preferences and intents of customers on an ongoing basis. But what actions can organizations take to achieve this customer-centric approach, and to ensure that the interactions they do have are smart and informed?

So many organizations have collected massive amounts of data related to their customers, and most of those organizations can glean meaningful insights from that data. But where we often see a huge disconnect is in the ability to create impactful experiences for the customer in the form of recommendations. It’s that gap between insight and impact that’s preventing organizations from nurturing and improving customer relationships. Data is only as valuable as the insights you can glean from it, and that insight is only as valuable as the benefits you apply on behalf of your customers. Ultimately, the ability to collect data and infer insights is meaningless without the ability to translate it into meaningful actions.

In order to leverage data to create a customer interactions that exceed customer expectations, there are several steps that organizations must take, including:

• Clearly Define Your Business Objectives: Before you can make your data work for you, you need to fully understand exactly what it is you want it to do. You’d be shocked how often very smart people are unable to clearly articulate the business objectives behind customer-related projects, even if it’s as simple as “win new customers” or “increase customer lifetime value.” Understanding what you want to accomplish before you start is critical.

• Incorporate ALL Data About Your Customer: Bringing together disparate data sources is an enormous challenge for organizations, it is perhaps the most essential element to develop an accurate and comprehensive understanding of your customers’ preferences and needs now and into the future. It is also necessary in order to connect the dots from all of the touchpoints between you and your customer to ensure that your interactions are relevant.
• Close the Gap between Data and Action: Now that you’ve got the right data and you know what you want to accomplish, the next step is to operationalize. Forrester calls this step the “Insights to Action gap” and the way to bridge that gap is to connect data to actions. That means actionable, proactive, prescriptive recommendations generated from your data being used to ensure the customer experience meets their needs.

These brief steps only scratch the surface of what is needed to translate data into actionable intelligence and create truly smart customer interactions. For more information, I highly recommend a recent Webinar between NGDATA and Forrester, which you can find here.

Whatever your experience has been – for better or worse – the matrix has become a necessary organizational structure in today’s business environment. Companies that have multiple product lines, conduct business in different countries, and serve a variety of customers through several channels know that the matrix structure is here to stay.

In a matrix organization—where people rely on getting work done through others over whom they have no direct authority—maintaining high levels of cooperation and coordination can be a challenge. The findings of OnPoint’s Execution Gap study helps clarify the extent to which organizations struggle with this:

• 40% of managers surveyed do not believe that people cooperate across functions and departments to achieve their organization’s strategic objectives.
• 44% of managers surveyed do not believe that people in different divisions readily share information, ideas, and best practices.

What can leaders do to encourage and sustain cooperation?

Working effectively in a matrix requires trust, cooperation, and coordination built upon a foundation of shared goals, clear roles and decision authority, and transparent and timely communication. While these behaviors provide a foundation to encourage collaboration, they won’t eliminate disagreements about what, when, and how to do things. In order to sustain cooperation and collaboration in a global matrix structure, leaders must gain others’ support for their ideas and constructively resolve differences across organizational boundaries. Therefore, it is essential for today’s leaders to hone their influence skills.

The key to influencing in a matrix is to build the foundation for the effective use of the influence tactics well in advance. If you wait until the moment when you need to change the perspective, behavior or attitude of your matrix partners, it’s too late. The most effective leaders use the following behaviors in all their daily interactions.

1. Demonstrate Credibility

Being seen as someone who “knows what they’re talking about” is an important determinant of whether people give your ideas and proposals appropriate consideration.

Quick Tip: Don’t exaggerate and admit when you don’t know something. It may seem counterintuitive but admitting when you don’t know something increases the likelihood people will take what you say seriously when you do express an opinion or preference

2. Identify Shared Goals or Common Ground

Even a well thought out proposal will not result in a change in the other person’s behavior or attitude if goals are not aligned. Despite the potential power of an argument and the strength of supporting data, if leaders are focused on an outcome that the other person is not interested in, they will not be successful. Rather than repeating their position more forcefully when they realize their rational argument is not having the intended effect, they take a moment to ensure goals are aligned.

Quick Tip: Meet with matrix partners to complete a Goal Alignment Grid which clarifies goals that are shared by the matrix partners and provides an opportunity to discuss how matrix partners can help each other achieve their work unit’s goals.

3. Build Positive Work Relationships

Positive work relationships and trust are a prerequisite for the effective use of the influence tactics of inspiration and consultation. Trust and relationships take time to establish and must be in place if you want to increase your style flexibility and decrease your dependence on rational arguments.

Quick Tip: Demonstrate reliability by consistently meeting your commitments and keeping your promises. One way to do this is to commit to more manageable, but more frequent, milestones rather than to a single final deliverable that is often more challenging and the outcome of which more difficult to manage and predict.

4. Get to Know the Needs and Values of Others

The key to effective influence is to see the issue from the other person’s point of view rather than your own. Using facts and focusing on values and benefits you think are desirable, or that would generally be attractive, is not as effective as clarifying the specific benefits complying with your proposal would have for the other person or how your proposal is consistent with the specific values and beliefs that are important to them.

Quick Tip: Make time for “small talk” with matrix partners. For example, during a call, build in time to discuss non-work topics before moving to the formal agenda.

5. Clarify What Resources You Control that Others Need

One core tactic for gaining the support of others is providing resources or help that would make it less difficult for the other person to comply with the request or proposal. To do this well, you need to know what resources you control and what they need.

Quick Tip: Learn about your matrix partner’s business and their customer’s business. The more you understand the issues and challenges they face, the easier it will be to identify the resources you have that your matrix partners would value.

Organizations are complex structures with many interdependencies. We rely on others to help achieve results, and that means cooperation and collaboration are often the key to our success. Ensuring the conditions that create and sustain cooperation and collaboration are in place is even more challenging in a matrix structure. Leaders who are able to effectively use influence to gain the support of their matrix partners will have much greater success in creating a culture of cooperation and achieving their business objectives in today’s matrix organizations.

This interactive guide outlines the fundamentals of effective influencing behaviors, when to use them and how influence varies across cultures and gender. It’s based on our own research and research from others in this area. Take the first step toward empowering your leaders by exploring the guide and sharing it with your teams.

From simple message segmentation to programmatic ad buying and individual-level website customization, the combination of big data and technology is transforming the possibilities of personalization.

But the rise of personalization tools and popularity has also meant the rise of marketers doing personalization the wrong way. I’ve lost track of the number of times we’ve seen:

• Ad hoc implementation of off-the-shelf features without understanding what need they’re solving.
• Poor personalization insights with little data analysis and framework thinking driving the implementation.
• Lack of rigorous process to hypothesize, test, and validate the personalization ideas.
• Lack of resources to sustain the many additional marketing messages that must be created to support many personalized target segments.

That’s why, in collaboration with our partners at Optimizely, we have created a roadmap for creating the most effective personalization strategy:

• Step 1: Defining personalization
• Step 2: Is a personalization strategy right for you?
• Step 3: Personalization ideation
• Step 4: Personalization prioritization

Step 1: Defining personalization

Personalization and segmentation are often used interchangeably, and are arguably similar. Both use information gathered about the marketing prospect to customize their experience.

While segmentation attempts to bucket prospects into similar aggregate groups, personalization represents the ultimate goal of customizing the person’s experience to their individual needs and desires based on in-depth information and insights about them.

You can think of them as points along a spectrum of customized messaging. You’ve got the old mass marketing approach on one end, and the hyper-personalized, 1:1, marketer-to-customer nirvana on the other end. Segmentation lies somewhere in the middle. We’ve been doing it for decades, but now we have the technology to go deeper, to be more granular.

Source: Widerfunnel

Every marketer wants to provide the perfect message for each customer — that’s the ultimate goal of personalization.

Step 2: Is a personalization strategy right for me?

Here are 3 questions that will help you determine your personalization maturity and eligibility.

Do I have enough data about my customers?

For companies getting started with personalization, we recommend that you at least have fundamental audience segments in place. These might be larger cohorts at first, focused on visitor location, visitor device use, single visitor behaviors, or visitors coming from an ad campaign.

If you haven’t categorized your most important visitor segments, you should focus your energies on segmentation first, before moving into personalization.

Do I have the resources to do personalization effectively?

• Do you have a team in place that can manage a personalization strategy?
• Do you have a personalization tool that supports your strategy?
• Do you have an A/B testing team that can validate your personalization approach?
• Do you have resources to maintain updates to the segments that will multiply as you increase your message granularity?

Personalization requires dedicated resources and effort to sustain all of your segments and personalized variations. To create a truly effective personalization strategy, you will need to proceduralize personalization as its own workstream and implement an ongoing process.

Do I have a process for validating my personalization ideas?

Personalization is a hypothesis until it is tested. Your assumptions about your best audience segments, and the best messaging for those segments, are assumptions until they have been validated.

“Personalization requires the same inputs and workflow as testing; sound technical implementation, research-driven ideation, a clear methodology for translating concepts into test hypotheses, and tight technical execution. In this sense, personalization is really just an extension of A/B testing and normal optimization activities. What’s more, successful personalization campaigns are the result of testing and iteration.” – Hudson Arnold, Strategy Consultant, Optimizely

Great personalization strategy is about having a rigorous process that allows for 1) gathering insights about your customers, and then 2) validating those insights. You need a structured process to understand which insights are valid for your target audience and create growth for your business.

Source: Widerfunnel

There are two critical phases to an effective personalization strategy: Explore and Validate. Explore uses an expansive mindset to consider all of your data, and all of your potential personalization ideas. Validate is a structured process of A/B testing that uses a reductive mindset to refine and select only those ideas that produce value.

Without a process in place to prove your personalization hypotheses, you will end up wasting time and resources sending the wrong messages to the wrong audience segments.

Personalization without validation is simply guesswork.

Step 3: Personalization ideation

If you’ve answered “Yes” to those three questions, you’re ready to carry out personalization; you are confident in your audience segments, you have dedicated resources, perhaps you’re already doing basic personalization. Now, it’s time to build your personalization strategy by gathering insights from your data.

One of the questions we hear most often when it comes to personalization is, “How do I get ideas for customized messaging that will work?” This is the biggest area of ongoing work and your biggest opportunity for business improvement from personalization.

The quality of your insights about your customers directly impacts the quality of your personalization results.

Here are the three types of personalization insights to explore:

1. Deductive research
2. Inductive research
3. Customer self-selected

1) Deductive research and personalization insights

Are there general theories that apply to your particular business situation?

Psychological principles? UX principles? General patterns in your data? ‘Best’ practices?

Deductive personalization starts with your assumptions about how your customers will respond to certain messaging based on existing theories...but it doesn’t end there. With deductive research, you should always feed your ideas into experiments that either validate or disprove your personalization approach.

2) Inductive research and personalization insights

Are there segments within your data and test results that you can analyze to gather personalization insights?

If you are already optimizing your site, you may have seen segments naturally emerge through A/B testing. A focused intention to find these insights is called inductive research.

Inductive personalization is driven by insights from your existing A/B test data. As you test, you discover insights that point you toward generalizable personalization hypotheses.

Here’s an example from one of WiderFunnel’s e-commerce clients that manufactures and sells weather technology products. This company’s original product page was very cluttered, and we decided to test it against a variation that emphasized visual clarity.

Source: Widerfunnel

Surprisingly, the clear variation lost to the original, decreasing order completions by -6.8%. WiderFunnel Strategists were initially perplexed by the result, but they didn’t rest until they’d uncovered a potential insight in the data.

Research published by the NN Group describes teen-targeted websites, suggesting that younger users enjoy searching and are impatient, while older users enjoy searching but are also much more patient when browsing.

With this research in mind, the Strategists dug in further and found that the clear variation actually won for older users to this client’s site, increasing transactions by +24%. But it lost among younger users, decreasing transactions by -38%.

So, what’s the takeaway? For this client, there are potentially new ways of customizing the shopping experience for different age segments, such as:

1. Reducing distractions and adding clarity for older visitors
2. Providing multiple products in multiple tabs for younger visitors

This client can use these insights to inform their age-group segmentation efforts across their site.

3) Customer self-selected personalization

Ask your prospects to tell you about themselves. Then, test the best marketing approach for each segment.

Customer self-selected personalization is potentially the easiest strategy to conceptualize and implement. With self-selected personalization, you’re asking your users to self-identify, segmenting themselves, which triggers specific messaging based on how they self-identified. And then you can test the best approach for each of those segments.

Here’s an example to help you visualize what I mean. One of our clients is a Fortune 500 healthcare company — they use self-selected personalization to drive more relevant content and offers, in order to grow their community of subscribers.

First, this client created segments, focused on this particular health situation, that people could click on: “Click on this button to get more information,” “I have early stage disease,” “I have late stage disease,” “I manage the disease while I’m working,” “I’m a physician treating the disease,” and, “I work at a hospital treating the disease.”

These segments came from personas that this client had developed about their subscriber base.

Once a user self-identified, the offers and messaging that were featured on the page were adjusted accordingly. But, we wouldn’t want to assume the personalized messages were the best for each segment.

In self-selected personalization, there are two major areas test. You want to find out:

1. What are the best segments?
2. What is the best messaging for each segment?

Developing an audience strategy

Developing a personalization strategy requires an audience-centric approach. The companies that are succeeding at personalization are not picking segments ad hoc from Google Analytics or any given study, but are looking to their business fundamentals.

Once you believe you’ve identified the most important segments for your business, then you can begin to layer on more tactical segments. These might be qualified ‘personas’ that inform your content strategy, UX design, or analytical segments.

Step 4: Personalization prioritization

If this whole thing is starting to feel a little complex, don’t worry. It is complex, but that’s why we prioritize. Even with a high-functioning team and an advanced tool, it is impossible to personalize for all of your audience segments simultaneously. So, where do you start?

Optimizely uses a simple axis to conceptualize how to prioritize personalization hypotheses. You can use it to determine the quantity and the quality of the audiences you’d like to target.

The x-axis refers to the size of your audience segment, while the y-axis refers to an obvious need to personalize to a group vs. the need for creative personalization.

For instance, the gray bubble in the upper left hand quadrant of the chart refers to a company’s past purchasers. Many clients want to start personalizing here, saying, “We want to talk to people who have spent $500 on leather jackets in the last three months. We know exactly what we wanna show to them.”

But, while you may have a solid merchandising strategy or offer for that specific group, it’s a really, really, really small audience. That’s not to say you shouldn’t target because there is an obvious need, but it needs to be weighed against how large that group is. Because you should be treating personalization like an experiment, you need to be sensitive to statistical significance.

The net impact of any personalization effort you use will only be as significant as the size of the segment, right? If you improve the conversion rate 1000% for 10 people, that is going to have a relatively small impact to your business.

But, if you move right on the x-axis, you’ll be working with a larger segment, even if the personalized messaging is less obvious (and might require more experimentation). Most companies we speak to don’t have a coherent geographical personalization strategy, but it’s a large way of grouping people and, therefore, may be worth exploring!

You may be more familiar with WiderFunnel’s PIE framework, which we use to prioritize our ideas. How does this axis relate? Optimizely’s axis is a simplified way to think about personalization ideas to help you ideate quickly. It’s two inputs, Obvious Need and Audience Size are essentially two inputs we would use to calculate a thorough PIE ranking of ideas.

The Obvious Need axis would influence the Potential ranking and the Audience Size would influence Importance. Thinking about the third PIE factor, Ease, may help if some segmentation data is more difficult to track or otherwise acquire, or if the maintenance cost of ongoing messaging is high.

Conclusion

To create the most effective personalization strategy for your business, you must remember what you already know. For some reason, when companies start personalization, the lessons they have learned about testing all of their assumptions are sometimes forgotten.

You probably have some great personalization ideas, but it is going to take iteration and experimentation to get them right.

A final note on personalization: Always think of it in the context of the bigger picture of marketing optimization.

Insights gained from A/B testing inform future audience segments and personalized messaging, while insights derived from personalization experimentation informs future A/B testing hypotheses. And on and on.

Don’t assume that insights gained during personalization testing are only valid for those segments. These wins may be overall wins.

The best practice when it comes to personalization is to take the insights you validate within your tests and use them to inform your hypotheses in your general optimization strategy.

Account Based Everything has been the rage of the past couple of years. The principles of ABE are outstanding–focused on further tailoring and personalization of our marketing and sales approaches to the specific needs and priorities of the customer–both the enterprise and individual (actually these are great principles for any customer outreach).

Inevitably, we start putting these accounts into our account programs: Major Accounts, Key Accounts, Strategic Accounts, Corporate Accounts, Global Strategic Accounts, Super Duper Really Humongous Very Special Accounts (OK, I invented that one).

We do these things because the customer is important to us. We want to retain the revenue we have, we want to grow the revenue, we want to build a long-term “partnership” with the customer.

We build special programs to treat these customers specially. We share these programs with our customer, “We’ve made you a part of our Super Duper Really Humongous Very Special Account Program! We will be treating you specially, as part of this program, so you can buy more stuff from us.”

Having been on the customer side when presented this special privilege (sometimes, there’s a special coffee cup or some other thing involved), my immediate reaction has usually fallen into one of two categories:

“Oh, so that means you will be giving us a bigger discount! Tell me how much it is, is it retroactive?”

or more frequently, “So what, I’m not sure I care…….”

The problem with many of our ABE strategies is we do these special things because the customer is very important to us. However, we fail to look at it from the customer point of view, “How important are we to them?”

I was speaking about this recently to an EVP of Sales for a very large company. He laughed, telling me of a “vendor executive” coming in to explain the importance of their special ABE program. He told the vendor, “Thank you, but it doesn’t mean much to us. You are actually our third source for these products and get less than 10% of our spend in this area. Our primary vendor gets 70% of our spend and we invest a lot of time in that partnership.” As you might expect, the vendor executive was dumbfounded, he didn’t even have the quick wits to ask how he might get more share of the business and become more important.

What would happen if we turned our ABE strategies on their heads? What if instead of focusing on how important the customer is to us, we started asking ourselves the questions, “How important are we to the customer? How can we become more important to the customer?”

Customers don’t tend to care about how much they spend on us or even how much more they could spend on us, or even our share/potential share of the account. They care about the value we create for them.

So what would happen, if we started focusing our ABE programs on those customers where we can create distinctive value that is very important to them?

Some obvious questions arise:

Doesn’t this favor very large companies? Perhaps large companies have a greater portion of a customer’s spending because of the breadth of their product lines, the resources they can deploy, the sheer magnitude of what a customer might be spending on the large company. But if we focus on the value we create, we might be able to command attention far greater than the size of our company might indicate.

For example, recently, I was working with a small-medium client. They had competitors several 10 times their size, but were focused on expanding their relationship with an industry giant (My client was about $100M, their customer was about $75B, their competitors were $500-2B. But they identified opportunities that would drive several hundred million in growth for the company. They had identified things the company could do, opportunities they were missing. The CEO and I were invited into the office of the customer’s CFO. He was intensely interested in the opportunity we had identified and how they could realize the opportunity. The CFO wondered, out loud, why their larger suppliers had never approached them with the idea, even though they were spending far more money on those suppliers. At the end of our meeting, the CFO asked my client, “Would you be willing to be our strategic partner in this initiative?”

Through deep understanding of the industry, markets, and their customer, this small company had identified opportunities that were extremely important to the top executives of their customer–more importantly, their larger competitors hadn’t done this. My client became very important to the customer, creating a relationship that would drive revenue far beyond their expectations.

Perhaps you can’t do something that impactful (I tend to think too many organizations sell themselves short). Perhaps you can’t be important to the SuperDuper Really Humongous enterprise. Perhaps, instead, you can become very important to a function, a group of people, or set of divisions within the enterprise. Perhaps we understand them so deeply and we create such value to them, that we become critical or strategic do them. We become so important they choose to become one of our key accounts.

You’re probably starting to get the point. Perhaps, we have ABE backwards.

Perhaps rather than choosing accounts based on how important they are to us, perhaps we get accounts to choose us because of how important we are to them.

What would happen to our relationships if we focused on that, instead?

From the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

advertisement – ad·ver·tise·ment (noun) – a public notice; especially : one published in the press or broadcast over the air

Before the internet, media was scarce; people had few options and media outlets had the power to push advertisements onto viewers. Today, media is ubiquitous and choices are abundant – it’s actually attention which has become scarce – so advertisers are having a harder time pushing ads in front of consumers. Better personalization and targeting are helping, but in particular with younger users, the push model of advertising faces an uphill battle when it comes to driving conversions and conveying a brand message.

Some statistics illustrate where we’re headed:

• 32% of internet users will use an ad blocker in 2017 (eMarketer)
• 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations. Only 33% trust ads. (Nielsen)
• Teens say that their favorite YouTubers understand them better than their friends (Google)

No wonder 75% of marketers are now using influencer marketing. Influencer marketing represents a new pull method of advertising – by partnering with voices that consumers already trust, brands can pull people into their brand message through authentic storytelling and creative content development. Influencer marketing is a relatively new concept but is quickly becoming a de facto part of the digital marketing mix.

What are micro-influencers?

These days, the term “influencer” has become synonymous with “celebrity,” with digital influencers such as PewDiePie and Huda Kattan garnering larger followings than even their mainstream counterparts. Sponsorships and collaborations between brands and these influencers have become highly visible events with multi-million dollar budgets. And for many large brands, influencer marketing has been a huge success.

But how about smaller brands, with smaller budgets? Fortunately, there’s a wide range when it comes to influencer audience sizes, and that’s where micro-influencers come in. Although exact definitions vary, generally, think of micro-influencers as digital influencers with a total audience size of between 1,000 to 100,000 followers.

When it comes to engagement, though, smaller is actually better. Makerly recently published a study which showed that influencers with smaller followings actually have higher engagement on their posts, when compared to larger influencers. In fact, influencers with between 10,000 to 100,000 followers are 4x more likely to get a comment on a post than “macro-influencers” (larger influencers) with 10 million followers.

Advantages of working with micro-influencers

Higher engagement

As noted above, micro-influencers tend to have greater engagement on each of their posts than macro-influencers. This means their engagement value per follower tends to be higher than for larger influencers.

According to Makerly’s study, influencers with 10 million followers have a like rate per post of 1.6%, while micro-influencers with 1,000 followers see a far higher like rate of 8.0%.

Topical specificity and authority

Micro-influencers are more likely to be posting about specific, niche topics. Many are experts in their topic and have loyal followings of people who share a passion for the same topic. When it comes to micro-influencers, you can find fly fishing bloggers, cosplay Instagrammers, and vegan cooking YouTubers.

If your brand fits a niche interest, these micro-influencers can be a huge asset in your marketing mix. Not only will these micro-influencers be more likely to be personally interested in your product, their audiences are more likely to be receptive to your brand, and the influencer’s recommendation is more likely to be seen as authoritative and authentic.

Less competitive

Larger, macro-influencers are in huge demand – everyone knows who they are, and brands large and small are fighting to work with them. So not only is it hard to get their attention, once you do, their prices are often sky high (large influencers with 5 million followers can command fees of $100,000 per post). For many startups and smaller brands, macro-influencers often don’t make sense from a budget perspective.

Micro-influencers are not as well known, and although many do receive a high volume of requests, they are easier to reach and often charge much more reasonable rates.

Personal relationships with followers

Micro-influencers are more likely to have real, personal relationships with a higher percentage of their followers since many influencers start out with their friends as their initial follower base and grow from there. As influencers grow larger, they know fewer of their fans personally, often leading to a more arms-length relationship.

Micro-influencers by nature will also have more time to interact with their followers, responding to more of their comments and fan emails than macro-influencers can budget. This also gives them a more intimate relationship with each follower, potentially leading to greater engagement and value placed on their recommendations.

Perceived as more authentic

Macro-influencers are increasingly resembling commercialized media companies, with agents, press kits, and running frequent, highly visible brand collaborations. Conversely, micro-influencers are more likely to be doing what they do purely out of love of doing it. Some may not even approach their posting as a business at all. Their recommendations may carry greater weight as real and authentic among their followers.

How to find micro-influencers

Use hashtags

Hashtags are a great way to find people via their posts based on specific topics. Try more specific hashtags, like #frenchcooking or #cookingforone that matches your niche, instead of more general ones like #cooking. Social networks which most actively use hashtags include Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.

Bloglovin

Bloglovin is a large community where bloggers share their latest posts. It’s a great way to find bloggers on virtually any topic. People are very active there, and the site is easy to search. Just follow bloggers who catch you eye, and build a relationship from there.

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a powerful marketing tool which gives you access to thousands of bloggers and social media influencers. You can pull together lists of influencers in virtually any topic, and export them to a spreadsheet to conduct outreach. You can also search by post or content type, to see which influencers have the top performing content in terms of likes and shares, for any keyword. Buzzsumo is great for finding micro-influencers since their platform covers even small influencers.

Your follower list

There are probably micro-influencers within your own social media followers right now. They are prequalified as interested in your brand, so you just need to search through your followers and identify people with larger followings who might make sense for a partnership.

Google

A good old-fashioned Google search is another great way to find micro-influencers. Depending on the niche, you can easily find lists or directories of blogs or influencers per your interest, and just find them by keyword.

How to work with micro-influencers

Focus on relevancy

In a world with infinite choice, relevancy is king. Influencers are being approached with offers every day, so why should they choose to work with your brand? The more closely your brand or product aligns with their interests (and what they post about) the more likely they will be to want to work with you.

Additionally, greater relevancy lends greater authenticity and credibility to an influencer’s recommendation of your brand. You may also pay less, or even nothing at all if the influencer truly loves your product.

Think long-term

Think of your online niche as your digital neighborhood, and influencers as your neighbors. Some may come and go and others you’ll see again and again. Rather than approaching influencer marketing with a transactional mindset, think with a long-term growth mindset. Get to know the influencers you work with, and let them get to know you and your brand. Often the lasting, enduring relationships are not only more enjoyable and personally rewarding, they can have the largest impact on your business.

Follow and engage with them

Prior to going in with a formal request, follow each influencer on social media, engage with their posts and engage them in conversation. This helps you better understand their personality and interests so you can determine their fit with your brand. It also helps you approach them with a more personal request which is more likely to get a positive response.

Offer personal discount codes

Giving each influencer their own official promo code giving their followers a discount at your store lends them an additional level of credibility as an ambassador of your brand. Influencers will appreciate the association with your brand, as well as the chance to offer a perk to their readers. Discounts codes also can greatly increase the conversions you see from an influencer campaign, providing an additional incentive to buy.

Lead with what’s in it for them

This is Sales 101, but when you do approach an influencer, make sure your message is tailored to their needs, not yours. Don’t make the very common mistake of crafting an outreach email that essentially describes your product and focuses on your key selling points. Influencers sift through dozens of requests per day and are far more likely to tune into an email that speaks to something they care about, something they need.

“The person who can capture and hold attention is the person who can effectively influence human behavior.

“Who is a failure in life? Obviously, it is the person without influence; one to whom no one attends: the inventor who can persuade no one of the value of his device; the merchant who cannot attract enough customers into his store; the teacher whose pupils whistle or stamp or play tricks while he tries to capture their attention; the poet who writes reams of verse which no one will accept.”

– Harry Overstreet in Influencing Human Behavior (1925)

The Most Important Content Marketing Lesson Has Nothing to Do with Your Content

What I am about to share with you is one of the most important lessons you can learn about content marketing (or marketing in general).

The most shocking thing about this lesson is this: it has nothing to do with your actual content!

I’ll explain to you what I mean in just a second, but first I want to tell you a story that Brent Barlow once told in the Salt Lake City Deseret News.

It’s a story that reveals why what I am about to teach you is so important…

The Lawyer’s Frustrating Conversation with a Woman Who Wanted a Divorce

Photo from Flickr by Wesley Fryer

A woman went to a lawyer and said she wanted a divorce. The lawyer got out his note pad, and proceeded to ask her some questions.

“Do you have any grounds?” he inquired.

“Oh, yes,” she replied. “About three-quarters of an acre.”

The lawyer paused for a moment, then queried, “Do you have a grudge?”

“No,” the woman answered quickly. “But we do have a lovely carport.”

Again the lawyer paused and then asked, “Does he beat you up?”

“No. I get up before he does every morning,” the woman reported.

Finally the lawyer blurted, “Lady, why do you want to divorce your husband?”

“It’s because,” she explained, “that man can’t carry on an intelligent conversation.”

———–

We laugh at this situation, because it’s not us.
But if you were that lawyer, then you wouldn’t be laughing! You’d be extremely frustrated.

But wait a second.

Before you let out a big sigh of relief that you’re not in this situation, I have bad news for you.

If you and I don’t learn the lesson I am about to share with you today, then we will be in the same situation this lawyer was in – but we’ll be in it with our prospects and customers!

How successful do you think you’ll be if that’s how your conversations with your prospects and customers go?

Even worse, if we don’t learn the lesson I am about reveal to you, there’s a danger that you won’t just be like the lawyer, you’ll be like the woman in this story!

You’ll have problems connecting with your prospects and customers and you’ll believe it’s THEIR fault!

In fact, there’s something that happened recently that is very similar to this situation.

Three Important Disclaimers Before You Read On

Before you read on, please read these three important disclaimers:

1) I didn’t vote for Donald Trump.

I actually didn’t vote for either candidate, because both candidates just seemed too flawed to me.

2) If you are still emotionally distressed about the election, then you probably shouldn’t read on.

You won’t learn anything and you’ll only be frustrated. So my suggestion is that you stop now while you’re ahead!

3) When I was in martial arts our sensei used to say, “You can always learn from any person or situation. You can either learn what to do or what not to do!”

There is a VERY important content marketing lesson that we can all learn from the presidential elections, regardless of whether we are happy with the results or not.

If you understand these three things and you’re still ready, willing, and able to learn something, then please read on…

Former President Obama Reveals the Most Important Content Marketing Lesson from the 2016 Presidential Elections

By Official White House Photo by Pete Souza – P120612PS-0463, Public Domain

In December 2016, former President Barrack Obama gave an hour-long interview with NPR. And it was in this interview that he revealed a very important content marketing lesson for us all. (Although he didn’t intend it to be a content marketing lesson.)

In the interview former President Obama said this…

“There are clearly failures on our part to give people in rural areas or in exurban areas a sense day-to-day that we’re fighting for them or connected to them.”

And don’t miss this the next thing he said, because it reveals WHY the rural areas felt this way…

“Part of the reason it’s important to show up is because it then builds trust and it gives you a better sense of how should you talk about issues in a way that feel salient and feel meaningful to people.”

Did you catch it? Do you see the lesson?

It’s the same problem the lawyer, and the woman he was trying to help, had.

Obama basically said that Hillary didn’t know how to talk to voters in the rural areas, because she didn’t know them.

That means that the key lesson we need to learn is this…

The Most Important Content Marketing Lesson from the 2016 Presidential Elections: You must know your audience.

I mean, think about it:

• If you don’t know your audience, how can you ever create content that can help them?
• If you don’t know your audience, how can you ever create content that will impact or influence your prospects or customers?
• If you don’t know your audience, how will your sales conversations ever be anything but frustrating and fruitless?
• If you don’t know your audience, then how can your content marketing or your business ever succeed?

Do you see why this is such an important lesson for content marketers to learn this year?

But don’t be fooled.

This isn’t just an important lesson for this year. This has ALWAYS been the most important lesson for content marketers and marketers to learn.

If you don’t believe me or former President Obama, maybe you’ll believe a marketing legend…

This Echoes the Warning Eugene Schwartz Gave 24 Years Ago

Eugene Schwartz was a master of copywriting. Why do I say this? Because his copy and letters are said to have generated more than $150 million in sales.

If that wasn’t impressive enough, he was one of the world’s highest paid consultants. (I heard that Rodale Press once reportedly paid him $54,000 for four hours of work!)

Well, in a lecture that he gave 24 years ago he gave a warning to a room of marketers that sounds a lot like the warning that former President Obama gave.

In 1993 a lecture that Schwartz gave to Phillips Publishing called The ‘Lost’ Secrets of Breakthrough Advertising he said this…

“You cannot lose touch with the people of this country, no matter how successful or how potent you are. If you don’t spend at least two hours a week finding out where the market is today, you are finished! You will have a career of three blazing years and be finished.”

Do you understand what that means?

That means your first step as a content marketer, or marketer of ANY kind, is the same as any effective communicator.

You must know your audience.

• Can you imagine someone who is blind-folded being able to speak effectively to an audience they’ve never met and don’t know?
• Can you imagine someone who is blind-folded being able to sell effectively to a single prospect that they know nothing about?

Either situation would be impossible, right!?!

Then how can YOU ever create effective content marketing if you don’t know your audience?

If you don’t know your audience, then you are – for all intents and purposes – blindfolded to who you are communicating to!

Do you now see why your most important lesson as a content marketer has nothing to do with your content?

It has everything to do with your audience.

You must know their desires, their dreams, their goals, and even their fears.

Until you accomplish this step, your content marketing, all of your other forms of marketing, will remain powerless and anemic.

More to Come

This lesson is so important that I’ve decided to do two other posts on the topic of knowing your audience.

If you enjoyed this post and found it helpful, then you’re going to want to stay tuned!

But in the meantime…

The Common Mistake Most Businesses Make with Their Content Marketing

Because many companies don’t realize the importance of knowing (REALLY knowing) their audience, they start the process of content creation by asking the wrong question (or at least it’s the wrong question to ask at the beginning).

And that’s the reason their content marketing never seems to get any traction.

If you can really learn this lesson about knowing your audience, then you’ll be able to create content that will allow you to stand out from your competitors.

If you’d like to learn more about this, then check out the FREE 12 minute video I’ve created for you that introduces a way of thinking of content marketing that I call “Question Directed Content Marketing.”

Click here to sign-up to watch the free video!

You never want to ask an ad optimizer to ballpark an “average” campaign and what its average cost per acquisition (CPA) might be. Why? Because they will tell you that “it depends.”

Understanding your CPA requires knowing the nuances that surround each and every acquisition effort that your team puts forth. Your CPA for search is going to be different than social. Your retargeting CPA is often lower than your acquisition CPA. Your CPA for female audiences is likely different than male. You get the picture.

Many of our clients run their campaigns with CPA goals in mind. Doing this helps you optimize for conversions over clicks. How much do you have to spend in marketing dollars to get a paying customer? CPA tells you.

In direct response, CPA is the right metric to optimize for when:

• You want the most leads at a fixed cost (max CPA, or in this case Cost Per Lead – CPL) so that you don’t lose money and can maintain your profit margin.

• Your products/offers don’t have the same monetary value. Optimizing for a blended CPA is common for an industry like e-commerce – order values are unpredictable, so maintaining a blended CPA on sales makes it easier to track.

CPA is also the metric to go by when you want to know the quality of your conversions (which should be, um, always).

Low CPA = high conversion rate. High five.

High CPA = low conversion rate. Time to pause and test different targeting or creative.

There are times where you may think you’re doing everything right and still your CPA is not where it needs to be. Here are three strategies to test to lower your CPA:

(1) Test Your Landing Pages

You understand the importance of landing page design, what it should include (clear, concise information related to the ad, a call to action above the fold) and what it shouldn’t (interstitials, blocks, and blocks of text).

But knowing what to include or not isn’t enough if your CPA isn’t where you want it to be. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Your social advertising can get your potential customers to the water, but if your landing page doesn’t convince them, they won’t drink/convert.

At this point, you need to take your landing pages a step further by A/B testing them for conversions. Your appetite for testing will inform how you go about doing it: some tweak one small element, a button color or headline, to see if it makes a difference; others reformat entire pages or destinations to test a new direction or creative theme.

In e-commerce, it’s common that our clients test multiple types of landers – product pages are obvious, but also category pages (an ad for a dress leads to a landing page showing the category page for all dresses).

Find out if your landing destination is dropping the ball – tweaking and testing them will ensure they are doing their job.

(2) Test Your Bidding Strategy

While naturally, you want to maximize conversions to get CPA down, you can also work on your bidding strategy to control the price you pay for those conversions.

You always want to make sure you’re using the bidding type that best reflects your budget and campaign needs. There are two major ways to handle bidding on Facebook: Average Cost Bidding and Maximum Cost Bidding.

We can dive deep into average cost vs. max cost bidding, but the biggest difference is when you determine whether you want a set price or give yourself room to expand with your bidding.

For Maximum Cost Bidding, you set your max bid threshold with Facebook from the start of your campaign. Facebook will only show your ads so long as you are far under your maximum bid cost. Once you start reaching your threshold, Facebook will slow down your ad delivery so that you don’t exceed your maximum bid.

Average Cost Bidding starts out the same as you select your target bid threshold, but Facebook will bid based on what the average cost is over your 1- or 7-day click window. You’ll get delivery, regardless if the cost for conversions is above your target threshold. All that matters to Facebook’s algorithm is that at the end of the window (1 or 7 days), the average cost matches the amount you previously set.

If you’ve seen success with Maximum Cost Bidding in the past, there’s no reason to rock the boat. However, it’s worth testing Average Cost Bidding if you’re looking to decrease your CPAs and you’ve tried other methods to no avail.

Average Cost Bidding exposes you to a wider audience than a maximum cost bid campaign. For some of our clients, we’ve won more auctions, we’re reaching and engaging with more of the audience, and CPAs are down.

While Average Cost Bidding may not be the answer to your CPA conundrum, it’s worth a shot to change up your bidding strategy if you’re unsure of which methods will increase your overall ROI.

(3) Test Your Audience Segments

Last, but certainly not least, you can also test your audience segments to see if that holds the key to a lower CPA.

If you’re targeting broadly through interests and segmenting by demographics, you’re only scratching the surface. To find – and then double down on – what works, you need to try a bunch of different things.

You should always be testing multiple audience segments against one another and allowing Facebook to gather insight about your audience so that they can properly serve a relevant message to the right kinds of people.

And if you’re not using Custom Audiences and Lookalikes, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. Retargeting alone to website traffic through Custom Audiences can help you get your CPA down to where you want it, and targeting 1% Lookalikes of a Custom Audience comprised of your highest value customers/users is often a good place to start to find a more relevant audience.

For a national campaign, you want to shoot for an audience size of at least 1 million people. It’s a sufficient pool of people to target and ensures there’s a level of relevance for your offer. Facebook will rotate these audiences, showing ads based on users click behavior and will develop new audiences over time.

The more people you have to market to, the more likely you are to find audiences to convert.

Don’t get too crazy, though – technically there is such a thing as too narrow of an audience segment. It’s possible to go too far in allocating money for extremely circumscribed niche audiences. Your CPMs would go up, or you just wouldn’t spend because your targeting pool would be too small.

No matter your product or service, testing different audience segments can help you find precise segments where your advertising dollars are best spent and will work towards decreasing your CPA overall as you put more budget into those groups.

Conclusion

There’s no such thing as a one size fits all social advertising strategy, and obviously, there are tons more you can do to try to nail down a lower CPA. The overall purpose of these types of tests is to continually test different elements until you find the sweet spot for a sustainable CPA.

When you’re not seeing the same CPA results that you’re used to seeing, the suggestions above are an excellent place to start. While Facebook is a competitive marketplace, and other external factors can impact your ability to find affordable conversions consistently, you want to make sure you’ve done everything you can do first before looking at what else may be the issue.

Make sure you’re also keeping the pulse on rising costs due to seasonality, review your industry’s benchmarks, and once you find additional higher quality audiences, know that they may be more expensive to acquire.

If all of that checks out, take our suggestions above and start mapping out your testing roadmap with the necessary due diligence to bring those numbers down.

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

The simple answer is that one is scheduled, and the other is not. Some may add that in a warm call the recipient may be aware of the person calling and the reason for the call, usually in the form of a referral. Some may add that one can “warm up” a call by doing research and having something relatable for the recipient, so they don’t blow you off as quick.

But the reality is that the difference is in your head.

Any unscheduled call, be it from a referral or from an overly informed rep, is an interruption. That’s why I tell people that I work with to reorient how they think about their work. If you are calling people who do not have a call scheduled in their calendar, you are interrupting them – next time someone asks you what you do for a living, I want you to say with great pride – “I am a professional interrupter; I interrupt people in the process of helping them achieve their objectives and delivering positive impact on their business.”

Download your copy of the Objection Handling Handbook

The challenge for most sales people, and the reason the call leaves them feeling cold, is that they are unprepared for the series of events and reactions their interruption sets into process.

After having research the company in an effort to warm the call, they figure that they have something relevant to say, and fail to take into account the interruption. So they wax poetic, all the while the prospect is thinking “how can I get back to work”. This is just compounded when they are usually talking about “solutions”. Given that 70% or more of the market is not looking for a solution, the interruption just seems worse when they deem the message to be irrelevant. Add to this that they have heard this same approach a thousand times before. So what can you do, focus on Objectives, not pains or needs; every business has objectives, align with those, and you’ll go from an irritating interruption, to an interruption with possibilities. Yet few research, they continue to research for problems some may have that fit their solution, rather than the other way around. You want the reaction to be “I was thinking about this”, not “WTF is this guy talking about”, leading to a click or objection.

When the objection comes, most sales people take the rejection personally. After all, they spent all this time researching the company, the person, and god knows what else, and at the moment of interruption, it seems all for not. As soon as it is personal, people get defensive, and it’s all downhill from there.

Managing and overcoming objections on a cold call starts long before they come up in the call. We interrupt, that triggers specific reaction. As before, if the initial narrative was a “solution” based intro, most reps defend and double down on that narrative, thus accelerating their fate. But if the intro was based on Objectives, doubling down on those allows you to expand your potential value rather than limit it.

If you can accept that you are an interruption, and focus on objectives and impacts, you will be in a position to manage and take away objections, and move towards a conversation – a sales conversation about their objectives, not pains, needs or solutions.

Download your copy of the Objection Handling Handbook

The post What’s The Difference Between A Cold Call and Warm Call? appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

The people with the most grit are really poor or really neglected and they overcome those circumstances. But why aspire to that? We glorify it like life is one big Horatio Alger story.

Working smart is the opposite of grit
We also glorify the idea of persisting through hardship. There’s the Seth Godin book of grit that everyone loves: It’s The Dip. He says everything worth doing has a really tough moment where other people stop but you keep going. However his idea is really about recognizing patterns, and it’s best in the business world where there are rules for success and everyone is basically a sheep trying to get the same thing: higher sales, new markets, more funding, etc.

In Godin’s scenario people are not engaging in grit so much as getting a leg up. A great example: My friend who imported a violin teacher from Bulgaria so her daughter doesn’t have to fight to get the best teachers in Boston.

Crazy passion is not grit, it’s craziness
The other type of grit is the person doing something totally new. There is no dip because there is no established upswing. And it’s the upswing that makes the downswing a dip rather than an endless path to hell. In the cases where people are not sheep– where someone is really truly doing something new – there is only a terrifying abyss.

A good example: Herman Melville writing Moby Dick. His family starved and he kept writing even though there was no established market or precedent for what he was writing.

But a more disturbing example is Charles Goodyear in the mid 1800’s:

After learning about rubber he convinced himself he could make his fortune by turning it into useful objects like waterproof shoes. All attempts ended in disaster and his life became a catalog of misery. His shoes melted in the summer, six of his children died, and his family lived in poverty. But Goodyear was determined. When debts landed him in jail, he asked his wife to bring him a rolling pin and some rubber and he carried on inventing in his cell. He made his breakthrough when he accidentally dropped a piece of rubber on a hot stove. It cooked and shriveled into a hard black mass that Goodyear immediately spotted as the thing he’d wanted all along. This is how he developed the tough black rubber we use in tires today by a cooking process now known as vulcanization.

America’s economic edge comes from entrepreneurship, invention, creative thinking. (Political side note: it’s what you get from being the great melting pot where new ideas smash up against each other all the time.) But it’s also crazy people who somehow figure out something great, in spite of themselves.

Grit is working hard because hard work is an end in itself
But that doesn’t come from grit. Grit is the Protestant work ethic and it’s fundamentally conservative and stifling. The Protestant ethic is about enforcing society’s values on the potentially wayward so that people kept building houses, having children, and populating towns (to fight Native Americans and take their land). The Protestant ethic espouses hard work as an end in of itself.

But we know that doesn’t get people anywhere. It’s why the kids at Stuyvesant who test at the very top end up underperforming as adults. It’s why the huge successes in Silicon Valley are not actually about people failing and trying again. They are outliers who are a little bit crazy and build something no one can even understand until after it’s built.

The value of an end result is not about how much work it took but how good it is. And this is why Alfie Kohn has a ten-point tirade about why grit is not a productive means to a creative, innovative society.

Grit presupposes a male outlook on life
The Protestants who celebrated work so heartily did not celebrate women’s work.

Who is most likely to come up with an idea without spending years working on it? Women. Because they don’t have time to fail and fail and fail again. Women can work full speed ahead until  30, then they have to start having kids. So women can’t risk having five businesses before one takes off. There is no time.

And women who can’t be sheep in the workplace because the paths the sheep take to food and water are for men. For men, time is linear. They head toward a goal and how they function each day defines them: what do you do? is the ubiquitous workplace question. And flow is the ultimate goal: how much do you love your work? How engaged are you?

I have thought for a long time that all the time management gurus are men because men have huge chunks of time uninterrupted by children. And the workplace is organized for time productivity, whereas the home is organized in a non-linear way that segments time into lots of small chunks interrupted by emergencies/breakdowns/crying etc. The workplace is about using time to get money. The home is about using time to get a nap.
 
Flow vs. confetti
Brigid Schulte talks about  women’s time as being like confetti; little chunks float by in an unorganized way and you take them as you can. There’s no grit here; it’s just trying to stay ahead of the next problem. There is no flow because dinner would burn. There is no engagement because cumulative sleep deprivation of raising kids shifts focus to just keeping them alive.

Grit is bad for women like school is bad for women. Both are fixed games women can’t win. You go to school “to get a good job” and even though we know most educated women want to be home with children, we never tell those girls that growing up to take care of kids is valuable. And we tell kids that grit is what makes adult life good, but we don’t tell those kids that hard work measured by number of consecutive hours and intensity of engagement is not something that can happen in a house full of children.

The patterns women work in today — moving in and out of the workforce depending on their stage of life – is antithetical to grit. Women are working smart and planning ahead and accomplishing their goals with fragmented hours and alternative careers.

We are far past celebrating grit. Let’s celebrate shrewd and crafty workarounds. Let’s measure results instead of process. That’s how we’ll crate equality in the workforce.

In analytics, nothing matters more than data quality. The practical way to control data quality is to do it at the point where the data is created. Cleaning up data downstream is expensive and not scalable, because data is a byproduct of business processes and operations like marketing, sales, plant operations, and so on. But controlling data quality at the point of creation requires a change in the behaviors of those creating the data and the IT tools they use.

Enter the chief data officer, or CDO. CEOs are increasingly adding the CDO role to their management teams to tackle the big business issues that come with data. Plenty of CDOs want to improve data quality, but motivating this change requires that CDOs create new organizational incentives and processes. Without the ability to do both, their efforts will fall flat.

Here’s an example. The chief data and analytics officer (CDAO) of a consumer product company is struggling to manage end-user consent data. Users provide consent for the use of information collected by the company on the company website, in an app, in the connectivity features of the product, and at the point of sale. The consent agreements are created by the relevant business units and reviewed by their legal teams. Part of the challenge for this CDAO is that the terms governing the data at the aggregate level are not clear. It is tough to figure out what the company can and cannot do with the merged data. As a result, maintaining and using the merged data set is costly and complicated.

The CDAO needed to solve two problems that were not envisioned in his original job scope: integrating data governance into the product development process and guiding the development of the IT systems that collect and manage consent information. The CDAO had not established formal or informal influence on these seemingly unrelated business processes, so he ultimately failed to address the problem.

Because the quality of the data collected determines its value as a corporate asset, and the amount of incremental work required to make it usable, CDOs need to work across the enterprise to control and improve data quality. This requires close collaboration with the operating units and IT. Here are five levers the CDO can use to show why spending time on data quality matters:

Low-quality data can be a source of waste in business operations. A large durable goods manufacturer wanted to quantify the value of the IT portfolio to its product development function. Using concepts from lean manufacturing, it modeled the time engineers spent creating and transforming data. It found that engineers spent close to 60% of their time transforming, translating, and reconciling information, i.e., “non-value-add” time. This model was used to create a roadmap to increase productivity by improving information quality and an advanced analytics model to optimize the IT portfolio. Quantifying the impact of data quality on the efficiency of operations, and then helping the operations improve their data quality to get the savings, is a win-win.

High-quality data can reduce the cost and risk of IT projects. The same manufacturer analyzed the historical performance of its large IT projects. It found that data quality was one of the top three causes of project delays and cost overruns. IT projects did not understand the quality of the data required to be loaded into the newly developed systems. This resulted in having to redo work and scrambling to fix data quality. Projects spent an average of 12% of their budget on addressing data quality issues, resulting in a 4% cost overrun after reserves were exhausted. Assuring data quality issues are identified ahead of IT project planning, and working to assure coordinated action to address them, is an opportunity for the CDO to deliver a win for IT while assuring data quality is controlled at the point of creation in future IT systems.

Clean data enables better, faster analytics. When analytics practitioners carry out an analytics project, they can spend 80% of the time preparing data for analysis. Because different projects often require overlapping data, there is a potential for overlapping work. Improvement in data quality reduces the cost to create and maintain the analytical data assets, which reduces the costs of analytics. It turns analytics consumers in the business functions into advocates for data quality.

Good data practices are good for compliance. Traditional companies, i.e., companies whose core product is not data, can be averse to the risks posed by collecting and storing data. The CDO can convince the compliance, audit, and legal functions that a systematic approach to data management can reduce risk while also improving operational efficiency and increasing data quality.

Better data practices deliver bottom-line value. Companies purchase data about customers, suppliers, and prospects from a variety of sources. Often these purchases are done by specific business units with limited rights. A CDO can reduce, rationalize, and centralize data purchases, delivering direct savings to the company. To sell data, the company needs to invest in taking the raw data coming from operations and its connected products and enhance it, making it a usable product for a third party. The CDO can help facilitate this process so that it is done in a scalable way across the enterprise. In this case, the CDO creates a win-win between those in the company charged with selling data and those incurring the incremental costs associated with producing and processing it for sale.

Just as in product development and manufacturing, where the slogan is “quality is everyone’s job,” in a world where data is a corporate asset, data quality is now everyone’s job. And as CEOs increasingly turn to CDOs to lead that charge, knowing how to make the most of such a function will be an essential skill.

It’s February. The coldest time of the year, last month of winter, and period where your reps are most vulnerable to the winter doldrums.

If you started off 2017 with a massive Sales Kickoff, now is the time to lock in and make sure the momentum you launched the year with doesn’t get sidetracked by shivering temperatures and a sales force starving for Vitamin D.

The following are 3 tried-and-true strategies to implement not only in late winter, but in any crucial time of year where seasonal and cultural conditions threaten sales team focus and motivation. Because whether it’s mid-February or the dog days of summer, it’s never a good time for Mother Nature get in the way of hitting quota.

Strategy #1. Designate Player-Coaches.

The Strategy: Designate worthy reps as team captains and player-coaches and set up a strategy to build peer-to-peer accountability.

How It Works: This strategy combines individual recognition, positive reinforcement and the element of surprise. Pick reps who are team-oriented and performing well, but have yet to be assigned a true leadership role in your company. Sales leaders should select these reps carefully and meet with them 1:1 to inform them of their selection, followed by announcing their appointments at an all-hands meeting.

These reps should serve as de facto assistant coaches chosen to advance team camaraderie and rep development. By launching this initiative, you’re driving engagement and accountability, rewarding high performers and team players and injecting new energy into your sales force. The key is setting a game plan for weekly/bi-weekly check-ins with your new team leaders and being strategic with how you announce the initiative, select your team leaders and compensate them for their efforts.

Real-World Example: To see how sales organizations use software like Ambition to drive sales team accountability and create peer leadership, check out this explainer video narrated by Outreach Sales Development Manager Alex Lynn.

Strategy #2. Create Fresh Incentives.

The Strategy: Announce a unique new incentive or set of incentives tied to key performance goals.

February is a great month to get creative with your employee recognition and sales incentives strategies. If you sense your sales incentives have been vanilla, now is the time to change that. These new incentives don’t have to be expensive – they should be designed to focus more on “shocking the senses” so to speak via personalization, timeliness, and uniqueness. In addition, they should be attached to lower-tier objectives for your sales team’s key metrics, divvied out more frequently, and tailored towards something as simple as progress to goal, high daily activity, or a new sales contest. The clearer, more tangible, and more achievable, the better.

Real-World Example: For ideas as to what these look like, check out this experiential incentive offered by Drew Woodcock, VP of Sales at Los Angeles Business Journal 2016 “Best Place to Work,” ChowNow.

Strategy #3. Run Bold Competitions.

The Strategy: Announce a unique new sales contest.

If you’re going to run a sales contest, traditionally “down” months for sales force energy are the perfect times to do so. As we’ve profiled in our Winner’s Guide to Running Effective Sales Contests, the keys to a successful sales competition are to compete on metrics that matter, engage the entire sales team, and offer a fresh take on traditional competition formats. Professional and collegiate sports can offer great inspiration for the latter component. Whether it’s the Super Bowl, March Madness or fantasy sports, major sports events are going to be the talk of the office and can be retrofit for the purposes of a sales competition.

Real-World Example: For an example of a sales contest that did all three (and worked in bold new incentives), here’s one run by Cell Marque Director of Sales and Tactical Marketing, Lauren Hopson.

New Ways to Drive Sales Team Motivation and Focus

Companies like Base and Ambition specialize in helping sales leaders create data-driven sales environments. Whether you elect to run one or more of the above initiatives or create your own strategy, be sure to power it with real-time, insightful and compelling sales performance data. The more crystal clear and real time the metrics, the better. Whether it’s sports or sales, a team is always going to try its hardest when the stakes are high, everyone’s watching, and the entire team knows the rules of the game, what they need to do win, how much time is left on the clock, and the current score.

For a list of 112 software tools – complete with links, pricing, and original writeups – that can help your sales organization stay on the winning path, download the The 2017 Trends and Tech Guide for B2B Sales and Marketing, written by Prezi, LeadGenius and Ambition.

In the movie Forrest Gump, the protagonist becomes a very rich man due to a natural disaster and its unforeseen business consequences. When he first enters the shrimp boating business, Forrest catches no shrimp. His fortunes change when a hurricane strikes and his boat is the only one to survive the disaster. Facing no competition, he becomes a multimillionaire.

It’s a funny scene, and it illustrates an economic truth: Businesses are often unprepared for environmental disaster. Policy makers have recognized as much, and in recent years the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has taken actions to force companies to disclose climate change–related risks. The Trump administration has threatened to roll back those requirements, which would hurt companies, investors, and consumers.

Over 20 years ago, Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter introduced the Porter hypothesis, which posits that environmental regulation can benefit companies by nudging them to explore their current production methods and eliminate costly waste that they have been blissfully unaware of. Nobel laureate Herbert Simon’s model of bounded rationality in decision making explains how this could work. In Simon’s model, decision makers face costs when taking an action, and this makes them stick to “business as usual.” In such a case, a firm’s leadership may respond sluggishly to evolving risks. If that’s true, a strong nudge by government could encourage such a company to change its ways, resulting in better environmental and financial performance.

The SEC has recognized this point; in 2010 it issued a planning document asking publicly traded companies to disclose their climate exposure risk. The Bank of England’s Mark Carney has also been stressing the importance of addressing these issues.

President Trump’s pick for SEC chair, Jay Clayton, has advised clients to disclose climate-related risks. But given the administration’s general deregulatory bent and refusal to recognize the existence of climate change, the fate of the climate disclosure requirement suddenly appears less than certain. If major corporations are not prepared for emerging climate risks, then the country’s economic performance could suffer during times of extreme climate shocks. In contrast, if companies are required to disclose their climate risk exposure, as the SEC had planned, then this discovery process would be reflected in asset prices, which would incentivize companies to build up their climate resilience. This optimistic claim represents a restatement of the original Porter hypothesis, and there is empirical evidence to support it.

A recent industry case study suggests that investors have been unaware of how past climate shocks affect corporate profitability. Consider an investment strategy where you short stocks in the food sector during times of drought and purchase food stocks during times of heavy rain. A recent NBER working paper documents that from 1985 to 2014 this trading strategy would have yielded a large annualized average rate of return of 9.2%. Why? The food sector’s profitability is negatively correlated with drought because agricultural output hinges on climate conditions. Given that future drought conditions can be predicted using current information, adherents of the efficient markets hypothesis should be surprised that investors did not see these patterns and invest accordingly.

The SEC’s proposed rules require firms to go through a process of “self-discovery” to learn about what new risks they face. For firms that have already gone through this process privately, the regulation will not lead to new information for the firms themselves, but by having to disclose the information, shareholders and potential investors will be better informed. This will create more market accountability and will incentivize such firms to hire environmental and logistics consultants to offer solutions that reduce the firm’s risk exposure. Such consultants might suggest strategies such as having contingent backup supply chains — for example, what steps can be taken to guarantee that Starbucks doesn’t run out of coffee beans for a month? Geographic locations could be ranked by their climate resilience so that a company like Google does not keep its servers in a place that is at risk of extreme disasters.

As a public goods provider, the government can play a useful role in nudging companies to disclose such information, thus drawing investors’ attention to it. Disclosure requirements can also help firms whose leaders do not know what they do not know, in terms of the new climate risks they face. Such firms are less likely to have evaluated their evolving risk exposure. If President Trump enforces the existing SEC regulation and encourages the introduction of penalties for not making such announcements, then this subset of companies will learn about the new risks they face and will recognize that the public disclosure of this information will hold them accountable.

Different companies will learn about different risks. Some may learn that their current headquarters faces a flood risk, while others may learn about their exposure to much higher electricity bills due to dynamic pricing or power blackout risk at factories in the developing world. Some may learn about transport logistics risks such as not being able to send big ships down the Mississippi River because of drought.

The net effect of these disclosures will be that firms increasingly invest in resilience in order to claim that they are making progress in limiting their risk exposure. As these firms demand new solutions to their challenges, new entrepreneurs will appear to supply them. In this sense, the SEC disclosure rules will help to accelerate adaptation so that fewer sectors will be vulnerable to extreme weather events.

“What’s keeping you up at night?”

“How important is X to you?”

“What do you know about our company?”

Most prospects get the same questions from salespeople over and over again.

Using any of these cliché, routine questions harms your credibility. Rather than seeing you as a trusted advisor, the buyer associates you with all the other reps they’ve ever spoken to. It’s usually not a positive association.

In addition, your prospect will go on autopilot and recite the same answer they’ve given on previous sales calls. You’ll lose the chance to get information your competition doesn’t have; furthermore, it’ll be hard to re-engage them in the conversation.

To maintain authority, keep the buyer’s attention, and find out what they’re really thinking, ask questions they’re not expecting. These six inquiries will come in handy throughout the sales process.

1) “It’s [date two months from now]. You haven’t purchased [product]. Why not?”

This question dives directly into your prospect’s concerns and surfaces potential internal obstacles.

It’s a version of the traditional question, “What would stop you from buying [product]?” But because your prospect hasn’t heard the question in this form before, they’re likelier to share their honest, unfiltered thoughts with you.

Giving a specific date is effective as well. The buyer immediately pictures themselves on that day in the future -- giving you a good segue into the risks of doing nothing.

2) “What’s your objective for this [conversation, meeting]?”

The buyer usually has different expectations for the discussion than you. Maybe you’re hoping to learn more about their situation, demonstrate your product’s value, or get their support as an internal champion.

However, your prospect might be interested in getting advice or insights, learning more about the product category, seeing how knowledgeable you are about the product and the space, or figuring out how much your solution costs compared to their current provider.

Once you’ve gotten their goal onto the table, you can do two things.

First, you can actually fulfill that goal. If the buyer wants to know your price, give it to them. You don’t want to drag out a sales conversation with someone who can’t afford the solution.

Second, you can create an upfront contract. Let’s say your prospect wants to get your suggestions on building a referral program. Before you delve in, say, “Do I have your commitment that we’ll schedule another call if you’re satisfied with the tips I give you today?”

At the end of the call, ask if they’re satisfied. If they say yes, you’ll have already secured a follow-up conversation.

3) “What do you need to accomplish to [get a promotion, receive X award, secure funding for Y, get Z campaign off the ground]?”

Tying the solution to the buyer’s personal career goals can accelerate the deal. After all, if they see a clear connection between buying your product and moving forward professionally, they’ll be eager to sign.

Before you can draw that link, however, you need to know more about their objectives. Use this question to figure out the milestones or steps they need to hit.

4) “Why?”

Most salespeople respond to objections by telling the buyer why that concern is invalid. However, this approach can backfire. Prospects often end up more convinced than ever their worry is legitimate.

Instead of arguing with them, get them to convince themselves. If they say, “That price is too high,” ask, “Why?”

They might respond, “Our most expensive machine to date costs half that,” at which point you can reestablish your product’s relative ROI.

Or perhaps the buyer tells you, “My boss will never approve this purchase.” It’s tempting to immediately offer case studies and compelling arguments your prospect can use to persuade their boss. Simply saying “Why?”, however, is usually more effective.

The prospect might give you an answer you hadn’t anticipated, such as, “She bought a similar solution at her former company and hated it,” or “She’s trying to redirect our budget toward X objective.”

Once you have the details, you can help the buyer overcome the internal obstacle -- or alternatively, decide they’re not a good fit.

5) “Can you [help me understand something, give me a little more context]? You’ve said [solving X, doing Y, pursuing Z] is a major priority for you. Why haven’t you already [taken action, addressed this issue]?”

Pursuing deals when you can’t answer “Why now?” is dangerous. Your prospect might sound committed to overcoming an obstacle or capitalizing on an opportunity, but something has been stopping them from doing so. You need to know why they’ve finally decided to act. Maybe they’re not truly invested, in which case it’s a waste of time and energy to continue humoring them.

This question lets you dig into their timeframe and desire to change without being overly aggressive. Most buyers won’t anticipate such a direct approach, so they tend to give you a genuine reply.

6) “What’s your best alternative?”

If the buyer is seriously considering your offering, she’s also looking at other options: Other vendors, the choice to build an in-house solution, or even the decision to do nothing.

Rather than pretending these alternatives don’t exist, bring them out into the open. You’ll have a much better sense of how to position your product. For instance, if your prospect is reviewing two other companies in your space, you can highlight your solution’s unique strengths. If, on the other hand, her top alternative is building an internal version, you might bring up the opportunity cost of waiting for a development team versus installing the product immediately.

You need to establish trust before you ask this, or it may make your prospects bristle.

These questions are designed to catch prospects off-guard -- not enough to harm the relationship, just enough to provoke an authentic response. Your conversations will become more valuable and memorable as a result.

We're happy to announce the beta launch of 99Inbound, which makes it easy to capture form submissions as leads in Close.io

How It Works

Build a web-form in 99Inbound, link it to your Close.io account, then embed it in your webpage. That’s it.

Now any time it is submitted you will get a lead in your Close.io account. Plus you can add custom fields to your form and map them to Close.io fields or custom variables.

Forms come with either Bootstrap or Foundation CSS classes, so they use your existing website styles, which means they don’t look out of place.

Use Cases

99Inbound is useful anytime you need to capture user information and have it sync to Close.io, but here are some specific use cases.

Contact Forms
Create a simple contact form for sales inquiries. This way any inquiries go into your inbound workflow and can be handled without any manual copy-paste.

White Paper or Ebook Distribution
By providing a free download on a useful subject you can encourage website visitors to give you their contact information. By collecting this information through 99Inbound their details will auto-sync to Close.io. Plus 99Inbound’s auto-responder can automatically send them the link to the EBook or White-paper that you’re looking to distribute.

Event Registration
I’ve found Close.io to be the best place to manage many types of contacts, including for small informational events in the local area. Using 99Inbound lets you provide a registration flow without having to manage a third party system.

Features

I’m expanding on features all the time, but I’m launching the beta with a stable set of powerful features:

• Close.io sync - all submissions sync to Close.io immediately
• Slack Notifications - get notified when a form is submitted
• Auto Responder - respond to submitters with a custom message (great for delivering white papers)
• Bootstrap and Foundation Native - Forms are provided with either Bootstrap classes or Foundation classes so they look totally native on your website
• Multi-Account - connect multiple Close.io and Slack accounts
• Custom Submission Message - provide a personal message on form submission, displayed where the form used to be
• Custom field support - map any form field to a Close.io custom text field
• Unlimited form fields - add as many fields as you want, mark as required or optional
• Field validation - validate inputs like numbers, emails, or telephone numbers

Sign-Up For Free

99Inbound is offering the service for free during an open beta period. So there’s no reason to not sign up today and start capturing inbound leads.

Sign up now

Marketing automation (MA) may have once seemed like an abstract concept and just a buzzword, but since the early 90s it has evolved substantially and now effectively performs a range of essential marketing tasks. The results it brings to marketers today are very real, and very beneficial.

In fact, businesses that use marketing automation to nurture prospects experience as much as a 451 percent increase in qualified leads. Surprisingly, however, a decent percentage of marketers, about one-quarter, are still not using MA.

But if marketing automation is so powerful, how can it transform marketing for your company?

Marketing automation: The nuts and bolts

The power of marketing automation resides in its ability to automate and measure marketing activities. Management expert Peter Drucker said, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” This idea is at the heart of marketing automation.

Marketers complete many mundane tasks each day. Many of these jobs do not require the high level of expertise that marketers have to offer — they just need to get done. Automation takes these tasks off marketers’ to-do lists. For example, you can send emails based on time delays or trigger additional emails based on behaviors such as “opens” and “clicks.” The automation of actions such as these can have major impacts on your business. Here are four ways that automation is helping marketers achieve exceptional results.

1. The gift of time: Marketers become more effective

Digital marketing expert Jay Baer said that “social media allows big companies to act small again.” Marketing automation works in a similar fashion, because it allows personalized actions to be scaled, which saves time and maximizes resources.

In fact, a large percentage of marketing automation users report that one of the largest benefits of this type of technology is time savings. Repetitive marketing tasks are automated, such as:

• Social media updates and posts. Automating social posts can save more than six hours per week on social media management.
• More relevant content is provided. When companies show customers more relevant content and offers based on past shopping history, they can increase average sales by 20 percent.
• Speed up the sales cycle. When you gain the ability to automate tasks, you can greatly speed up the sales cycle.

Waking up in the morning, everyone has the same 24 hours in a day. For many people, at least eight of those hours are spent at work — and most workers want to leave feeling like they got a lot accomplished. Marketing automation creates that feeling through time savings.

2. Customer engagement feels more authentic

Content marketing keynote speaker and best-selling author Ann Handley said, “Even when you are marketing to your entire audience or customer base, you are still simply speaking to a single human at any given time.”

Marketers are tasked with making each customer feel like they are truly known by the brand — and, in many cases, the marketer has never met the customer.

MA helps marketers achieve this high level of engagement because it assists with delivering the right content at the right time. Increased engagement also helps companies capture more leads. Eighty percent of marketing automation users observed a 77 percent spike in conversions. Plus, B2B marketers who implement marketing automation increase sales-pipeline contributions by 10 percent. This technology achieves engagement through:

Delivering the right message at the right time. Nurturing leads is critical to building engagement. Instead of blasting the audience with messages you guess or assume are relevant, marketing automation provides “spot on” messaging through accurate insights and data. Email campaigns are deployed with greater accuracy, resulting in higher open rates and increased conversions.

More effective social engagement. A large chunk of your audience is active on social, whether it’s LinkedIn, Twitter, or another platform. Many of these customers, however, are not active during normal business hours. Marketing automation helps you stay active on social at the exact moments when your target audience is present, resulting in greater engagement.

Personalized website and email content. Personalized and dynamic content ensures that customers feel truly known. Marketing automation allows content to be matched precisely to the individual.

Engagement is the foundation of the customer relationship. Without engagement, it’s difficult to successfully move prospects through the buying journey. Once you build these relationships, marketing automation can help increase success through upselling and cross-selling.

3. Increased opportunities to upsell

Have you visited Amazon.com recently? If so, you may have bought a product that requires replacement items. For example, the purchase of a water purifier would eventually require additional filters. At the period of time when a customer would typically need these replacement items, the retailer could present the products. Additionally, the retailer could serve up items that others viewing similar products purchased. Marketers know the value of upsells and cross-sells. All those little add-ons can have a powerful effect on the bottom line. Marketing automation helps identify these opportunities and capture those sales.

In fact, studies show that companies that use marketing automation outperform companies that don’t by 59 percent. Here are a couple of ways that marketing automation helps you to upsell customers more effectively.

Leverage past purchase data. Providing customers with targeted recommendations that show what they may need to purchase based on previous buying patterns helps you easily serve up relevant offers and upsells. For example, let’s say a customer recently purchased an online SEO service. If so, he or she may be interested in buying the additional consulting package that goes with this service.

Leverage website activity. Having insight into customers’ behavior when they visit your website is helpful. A customer who first visits your pricing page and then downloads a pricing guide is highly engaged with your products. You can use these two behaviors as a trigger. As a result, a targeted email is sent to the customer, asking whether he or she would like to schedule a demonstration of the product.

Marketing automation provides the ability to capture new opportunities that marketers otherwise wouldn’t have the time or bandwidth to pursue. A large piece of capturing these opportunities, however, is effectively scheduling key communications.

4. More precisely timed communications

A famous Roman philosopher named Seneca said that “luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” Marketing automation helps you prepare communications in such a way that you’re in front of the customer at precisely the right moment. It can help you:

Deploy communication by season. Depending on what industry segments you serve, your customers may have prime times for various opportunities. For example, school districts may make the majority of purchase investments in the early fall. Or some companies may be making last-minute purchases at the end of the year. They have excess budget left, and need to spend it or face the risk that finance will lower their budget for the coming year. Automated campaigns triggered by these specific periods of time can help you more effectively seize these opportunities.

Save unhappy customers. You have a small window of opportunity to save unhappy customers, and marketing automation can help you accomplish this. Yet we can’t call every single customer and give them the TLC they require — it’s simply not scalable. So instead you can use triggers to identify which customers may need extra attention.

Launch retention campaigns. A company that experiences a high attrition rate may not be sure why its customers are leaving. After studying the issue, its management may determine that customers are leaving most frequently at the one-week and three-month marks. As a result, the company can use marketing automation to create education-nurturing campaigns, including high-value content addressing common customer problems.

Engaging with customers more accurately

Marketing automation helps you understand customers in context so you can more effectively discover and deliver what they need most. No longer are you guessing what they want and when they want it. You know with absolute accuracy, and can deliver more relevant content and offers.

As a result, you can build more authentic relationships and drive greater impact for your brand in a way that is measurable, concrete, and more effectively scales your existing resources.

Are you using marketing automation? If so, what are the major results you’ve experienced? Please share!

Do you have a content marketing strategy? Are you unsure what lead magnets work best?

While running a content marketing strategy, it is important to capture email subscribers. Social media can be great for driving traffic, but it isn’t highly effective in generating customers.

McKinsey & Company found that email is nearly 40 times more effective than Facebook and Twitter combined in the acquisition of customers.

One way to convert website visitors is by asking people to sign up to your newsletter. But this isn’t as effective as offering an incentive in exchange for an email address as discovered by Chris Spooner who was able to capture 10X more leads when he gave away an incentive and made a few other changes.

If you’re wondering what you can use as a lead magnet to capture more leads, then you have come to the right place.

Below I have discussed the benefits of various lead magnets and how to get the most out of them. Pick and use the ones that suit your target audience best…

1. Your time

If it’s going to take you a while to create your first lead magnet, then in the meantime you can ask people to sign up in exchange for a free consult.

You might expect this to take up a lot of time, but you can avoid that if you cleverly do what Rich Brooks’ of The Marketing Agents did.

On his website he asked people to subscribe to his newsletter and in exchange he gave them a chance to win a free one hour marketing consult.

On the free consult landing page, he goes on to explain that every week he will do a website and marketing consult with a subscriber on his email list.

Rich Brooks’ also mentions that he will record the consult and share it on YouTube. So with this process he’s not just getting email subscribers, but also some content for his YouTube channel.

You too can offer a free consult in a similar manner and convert traffic into subscribers. If you do a great job, some of these people will turn into paid clients.

You can also mention how much you usually charge for a consult like this on your landing page. This will boost conversions.

2. Webinars

Webinars make great lead magnets as it’s a live event many people want to sign up for. According to Adobe Connect, the average conversion rate of their webinar landing page is 51%. 36% of registrants viewed the live event, 54% viewed the recordings and 19% of the attendees joined a product demo at the end of the webinar.

If you would like high conversion rates such as the above, make sure you use a good landing page.

When KISSmetrics began running webinars they used the regular landing pages offered by GoToWebinar.

These had a very low conversion rate, so the company used Unbounce to build some new landing pages. They boosted their conversion rates to 40% to 80%, an increase of over 1,000%.

On the landing page they even added a question asking people if they would like to sign up for a demo. This got KISSmetrics an average of $13,000 in highly qualified new opportunities from each webinar.

Here are some quick tips to help you set up a high converting webinar landing page…

Get a good landing page tool: There are many landing page tools. They already have high converting webinar landing page templates. All you need to do is add in your copy and branding and you are ready to go. Some good companies are LeadPages, Unbounce and Instapages.

Use the power of scarcity: Most webinars will have a limited seating of 100 to 1000 attendees. Make sure you mention this in your copy as scarcity can increase conversions. Also add a countdown timer that shows when the webinar is starting.

Mention bonuses: If you plan to give away discounts, bonuses or exclusive content during the webinar, make sure you add this information to the landing page too. This will persuade more people to attend.

After you conduct the webinar, make sure you promote the recording on a landing page and give access to it in exchange for a sign up. If you conduct webinars on a regular basis, you will have so many lead magnets just like KISSmetrics. To make the webinar recording landing page more persuasive, include testimonials from past attendees.

3. Giving away your products

Your products can be excellent lead magnets too as they give people a taste of what is to come. This works for businesses that have several products or if you have a premium version of the same product. This type of lead magnet can get you a lot of free subscribers, but the free sign ups will only convert to customers if the free product is of top quality.

An example of a company that uses free products to get sign ups is Creative Market. Creative Market is an online marketplace where creatives like designers and photographers can list and sell visual assets like images, vectors and other things for designers, marketers, bloggers and business owners.

To get people to sign up, Creative Market offers 6 new products for free every week. All you need to do is sign up for an account and you can download these products for free. They change these products every single week.

Even people who have already signed up can download these new products week after week. This is a great way to get more subscribers and to get the buzz out about their free lead magnets as existing users who download the products will inform their friends and followers.

4. Free tools and analyzers

Several businesses are creating tools that analyze people/businesses and provide personalized reports. Their target audience can use these tools to check how well they are faring. But in order to use them, they need to provide their email address in exchange. Many people won’t mind doing this if in exchange for an email address they are getting a highly personalized report.

A great example is Hubspot’s Website Grader. To use this tool all you need to do is submit your website URL and your email address. The Website Grader will audit the website and tell you what’s good about the site, what’s bad and the steps you can take to improve it. As Hubspot provides online marketing software this helps them attract very relevant leads.

A similar example is LeadPage’s Landing Page Grader. LeadPages also have another free tool called Rapidology. As both these tools help people increase their website conversion rates they attract sign ups from a relevant target audience.

5. Content upgrades

A content upgrade is a lead magnet that is specifically created for a blog post. You create a unique one for each blog post. This strategy can increase conversion rates by 529%.

Conversion rates are extremely high because you sort of make each blog post into a landing page.

The content upgrade can range from something simple like the PDF version of the post, to a checklist, to an email course. SumoMe experimented with different content upgrades and found that spreadsheets and ebooks work best.

Offering the ebook version of the post the person is reading will only work if the post is very long like this 5,000+ word post. You can ask people to sign up for the ebook version of the post so that they can read it later.

If your post is shorter, you will need to put more effort and create a quality lead magnet like a checklist or video.

If you plan to use this technique make sure you put a lot of effort into researching, writing and promoting this post. The post needs to continue attracting traffic through social media and search engines for a long time as creating a content upgrade from scratch can be time-consuming.

Wrap

You can include all of these 5 lead magnets in your content marketing strategy. They can all bring in big results. But remember that capturing a lead is just the beginning. After that you need to nurture this lead with more free content. This will get more leads to convert to customers.

Which of the above lead magnets have you used? Which ones have worked best for you? Please leave your comments below.

Developing relationships with prospects at every stage of the sales funnel is an essential step in maximizing your number of buyers. Marketing automation can help with this process.

Marketing Automation Helps Turn Leads Into Buyers


Lead nurturing is an essential part of marketing, but it also relies heavily on the sales team’s ability to turn leads into sales. Studies show that on average, half the leads any given company has are still on the fence about whether or not they want to buy, and 80% of new leads don’t turn into sales. With the right automation platform, you could see far better success than the norm.

The benefits of marketing automation for this process may not be immediately obvious, but these platforms are now essential to maintaining and improving customer relationships. More than 90% of marketers report that automation is very important to their overall marketing success, and that extends across all channels. Information simply moves far too quickly for marketers to use effectively without some form of marketing automation.

1. Creating New Customers

You always want to be drawing in new business to your company, and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms can be interwoven into your marketing automation system so everyone involved in your lead nurturing processes can contribute new information as soon as it’s available.

Managing Customer Profiles

Customer profiles, also commonly called buyer personas, are vignettes of a company’s ideal customer types. These profiles are an essential part of the automation process because marketing and sales professionals use these profiles to determine how to approach customers and leads. Using your marketing automation platform, you can custom tailor content to every type of customer – even specific customers – so that your marketing efforts have the most effective impact for each type of customer you serve and every type of lead you want to draw into your brand.

2. Retaining Existing Customers

Generating new prospects is vital to running a business, but creating new customers should not come at the cost of losing older ones. This is another area where marketing automation truly shines. Your marketing and sales professionals can keep tabs on every aspect of a relationship with a customer and all updates as soon as they are available. This keeps everyone abreast of a customer’s unique situation using the most recent information. When leveraged wisely, you can turn automation into a method for keeping your existing customers coming back with little prodding.

Automatic Interactions

You can customize your automation processes to the point where the bulk of your lead nurturing interactions happen automatically. Using your CRM input, customer actions dictate specific responses. You can choose how and when those responses happen based on the customer’s profile, past interactions, past purchases, lead status, and various other metrics, along with the customer’s action. Attempting to accomplish this without automation would be time-consuming and all but impossible, especially for larger enterprises with vast numbers of customer accounts.

3. Craft a Winning Formula

Your automation processes are going to take a lot of mundane, repetitive tasks off your marketing and sales teams’ plates, but that doesn’t mean they can be set and forgotten. Your automation and CRM platforms are of course going to require your attention from time to time, so it’s important to be constantly reassessing how you can leverage your automation processes as lead nurturing tools. The platform certainly makes keeping in touch with your customers easier, but it’s up to you to adapt the automation tools to your company’s unique needs.

Tech marketers are busy people. You’re working on a million things at any one given time, all in the name of growing your tech business. You would love to have a single, integrated messaging document or platform that helps you plan everything out. Something from which you can pull a killer social media message or eBook idea. That’s where a Tech Marketing Playbook (TMP) would come in handy.

Signs That You Need a Tech Marketing Playbook (TMP)

#1: You’re creating content inconsistently.

Your tech blog has GIANT gaps in it because you post whenever you remember. Which means your last post was 4 months ago and the one before that was 14 months ago. Your single published landing page is for a tech product you launched 18 months ago. You’ve got ideas for a whole series of content marketing pieces that are tied together with a central theme, but no published content for it.

#2: You’re note getting any traffic, downloads, or engagement of any kind.

Your website numbers are on a downward trend and bounce rates are sky-high. Your social media accounts get little or no traction from anyone. Your audience isn’t signing up for any of your webinars or downloading your reports and white papers.

#3: Your marketing funnel isn’t mapped to your sales funnel because you have no marketing roadmap.

Sales has their funnel defined and work diligently through it with their prospects, leads, and customers; marketing doesn’t. Mainly because marketing doesn’t have a marketing roadmap defined. So they don’t know what type of content to produce in support of their (or anyone else’s) funnel. Everyone’s working independently, not pulling in the same direction.

#4: You struggle to produce marketing materials and have problems delegating the work.

Whether you have in-house marketers or work with outside freelance copywriters, you struggle to produce marketing materials because you don’t have anything documented. Your strategy lives in your head (or worse, in your CMO’s head.) You don’t have a one-sheet you can send off to anyone you’ve delegated content production to and you simply don’t have the time to sit down with them to explain anything.

A TMP Makes All of This Easier to Deal With

That’s because a TMP is an integrated, master messaging document you and your team can use to produce any marketing material you need. It’s filled with consistent messaging and ideas so that you’re all on the same page. Each member of your marketing team will use the same document to produce their content, regardless of what it is. Reduce the amount of back & forth emails asking for the “latest tagline”, eliminate the Q&A session you have to hold with new freelance copywriters you hire to work on your content. Increase the quality of your content marketing pieces right away with a TMP.

If you’re looking for a solid foundation for your tech content marketing, a TMP is just the thing. Whether you’re new to content marketing or are a mature team using it, a TMP helps keep you on track with your strategy, ensuring you hit your targets.

Financial services. Healthcare. Higher education. Manufacturing. Marketing to a new vertical is no easy feat. It takes time, resources, and dedication. But all the hard work and investment pay off as you go from being relatively unknown in a segment to the best-in-class solution.

Rather than dedicating all their resources into broad-based marketing, many organizations are adopting a vertical approach. This enables marketers to develop a “beachhead strategy”, focusing on and winning a particular market first before moving into other, larger markets. A vertical approach can be very effective when marketing to target accounts as well, helping you and your organization deliver a more personalized experience.

Let’s look at five key steps to penetrate a new industry:

1. Understand the Market

Start by understanding the market of the segment or vertical you’re trying to penetrate and its nuances. At Marketo, we have team members who are dedicated to verticals of interest. These roles span different functions—segment marketing managers, solution consultants, and account executives—and they are tasked with different areas of market research to establish the breadth and depth of the segment—from perusing analyst reports to staying on top of emerging trends. It’s also critical to look at your own database and leverage the sales and customer success teams for insights as well.

Here are some good questions to answer to get a better understanding of the market:

• How many existing customers in the vertical do you have?
• What is the churn rate of the customers in this vertical vs. your overall churn rate, and what factors might contribute to that?
• How are those customers using your product or service; in other words, is there a product-market fit?

Ultimately, your goal should be to establish the total addressable market (TAM), or total available market, which is essentially the revenue opportunity available for your product or service.

2. Identify Your Personas

Once you have a good understanding of the vertical, start identifying your personas so you can map their buyer journeys and understand how they interact with the different touchpoints at each stage.

Who are the decision-makers and influencers, and what are their demographics and behaviors? How are they different from the personas in other segments? At Marketo, for example, we found that the ideal personas in certain industries may be sales or IT leaders as opposed to marketing leaders, as they drive most of the purchasing decisions. Don’t forget about others who play a role in the purchase process as well, such as influencers or gatekeepers. Again, be sure to include your sales team in your research process—they will have valuable insights and feedback since they are on the front line.

3. Build Sales Support

This step is critical, so don’t cut corners or overlook it! Your sales team is eventually going to be doing the selling, so they need to be armed with as much knowledge and as many resources as possible. You need to enable both your inside and field sales teams with the right messaging and content so they can effectively sell into the chosen segment. For example, if you want to engage asset management firms, a term that would resonate with them is “assets under management” or “AUM.” Similarly, you may find that some of your common vernacular will not work in a new segment. For example, don’t make references to “leads” when trying to penetrate the higher education market.

Much of your messaging development for a new vertical should be based on your research from the prior steps; you should already have an idea of what kind of messages would resonate with your buyers, so it then becomes a matter of creating a cohesive and succinct messaging framework for your sales team.

Here are some segment-specific materials you can create to fully enable your sales team for outbound prospecting:

• Call lists: List of qualified people in selected accounts for sales outreach
• Call scripts: General guidance on what to say when cold calling prospects
• Datasheets: One-page documents explaining how your product is a good fit for a certain segment
• Training decks: Slide deck for internal sales enablement designed to provide basic knowledge on the chosen segment to your sales team
• One-page overviews: High-level document addressing the challenges, pain points, and solutions for the chosen segment

4. Start Your Demand Generation Engine

To scale your vertical strategy, demand generation is instrumental in driving qualified leads for the chosen segment, engaging them, and nudging them to the next stage of the customer lifecycle.

To run programs across the lifecycle effectively, the content you have already created may not be sufficient; you need content that’s tailored to each stage of the buyer’s journey. At the early stage, content such as ebooks, slideshows, and blog posts are effective for generating awareness. At the mid-stage, webinars and case studies play an important role in nurturing leads. And at the late stage, product demos can go a long way. While this may sound like a lot, with strategic repurposing, you can ensure that each vertical has content that’s tailored to the market and buyer’s journey.

A helpful exercise is to map out the programs and the frequency with which you can run each program. It is easy to overpromise, but a framework like this will help you set expectations and stay within your budget and resources.

5. Measure Your Results

As with every initiative, it’s important to measure your results. You may not see enough traction initially since much of groundwork is focused on research, content development, and training and leads take time to mature. However, early-stage metrics are still good indicators of early success as you measure all the way through to your ROI.

Here are some important marketing metrics to track at various stages:

• Early-stage:
  • New names: The number of buyers who are in your database but have not engaged with your company yet (e.g. acquired through a business card at a tradeshow)
  • Leads: The number of leads who are qualified buyers based on your buyer profile and are opted-in to your marketing communications through engagement with your brand
• Mid-stage:
  • Marketing qualified leads (MQLs): The number of qualified leads based on the scoring model agreed upon by sales and marketing
  • Sales qualified leads (SQLS): The number of qualified leads who are interested in your product or service and are a good fit, based on further evaluation from your sales team
• Late-stage:
  • Opportunities: The number of SQLs who fit the BANT criteria (budget, authority, need, and time).
  • Pipeline: The total value of opportunities created in the segment
  • Closed won: The number of opportunities that were successfully turned into paying customers. It is important to compare this metric with “closed lost” in order to ascertain the win rate
  • Revenue: The revenue generated from closed won opportunities since the programs started

While these metrics may look similar to those for your broad-based programs, the focus will be on vertical accounts specifically. Accordingly, you may want to set up separate reports and dashboards in your marketing platform to track them.

Want to learn more about industry or other areas of marketing? Attend Marketo’s Marketing Nation Summit, the premier marketing industry event, in San Francisco from April 23-26th! Join my session with Graham Gallivan on “Penetrating Industries With An Integrated Sales and Marketing Strategy”.

PR and digital marketers frequently consider engagement a key social media metric. Yet some believe online engagement is faltering. Fewer brands engage with followers, they assert.

Very few companies, typically larger brands, dedicate the staff for extensive engagement. Wendy’s tweets are an exception. Even JP Morgan, a huge financial services company, gains few responses on Twitter, as a glance at its feed shows, as Arik C. Hanson, principal of ACH Communications, points out in his marketing and communications blog. It treats Twitter as a broadcast channel. Accenture, a large B2B brand with over 300,000 followers, elicits little response on Twitter.

Trolls, the 2016 Election, and general declining interest in online conversations may be to blame for the decline in engagement. Online publications are closing comments sections on articles. In a most recent example, Vice shut down its comments section, blaming an overabundance of trolls. Publications say they’re moving conversations to social media, but those conversations are now also increasingly dominated by hyper-political debates, personal attacks and hate speech.

Winning Engagement is Challenging for Brands

Sparking engagement is more difficult for brands. Comments and shares have dropped. At their best, comments provide meaningful input, spur conversation, and provide feedback. Shares, the best form of engagement, help spread the brand’s marketing and PR message. Likes, the lowest form of engagement, barely qualify as significant engagement. If comments and shares disappear, brands will be left with very little else, Hanson warns.

Hanson relies on personal observations and lacks hard data. Others have complained of an increase in derogatory comments, especially during the presidential campaign. People may be sharing posts, but share only with people they agree with in their own networks.

Marketers have differing views about the importance of engagement as a social media metric. Some argue engagement indicates the quality of content and the effectiveness of the brand’s marketing more realistically than number of followers.

Even Likes Count

Even the number of likes matter because consumers believe the popularity of a product correlates to its quality, says Lesya Liu, social media strategist at The Social Media Current. “We as entrepreneurs also look at the like counts as a metric for reputation of the company and as a metric for effectiveness of social media marketing efforts,” Liu writes in Entrepreneur.

However, engagement is not the ultimate business goal, only a tactic to produce leads, clients and sales. Like any other business activity, engagement entails costs and resources that must be balanced against results. The key to success is determining how engagement helps you reach your business goals.

Engagement must be linked to business objectives. Engagement is only a tool, one that’s not extremely valuable on its own unless it’s tied to a measurable goal. Those goals can be customer acquisition, product development, customer service or brand awareness.

Bottom Line: Engagement may be falling out of favor as a social media metric. Trolls and declining interest in online conversations may be putting a damper on engagement. Some brands may place a low priority on engagement, and instead use social networks as a broadcast channel. Many marketers tout the benefits of engagement, saying it can accurately measure marketing success. The key is to link engagement with bottom-of-the funnel metrics.

This post was originally published on the Glean.info blog.

Targeting your dream clients is a better and more important activity than calling on leads, warm, hot, or cold.

The post Targets Are Greater Than Leads – Episode 44 appeared first on The Sales Blog.

No one is immune to burnout. But salespeople may be uniquely vulnerable: Sales is typically considered one of the most high-stress, demanding professions.

Unfortunately, selling performance is highly correlated to mindset.

When you feel exhausted, anxious, or unmotivated, it’s difficult to pick up the phone or meet with prospects -- let alone prove to them why your product is the best fit for their situation and needs.

There are a number of tried-and-true techniques for recovering from burnout, like getting enough sleep, exercising, and taking a break from work. If you’ve tried these strategies and still haven’t bounced back, use the six following sales-specific ideas.

How Salespeople Can Recover From Burnout

1) Take Inspiration From Other Reps

When you’re experiencing burnout, your current library of emails, call and voicemail outlines, and helpful resources may seem stale or overused.

Just one new email template can be enough to jumpstart your selling efforts and give you a motivational boost -- it's exciting to see a flood of responses in your inbox from a fresh prospecting email you’re trying out.

Wondering where to get this content? The other salespeople on your team are excellent sources. Ask if they’ll share (or even trade) their top-performing email sequences, outlines, and/or scripts.

Tweak their content to make it feel like your own. For instance, if your teammate sends you a clever breakup email, you might keep the concept but change the specific language. This step ensures your messaging is authentic and unique.

2) Switch Leads With Another Salesperson

To shake up your regular routine -- and take off some of the pressure to perform -- Jeff Hoffman recommends exchanging leads with another salesperson on your team.

For example, you give her 25 of your prospects to call, and she gives you 25 of hers. If she successfully connects with any of your prospects, she’ll transfer those contacts back to you, and vice versa.

Because you’re dialing leads that aren’t your own, you’re not as emotionally connected to the results. You may even enjoy making these calls. Do this once or twice, and you’ll likely regain your enthusiasm.

3) Listen to Your Best Calls

Replaying your best calls gives you an instant burst of energy. Not only will you remember how it feels to be at the top of your game, you’ll be reminded of your most effective questions, responses, and strategies.

4) Talk to Your Manager

Your sales manager would rather learn about your decreased motivation from you than see your performance suddenly drop off with no explanation. Give them the heads up during your next check-in, or schedule a separate meeting to discuss the issue.

If your manager was promoted from an individual contributor role, they’ve probably experienced the same type of burnout. They’ll be able to relate to your situation and share valuable recovery strategies.

Being aware of the situation also enables your manager to temporarily adjust your workload. Maybe they were planning to give you a new, more ambitious activity goal; now they know you’re feeling burnt out, they might hold off for a month.

5) Attend a Sales Event

Meetups, conferences, talks, webinars, and training courses help you beat burnout for two reasons. First, they give you a break from your day-to-day routine. A change of pace (not to mention some time away from your desk) usually helps alleviate stress and lethargy. Second, you’ll acquire new tips, techniques, and ideas. You’ll hopefully be inspired to get back into the office and try them out.

6) Get Advice from the Pros

Even the best salespeople go through tough times. In this episode of “Stories from the Sales Floor,” selling experts like Matt Heinz and Pete Kazanjy discuss hitting rock bottom. It’s comforting to know you’re not alone -- and this condition isn’t permanent. In addition, you may pick up some valuable suggestions for burnout recovery.

Have you experienced burnout in your sales job? How did you recover? Let us know in the comments!

Author: Chris Gillespie

So you have a new sales job. The desk is clean, the laptop screen has shiny protective film, and your strategy is a blank slate. You feel giddy with excitement at what the future holds, and you can hear the cowbell clanging as other account executives ring in their deals. Quietly, you resolve to outsell them all.

But once you create your new Outlook signature (no .jpg images now, that’s a rookie mistake) and open a fresh spreadsheet, people begin joking “When’s that first deal coming in?” It’s then that you realize the pressure is most certifiably on.

Having been through this many times myself, I’ll share my top 11 tips for ramping quickly in a new sales role:

1. Leverage Your Mentor

Time is of the essence here, and while it’s going to take you months to truly soak up the culture yourself, you can speed up the process by shadowing your mentor. If you aren’t assigned one, approach someone who’s at the top of the sales leader board. Pitch them on how helping you will make them look good, especially when they help you sell something fast. Then, get their permission to spend time observing them in their prep, on their calls, and in meetings. You’ll soak up what to do and even more importantly, what not to do.

The bottom line: Get a mentor who’s invested in your success.

2. Learn the Tribal Stories

Stories are how you’ll learn why people actually buy from you. Case studies are a great place to start, but often, the best stories aren’t written down but rather passed from salesperson to salesperson in classic oral tradition. The ones that keep spreading do so because they contain invaluable kernels of wisdom.

For example, I recall a story about a salesperson who used to sell purely on talking–wouldn’t even share a presentation–and would pitch such a beautiful picture that prospects would buy sight-unseen. I don’t even know if this was ever true, but it convinced me to show less and talk more, and I can accredit more than a few deals to this strategy.

In my experience, no amount of videos, computer-based trainings, or datasheets will compare to listening to a seasoned salesperson spinning these yarns. In fact, after just a couple of months, even a junior salesperson can accumulate several years’ worth of sales knowledge through the power of stories.

The bottom line: Memorize as many stories as you can about why customers purchased from your company.

3. Learn How a Deal Gets Done

Leads morph into sales the same way a caterpillar does into a butterfly: they go through predictable stages. What are your company’s deal stages? Write them out. This includes learning who’s involved in each one, such as sales development reps, solutions consultants, sales operations teams, the deal desk, services team, legal team, etc. Know roughly what each group’s function is so that you know where to go when the time is needed. Use your newness as an excuse to bumble around, introduce yourself, and take people out to coffee.

The bottom line: Write out your company’s deal stages and who is involved at each one. It might look something like this:

4. Know Your Numbers and What You Have to Do

It always amazes me how many salespeople don’t know or concentrate on their numbers. Without this focus, you’re like a kite in the wind, subject to every passing breeze. Your performance (read: income) will be just as unpredictable.

How many calls/touches do you have to make to start a conversation? How many conversations lead to a sale? Find the most metrics-driven person on the team and get some approximate conversion rates to start working with so that you have benchmarks for your activity.

For instance, if you know that you can close three deals each month, 35% of all open deals close in-month, and it takes 50 calls to start one deal, you should be making no less than 107 calls/touches per week.

The bottom line: Get a peer to help you fill this out:

($ average sale)(# of sales needed to hit quota) = (# of opportunities)( average close ratio of opportunities) = (# of conversations)(average conversion ratio of conversations) = (# of calls)(average conversion ratio of calls)

5. Identify Your Strengths and Weaknesses

To get anywhere in sales, you must play to your strengths without being crippled by your weaknesses. Find out what you are best at and where you need to improve. A simple exercise to figure this out is to list out all the activities that you do in your role and rank them in order of favorite to least favorite.

For me, that’s:

• Planning
• Virtual presentations
• Mentoring
• Discovery calls
• Making slide decks
• Negotiations
• Cold calling

Done? Circle the bottom item on that list: that’s usually where you’re the weakest and need help. Hold yourself accountable for it and make your manager aware that this is an area that you want to grow in. Ask for their support and tackle it head-on by doing it repeatedly.

The bottom line: Make note of your strengths and weaknesses and always be improving.

6. Know What Is Expected of You

It’s critically important to set proper expectations so that you know how to exceed them. While everybody loves to hear warm, fuzzy, and optimistic things during the onboarding process like “With your experience, you’ll be performing in no time,” you need to iron out exactly what “performing” entails. Does that mean hitting quota in two weeks? Two months? A year?

If you don’t do this now, you could be blamed for, say, an unexpected team shortfall. Emotions always rise at the end of month and quarter, and this immunizes you from that. Save everyone the headache and create SMART goals (simple, measurable, actionable, realistic, and timely) and come up with exact numbers on what you will be expected to deliver and review it with your manager.

The bottom line: Get your manager’s expectations in writing.

7. Create a Plan That’s Actually Based on Reality

Management hired you and they’re excited about your potential—you plan to go in swinging and deliver your number faster than anyone else has before. But be extra careful about setting expectations too high.

I know plenty of sales reps that have optimistically forecasted doing 200% percent of their number in their first month because they were feeling good about it. Two months in, that was not the case. As you might expect, they’d fallen short and like Icarus, flew too close to the sun. Don’t put yourself in this position.

It’s far better to under-promise and over-deliver. These first few months are your chance to set a good and lasting impression with your boss, so aim to be the guy or gal who called 60% and delivered 80%, not the other way around.

The bottom line: Be realistic and create a plan that’ll allow you to over-deliver and post that goal on your desk.

8. Silo Your Activities for Efficiency

Trying to create lists, prospect, take notes, and strategize your next move all at the same time is a lot like trying to change gears on the freeway: you’ll create unnecessary friction and sparks will fly. That constant switching back and forth will wear out your transmission (brain).

So, break up different tasks like you’re on an assembly line and hit them one at a time: analyze your territory in one sitting. Come up with a list of companies and contacts in one sitting. Email through the list in one sitting. Call through the list in one sitting. Basically, do all your freeway driving one day and all your around-town errands the next. You’ll achieve a much higher top speed and get a whole lot more done with a lot less mental strain.

The bottom line: Tackle your activities one at a time.

9. Activity is Not Productivity

There is a powerful learning curve to getting started in sales. At first, you won’t know what’s productive and what isn’t. Instead of sweating it, think of yourself as a scientist in a lab trying different combinations of chemicals in order to make a serum. Every experiment gets you one step closer to the answer.

And like a scientist, don’t get emotionally attached to the outcomes. As Einstein said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.” After a few weeks or months, you should start to narrow down your focus to just those subject lines, objection-responses, and activities that were promising and achieve a far greater efficiency at selling.

The bottom line: Stay open to change and keep trying new combinations until you find what works.

10. Lean on Your Resources to Do the Selling

In sales, your job is to develop new business. Note carefully that nobody said that you had to do it alone. Just like you lean on your mentor, lean on your resources like solutions consultants, your manager, and even your company’s executives to help get it done. They want you to close your first deal, and you get to watch them work their magic and soak it all up. Once you get that morale-boosting first sale under your belt, then you can start to take things into your own hands and run the next one.

The bottom line: Don’t fight alone—ask for help closing your first deal.

11. Pay It Forward

“When I am tempted to criticize I will bite my tongue; when I am moved to praise I will shout from the roofs” – Og Mandino.

Go ahead and buy a few bottles of wine now to keep in your desk drawer. Why? Because in a successful sales environment, wine bottles are the “thank you” currency. Hand them out when people help you with things, like your co-worker in legal who stayed late to help you close a deal.

And when you’ve finally gotten a grasp on things, share your knowledge just as freely. Extend a hand back down the ladder that you just climbed up and help others just as you were helped. This is your opportunity to create the virtuous helping culture that we all want to be a part of. Pay it forward.

Feeling better about being new to the role? Good. Now, it’s time to put these tips into action. Have your own to add? Share them in the comments below!

11 Tips for Starting a New Sales Role was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 11 Tips for Starting a New Sales Role appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

The Amazon Echo and Google Home could be used to make and receive phone calls later this year, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal’s Ryan Knutson and Laura Stevens.

Citing “people familiar with the matter,” the report says that both Amazon and Google are looking to activate the feature, but that their attempts have been slowed by privacy and regulatory concerns.

Amazon has reportedly been working on Echo-specific voice calls since 2015, but has been held up by “employee turnover” as well. Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google declined to comment on the matter, only saying that it “continue[s] developing new experiences for Google Home.”

How exactly this feature would work on either device is unclear. The report suggests that the smart speakers would “most likely” use voice over internet protocol (VoIP) tech, which lets you make calls over the internet. This is what apps like Skype do today. Amazon launched its own Skype competitor called Chime on Tuesday.

The report says Amazon is considering other options, though, like giving the Echo its own phone number and using call forwarding, or syncing an Echo owner’s phone number with the speaker itself.

In any case, Amazon would be entering the market with less experience in phone tech than Google, which has operated its Google Voice service since 2009. Google Voice currently gives users a phone number that can be used for forwarding calls and making VoIP calls; it was recently updated by Google in late January. Google also runs a wireless service called Project Fi, which provides mobile data by piggybacking off Sprint and T-Mobile’s network.

Integrating voice-call support would make sense for speakers that, particularly in the Echo’s case, are growing increasingly popular and intelligent. But it would likely further the ongoing privacy concerns that exist with such devices, especially since both speakers have the ability to record conversations. One of the WSJ's sources says that Amazon wouldn't record the content of conversations, but that it would collect the length of those conversations and what numbers are dialed.

All of that, plus the myriad of regulatory hurdles associated with creating new telephone features, means Google and Amazon are likely far from getting speaker-specific voice calls up and running in the near-term. But if they do make it work, voice calling could turn the Echo and Home into modern-day landline phones.

You can read the full Wall Street Journal report here >>

SEE ALSO: Why Amazon's Echo is totally dominating — and what Google, Microsoft, and Apple have to do to catch up

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: These popular devices keep a recording of everything you ask them — here's how to find it and delete it

Will Roe v. Wade be overturned?

Will the United States bail on every international treaty to which it has previously signed?

Will Nicolas Cage have a late-career resurgence?

How often should I post to social media?

These (among others) are the central questions of our time.

You could fill Tom Brady’s trophy case with the amount of research that has been conducted on social media posting frequency. Our friends at CoSchedule, in fact, collated much of it to create this nifty consensus guide on when to post.

It’s good stuff.

But, it’s not true. None of it is true. Because all of those studies look at the success of each post in a vacuum. How many clicks, likes, shares, comments, etc. did a piece of social content get, and what happens to those baseline results when the frequency of publication goes up, or down?

Every single one of these reports ignores an unassailable certainty about success in social media marketing:

Social media posts that succeed are those that are worth posting.
Click To Tweet

Put another way, increased frequency doesn’t imperil your success in social media marketing. Instead, your success is mitigated every time you post something mediocre, or worse.

If You’re Not Up, You’re Down

Scott Stratten’s Brand Pulse concept

My friend Scott Stratten talks about the principle of Brand Pulse. He says that every interaction between a brand and a consumer either increases that person’s affinity for the brand, or reduces it. There is no “neutral” gear in our feelings about companies, only “forward” and “reverse.”

If you post something irrelevant, pointless, or worse in social media, the pulse slows. If you post something interesting and useful (a Youtility, if you’ll excuse the reference), the pulse quickens.

From the perspectives of emotions, loyalty, and advocacy the Brand Pulse idea has always been true. But now, it’s even more important because the social media overlords have designed algorithms to mimic the Brand Pulse.

Awesome is Celebrated. Lame is Hidden.

The algorithms employed by Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (and, to a lesser degree Google’s SERPs and SEM ad placement) are essentially governed by the principle of the Brand Pulse.

To whit, a piece of content shared in social media that gets disproportionate numbers of clicks, comments, shares, and likes will not only succeed because of the additional reach of the shares, but because the platforms actually show the content to more people.

Brands like to complain about this uneven distribution of content, but in reality:

Social media content is the ultimate meritocracy. Good content wins. Bad content fails.
Click To Tweet

Imagine if this meritocracy was applied to other elements of our lives. The great restaurant in your town is open 24×7. The crappy diner that never changes the oil in the fryer is only open 3:30-5:45 Tuesdays and Sundays: that is the restaurant equivalent of the social media Brand Pulse algorithm.

More is Neither Less, nor More

A few years ago, I published a slideshare presentation and blog post based on a presentation I gave at a SocialFresh conference called Shotguns Trump Rifles. My thesis at the time was that you should post more content in more places because it was the best way to defeat the algorithm changes that were just then starting to impact how social media posts were distributed and seen.

At the time, it made a lot of sense (at least to me), and our clients had a lot of success with that approach.

But today, the algorithms have grown even more finicky and pervasive. Now, posting mediocre content in social doesn’t actually impact your customers’ impressions of your brand all that much, because your customers NEVER EVEN SEE the post. Things that are invisible are rarely disappointing.

In social media, the algorithm is the most important customer.
Click To Tweet

Unless the algorithm loves your content, your actual, human customers will never know you exist. For evidence of this, look only at the many business Facebook pages that have zero engagement. Not limited engagement. Not little engagement. ZERO. Yet, they continue to post the same kinds of content on a daily basis because some study said daily posting is the right cadence.

(I am guilty of this too on my Jay Baer business Facebook page. I need to get much better there)

You should post to social media every time (and only when) you have something to post that your audience will love.

If you don’t have something worthwhile to say, DO NOT SAY IT. When you decide to push publish anyway, you are digging yourself and deeper and deeper hole with the social media algorithms.

The best social media publishing frequency is: when it's worthwhile
Click To Tweet

Cash Can’t Save You

As a practical matter, many businesses try to outfox the algorithms not by publishing exceedingly interesting content, but by using social media advertising to gain the reach they cannot achieve on the merit of their missives.

And, of course, this can help paper over your informational deficiencies.

But, I have NEVER seen a circumstance – either for Convince & Convert or for our many corporate clients – where a piece of content that failed organically succeeded wildly once paid promotion was applied.

Content that informs, entertains, or delights will work organically, and THAT is the content you should pay to promote. Putting significant paid amplification against mediocre content is the epitome of trying to make a silk purse out of sow’s ear. You can fool a few people at a distance, but upon close inspection, the whole charade comes tumbling down.

Gary Vaynerchuk put this more plainly recently when he said in a video (paraphrasing) Paid advertising cannot make shitty content less shitty.

If you want your social media program to succeed, stop worrying about what the research says about when and how often to post on each channel, and use just this one guideline…

Is this worth knowing?