04 Jan 22:05

Fold-Up Smartphone Screens Could Finally Make Their Big Debut

In 2017, Samsung will likely release a smartphone that transforms into a tablet

Illustration of a smartphone folding over the edge of a desk — Photo-illustration: Edmon de Haro

The rumors have been swirling for months. Though they couldn’t be confirmed, their persistence suggests that something significant may be coming from Samsung, possibly as early as this year: a foldable mobile.

Today, the world of mobiles consists of two major realms—tablets and smartphones. Tablets are good for reading magazines and books, typing long messages on a linked keyboard, looking at pictures, and surfing the Web. Smartphones are good for texting and talking. Engineers have long dreamed of merging the two.

Such a device would morph from one to the other by folding: Open, it’s a tablet, but by bending or folding it in half you’d transform it into a phone. “You can expect to open up your phone and double the screen real estate,” says Roel Vertegaal, a computer scientist at Queen’s University in Ontario. Besides the versatility, you’d have interesting new possibilities—imagine bending your phone to flip ahead in an e-book, just as you would flex a novel’s covers to jump ahead a few pages.

Gadgets Galore

bar chart — Shipments of smartphones were expected to outnumber those of tablets by an order of magnitude in 2016. Source: International Data Corp.

Samsung has pursued flexible designs for at least four years, going so far as to develop “artificial muscles” that push and pull a smartphone’s components into new positions to prevent damage as it bends. Now, according to media reports, the company may finally be ready to share those technologies with the world and save users the hassle of carrying both a phone and a tablet.

“Having that bimodality in a device would, I think, be really game changing,” says mobile analyst Wayne Lam at IHS Markit. “You’re not only creating a new form factor for the phone, but you’re also cannibalizing other product categories.”

Competitors are thinking along similar elastic lines. At a trade show last summer, Lenovo showed off a concept product for a smartphone that folded around a user’s wrist into a wearable device. Throughout 2016, a Chinese manufacturer named Moxi Group promised a limited release of its own high-end flexible smartphone. But Samsung would be the first of any major company to debut a device with a truly flexible screen.

If Samsung does release such a phone, it would signal the first major departure from the flat, rectangular form that has defined smartphone designs since Apple released the first iPhone in 2007. Manufacturers have experimented with curved glass and adopted larger screens, but essentially all smartphones today are design descendants of that original iPhone.

The simple, rigid smartphone has endured partly because the challenges of building a foldable screen that is rugged and dependable are great. Stiff components such as the battery must be made to either bend along with the screen or be situated away from the fold.

Vertegaal himself built a flexible smartphone in his lab last year and tested hundreds of screens before settling on one that worked—a high-definition organic light-emitting-diode screen produced by LG Display. OLED screens contain a thin film of organic compounds that produce light from an electric current right at the surface of the device. They are a favorite of designers working on flexible TV and mobile units because they do not require the bulky backlight and filters found in LCD screens.

Samsung happens to be the largest global supplier of OLED panels. In 2013, the company showed off a concept product with a bendable OLED screen at the CES electronics show. It set off a frenzy in the tech blogosphere and led to speculation that the company would release a smartphone based on it.

Vertegaal says the biggest challenge in building his own flexible phone was powering all the pixels in his LG display with connectors that could withstand repeated bendings. To keep it simple, he used a relatively primitive screen that had only 720 pixels. He realized that the rigid materials found in conventional smartphones are, unfortunately, quite delicate. “Circuits are made out of metals, and these metals break under stress,” he says. “While it’s possible to make these bendable screens, it’s difficult to make them in a way that they don’t break.”

One solution may be to use printed electronics to integrate razor-thin circuits and flattened antennas along the surfaces of a smartphone. In theory, this technique could make phones more flexible by reducing the number of large components and fragile attachments within the device. However, the easiest way to create such products is with injection molding, a process that is seldom used in smartphone manufacturing.

Right now, only two companies in the world have the expertise and production chops to manufacture a smartphone with a bendable display for the mass market: Samsung and LG, says William Stofega, a mobile analyst at International Data Corp. Just last year, at CES, LG exhibited an OLED screen, less than 1 millimeter thick, that could roll up like a newspaper. But Stofega says the time, complexity, and expense of manufacturing means that any flexible products that debut this year will likely be pricey, high-end devices.

Samsung needs a hit to regain momentum after last year’s Galaxy Note 7 fiasco, in which it coped with reports of dozens of the smartphones catching fire. Ultimately, the problems prompted a recall that slashed profits by 17 percent, or US $4 billion, in that quarter. A flashy line of foldable phones could help the company rebuild its reputation. However, it would be a high-risk strategy, Stofega notes. “No one wants to risk coming out with a device that looks pretty cool and then, after about 2,000 bends, just cracks right in half,” he says.

Samsung wouldn’t comment on its plans for 2017. So we’ll all have to wait and see if the company dazzles us this year with a couple of flexible smartphones—or leaves the many design headaches and teething pains for its rivals to endure.

This article appears in the January 2016 print issue as “Fold-Up Screens Could Make Their Big Debut.”

04 Jan 22:05

Intel Finds Moore’s Law’s Next Step at 10 Nanometers

In 2017, the company will exploit its manufacturing edge to create a new generation of chips

/image/Mjg0MzkxMw.jpeg — Photo-illustration: Edmon de Haro

These days, forecasts about the future of Moore’s Law tend to look quite gloomy. But Intel’s outlook—at least for the next few years—is decidedly bright.

Sometime in 2017, Intel will ship the first processors built using the company’s new, 10-nanometer chip-manufacturing technology. Intel says transistors produced in this way will be cheaper than those that came before, continuing the decades-long trend at the heart of Moore’s Law—and contradicting widespread talk that transistor-production costs have already sunk as low as they will go. In the coming years, Intel plans to make further improvements to the design of these transistors. And, for the first time, the company will optimize its manufacturing technology to accommodate other companies that wish to use Intel’s facilities to produce chips based on ARM architecture, which is nearly ubiquitous in modern mobile processors.

Arm on the Rise

Although it wasn’t always the case, today there is little about the name of a chip-manufacturing generation, or “node,” that aligns with the dimension of any particular feature on a chip. But the transistors on Intel’s 10-nm generation will still be denser than those on today’s 14-nm chips—as well as other companies’ 10-nm offerings, says Intel senior fellow Mark Bohr. Intel has released few figures to date on the dimensions of the new generation. But both the length of transistor gates, which turn transistors on and off, and the distance from one gate to the next—a figure known as gate pitch—will be smaller this time around. The minimum gate pitch will go from 70 nm to 54 nm. And logic cells—transistor combinations used to perform standard logic functions—can be less than 46 percent the size of those built on 14-nm technology.

This is a more aggressive level of miniaturization than in years past, says Bohr, and it helps counteract a recent trend: a slower cadence to the introduction of new chip-manufacturing generations. “One important message is that this node, and the products that we’ll be making on it, will hopefully dispute some of the concerns of the industry that Moore’s Law is slowing down,” Bohr says.

Even though the cost of producing a wafer full of chips will be higher at 10 nm than at 14, Intel says the cost per transistor will be lower. The 10-nm chips are also expected to deliver improvements to switching speed and energy consumption. As has been the case for years already, clock speed isn’t liable to increase, though. “It’s really power reduction or energy efficiency that’s the primary goal on these new generations, besides or in addition to transistor cost reduction,” Bohr says. Improved compactness and efficiency will make it more attractive to add more cores to server chips and more execution units onto GPUs, he says.

“It’s really power reduction or energy efficiency that’s the primary goal on these new generations”

In the past, Intel upgraded its transistors once every couple of years, with the introduction of a new manufacturing generation. But at 14 nm, the company offered what might be called a deminode: a set of improvements to its 14-nm transistors before the debut of 10 nm. At 10 nm, the company aims to introduce two of these deminodes (10 nm+ and 10 nm++) before it introduces its next manufacturing generation at 7 nm. This is in part a reaction to the increasing challenges in moving to the next chip generation, Bohr says: “If it’s going to take you longer to [get to] the 10-nm or to the 7-nm generation, then the next best thing to do is to find ways to enhance what you have today and keep delivering better products every year.”

Samsung and TSMC are also making 10-nm chips; in October, Samsung announced that it is the first to reach mass production, with devices bearing its 10-nm chips launching in early 2017. GlobalFoundries is opting to go straight to 7 nm beginning in 2018. All are aggressively pushing the limits of miniaturization, says Dan Hutcheson, CEO of VLSI Research, a firm that analyzes developments in the semiconductor industry. “Everybody’s making these leaps,” Hutcheson says. But they are not marching entirely in lockstep: If you compare 10-nm offerings, he says, “Intel is still about a couple of years ahead” in terms of feature size.

In addition, Hutcheson says, Intel is distinguished from other chipmakers by the control and uniformity of its manufacturing process. This could offer the company a significant advantage when it comes to its foundry services, which use Intel production lines to fabricate chips for other companies.

Manufacturing chips for others is a new approach for Intel. And adding the ability to manufacture ARM processors is an important step. “If you don’t have ARM,” says Hutcheson, “it’s really hard to be a foundry, because it is the standard architecture.”

Intel says the first 10-nm chip to ship will be one of its own processors, with chips for others to follow, but perhaps not until 2018.

This article appears in the January 2017 print issue as “Moore’s Law’s Next Step: 10 Nanometers.”

04 Jan 22:05

2017: The Year of Self-Driving Cars and Trucks

Connected cars and driverless fleet cars are on the way. How will we deal with them?

opening illustration for spectral lines department — Illustration: Greg Mably

Former GM R&D chief Larry Burns has likened it to an arms race. But whether you think the advent of self-driving vehicles is going to destroy our economic systems or save our cities, the total automation of driving is certainly going to transform the way we live.

Ford, Google, Mercedes-Benz, Tesla, and Uber, among others, have all boldly declared that they will get fully autonomous cars and trucks on the road in the United States by 2021. At the end of last year the Uber-owned company Otto sent a Budweiser beer delivery from Fort Collins, Colo., to Colorado Springs by autonomous truck. Chinese Internet company Baidu, partnering with Foton Motor Group, introduced its sleek semi-autonomous Super Truck. Daimler tested a driverless truck platoon in Germany. The only place driverless cars don’t seem to be turning up anytime soon is India, where, according to Maruti Suzuki chairman R.C. Bhargava, autonomous cars will never be able to keep up with their make-it-up-as-you-go human counterparts.

In this year’s Top Tech special report, you’ll find a story by Evan Ackerman about nuTonomy, one of the up-and-coming companies jockeying for position in the race to build autonomous cars and fleets. The MIT spin-off has been experimenting with its software- and sensor-loaded Renault Zoes in Singapore since last year, and is also test-driving its nascent self-driving taxi fleet in the Boston area.

Singapore has to be proactive about self-driving cars, as Ackerman points out: The city-state’s 5.6 million people are packed into just over 700 square kilometers, making it the third most densely populated country in the world. Roads in Singapore take up nearly as much land as housing does, and as the population keeps growing, building more roads is simply not an option. Boston has similarly run out of road room.

As with any disruptive technology, there’s good news and bad news. Rice University’s Moshe Vardi, interviewed in advance of the Humans, Machines, and the Future of Work Conference he organized in Houston last month, explained the many positive impacts self-driving vehicles will have on us and our environment, “until you start to think about what it will do to the job market.” And that’s because, in the United States at any rate, the most common job in more than 50 percent of U.S. states is that of driver. Some 3.5 million people drive for a living. Not to mention the tens of millions of people who work in the infrastructure that supports cars, trucks, and drivers—motels, restaurants, gas stations, you name it—some 15 million by Vardi’s estimate.

Technological progress may not be inevitable, but technological change certainly seems to be. Questions about the impact of self-driving vehicles on the global workforce are already the subject of fierce and sometimes hand-wringing public debate, but mostly among sociologists and economists and Silicon Valley gurus. How interesting and useful it would be if the technologists and engineers who are assembling this new self-driving world helped frame these discussions about our driverless future.

This article appears in the January 2017 print issue as “Self-Driving Cars and Trucks Are on the Move.”

A correction to this article was made on 3 January 2017.

31 Dec 18:26

Cloud Computing Explained: SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS

by Luke Robbins

Cloud computing is an invaluable resource that all modern businesses should consider as part of their strategy. But many people hesitate to act because they don’t quite understand it – what it is, what it does, or how they can use it to improve their business and their bottom line. That’s quite understandable, since the topic can be somewhat confusing and the term has been appropriated by some businesses for unrelated purposes in order to take advantage of cloud computing’s popularity.

So today, we’re clearing the air, clearing away the obscurity of the cloud to see what’s really going on at ground level.

Cloud Computing: The Basics

Cloud computing sounds ethereal and impossibly complex, but at the end of the day, it is simply access to computers. Just, not your computers. Cloud services are shared resources that provide applications, tools, and data on demand to businesses and individuals, freeing them from the necessity of ownership. It acts like a utility, providing as much or as little power as your business needs – and billing you accordingly.

Cloud computing provides numerous benefits to customers, offering flexibility, reliability, and scaling capabilities that are difficult for most businesses to match with on-site alternatives. And it does all this while saving you money. Because you’re sharing resources, you don’t have to shoulder high purchase or maintenance costs, and instead can leave it to the experts. Your provider maintains the hardware and handles security, relieving you of some major headaches.

That’s a rather high-level overview, but what can cloud computing do exactly? How can you utilize this resource? Let’s go over the three major cloud computing applications: Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) to see how companies use these services to improve their business processes.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

You’ve probably heard of this one. SaaS is the largest market of cloud services, and the most accessible to the average person.

In a nutshell, SaaS is simply a term for applications or databases that are accessed over the Internet, instead of being housed on-site. It’s a pay-as-you-go service that eliminates the need to purchase such software outright. Though the action behind the curtain is quite complex, on its surface SaaS is just a way for you to access programs you would otherwise download or install on your computer.

The SaaS market includes applications like CRM software, enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs), CMS software (like the kind supplying this blog post), supply chain management, and various other applications such as file sharing, online backups and data management. Want names? Salesforce, Microsoft Office, and Adobe products are all available in SaaS form.

Why go for SaaS over a full purchase? Well, besides the software that is exclusively SaaS, this model benefits companies by allowing flexibility, scalability, risk-avoidance, and a lower cost of entry:

Because SaaS is accessed over the Internet, it goes where you are. Don’t have your work computer with you? Doesn’t matter: just sign in at your new location and you not only have your software, but your data and work history ready to go.
Going through a rapid expansion? With SaaS, you don’t have to purchase and install dozens or hundreds of copies (along with new servers) – just purchase access for new users.
Software is not perfect. Ever. Even the space shuttle had errors. What matters is being able to correct those problems when they come up, as well as implement improvements. With traditional software models, you would have to purchase new editions, or wait for big yearly updates to come through in order to get that functionality. But with SaaS, upgrades are continuous, improving the software regularly.
SaaS lets you dip a toe in. You can try out the software, and decide later whether or not you want to continue use. Applications can cost businesses tens of thousands of dollars; it is prudent to take the option that gives you the chance to determine if the purchase is worth it.
SaaS can handle spikes in traffic. When you run your applications on your own servers, you are limited by that capacity, and if there is an unexpected demand then they will crash. But cloud computing centers are built to handle that overload, and can scale to handle the traffic.

So why don’t people use SaaS for everything? Well, it seems to be moving in that direction. SaaS was a $50 billion industry in 2015, and is expected to more than triple by 2022. It is growing nearly five times faster than the traditional software market, and is only accelerating as the infrastructure and platforms behind it develop as well. And that leads us to…

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Software development is not only difficult in itself, but involves an incredibly complicated and convoluted process to get the product to the consumer. Companies have to do more than write code – they have to manage runtime, middleware, operating systems, virtualization, servers, storage, networking, and more. That’s a lot to handle, particularly for companies who are just starting out, who don’t have the budget, the infrastructure, or even just the time to deal with all of these elements.

Enter cloud computing, in the form of Platform-as-a-Service. PaaS helps developers create, ship, and manage their applications by assuming all of the responsibilities that normally accompany this process. Users just pay to access the PaaS through a web browser and can hit the ground running with development, without first having to get everything set up. Its integrated development environment (IDE) includes functionality to manage all of these aspects to facilitate deployment, and connects with other systems for easy integration of files or data.

But PaaS goes even further than that, providing web-based tools to aid in development, team collaboration, version control, database integration, security, and monitoring. PaaS also provides many of the benefits of SaaS, such as the pay-as-you-go pricing model, scalability, rolling upgrades, and the ability for users to access their desired applications from anywhere.

Odds are, you already know about the biggest players in the PaaS market. Amazon Web Services leads the field, but it faces competition from companies such as Salesforce, Microsoft Azure, RedHat’s OpenShift, Heroku, and of course, Google App Engine.

PaaS is poised as the fastest growing segment of cloud computing, projected to attain a 41% compound annual growth rate through 2016.

Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS)

While the average person typically encounters SaaS more than PaaS or IaaS, it’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service that probably springs to mind when you think about cloud computing. IaaS is, as the name suggests, a way of providing infrastructure to users as an on-demand service. It’s the hardware – physical servers, data storage, network equipment – and related backend software that companies can utilize for a fee, without having to purchase these items themselves.

Shared resources are referred to as “public cloud,” and are deployed over the Internet. This is the typical form IaaS takes, but some companies prefer to employ cloud computing principles on a “private cloud,” for security reasons and to ensure complete control. Due to the popularity of the latter, some providers have begun offering hybrid cloud solutions, consisting of a mix of the two. Providers include the usual suspects such as Amazon Web Services and Google, along with competitors like Rackspace and regional providers.

It probably will not come as a huge surprise to hear that the benefits of IaaS are – as with SaaS and PaaS – the ability to scale dynamically, a utility-like pricing model, distributed resources, and the ability for multiple users to share a single piece of hardware. It benefits organizations that don’t have the money to invest in hardware, avoids the usual IT-related problems of rapid expansion, and helps with volatile demand, absorbing spikes and dips without a hitch.

Drawbacks of Cloud Computing

Clearly, cloud computing provides a plethora of advantages for business owners, while saving them money at the same time. But what’s the catch? Where does cloud computing fall short?

The first drawback of cloud computing options is speed. Whether or not that is problematic depends on your business, and how critically you depend on your operational efficiency. For the average user, this doesn’t make a difference. But if you require extremely fast processing of real time data – for instance, in the financial industry – then the time required for your local network to communicate with your cloud resources may make this option infeasible.

The second drawback – though first in the minds of many, hence private clouds – is security. There are a number of risks associated with cloud computing, and while security of cloud computing is improving rapidly, some companies do not feel comfortable leaving their sensitive data – and applications – in the hands of a third party.

Cloud computing also may be impractical for companies who have to follow certain compliance standards about where data is stored. Some industries (and countries) have rigid rules, which cloud computing does not necessarily meet. However, with modern encryption, the major cloud providers now meet most standards.

Price is an important consideration as well: while cloud computing eliminates high startup costs, it is not always as economically viable in the long run for large companies, who will always need a large amount of processing power and also benefit from buying hardware in bulk.

Finally, one of the biggest and most obvious drawbacks of cloud computing is the cloud itself, and how you connect to it. Cloud computing allows you to replace much of your software, platform, and infrastructure needs with access over the Internet, but that requires, well, the Internet! Without that connection, end users can’t access their data, their applications, or anything else that’s not also locally available. This isn’t necessarily a huge concern for every business, but it does require a little more care when planning out business operations.

Taking the First Step

Phew! That was quite a ride, and we covered a lot. But believe it or not, we just barely dipped a toe into the field of cloud computing. So what do you think? Cool, right?? Cloud computing is an incredibly powerful tool when leveraged properly, and you should absolutely consider how it can benefit your business.

[This post was originally published on Switchfast.com]

31 Dec 18:26

5 Easy Ways to Individualize Your Mobile Messaging in 2017

by Justina Perro

Think about your favorite apps and why you enjoy them.

Do they remember the last action you took within the app?

Do they serve up relevant information inside the app?

Do they send you communication that feels personalized for you?

You’ve heard us talk a lot about individualization lately; and that’s because we anticipate it becoming the focal point of app user engagement and retention as we move into 2017.

And while the basic best practices to delivering an individualized experience might be universal, the secrets to success vary greatly by industry.

To get you started, we’ve broken down some easy ways to segment users into audiences so that your app marketing remains individualized and engaging.

1.) By usage frequency:

Basing your messaging off of the in-app behavior of your users is one of the easiest and most effective ways to tailor your messaging. Since little to no assumption is necessary, it’s an effective way to highlight content that will appeal to a specific audience or target a promotion. What does frequency segmentation look like by industry?

Media & Entertainment:: A streaming app can serve up your ‘most frequently consumed content’ as a category for easy viewing. In addition, it can display an in-app message that recommends new shows based on the genres that you watch most frequently.

Travel: An airline app can send a loyalty reward inbox message offering a complimentary beverage on their next flight to all users who have flown over 10x with them in the past 12 months. Or, spin this as a re-engagement campaign by sending the promotion as a push notification to users that have flown with them more than 10x in the past 12 months, but haven’t booked any flights in the past 2 months.

Retail: A restaurant can send users who frequently order their Italian combo a “$2 off” push notification offer. They might even want to use a geofence and send it as a geo-push, so that the user sees it right as they’re walking by one of the restaurant’s locations.

netflix segmentation.png

Netflix serves up my most frequently watched content so I can dive right back.

2.) By favorites:

Similar to the frequented items, if a user has a go-to artist they listen to or a hotel chain they prefer to book with, it’s perfect opportunity for you to engage with them in a meaningful way. Segment users based on these known favorites so that you can serve up a truly personalized in-app experience as well as tailor your messaging to them based off of this information.

Media & Entertainment: A music streaming app can create customized playlists for their users based on their favorite artists
Travel: Sending a 15% off push notification to a user who has indicated that they prefer to stay at Starwood Hotels.
Retail: A drugstore can send a geo-push to users walking by their store with offers on items they frequently purchase.

bands in town segmentation.jpg

Bands in Town let Massachusetts fans know that The Biebs is coming back to town with this rich push.

3. By recently viewed/recent actions:

One easy way to deliver individualize content is to create timely campaigns off of recently viewed content or in-app actions. Here’s how:

Media & Entertainment:: A news app can send a push notification with updates to a developing story the user viewed.
Travel: A travel app can send a push notification with updated pricing to all users who recently viewed flights to the Bahamas. To make this push even more effective, the app might want to call out if there’s a new lowest price.
Retail: An eCommerce app sends a notification offering free shipping on an item that a user has viewed multiple times, but hasn’t purchased.

Screen Shot 2016-12-22 at 9.55.25 AM.png

Hopper keeps an eye on flights for users, and sends them a push when the price is right.

4. By conversion:

Similar to in-app actions, another best practice for mobile marketing is to ensure there is always confirmation for any conversions taken within your app. This provides peace of mind to your users that they are all set, and as with any transaction, is just in good form to do so.

Media & Entertainment: A media app confirms your reservation with an in-app message.
Travel: A travel app sends a push notification reminding users it’s time to check-in to their hotel.
Retail: A coffee chain sends an in-app message confirming a user’s coffee order has been placed, and will be ready for pick-up shortly.

opentable segmentation.png

OpenTable sends me a reminder about my upcoming reservation.

5. By location:

Location-based engagement is one of the most compelling ways to reach a user because of how personal it is. At a basic level, understanding where a user lives is incredibly important to know, because it provides context to almost all of your future messaging. For example, if a retail app sends a push notification about a swimsuit sale in January to users in Minnesota, it’s not going to go over well.

If you want to take your location-based messaging to a new level, you should consider using geofences to trigger notifications the instant a user enters or exits a specific location. It doesn’t get much more personalized than that!.

Media & Entertainment: A ticketing app lets users know when their favorite band is coming to town
Travel: An airline app lets users know when there are flight deals for vacations from their hometown
Retail: A retail store sends a geo-push to someone walking by their store to remind them about the unspent balance on their gift card

Sephora reminds users they have free money to spend when they pass by their store.

Listen Up App Marketers: Basic Segmentation Is No Longer An Option

As you can see, there are many ways you can slice and dice your user data to create compelling user experiences, and it doesn’t take a ton of effort to do so. User segmentation needs to be an underlying theme to your 2017 app marketing strategy.

Why? Because there’s no such thing as a one-size-fits-all app experience. What’s exciting to one user may fall flat with another. Similarly? What matters to a user in Florida may not matter to one in Oregon. What is relevant to every user is the desire to having their app experience tailored to them.

The rule of thumb for all of your marketing should be to not reach out unless you have something worthwhile to say. It’s ok that not all users will fall under the above segmentation examples. It’s also ok for users to not receive a message from you for a while. No news is good news holds true for mobile marketing so that users don’t become desensitized to your messages.

How do you segment your app users? We want to hear below!

31 Dec 18:23

6 Really Basic Sales Missteps That Annoy Customers

by Kim Honjo

We’ve all had interactions with salespeople that left us more irritated than eager to buy. Maybe they tried the hard sell too early on, or didn’t really listen to what your needs were. As good as their intentions might have been or how right the product or service was for you, you left the conversation with a distinctly negative impression.

Recently, we talked with a handful of industry experts who shared their insights about common “sales fails” — check them out here in our interactive guide. It got me thinking about some of the sales faux pas I’ve personally experienced, and I’m sure I’m not the only one. I wouldn’t quite describe them as complete sales “fails,” but these habits won’t win you more business or impress your customers. Any of these annoy you too?

1. You don’t know or remember my name.

Really? It’s the absolute minimum you can do when you’re with a prospect or customer. A short story: Years ago, one of our vendors could not distinguish between two male colleagues. They looked nothing alike, but the rep was forever mixing up their names. At first, it seemed a little funny, but it ended up going on for years. After meeting regularly, multiple times a year, it’s not a joke anymore — it’s just rude. We wondered what else the rep was forgetting or was careless about.

2. You speak more than you listen.

Most salespeople are terrific conversationalists; it is a core part of the job. But a great rep knows that going into a meeting and pitching things left and right is a surefire mood-killer. If you’re speaking to a prospect like you’re on the TV show Shark Tank and they’re the Sharks, you’re making the assumption that you know what they need and what’s best for their company. It should be the other way around. Ask the customer to explain their problems and vision to you, so that you can respond with informed recommendations and solutions that fit the challenges they describe. When you listen more, you’re building stronger relationships and showing the prospect that you bring value to the table as a business advisor.

3. You call over and over (and over and over…)

Before the internet and email, one of the only ways to drum up new business was to cold-call. But since one call wasn’t likely to do the trick, sales reps began calling incessantly with the hopes that they would eventually connect with an interested party. That kind of tenacity might have worked in past, but selling has since evolved beyond a broad strokes guessing game. Customers no longer want nor respond well to repeat callers. Today’s CRM solutions can cut out the guesswork and let a rep know exactly where to focus their efforts, instead of annoying prospects and customers by blindly picking up the phone to interrupt their day with yet another call.

4. You’re not selling to the right person.

When I was working as an assistant, I used to get queries from all kinds of sales reps from everything from software, to office supplies, to brand partnerships. Most of the reps realized I was a gatekeeper of sorts, but many of them plowed forward anyway, trying to sell to me outright, despite my not having any kind of purchasing power or full knowledge of my company’s strategic plans. It wasted both of our times. Before going in, salespeople need to conduct research via a company’s website or social media to ensure they’re reaching the best possible person — and tailor the pitch accordingly.

5. You look at your phone during our meeting … repeatedly

Excuse me, do you have something more pressing going on? Maybe you do. Maybe you’re checking on the status of a very important deal or waiting for a crucial communication to come through. Staying connected and on top of all tasks is a priority, and it’s tempting to reach for our phones to sneak a peek, but resist! During a meeting, the customer you’re with and what you can do for them is your top priority. Looking at your phone conveys the insulting impression that your mind is elsewhere and that this meeting — and this prospect or customer — isn’t important enough to warrant your full attention.

6. You aren’t prepared when I speak with you.

I’m not talking about unexpected run-ins at a local restaurant, or even if I call you back at 5pm on a Friday as you’re heading out the door. I’m talking about when we have a scheduled meeting. Going into a sales call or meeting with no plan is a mistake that both novices and experienced sellers make. Take the time to think strategically about your desired outcomes, both for your prospect and yourself. It will help your interactions go more smoothly and you’ll accomplish a lot more.

Check out this interactive guide for more “sales fails” — and how to avoid them.

31 Dec 18:22

How Starbucks’s Culture Brings Its Strategy to Life

by Paul Leinwand

In most organizations, culture and strategy tend to be discussed in separate conversations. Executives know that culture is important and that a negative culture can hurt company performance, but they often don’t know what to do about it. Or they attempt to improve the situation by launching a culture initiative to “make the workplace more positive.” What most executive teams typically fail to do is to connect the company’s culture with how the company makes its strategy work.

Take Starbucks: The cafe chain positions itself not just as a seller of coffee but as an experience provider, creating a “third place” for conviviality beyond home and the workplace. Walk into a Starbucks anywhere in the world and you will find a consistently comfortable and welcoming ambiance. But you don’t get that simply by telling your staff to be warm and friendly.

Starbucks’ culture is powerful because it is tightly linked to the company’s distinctive capabilities. The feel of Starbucks stores isn’t created merely by the layout and the décor — it exists because the people behind the counter understand how their work fits into a common purpose, and recognize how to accomplish great things together without needing to follow a script.

Over many years, Starbucks has built a capability to foster a relationship-driven, employees-first approach, which encourages staff to form close bonds with each other. Called “partners” rather than employees, even part-time staff (in the U.S.) receive stock options and health insurance. At the height of the global financial crisis, when other companies were cutting HR costs wherever they could, Starbucks invested in staff training, including coffee tastings and courses that ultimately qualified for credit at higher education institutions. Former company president Howard Behar believed that employees who feel cared for will care about their customers. One former Starbucks worker noted that “nobody at Starbucks ever ordered anyone to do anything. It was always: ‘Would you do me a favor?’ Or something similar.”

While most organizations somewhat support the notions of diversity and inclusivity, Starbucks not only understands the importance of having staff of diverse backgrounds in order to create a welcoming environment for customers of diverse backgrounds; it has built the capability to deliver on that aspiration into its HR processes. Together, these capabilities enable Starbucks to deliver on its strategic goal of being that “third place” that customers value.

Companies whose culture and strategy are not aligned in this way often struggle to understand how they can make the linkage. Every company has its own distinctive culture — the reservoir of behaviors, traits, values and mind-sets that people in an enterprise share. But cultures are complicated, with hundreds of disparate elements. Often, these elements are not good or bad in and of themselves, but they have aspects with both positive and negative implications.

When most companies try to improve their culture, they focus on the negative aspects, and try to fix them. This sounds reasonable, but what we’ve learned is that the opposite approach is much more successful. You should identify a few positive attributes within your culture that are connected directly to your identity and the specific capabilities that are driving success in your business, double down on them and find ways to accelerate and extend them throughout the organization. Empower the critical few managers and employees who personify the best behaviors and can help you bring them to the forefront. Work on spreading the critical few behaviors that enable your strategy and counterbalance some of the negative aspects of your culture. Articulate—from the top down—the critical few attributes of your enterprise that people genuinely care about and that can help move your strategy forward. Great behaviors and attributes break down all the barriers to building your distinctive capabilities, and as they expand across the organization, they will squeeze out the negative aspects in your culture.

This relatively subtle approach has far more power than an unfocused “culture initiative,” because it lets people bring their own emotional energy to an enterprise where they feel they have a stake—and thus leverages the company’s culture to bring its strategic identity to life.

31 Dec 18:22

The Reason Why Prospects Don’t Call You Back

by Frank Rumbauskas

WhyWontProspectsCall

As much as I’d love to, I make an effort to read each and every email I receive from my readers. However, being a popular sales author, there’s no way I can return all of them, and even reading all of them is impossible due to sheer volume, but I do try.

However, your prospects don’t try. They most likely don’t even care. That’s why they usually don’t call you back.

Why? Because you’re not giving them any value up front, and they know it.

Every time I receive a cold call, or sometimes even an email, 9 times out of 10 I don’t even want to hear it. Why? Because I know very well that it’s someone either trying to sell me something, or trying to get something free from me without any compensation. In other words, there’s no value in it for me.

You may have heard by now the story of my first good sales training course, where I learned that cold calling is a waste of time. In addition, I learned of the acronym “WIIFM” in that training:

WIIFM = “What’s In It For Me”

We were taught that before saying one word to a sales prospect – or doing anything with your prospects – to always ask ourselves, “What’s the WIIFM?” Or to say, you had better have value for the prospect, or it was a total waste of time.

Almost no salespeople do this.

Every time I get unsolicited calls from sales reps, there’s never a WIIFM. And that’s why I don’t call back. Or write back. Or want to hear from them again.

Everything you say to a prospective customer, every word you type to your prospects, every action you take with a prospect, MUST contain a WIIFM. And you’d better give the WIIFM up front if you want the prospect to pay attention! There are no exceptions to this rule.

That’s why cold calling is a waste of time. Forget about all the tough receptionists, advanced anti-cold-call phone systems, no soliciting signs, and all that. If you do manage to get a qualified prospect on the phone or in front of you, the issue is that there’s really no way to open a cold call with a WIIFM. Cold calling, by its very nature, is anti-WIIFM. Cold calls are all about what YOU want, not what’s best for the prospect.

(Also, “elevator speeches” and “unique value propositions” don’t count as WIIFMs. They’re worn-out cliches and catchphrases that sales managers love to throw around, and that’s all.)

The bottom line is if you want to increase your sales numbers, and achieve huge sales success, you must never, ever approach your prospects without giving a WIIFM up front. And if you can’t think of one, you shouldn’t be talking to them in the first place. That means they’re not a genuinely qualified prospect for you – and it’s unethical to attempt to sell anything to anyone that doesn’t deliver powerful WIIFMs – real world value – to them.

In closing, remember that cold calling is by far the most anti-WIIFM sales strategy out there. If you’re cold calling, you have no hope of delivering a true WIIFM, up front, to your prospects, which means you have zero chance of making a sale.

Learn how you can stop cold calling forever and become a sales rock star by downloading a 37-page PDF preview of the Never Cold Call Again System.

31 Dec 18:20

Why Habits Build Business And Brands

by Guest Author

Why Habits Build Business And Brands

Habits are good for business. In fact, many industries could not survive without them. The incentive systems and business models of the companies that make habit-forming products require someone gets hooked. Without consumer habits, these habit-forming businesses would go bust.

While most of us think of cigarettes or gambling as habit-forming products, the fact is, a much wider swath of industries rely on consumer’s using their products without thought or deliberation. These habit-forming businesses have no secret agenda or nefarious ambitions. They are in business to give people what they want, even if at times, what the consumer wants isn’t necessarily good for them. But like every other company, habit-forming businesses are run by well-intentioned people. Hard-working folks with families and dreams of their own. So how then can these two realities coexist? How can companies seek to hook their customers, while also being run by decent people who have just as visceral of an aversion to manipulation as the rest of us?

The Habit Business

The answer lies in the business imperative. An enterprises’ worth is the sum of the future profits it will generate. MBAs are taught to calculate the value of an enterprise this way and it is the benchmark investors use to determine the fair price of a company’s shares. CEOs and their management teams are evaluated by their ability to increase the value of their stock. Their job is to implement strategies to grow future cash flow by some combination of increasing revenues and decreasing expenses.

Creating consumer habits is an effective way to drive share price by increasing what companies call “customer lifetime value.” CLTV is the amount of money made from a customer before they switch to a competitor, stop using the product, or die. Some products have a very high CLTV. Credit card customers for example, tend to stay loyal for a very long time and are worth a bundle.

Someone Must Get Hooked

Acquiring customers is expensive and time consuming. Ensuring customers are habituated to using a product decreases these expenses, thereby increasing enterprise value.

It’s worth noting that a surprising number of businesses follow a negative binomial distribution, also known as a Pareto concentration. Typically thought of as the 80/20 rule, the phenomenon occurs wherever a few buyers account for the vast majority of revenue. However, at times that split can be much more skewed than one might think.

While for most consumer goods, the concentration tends to be 60/20, for online gaming companies like Zynga, 100% of the revenue comes from just 2% of players.

In most consumer-facing businesses the Pareto Law applies. These customers are obviously very important to the company because without them, the enterprise could not survive, their profit margins simply would not allow it.

The combination of a business imperative to drive shareholder value by increasing CLTV along with the identification of the most loyal customers, means companies spend significant resources competing for a small set of “heavy users.” Habit-forming businesses are therefore highly motivated to hook customers – and keep them using their products for as long as possible.

Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by Nir Eyal. Excerpted from his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Build A More Valuable Future For Your Brand. Join us in Hollywood, California for Brand Leadership in the Age of Disruption, our 5th annual competitive-learning event designed around brand strategy.

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31 Dec 18:20

Building Effective Marketing And Sales Strategies

by Dave Brock

I just read an outstanding article, How To Create An Effective Account-Based Sales Strategy In 5 Steps.

It’s quite an excellent article, netting out the 5 Steps:

Define your ideal company profile.
Define your ideal buyer personas.
Build a sales process to match each buyer journey.
Provide content to match each stage for key personas.
Measure, learn, improve.

I finished this, applauding. I might have added some items around focusing on what the customer values and value creation, but I’m certain that is implied in the steps outlined in this article.

But then I thought, aren’t these the steps of any effective marketing and sales strategy? Aren’t we supposed to focus on our ideal customer profiles (enterprise, personas)? Aren’t we supposed to have selling processes that are aligned to our customers’ buying processes (journey)? Aren’t we supposed to have content that’s relevant to the customer–to each key persona and where they are in their buying journeys? Aren’t we supposed to constantly measure, learn, improve?

The tips provided in the article are sound tips for everything we do in sales and marketing–whether we are selling to a brand new customer or one we’ve known for some time. These lessons are relevant across all customer types–individuals, departments, groups, enterprises of all sizes.

Yes, there are some differences in account-based marketing and sales programs–but more from context and past relationship. The fundamentals of effective sales and marketing are the same for first time buyers, repeat customers, and accounts of all sizes. The fundamentals of identifying and creating value for our customers, whether they are individuals, departments, small businesses or enterprises, are the same.

It’s ironic as we “discover” account based sales and marketing programs, that the things we think of as different, are really the same. It causes one to pause to consider, “What if we did these things with every prospect, every customer, every organization we deal with? Would the results of all our sales and marketing programs be different?”

I know you already know the answer to that question. We know these principles are fundamental to any success. The tough part is our continued focus and commitment to execute on these fundamentals. But that’s what separates top performers from everyone else. They already know this.

31 Dec 18:19

4 Ways Lead Scoring Can Reinforce Your Marketing Strategy and Grow Your Revenue [Ebook]

by Tanya Chu

If you didn’t have much time to delve into your lead scoring this year, it’s not too late to make the business case to do so in 2017! How you structure (and restructure) your lead scoring can give you insights into how your marketing strategy is performing. Even if you already have a lead scoring system in place, it’s a good idea to re-evaluate it as your organization and its needs change.

Here are four ways that lead scoring can make you a smarter marketer:

1. Demographic Scoring Identifies Your Most Valuable Prospects/Customers

The demographic score measures how well your prospects fit your target audience. Some of them include:

Title
Job level
Job function
Geographic location

The demographic score is an incredibly important data-driven metric because it tells you the quality of your lead database at the top-of-the-funnel. Just by tracking the average demographic score on a weekly basis, you can gauge whether your database is becoming richer with the prospects that you are trying to attract or not. If the average is continuously going down, perhaps it’s time for you to consider a data vendor to help boost your dataset or take a random sample to see who you’re really attracting with your marketing initiatives.

As you learn more about your prospects and customers, you can develop more tailored campaigns. For example, if you see that director-level prospects tend to sign up for your webinars, then consider creating a webinar track with content targeted specifically for directors. In another example, if you are marketing to your existing customer base, knowing the job function of who is engaging with your content and actively participating in your programs can help you find or create the right content for your cross-sell and upsell efforts. Knowing the overall demographics of your database is also an excellent way to map out nurture tracks to address different interests.

2. Behavioral Scoring Determines a Prospect’s Current Level of Interest

I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all purchased something online before. Most people do their research before purchasing a product, scouring the web for similar products from different brands, comparing pricing and quality, and checking out customer testimonials and demos. These are buying intent behaviors. Other behaviors, like downloading checklists or cheatsheets, signal engagement and curiosity. Behavioral scoring is the categorization of all these behaviors.

At Marketo, we have an organized matrix that pares down all behaviors with respect to different marketing channels and the success level attained, and it is always being updated and tweaked to accommodate for new marketing campaigns. This global matrix keeps our behavior scoring unified across our global offices. Our demand generation team then uses this behavior score in their accelerator programs as a proxy to segment out who they want to send mid-stage versus late-stage material to. Relevancy and timing is key in getting that prospect to fast track to conversion and purchase.

3. Account Scoring Reveals the Group’s Readiness to Buy

Account-based marketing has been huge among B2B organizations, and this shift to account-centric engagement applies to scoring as well. Just as you can score individual leads demographically and behaviorally, you can score accounts based on what you see happening among the group of leads as a sum to check for sales-readiness.

Another neat idea is implementing predictive account scoring, which can be part of the overall account score. For example, if you have analyzed your existing customer base, you can project these insights onto your prospect base to see what accounts may have a greater propensity to purchase. In another use case, account scoring can be used in a whitespace exercise to see what accounts you may be missing in your current database.

4. Lead Scoring Ultimately Drives Revenue

Lead scoring shouldn’t exist only in the marketing realm. Sales needs to be involved in understanding how the lead score is generated and what the thresholds are for marketing qualified leads. One way to validate your lead scoring engine is by bucketing lead scores into tiers and tracking the conversion rates for each tier of lead scores into closed business. This could shed light on if demographic scoring is overemphasized or if certain behaviors do not need to be scored so high. Then, if your confidence level is pretty high in understanding how lead score correlates to closed-won deals, vetted scores can be used to check sales pipeline estimates and the likelihood of new revenue.

You should also find ways to correlate the lead score to won revenue to reinforce to sales that scoring does work and tune up aspects of leads scoring every quarter. One aspect is understanding the weighting, which I alluded to earlier. Is demographic score driving a high lead score, or is behavior? Should account score trump both these scores with the biggest weighting? Take these into consideration as you discuss with sales what they are seeing in the leads that are being delivered to them.

Lead scoring is a never-ending ongoing process so forge ahead in 2017! And if you’re leveraging an advanced marketing automation, one of the most powerful aspects about it is its flexibility with handling changing business needs and scoring models that reflect them.

Check out our ebook on 4 Steps to Developing a Winning Lead Scoring Model to get started, or refresh, your lead scoring engine.

lead scoring ebook

31 Dec 18:19

Why I Don’t Tolerate Indecision and Indecisive People

by Frank Rumbauskas

CallReluctance

Today I received a request from someone to remove his testimonial from my website, or to at least remove his last name and his location.

It’s not because he isn’t happy. Not at all. It’s because he’s constantly inundated with people who see his testimonial on the site, then call him to verify that it’s real before they buy.

But here’s the clincher: The testimonial only contained his name and town. There was no contact info at all. Which means that people are wasting a bunch of time tracking him down to get him on the phone, all to verify that he is “real.”

THIS IS JUST DAMN INSANE!

Seriously, how much time are people wasting on this nonsense, that they could be using to make sales instead? Not to mention that it just isn’t right to pester someone who was kind and generous enough to give me a testimonial. I’m willing to bet that it’s a huge amount of time, because someone who is doing that to one of my testimonials is probably doing it to all of them. In that amount of time they could close a sale or generate some new leads or read a new sales book.

I really shouldn’t have to remind people how fatal the flaw of INDECISION is to success. But apparently some people aren’t getting the message!

Napoleon Hill wrote that “I need to think it over” is the last line of defense for people who haven’t the courage to say either “yes” or “no.”

In fact, I’ve repeatedly told sales prospects that I’d rather hear them tell me “no” than “I need to think it over.” The reason is that the latter statement is a waste of my time. I demand decision. It’s one of the things that has made me successful. It’s sad that most prospects need to be reassured that it’s okay to say “no” before they’ll come out and say it. In most cases it’s a lot easier to close a sale and hear “yes” than it is to get someone to admit that they want to say “no!”

Indecision is the most fatal character flaw that leads to failure, primarily because it is at the root of most procrastination.

So I’m asking you to make a DECISION, right now, by making the following commitment:

Commit that you will lose the fatal character trait of indecision by making quick, definite decisions any time you face one and you have all, or even most, of the necessary facts at your disposal.

As Hill stated:

“Make a decision. Make ANY decision. ANY decision is better than NO decision.”

By picking up the habit of always making quick and definite decisions, and sticking to those decisions and reversing them slowly, if you do at all, you will find success rushing into your life at a pace you’d never even dreamed of before.

Seriously. Please make that decision right now – commit to this and stick with it!

29 Dec 18:49

The Difference Between Cheap and Good

by Sonia Simone

The Difference Between Cheap and Good

You’ve probably noticed how much cheap marketing and writing advice is out there. So many hypey “hacks” … so few results.

We’re much more into the long game. It takes time and energy to produce good content, which is why we like solid, proven strategies that are actually worth your time.

This week, we have some deep dives for you.

On Monday, Beth Hayden shared some thoughts on promoting your content to improve your SEO. (Like all good SEO recommendations, content promotion isn’t just for search engines — its most important function is to find more humans who would love to read, watch, or listen to your content.)

On Tuesday, Aaron Orendorff wrote about one of our favorite things — evergreen content. Instead of trying to chase news (along with thousands of other sites in your topic), with evergreen content, you develop a thoughtful, compelling angle on a subject and put in the extra work that lifts it above the usual noise. Aaron gives 20 ideas you can use to shape content that will work for the long haul.

I have a suggestion for you: Take Aaron’s list of 20, pick the ones that resonate with you, and get one onto your calendar for each month of 2017. They won’t be 12 easy posts to write … but if you put real effort into them, they’ll bring genuine, long-lasting authority to your site.

On Wednesday, I pulled together some of my favorite Copyblogger posts from 2016, with a few words on each one. (In other words, it’s a bit like this post, but for a whole year.) It’s divided into sections, so you can find your favorite topics more easily.

On the podcasts, The Showrunner shared their favorite audio production tips with you, and Members Only gets real about what it takes to create a product page that actually sells something.

Next week, we have some fun news that I think you will love. The whole editorial team is looking forward to all kinds of amazing conversations with you in 2017.

Enjoy this week’s goodies. Thank you so much for your time and attention in 2016, and I’ll catch you next year!

— Sonia Simone
Chief Content Officer, Rainmaker Digital

Catch up on this week’s content

4 Creative (and Aboveboard) Ways to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings

by Beth Hayden

20 Types of Evergreen Content that Produce Lasting Results for Your Business

by Aaron Orendorff

The Best of Copyblogger: 2016 Edition

by Sonia Simone

Are You Losing Sales Because Your Purchase Page Sucks?

by Sean Jackson

Professional Podcasting Tips for Pristine Production (and Hosting Hacks)

by Jerod Morris & Jon Nastor

The post The Difference Between Cheap and Good appeared first on Copyblogger.

29 Dec 18:47

Tipped out: Gratuities may be changing in the hospitality industry

by CB Staff

Restaurant owners are grappling with the thorny and complex issue of balancing the huge discrepancy in income between servers and kitchen staff created by the current practice of tipping.

Front-of-house staff generally receive a gratuity of between 15 per cent and 22 per cent while cooks who make the food may labour for minimum wage.

“The truth is labour costs are going up, minimum wages are going up, restaurant margins are going down, and so in order to close that gap and keep people working in the kitchen, restaurants are going to start taking control of that tipping revenue as a way of just making sure they can continue to meet labour costs,” says Mike von Massow, a professor in the department of food, agriculture and resource economics at the University of Guelph.

The issue of tipping differs depending on the industry sector — fine dining, casual or quick service.

“And even within the certain sectors — we’ve done some surveys and whether to move to a non-tipping model or not — our industry is split almost evenly on the issue,” says Mark von Schellwitz, vice-president for Western Canada for Restaurants Canada, who is based in Vancouver.

“There’s certainly no consensus on which way to go.“

Proposed models include a hospitality charge, profit sharing or a hybrid plan in which there’s a moderate increase in pricing along with a small service charge.

“I’m very much in favour of cooks and waiters and all restaurant employees making a living wage, which many of them don’t at this time,” says Anthony Bourdain, host of “Parts Unknown” which airs on CNN.

“Is the no-tipping, service-included plan the way to get there? I don’t know. I’m open-minded about it. I tip 30 per cent. Everyone should, in my view, but absent that, I suspect it’s the future.”

Dining chain Earls launched a 16 per cent hospitality charge in July at its 67th location, in downtown Calgary, to test the waters.

Craig Blize, vice-president of operations says the experiment, which the company will begin to evaluate in January, has been “polarizing.”

“A lot of our staff love it. Our kitchen staff definitely loves it and our support staff loves it and the majority of the servers do as well,” says Blize, who is based in Vancouver. “There have been some staff that have been disgruntled or haven’t liked that option so we have moved them to other Earls where we do have tipping.” There are no plans to roll the policy out to other locations.

Meanwhile, some guests love the all-inclusive charge while others “despise” it because they feel they’ve lost control over recognizing the service they’ve received. Earls67 will waive the hospitality charge if a client is displeased with the food or service.

But evidence suggests people don’t vary their tipping much whether they’ve received good or bad service, says von Massow. “It’s a social norm. We just do it anyway.”

In the history of gratuities, “tips” was an acronym for To Insure Prompt Service.

“When it began originally, I believe it was in the U.K., the tip was paid before the meal, so you gave the server a little bit of money just to make sure you got good service, then it evolved to coming after the meal,” says von Massow.

“In fact, most of Europe has moved away from tipping even though that’s where it began. It’s deeply rooted here.”

Some say tipping is an incentive to ensure people do a good job, though there are plenty of examples where great service is automatically provided.

“I’m a university instructor. I don’t get tipped, but I still work pretty hard and I care about the quality of my lectures,”says von Massow. “Can you imagine if I put a jar at the front of my lecture hall and students were to come and drop some coins and bills in at the end of a lecture and I say, ‘Of course I need to be tipped. How else am I going to deliver a good lecture?’”

Von Massow says he thinks many consumers will be happy if tipping is banished. At the end of a meal there can be an uncomfortable few moments as diners try to calculate how much to tip.

And it can affect restaurant dynamics and server behaviour.

There’s evidence of a strong correlation between the “expected” tip and quality of service, even though it may be unconscious. “Servers look at a guest or a group of guests who come in and the quality of service they provide is based on what they perceive the tip will be,”” says von Massow. This can relate to clothing, age, gender or ethnicity.

If a customer doesn’t order alcohol, the cheque is smaller so the tip will be less. Von Massow says he’s had restaurant people tell him they order beer or wine with lunch just to make sure they get better service.

There are also “quota” servers. Once they’ve achieved a target, such as $100 in tips for the evening, they’ll shut down and their service quality will go down.

Ned Bell, Vancouver Aquarium’s Ocean Wise executive chef, says the restaurant business is tough and service should be rewarded.

“Unless we’re willing to pay more for food, which I think we should be doing anyway, I think tipping needs to be something we should still see as a valuable thing of celebrating getting good service,” says Bell.

“If you don’t get good service you shouldn’t tip. But if you get good service and you enjoy a great meal I think you should reward the server and the restaurant’s staff … to help pay their bills. They’re making minimum wage.”

The post Tipped out: Gratuities may be changing in the hospitality industry appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

29 Dec 18:47

Ottawa scorecard 2016: The best and the worst ministers

by Marie-Danielle Smith, David Pugliese, Ottawa Citizen

THE BEST

Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland

With tireless effort bringing 28 countries and a multinational bureaucracy on board, Chrystia Freeland was instrumental in ensuring the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement with the European Union went ahead.

Much of the deal had been negotiated by the previous government, but new pressures and fears threatened CETA throughout the year, necessitating renegotiation and a lot of persuasion.

If Freeland had not intervened with its Social Democratic Party, Germany may never have signed CETA. And as the Belgian region of Wallonia blockaded CETA this fall, her emotional walk-out from meetings with its prime minister proved effective.

Despite post-election bluster from the United States, Freeland has remained a shrewd and vocal supporter of free trade and globalization. There’s little doubt she is preparing to press an incoming Trump administration on preserving the North American Free Trade Agreement and finally resolving a lingering softwood lumber dispute.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna

Catherine McKenna has shown herself to be a high-energy operator, who has been able to weather the storm on a tricky file.

Despite some yelling and screaming from premiers, she brought most provinces on board with a national carbon pricing plan. Like the carbon tax or not, McKenna was given a task and powered ahead with it, even with uncertainty south of the border.

She announced a plan to phase out coal, has been marketing Canada’s clean technology in China and has managed to defend pipeline decisions in parallel with articulating a clean-fuel strategy.

McKenna has embraced United Nations climate negotiations in a way Canadian environment ministers have not for a decade — a sunny sign for those looking for increased international engagement from Canada.

Transport Minister Marc Garneau

At the start of his mandate, Marc Garneau was handed lemons — a department struggling with its finances and in the vice grip of the Treasury Board Secretariat. But he appears to have made lemonade.

He’s steering a strategy called “Transportation 2030,” which includes measures to invest in green transportation, improve regulations and update infrastructure that facilitates the movement of goods from Canada to other countries. The strategy partly stems from a review of the Canada Transportation Act led by former cabinet minister David Emerson.

Airline rules are shifting so that low-cost carriers can survive the Canadian market and a “passengers’ bill of rights” is being introduced.

Meanwhile, Garneau is navigating a moratorium on tankers carrying crude oil on the north coast of British Columbia. His department is also studying ways to improve cycling safety.

We reserve some judgment for if, and how, Garneau introduces measures to combat distracted driving, which is responsible for an increasing number of deaths in Canada every year.

But all in all, the transport minister is proving himself a productive manager lacking in bluster and scandal, unlike a few of his honourable colleagues.

— Marie-Danielle Smith, National Post

• Email: mdsmith@postmedia.com | Twitter: mariedanielles

Fred Chartrand/The Canadian PressA little more than a year after being named National Defence Minister, the shine is off Harjit Sajjan.

THE WORST

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan

He emerged on the scene as Justin Trudeau’s “Bad Ass” wing man, with accolades and expectations he would be good news for the Canadian military.

But a little more than a year after being named National Defence Minister, the shine is off Harjit Sajjan.

His mandate letter from the prime minister required him to launch a competition to replace the CF-18 fighter aircraft.

Instead, Sajjan championed the purchase of 18 Boeing Super Hornet jets as a stop-gap measure, delaying an actual competition to replace the CF-18 fleet for at least another five years.

It was a good move for his boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as it pushed off a government decision on the controversial F-35 stealth fighter until well after the next election.

But critics say the Super Hornet deal is bad news for the Canadian military. They expect the eventual competition for new fighter jets to be dragged out for years, resulting in the Royal Canadian Air Force not receiving a replacement for the CF-18 fleet until the late 2020s or early 2030s.

Sajjan was also supposed to strengthen the Royal Canadian Navy while at the same time moving ahead with the shipbuilding strategy put in place by the previous Conservative government. Besides some changes to that strategy, the navy has not seen any new initiatives or additional funding to strengthen its position.

Sajjan also had the job of helping renew Canada’s commitment to United Nations’ peace operations. While that intention has been announced, action on that front has still to materialize.

The proposed new commitment has also been surrounded by confusion. Chief of the Defence Staff Gen. Jon Vance said in July the army would be heading to Africa very soon. Sajjan also said an African mission was being planned.

But in October, Vance backtracked, saying that no African mission was planned and any such claims were mere speculation.

However, a short time later, Sajjan reiterated that a number of African missions were being planned. Where and when Canadian troops are headed for UN duty could be announced sometime in 2017.

Sajjan said the high point of his first year in office was ensuring that a new defence review got underway. The review was supposed to be released in December, but was delayed until sometime in early 2017.

Sajjan acknowledged some regrets. Military personnel who have retired are waiting months to receive their pensions. Those dealing with post traumatic stress issues have found little or no help from the military system.

Sajjan blamed the previous Conservative government for cutting the administrative sections of the Canadian Forces and the defence department, which are needed for such services as dealing with pension processing and providing mental health support for troops.

“The pensions, the wait times were unacceptable, and reducing the wait times is very important to me,” Sajjan explained.

— David Pugliese, Postmedia News

• Email: dpugliese@postmedia.com | Twitter: davidpugliese

29 Dec 18:47

7 Big Growth Hacks for Lead Gen Success in 2017

by Trisha Winter

The worst thing you could do going into 2017 is to create a budget based on the way you do things today. Oh sure, you’re looking at conversion rates and reallocating what you are spending on the least successful channels to the most successful, but what about the things you haven’t yet tried?

Here are 5 growth hacks to try in 2017 that can have a big impact on your lead generation.

Growth Hack #1: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em

If you are like many companies, you’ve seen paid search get more expensive while volume and quality is decreasing. Don’t give up on paid search yet, just think about it differently. Take a look at who owns the top organic spot for your highest quality terms. Chances are it is a third party site like a product listing/review site or a publication or educational site. Reach out to these sites and see if there is a way to be listed on the page that is ranking, either as a banner ad or an in-text link. You might even find that some of those sites have paid search programs of their own (which I like to call paid search inception). Bottom line, you can get more clicks by paying for a listing on the top ranked organic site.

Growth Hack #2: Get personal – Website

Most likely, you have multiple people in your organization brainstorming how to improve your customer experience. If you’ve got the tools and time, I highly recommend providing a personalized experience on your website. Basically, this is providing a “personalized” experience to a returning website visitor based on what page(s) they visited the last time they were on your site. B2C has been using it for a while to get people to make purchases they’ve been considering. B2B can use it to get the right content in front of a researching prospective buyer so that they raise their hand to become a lead in your system.

Growth Hack #3: Get personal – Lead generation

Creating a personalized journey once a prospective buyer has become a lead is basically smart lead nurturing. Here you can have an email triggered to be sent to an individual that takes an action or combination of actions. Many marketing automation tools now have this capability. For example, someone who watched a webinar on a particular product/feature, then visited your pricing page gets sent an email talking about why your product/feature is differentiated and providing a relevant asset. Effort in this area will increase your lead conversion rates; which proves you don’t always need to spend more to get more leads.

Growth Hack #4: Get personal – ABM

ABM (Account Based Marketing) campaigns are a hot topic for marketers, and there’s a good reason behind that. Marketers and salespeople see that the outcomes from sales prospecting has decreased significantly over the past few years. If sales is responsible for bringing a significant percentage of SQLs into the pipeline, they are going to need your help. Work with sales to brainstorm ways to get the attention of a targeted list of accounts. First, generate the list in conjunction with sales. The list can be of their assigned target accounts or a subset of cold leads or a new list fitting your buyer profile. Then think of a deliverable that you can personalize at scale that would be of benefit to these targets. It could be a business assessment, an offer of training or even a personalized video to get their attention. Help create a “cookie cutter” so that sales can then execute the campaign one target at a time. The effort will be well worth it as you’ll see many more SQLs than what is coming out of cold prospecting today.

Growth Hack #5: Invest in customers

I guarantee that someone in your organization is work on improving “the customer journey”. There is a lot of buzz in the industry about being more strategic and thoughtful in our communications with customer across every stage of their interaction with us and interaction across departments/roles. Customer delight is a powerful thing, but did you know that a key part of this effort is also to leverage customers for lead generation? B2B companies are finding big success by leveraging referral programs to harness customers to provide personal introductions from people in their network who are a fit for your product or service. Referral programs don’t work for every company, take this quick quiz (no lead form) to see if referrals are a fit for your business. If they are, I definitely recommend you put some focus here in 2017.

Growth Hack #6: Don’t forget about partners

If you are like most demand generation marketers, partner marketers are people you are vaguely aware exist, but never really work with. You should definitely change that! All of the opportunity you have to run a customer referral program also applies to partners. In fact, partner referral programs are the highest producing referral programs. Have lunch with a partner marketer and see what they are doing to get lead flow from partners. If they tell you they are struggling with ad hoc productivity or with underperforming reseller arrangements, it just makes sense to work with them to automate partner relationships for a consistent flow of high-quality leads.

Growth Hack #7: Zero attribution = zero spend

No matter which activities you tackle in 2017, make sure you are focused on how many closed deals you are getting from each channel. I think most marketers have gotten past volume of leads as a measure of success, but now we need to push much further to validate spending. Go past MQLs and SQLs, soar past Opps and get direct measurement/attribution of Closed Won. Ultimately, nothing else matters so make sure you focus on activities that give you that direct link to impact on revenue. Otherwise, you could be wasting money on generating leads/opportunities that never make a purchase.

29 Dec 18:46

35 of the biggest failed products from the world's biggest companies

by Ben Gilbert

Google co-founder Sergey Brin wearing a Google Glass augmented reality device — Google founder Sergey Brin wearing Google Glass— the company's augmented reality glasses which were halted in 2015.
Kim Kulish/Corbis via Getty Images

Even the most successful companies in the world have the occasional flop.
As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos once said, "Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures."
We put together 35 of the world's biggest flops, from Nintendo's Virtual Boy to Google Glass.

Launching a product is tough and most end up as failures.

"Less than 3% of new consumer packaged goods exceed first-year sales of $50 million — considered the benchmark of a highly successful launch," says Joan Schneider and Julie Hall, co-authors of "The New Launch Plan," which examines the launch strategies of successful consumer product companies.

So even the most heavy-hitting names in business — from Nintendo to Netflix, Microsoft to McDonald's — have had some of the biggest belly flops.

Here's a look at 35 of those flops and what we can learn from them.

Aimee Groth, Jay Yarow, and Drake Baer contributed reporting to this story.

1957 — Ford Edsel

Bill Gates cites the Edsel flop as his favorite case study. Even the name "Edsel" is synonymous with "marketing failure." Ford invested hundreds of millions into the car, which it introduced in 1957. But Americans weren't buying it.

It was taken off the market in 1960.

1975 — Sony Betamax

Sony Betamax C7 1980 — SSPL/Getty Images

The 1970s saw a war in home video formats between Betamax and VHS.

Sony made a mistake: It started selling the Betamax in 1975, while its rivals started releasing VHS machines. Sony kept Betamax proprietary, meaning that the market for VHS products quickly outpaced Betamax. Though Betamax was technically superior, VHS won out by simply being ubiquitous.

1985 — New Coke

New Coke Ad — An advertisement for New Coke
Retronaut

In the early 1980s, Coke was losing ground to Pepsi. The infamous "Pepsi Challenge" ads were largely responsible for Pepsi's surge. In response, Coca-Cola tried to create a product that would taste more like Pepsi.

While New Coke fared well enough in nationwide taste tests before launching in 1985, it turned out those were misleading. Coke abandoned the product after a few weeks and went back to its old formula. It also gave its product a new name: Coca-Cola Classic.

1989, 1992 — Pepsi A.M. and Crystal Pepsi

In 1989, Pepsi tried to target the "breakfast cola drinker" with Pepsi A.M. It lasted only a year.

In 1992, Pepsi tried again, this time with a clear cola: "Crystal Pepsi." No dice — it died in 1993. As a throwback, Pepsi briefly re-introduced Crystal Pepsi in 2016 and again forits 30-year anniversary in 2022.

1989 — RJ Reynolds smokeless cigarettes

In the 1980s, just as anti-smoking campaigns were heating up, RJ Reynolds put $325 million into a new product: smokeless cigarettes.

They didn't work, and people weren't buying them — so four months later, they were gone. You might even say the idea went...up in smoke.

1990 — Coors Rocky Mountain Spring Water

Coors Rocky Mountain Spring Water launched in 1990 and didn't fare well. It turns out beer drinkers want only one thing from their favorite label — beer!

Even so, the company continues to be one of the world's largest brewers.

1993 — Apple Newton

The Newton is held up as an example of Apple's bad old days, before it was the world's most valuable company.

Forbes says the Newton PDA flopped for a number of reasons: Its price started at $700, it was 8 inches tall and 4.5 inches wide. Of course, Apple eventually turned the mobile tablet market on its head with the introduction of the iPad. They're not called "PDA" devices anymore because of the iPad.

1995 — Microsoft Bob

Microsoft Bob was supposed to be a user-friendly interface for Windows, a project that was at one point managed by Bill Gates' now wife, Melinda. Microsoft killed it one year after launching it in 1995.

Why?

"Unfortunately, the software demanded more performance than typical computer hardware could deliver at the time, and there wasn't an adequately large market," Gates later wrote. "Bob died."

1995 — Nintendo's Virtual Boy

Nintendo virtual boy — Retro Gamer Magazine / Contributor/Getty

Nintendo's Virtual Boy was an ambitious push into a burgeoning new technology — virtual reality. Simply buy the Virtual Boy and get swept away into the digital environs of VR.

Except the reality of Virtual Boy was totally unlike what it promised. Games were little more than black and red nightmares, with low-resolution graphics and gameplay that would've been better suited to a standard game console. Virtual Boy ended up selling under 1 million units — it's the biggest hardware flop in Nintendo's history (a history that goes all the way back to the late 1800s). The tale of the Virtual Boy is often held up in modern times to push back on the waves of hype surrounding new VR tech.

1996 — McDonald's Arch Deluxe

Arch Deluxe, McDonald's — McDonald's/YouTube

In 1996, McDonald's introduced the Arch Deluxe, which never caught on. It was intended to appeal to "urban sophisticates" — outside of its target demographic. To reach this group, McDonald's spent $100 million, which makes it one of the most expensive product flops in history.

Turns out, McDonald's was just too early — today, burger chains like Five Guys and Shake Shack are wildly popular upstarts, hawking slightly more expensive fast-food burgers to the modern equivalent of "urban sophisticates."

1997 — Orbitz soda

Although the soda, which looks like a lava lamp, appealed to young kids, it tasted like cough syrup. It disappeared off shelves within a year of its 1997 debut.

1998 — Frito-Lay WOW! Chips

File this under "too good to be true": In the late '90s Frito-Lay rolled out a miracle food, a line of chips with the upbeat branding of WOW! The marketing claim was tantalizing — a compound called Olestra allowed for a fat-free potato chip.

But, the additive had an unexpected side effect. The Olestra molecules couldn't be absorbed into the body, and instead had a laxative-like effect on the body, Fast Company reported.

Assuredly, those consuming the chips were exclaiming "WOW!" for the wrong reasons.

1999 — Cosmopolitan Yogurt

yogurt myths thumbnails 01 — A person examining a cup of yogurt.
Gene Kim

The magazine Cosmopolitan made the decision to launch a brand of yogurt in 1999. Needless to say, the yogurt market was already saturated, and Cosmo's readers were content enough reading the magazine. No word on whether or not it was any good.

2006 — Mobile ESPN

Mobile ESPN, introduced in January 2006, was one of the biggest flame-outs of "mobile virtual network operators," which also included Amp'd Mobile, Helio, Disney Mobile, and others.

The idea was that ESPN would exclusively sell a phone that offered exclusive ESPN content and video, leasing network access from Verizon Wireless. But ESPN had only one phone at launch, a Sanyo device selling for $400.

ESPN quickly shut down the service, instead providing content to Verizon's mobile internet service. And, of course, smartphones essentially obviated this entire concept.

2006 — HD-DVD

Sponsored mostly by Toshiba, HD-DVD was supposed to become the hi-def successor to the DVD when it launched in March 2006. Standalone HD-DVDs players were sold, and Microsoft's Xbox 360 — a wildly popular game console — sold an HD-DVD attachment (seen above).

But the Sony-led Blu-ray faction ended up winning the format war when Warner Bros. announced it was dumping HD DVD for Blu-ray on Jan. 4, 2008. It certainly didn't hurt that Sony's PlayStation 3 game console had Blu-ray playback functionality built right in — the PlayStation 2 helped christen DVD as the dominant format previously, and the PlayStation 3 took that concept another step further.

About a month later, Toshiba said it would shut down its HD-DVD efforts.

2007 — Joost

Joost, originally known as "The Venice Project," was supposed to be a peer-to-peer TV network for the future, invented by the European geniuses behind Skype. The company recruited a rising star — Mike Volpi — away from Cisco to become its CEO. It nabbed a deal with CBS.

Joost was supposed to reinvent the way we consumed professional video.

Instead, Hulu became the go-to site for TV episodes on the web. And who's ever heard of Joost nowadays?

Meanwhile, Joost had all sorts of problems with its P2P architecture, its bulky software player, its content library, and more. After launching in September 2007, it never took off; its scraps sold in late 2009.

2008 — Google Lively

For some reason, Google thought it had to compete with "Second Life." Remember "Second Life"? The virtual world that looked like a game but was actually just a virtual world for social interactions? Neither do most people. It still exists, powered by a super-dedicated userbase.

Google created its own version of "Second Life" in "Lively," which came out in July 2008. (Unlike "Second Life," "Lively" was supposed to be sex-free.) When the economy went down the toilet, those dreams faded fast. Google quickly pulled the plug by November 2008.

2009 — JooJoo

In the era of a $499 Apple iPad, an inferior tablet computer that also costs $499 doesn't work. (You may remember this device from its previous title, the CrunchPad.) JooJoo came out in 2009 and was gone by 2010.

2011 — Qwikster

In September 2011, Reed Hastings announced that Netflix would spin off Qwikster as a DVD rental business. This move met tons of criticism, and Hastings backtracked on his statement 23 days later.

At the same time, Netflix announced a video game add-on that would ship game discs to your house. Beyond just the name Qwikster, those plans were also scrapped.

2011 — HP Touchpad

HP gave up the TouchPad and its mobile operating system, WebOS, after just a month and a half on the market.

The tablet was no iPad killer, selling just 25,000 units for Best Buy over the 49 days it was on the shelves.

And, in fairness to HP, the TouchPad wasn't that bad. It was rough around the edges, but those could have been smoothed in the coming months. It just didn't really do anything better than the iPad, which means it's just like every other tablet out there.

2011 — Microsoft Zune

microsoft zune 2006 — Elaine Thompson/AP Images

In 2006, Microsoft launched Zune: its take on the iPod.

As Insider previously reported, though, the Zune seemed set up to fail because it didn't offer much beyond the iPod's existing features. Its only advantage seemed to be that users could share songs between Zunes. Added to that, Apple already had almost 80% of the market at launch. Zune never really managed to capture more than a small sliver of the market, Slate reported.

Five years later Microsoft announced that it would stop releasing new models.

2013 — Facebook Home

With Home, Facebook tried to become the home screen for your phone.

It failed. From our review:

"So, what happens when you have no control over what appears on your phone's home screen?

It becomes a mess."

In less than a month of being released, the two-year subscription plan dropped from $99 to $0.99. The consensus between reviewers and critics: Home worked only for the most fanatical of users. "It was fine for a Facebook addict," one reviewer noted. "But [it] seems to run through a lot of data and battery. Uninstalled."

2013 — Lululemon Sheer Pants

In March 2013, Lululemon recalled its black luon bottoms for being too sheer. The issue — which seemed to stem from the factory that produced the pants — resulted in and the company having to recall almost 17% of all women's bottoms, Insider previously reported.

"The ingredients, weight and longevity qualities of the women's black luon bottoms remain the same but the coverage does not, resulting in a level of sheerness in some of our women's black luon bottoms that fall short of our very high standards," Lululemon said in a statement at the time.

Customers were furious (naturally), and Lululemon's shares dropped by 7% the day after it announced the recall.

2014 — Amazon's Fire Phone

Amazon's Fire Phone was a flash in the pan — getting announced and released in 2014, then being discontinued the following year. It ran on Android, and looked competitive.

In reality, it was a critical and commercial failure. The one big sell point — 3D face scanning technology — was seen as a gimmick, and a limited availability at AT&T initially didn't help it get off the ground. In the long run, Amazon discontinued the phone 13 months after its launch, and outright retired from phone manufacturing after this one model.

2015 — Google Glass

A Google Glass sits on a table. — An older version of Google Glass, the latest business-focused version of which was discontinued Wednesday.
Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

Google's augmented reality glasses seemed destined to become the next "it gadget."

Once users actually began using Google Glass— starting with a small trial group in 2013— they began raising concerns that the device was a little too good at recording and capturing images. Eventually, users also began complaining about its price point, functionality, and design.

As a result, Google announced in January 2015 that it would halt the production of Google Glass and reevaluate its approach.

2016 — Samsung's Galaxy Note 7

What can be said about the disastrous Galaxy Note 7 that hasn't already been said? The Note 7 — one of Samsung's big flagship phones — had a little problem where it occasionally caught fire and/or exploded. There was a car that supposedly was burned down by one. The phones have been outright banned on flights, and Samsung had to recall the entire line. Talk about a self-own!

The Note line, however, persists — the latest version is the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.

2016 — Soylent

Soylent— the meal replacement company that has become a favorite among efficiency-minded techies— has a history of product recalls.

In October 2016, the company issued a recall on the 250-calorie bars it had introduced just months prior following reports from customers that the bars were making them sick.

One user said they had the "worst vomiting episode" they had ever experienced after eating the bar, as Insider previously reported. (The company still sells bars that are now 100 calories each.)

Over the years the company has also recalled or halted sales of its powder multiple times, The company recalled its powder following the bar recall in 2016, and in 2017, it recalled 890 boxes of vegan powder for dairy contamination.

2017 — Juicero

Juicero, a Silicon Valley startup started fundraising in 2013, was on a mission to be the first "the first at home cold-pressed juicing system," as founder Doug Evans explained in a post on Medium.

The $399 machine was designed to extract juice from proprietary fruit and vegetable packs, which users could purchase through a subscription service. Things started going downhill for the company, though, when a Bloomberg investigation found that users didn't need to use the machine to squeeze juice out of the packs. The revelation brought the machine's exorbitant price point into question.

By July 2017 the company announced that it would be undergoing a "strategic shift" to lower the cost of its product. The following September, the company announced that it would be shutting down its operations entirely.

2018 — Theranos Edison & nanotainers

Theranos, the blood testing startup valued at $9 billion during its peak, has since unraveled into a cautionary tale of fraud and failure.

Elizabeth Holmes launched the company in 2003, and by 2015, it had flourished into a Silicon Valley darling with plans of testing a host of medical conditions with small sample of blood. The blood would be collected via its proprietary nanotainers, and analyzed through its blood analysis machine, the Edison— in theory, that is.

By late 2015, though, a bombshell Wall Street Journal article dropped highlighting the company's struggles with its technology. As agencies including the FDA and SEC began taking a closer look into the company over the ensuing years it became clear that the company had been feigning the efficacy of its products and outsourcing complex testing to other labs.

By late 2018, Theranos announced it was shutting down.

2019 — AirPower

Apple had grand ambitions of launching a charging mat that could repower up to three devices at once— like your iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods. The company announced the product in 2017 along with the iPhoneX with plans for launching the following year.

Unfortunately, the mat was never actually released, due in part, to issues with heat management.

John Gruber, blogger and proverbial Apple oracle, wrote back in 2018 that "there are engineers who looked at AirPower's design and said it could never work."

2020 — Quibi

Quibi was a short video subscription service that launched amid the pandemic and lasted just six months.

The service, founded by former Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, had raised $1.75 billion and recruited a roster of major names across Silicon Valley and Hollywood like Meg Whitman, as CEO, and celebrities like Chrissy Teigen and the Kardashians to host its shows.

On launch day, though, Quibi only garnered 300,000 downloads, trailing behind the 4 million Disney Plus had on its launch, Insider previously reported.

In May, Katzenberg told The New York Times that the coronavirus pandemic was responsible for "everything that has gone wrong" with the app, which had only 3.5 million downloads by that point. By June the company began laying off employees, and by October the company fully shut down.

2023 — Jetson Rogue Hoverboard

In March, the US Consumer Product and Safety Commission recalled 53,000 42-volt Jetson Rogue hoverboards after numerous reports surfaced that they had caught fire. Two people had even died, according to the CPSC's report.

Jetson Electric Bikes, which makes the Jetson Rogue 42v hoverboards, noted in a statement that the lithium-ion battery packs in the scooters had the potential to overheat, and potentially catch fire.

In a report about the recall the New York Times noted that the product was sold in Target stores nationwide from August 2018 to June 2019 and also online between January 2019 to November 2021.

2023 — Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses

Facebook's Ray-Ban "Stories" smart glasses
Facebook

Back in September 2021, Ray-Ban launched a pair of smart glasses in partnership with Meta called Ray-Ban Stories.

At the time, the glasses felt a little futuristic, but also a little creepy. They allow users to take photos or videos through small voice-activated cameras and microphones located in both corners of the frames.

Yet the product has had a hard time attracting customers over the past two years.

Less than 10% of the smart glasses that were purchased by Ray-Ban stores since it launched have actually been bought by customers, The Wall Street Journal reported in July 2023 based on an internal document from Meta. The device has also seen 13% return rate, the Journal noted, based on the document.

Still, it might be too soon to call it a total flop: Meta is planning to launch a second-generation version of the glasses this fall, or in time for holiday shopping season, the Journal added, citing people familiar with the product.

2024 — Amazon's 'Just Walk Out' technology

Amazon Fresh — Amazon is rolling back its 'Just Walk Out' technology, which allowed customers to bypass the checkout counter.
UCG / Contributor/Getty Images

Amazon is rolling back its "Just Walk Out" technology, which relied on computer vision to help customers bypass the checkout counter at its Amazon Go convenience stores and Amazon Fresh grocery stores.

There was nothing wrong with the "Just Walk Out" technology per say, but customers "also wanted the ability to easily find nearby products and deals, view their receipt as they shop, and know how much money they saved while shopping throughout the store," an Amazon spokesperson previously told Business Insider, noting that the Dash Cart will accommodate these requests.

2024 — Google Podcasts

Google has been phasing out its podcast app since last year.

ALAIN JOCARD/Getty Images

Google finally ceased its podcast app for US users on April 2 after it announced last September that it would be moving all its podcast users to YouTube Music. While Google's own podcast app had a small share of the podcast audience, it ultimately wasn't enough to sustain the app. "About 23% of weekly podcast users in the US say YouTube is their most frequently used service, versus just 4% for Google Podcasts," Google said in its announcement.

Read the original article on Business Insider

29 Dec 16:24

If You Want to Focus on the Long Term, Be Grateful

by Art Markman

A common observation about human behavior is that people are biased toward what is best in the short-term. That does not meant that people always pursue short-term pleasures over long-term gains. It just means that the value of the long-term option has to be much larger than what people will get right now in order for them to choose to delay the benefit.

Economists call this idea temporal discounting. To use a money example, imagine that I was willing to give you $100 next month, or a smaller amount of money right now. If I offered you $10 right now, you would probably wait a month to get the $100. If I offered you $90 right now, you would probably take that rather than waiting. But, where is your dividing line? What is the smallest amount of money that you would take to wait a month to get $100?

The smaller the amount of money you would take now, the less you value future experience compared to present experience. If you would be willing to take $45 now as opposed to $100 in a month, then you are saying that $100 in a month is only worth $45 in today’s dollars.

In many situations, we want people to value the future more than they do now, so that they are willing to engage in activities that create future value. A paper in the June, 2014 issue of PsychologicalScience by David DeSteno, Ye Li, Leah Dickens, and Jenifer Lerner suggests that when people experience gratitude, they give more value to future events compared to present ones.

In this study, participants ultimately evaluated lots of situations like the prospect of getting $20 now or $50 in a week. These problems were given in order for the researchers to make an estimate of how much people were valuing future events compared to present events. Participants were told that some of them would actually get an amount of money based on one of their choices, so they should choose carefully.

The participants were divided into three groups. A control group was just asked to recall the events of a typical day. A second group was asked to recall situations that made them happy. A third group recalled situations that made them feel grateful. The idea behind the last two groups was to help distinguish between gratitude and more general positive feeling.

The group that thought about gratitude valued the future more than those who thought about either happy events or a normal day. This finding suggests that there is something about gratitude (above and beyond being positive) that leads people to be more focused on the long-term rather than the short-term.

It is not completely clear why gratitude should have this effect. One possibility is that gratitude makes people feel more connected to those around them. Social connection influences people’s sense that they are part of something larger and more permanent than themselves. That may make it feel less difficult to wait for a future reward.

Another possibility is that engaging in acts of kindness (which creates gratitude) often requires some degree of altruism on the part of the performer. So, thinking about these altruistic acts may make people feel like they can give up something in the present in order to get a future reward.

Clearly, though, more work needs to be done to understand why gratitude has the influence on the way people value the future.

29 Dec 16:24

Who Are You Mailing To? The Anatomy of an Effective Buyer Persona

by Mike Ryan

Have you taken the time to create an effective buyer persona for your business? A great mailing campaign can only be as successful as it is targeted to the right person at the right time. Figuring out who your ideal customer is in terms of their goals, behaviors, and demographics is the best way to make sure your valuable marketing content is being mailed to somebody who might actually want to read it!

What is a Buyer Persona?

Let’s start by defining what a buyer or marketing persona is, and isn’t.

A buyer persona IS:

A semi-fictional customer narrative
An accurate representation of who actually buys from you
A model created from your own customer data or market research

A persona is NOT a customer description based on wishful thinking, or your best guess as to who might be interested in buying your product or service.

Why Buyer Personas Are Important

When it comes to obtaining and retaining customers, the more you know about your ultimate client, the better.

Does Mary Massage value the convenience of your service above everything else?

Is the price of your product its most appealing feature for Carl Collector?

Being able to answer questions like these makes it easier for you to skew the content of your marketing material, AND figure out who your most promising target audience is when mailing to new prospects.

How to Create a Buyer Persona

A buyer persona usually includes information about your customer’s age, profession, income, and location, as well as more general details related to their goals, challenges, and how they shop or gather information.

Remember: a buyer persona is not something you create for each individual client – it’s a generalization about your customers as a group. Depending on the size of your business, you could have anywhere from one to twenty buyer descriptions and they might look something like this:

Mary Massage is a semi-retired, 50-year old certified accountant who works from her home in the suburbs of Big City, USA. She spends long hours at her computer, and likes to counter-balance this with regular massage therapy sessions. Because Mary Massage’s work schedule fluctuates so much, she appreciates being able to go online and book an in-home massage at the last minute.

How can compiling information like this help your mobile massage company to increase its customer base?

This profile tells you that your typical client makes a decent income but doesn’t have a regular schedule, which in turn tells you that the content you create and mail out should probably emphasize the convenience and flexibility of your service, rather than its cost. You can also see why a targeted mailing list that includes female professionals in a particular income bracket, who work from home, is a great place to start for reaching out to potential new clients.

While our persona example is pretty simple, the more data you can gather about your customers and leads, the more pointed and profitable your marketing strategy will be. Consider taking advantage of:

customer surveys,
client interviews,
lead-gathering website forms, and
buying trend analyses

Without knowing who you’re mailing to, you’re really just wasting time, energy, and your marketing budget on a direct mail campaign that’s unlikely to produce the results you want. Investing in an effective buyer persona is a great way to target your mail-out more successfully, and let today’s customers lead the way to tomorrow’s clients.

29 Dec 16:24

Social Media Is Growing Up. What Does That Mean for Your Marketing? [Podcast]

by Heike Young

In the context of the omnichannel mix, social media is at the epicenter of innovation. Not only does it have incredible capabilities for listening and publishing, but it’s also the nucleus for modern direct-response advertising for demand gen.

Now with emerging products like Facebook Messenger, social is set to continue revolutionizing e-commerce and customer support.

On this week’s episode of the Marketing Cloudcast — the marketing podcast from Salesforce — we’re discussing how social media is growing up and maturing into a more useful marketing tool. We brought on the expert: Luke Ball, Senior Director of Product Management at Salesforce, who knows social tools better than anyone else.

If you’re not yet a subscriber, check out the Marketing Cloudcast on iTunes, Google Play Music, or Stitcher.

Take a listen here:

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are six things that the maturation of social means for your marketing, from our conversation with Luke Ball.

1. Social today is the Swiss Army Knife of customer engagement.

“We’ve been through the hype cycle and the trough of disillusionment, but I’m seeing a lot of maturation happening right now. Many businesses finally realize the full potential of social and are incorporating it into their processes and business strategies in a more holistic way,” says Luke when asked about the current state of social.

As Luke points out, “We’re seeing new channels emerge within channels. Messenger is a great example and the one to watch this year.”

2. Social listening data is at an all-time high.

“Social media is real time. It’s extremely high volume, and people are literally falling over themselves to tell you what they think of your brand, your competitors, your industry, your products. That insight is actionable, it’s scalable, and it’s something that doesn’t just affect marketing,” says Luke.

With the influx of sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor, there’s truly so much you can listen to today when it comes to customer sentiment about your brand. In fact, there may be more out there than you can keep up with.

3. We need to stop pigeonholing the capabilities of social media.

The evolution of social has been so rapid that many brands are struggling to keep up. When brands pigeonhole social media as only an engagement tool or only a publishing tool, Luke says “they’re missing the bigger story. I would encourage companies to take a step back from how they look at it as a marketing channel. Look at the value of the content and the insight that’s coming through, both on an individual and aggregate level, ask: how can that inform your business?”

4. Social customer service is better than ever.

Handling service cases on social costs one-third of other channels and can offer a faster turnaround. Plus, these customers often tell other people about it after they’ve had a timely, helpful experience getting their question answered on social. “When you satisfy that customer, when you make them happy, it has an amplification effect that you don’t get in a private one-to-one channel like phone,” says Luke.

Also, as Luke points out, “Social customer service really is the most concrete ROI because you’re talking about a cost center, you’re talking things where you want deflection and fast turnaround,” he advises.

5. Tools and data are super accessible.

“We’re seeing the scaling of social. Teams of practitioners are now becoming centers for excellence. Their jobs are more about enabling, empowering, governing, selecting the strategies and tools for the rest of their business to be successful at social. We call this the hub and spoke model,” shares Luke.

Because of this shift, Luke explains, “You need to have a different set of priorities for the tools that they use. They have to be very user-friendly, easy to learn, easy to re-learn, mobile-first, have access on the go. They need to be consolidated so they’re a one-stop solution, and they need to be connected.”

“It’s a combination of making the tool more accessible but also making the data more accessible,” he says. And today, that’s actually possible — whereas in the early days of social, it was all just a dream.

6. Most companies still could do much more with social data.

“I don’t think most brands are fully realizing the value of the data that’s coming in,” says Luke.

Listening for life events can have a big impact. “For consumer brands, life events are huge moments in time when you can shift someone’s loyalty and awareness of your brand — which can have resonance for decades to come,” he shares.

Luke’s advice to organizations looking to get the most out of social? “Instead of asking: what can my company do in this scenario? It’s about flipping the lens and saying: what does my customer want from me and how do I fit into their life? Then structuring around that,” he says.

We talked about much more in the world of social with Luke. Get more insights in this full episode of the Marketing Cloudcast.

29 Dec 16:23

How to Turn Customer Support Calls into Revenue

by Sabrina Ferraioli

How to Turn Customer Support Calls into Revenue

The Focus on Customer Acquisition

If you ever call a company’s customer support department and then call their sales department, you’ll likely notice a difference in the level of service you receive in each situation. Frequently, it seems you are more liable to spend time on hold when you are seeking service than when you are calling to make a purchase.

That’s a sad statement on how many companies perceive the value of existing versus new customers. They place more emphasis on bringing new clients into the fold than on retaining and growing existing accounts.

An eye-opening Gallup study revealed that 71% of B2B customers are either indifferent or actively disengaged with their vendors. In other words, they are likely to end the relationship at any time. Perhaps there’s good reason for this. The vendor has also disengaged from these customers. While companies risk losing these customers, they can achieve 50% higher sales and 34% more profitability with customers who are engaged with them.

How Customer Support Can Boost Retention and Growth

Clearly, the sales game’s goal should not be strictly acquiring new customers. It should also be retention and growth. Given this reality, companies should no longer view customer support as a cost center. It can generate revenues and profits if companies approach it in a more customer-centric way.

When customers call in for support, for example, the goal is not to get them off the phone as quickly as possible. There’s a fine line between problems and opportunities and any interaction with the customer should be viewed as a chance to learn about them, develop the relationship and foster growth. Here’s how reps should handle these calls.

Resolve the Problem
First, of course, you need to help customers resolve the problem about which they called. So your representative must ask open-ended questions and listen carefully to the customer’s responses. Although the rep may be able to address the issue without selling more products or services, don’t rule out the possibility of an additional sale or upgrade. For example, Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions are available in different packages, such as Basic, Professional and Enterprise. The customer who has a basic marketing automation solution may call because they are finding email marketing consumes too much time. They can resolve this issue by moving up to the Professional package which includes sophisticated lead nurturing. Often, there are several ways to address an issue. If so, you can discuss each of the alternatives with the customer and the pros and cons. Having options puts them in the driver’s seat, with a choice as to the next step.
Seek to Offer Increased Value
Now the rep is the hero because they’ve resolved the customer’s problem. So they can take the call a step further. The rep should talk with the customer about challenges they face in their business. To make this conversation as productive as possible, train your reps to play a consultative role, enabling them to provide valuable solutions. The consultative role starts with asking questions and listening actively. A good way to ensure reps are listening (rather than thinking about the next thing they’re going to say) is to have them take notes. They should respond in a way that shows they are listening, perhaps by paraphrasing what the customer said. In this way, they ensure they understood the customer’s challenges and can provide feedback.

Now they have the information they need to upsell and cross-sell the customer on complementary products and services. When they talk about their recommendations, they can do so with more credibility because they can state the reasons for their suggestions. In the process, they can evoke interest, and are likely to be able to motivate the customer to buy without being pushy.

Perhaps the rep discovers that the client is losing track of their leads once they hand them over to sales. Learning this might provide an opportunity for cross-selling a customer relationship management (CRM) package.

If it’s not appropriate for the support representative to delve too deeply into a product sale, another option is to set up an appointment for a sales professional to discuss it further.

As they focus on pursuing new leads, marketers cannot afford to take existing customers for granted. They need to change their attitude toward their customer service and support centers. When customers call, it’s an opportunity to deepen the relationship and foster retention. Approached correctly, a support call may also be an opening for new sales and revenues.

29 Dec 16:23

7 Tips to Writing a Better Follow-Up Email

by Annie McMindes

Writing a follow-up email is hard. You’re working to snag the attention of a prospect who has an inbox full of droning provocations and unsolicited gloom, laden with demanding sales folks prodding them to take action they’d, more often than not, rather skip. Emails with real value tend to slip through the cracks.

The “Delete” response on cold emails is so fast today. An average buyer gets somewhere around +100 emails a day, but only opens 23 percent of them, according to a study by Tellwise. Moreover, that buyer is only clicking on 2 percent of them. But, according to SiriusDecisions, the average salesperson only makes two attempts to reach a prospect.

And I get it. You don’t want to be a pain in the keister. We all want to avoid being annoying at the risk of having to face rejection. But it’s our job to make sure we’re aligned with what our prospects want and need. The trick is to make your follow up email creative and useful so it doesn’t feel like a follow-up.

Here’s your 7 tips for the best follow-up email:

1. Know who you’re talking to.

Do a little research on who you’re dealing with in your email. Understand your persona so you can figure out how best to relate to them in your follow up email.

To get a heat check on your prospect, hit their social channels like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook to see what kind of content they’re responding to and how they’re responding to it. These channels will help you gauge what tone you can use to approach someone without offending them.

Humanize your approach. Talk to your prospect like a person, not just a number on the spreadsheet. Personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14 percent and boost conversion rates by as much as 10 percent, according to the Aberdeen Group.

2. Nail the subject line.

According to our friend Jay Baer over at Convince and Convert, some 33 percent of email recipients decide whether or not to open an email based on the subject line alone. It might seem like a tiny afterthought for your follow up email, but the subject line is the first impression you have on your recipients.

Creating a subject line is cinch. But creating a subject line that gets read? That’s a lot harder. Too many people lack creativity and end with a product like this:

Hello. My name is Annie of Arendelle. I’m with company XYZ. We specialize in…I can save you…for free!

If you’re going to be wasting your time and the prospects, then please continue sending opening lines like this. Nothing spells SPAM quite like a subject line with words like “free,” “trial,” “quick,” “limited,” or “save.” So skip those trigger words. If you’re following up on a cold email, keep it short and sweet. If you’ve had a previous conversation, inject part of your conversation into the header. The moment I read a subject line linking prior communication, I know it’s legit and not offering up a timeshare in the Bahamas. Your subject line counts, so don’t knee-jerk it.

3. Make the prospect your story’s hero.

Stop making your follow up email all about you. I know you can help solve a pain point and add value. You’re just trying to make an impact and <insert buzzword>. But if you can’t get their attention, you’ll end up with a fate no different than any of your competitors (hello, trash bin).

No one has to read your email.

Ask yourself why a prospect should care about what you have to offer. Shift the focus from what your product is to a solution answering their problem. Like Joanna Wiebe of Copy Hackers said, don’t amplify the act of progressing, amplify the value of it. Be customer-centric, look at what they need, what they want. And slide in your solution.

err were you planning to mention the customer needs in your follow up email

4. Get to the point. (And get there fast.)

In general, I think brevity always rules. As our friend Ann Handley said in Everybody Writes, if you can say something more simply, then you should. Skip the open-ended questions and be proactively specific in your messaging. If your goal is to schedule a meeting, then ask for it. Don’t waste the time of your recipient by beating around the bush.

People skim emails looking for the main highlights. Short paragraphs and bullets are great ways to make sure your key points are front and center. You have only a few seconds (8.5 seconds to be specific) to catch your reader’s attention. Get to the most important points, and get there fast.

5. Position your follow up email and value alignment.

The solution your company provides solves a real pain point for your prospect. You’re not selling something frivolous, you have something that will really help your prospect increase revenue. If only you can get them to listen and understand.

Some 70 percent of prospects make purchasing decisions to solve problems, while 30 percent make the decision to gain something. So reach out with confidence to align your product or service with their needs or wants.

6. Be human (and unexpected).

Most follow up email messages are straightforward and serious (and seriously boring). Mix in a little twist to craft the unexpected and get noticed. If you’ve done your research on the prospect and think they can handle it, throw in a little (tasteful) humor to mix things up. Get a pulse of their personality through their Twitter or Facebook – see what they’re talking about and what resonates with them.

Be aware, but not overly cautious. In general, if a prospect is ignoring you no matter what, sending a funny, unexpected message to show you’re still waiting on the other end is a great last-ditch effort.

And, bonus: According to Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to be More Persuasive, business people who send a funny, inoffensive cartoon to their negotiation partners before negotiating creates higher levels of trust and 15 percent larger profits than those who didn’t send a cartoon.

When a life raft of happiness in the form of something funny comes along, people are quick to get on board. But to paraphrase Shakespeare, too much of a good thing can be too much of a good thing. Try not to overuse humor in the sales process. It can become annoying or off-putting at a certain point.

7. Be relevant.

Stay up-to-date with your prospect’s LinkedIn profile. You never know if you can find a little tidbit of information that’s relevant to your geographic location, education or job history that can make the world a little smaller.

Tools like Google alerts can also keep you updated with the industry and a specific company. Mention and compliment their current content – like a blog post, ebook or case study. This shows you’re researching them and you actually care about the thought leadership your prospect brings to the table. Relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails. Every business has data. Make it meaningful and actionable to tailor your messaging.

29 Dec 16:21

It’s been a good year for the Amazon Echo (AMZN)

by Jeff Dunn

Amazon remains an e-commerce company at its core, but like any tech giant, it’s put its fingers in many other pies over the years. Some of its attempts have been disasters. Others are bona fide smash hits.

The biggest surprise, though, continues to be the Amazon Echo — the family of smart speakers that, along with its Alexa voice assistant, has steadily put Amazon in a leading position within the Internet of Things and the burgeoning consumer market for artificial intelligence.

As this chart from Statista shows, the Echo only gained momentum in 2016. Device sales have more than doubled year-over-year, while the amount of “skills” third-party developers have built for Alexa has risen by thousands within the span of a few months. And because Amazon ties the device so tightly with its retail site, Echo buyers also tend to pump more money back into the company’s core business.

All of this should be on the conservative side once the year comes to a close, too — that 5.2 million figures doesn’t include holiday sales, and Amazon said on Tuesday that the diminutive Echo Dot has been the highest selling device on Amazon.com since November 1, with the standard Echo in the top four. All of this comes despite the Echo only being available in the US, the UK, and Germany.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, though: A recent police search warrant for an Arkansas man's Echo recordings has served as a reminder for the privacy concerns inherent to devices like this, and on a functionality level, we’ve found that Alexa itself still needs plenty of work. The latter point would explain why Echo owners mostly use the device for basic tasks.

amazon echo 2016 chart

Join the conversation about this story »

29 Dec 16:21

Resolve to be a Contender Not Column Fodder

by Tibor Shanto

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca

If you are in B2B sales, you have, knowingly or not, been column fodder. I often ask sales people if they know what that means, and for the most part most do not. While some of you may know what I mean, others may not so let’s define. It is a situation where a buyer has decided that they will give the business to a specific, usually favoured, vendor. These same buyers, also know from experience or set expectations, that their boss (or the owner), will want to see some comparables before approving said purchase. So they set things up in a spreadsheet for presentation.

Column A – This has all their requirements
Column B – The chosen vendor, the one that will get the deal short of divine intervention (bad news for atheist sellers).

But they know the boss is going to ask to see options, so this buyer engages with two other vendors. Asking very specific questions, questions matching the requirements in Column A. This line of questioning often fools sales people making them believe that the interest is real due to the specificity of the questions, and the degree of engagement by the prospect. (I know earlier I called them a buyer, but that is only true for the vendor in Column B, if you’re in C or D, they are and will only ever be prospects.) In the end the buyer presents these in a way where Column B is all but assured that they win the deal, and you and one other rep serve as column fodder.

But it does not have to play out that way. You can take steps to either avoid playing the game, or play it to disrupt and win. Contrary to what some may think, I think the prudent course is to avoid playing the game, and spend the time and energy prospecting for potential buyers who are willing to engage based on merit, not the need to justify a purchase from someone other than you.

First thing you can do is to ensure that you are interviewing the prospect as much as they interview you. While it is the prospect who should be speaking more, it is the seller who should set that into motion with good questions that not only bring light to the issue, but challenge the prospects pre-conceptions, and direction. With Fodder calls, not only is the rep talking more than the prospect, but the prospect is driving the direction, asking the questions, and keeping the discussion in predetermined petametres that deliver the desired result, fodder, not knowledge.

If it is a real curiosity, you could get to the root of things by asking a combination of:

Where they are now?
How they measure the situation?
Where they had planned to be?
Why the Gap?
Quantify the impact of addressing the Gap?
Quantify the impact of inaction to address the Gap?
Extrapolate Rewards over entire the course of ownership/benefit?

If you can’t change the path the conversation is on, you need to seriously think about walking away. If the conversation is nothing like the ones that lead to closed deals, you have to ask why, and then react accordingly.

I have some reps tell me that they “play” along, believing if the chosen vendor drops the ball, they will be “next in line”. Problem is even if that happens, human ego often prevents the buyer from coming back Column C or D, a new search is much simpler for them.

Last thought, that time you wasted playing Fodder, not only could have been spent with a real prospect, but you’ll never get it back.

Be a Contender in 2017!

See you next year!!

The post Resolve to be a Contender Not Column Fodder appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

29 Dec 16:21

Ottawa scorecard 2016: The winners and losers under the Trudeau government

by John Ivison, David Akin, Marie-Danielle Smith, David Pugliese, Ottawa Citizen

Tony Caldwell/PostmediaOne of the Trudeau government’s final bills tabled in the House of Commons before the Christmas break will give Statistics Canada more independence from any government of the day.

More than a year has passed since the Liberals rose to power in October 2015 – enough time to make some calls on the rising stars and falling ones on Parliament Hill, and the winners and losers under the Trudeau administration. And despite various distractions at home and beyond the borders, a theme has emerged that may ultimately define this government.

yir-01

PODCAST

John Ivison and David Akin from the National Post’s parliamentary bureau, hand out bouquets and brickbats; size up pending leadership races and assess the ups and downs of the Trudeau government in 2016.

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SCIENTISTS IN NEED OF FUNDING

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau talks a lot about the middle class but if there’s one group of Canadians that were favoured by the Liberal government in 2016, it was the people wearing white lab coats.

That scientists won more money and more respect from the Trudeau government shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, the Liberals campaigned on a platform to do just that and the government has, by and large, kept those promises.

Science Minister Kirsty Duncan has been nearly invisible in the House of Commons, but she’s logged plenty of kilometres preaching the virtues of science, and investments in science, all across the country.

Duncan’s name has been on hundreds of cheques issued over the year worth billions of dollars, all made out to funding research projects in colleges, universities and laboratories.

And Duncan’s boss recently gave reason to believe it will be the same next year.

“This is something we need to do more of,” Trudeau said at a press conference this month in Montreal, where he announced billions of dollars of federal support for universities and colleges in Quebec. “We need to be basing our decisions and policies on facts, on evidence and on science. Being able to empower and encourage scientists to do the necessary research, to challenge the orthodoxy of the moment, whether it be political or elsewhere, it is extremely important that we recognize that science, knowledge, understanding is essential to create opportunities and growth in any meaningful way.”

We need to be basing our decisions and policies on facts, on evidence and on science

Notably, the Trudeau government’s first act in office was to make the long-form census mandatory again, something the previous Harper government had made voluntary. And one of the Trudeau government’s final bills tabled in the House of Commons before the Christmas break will give Statistics Canada more independence from any government of the day.

Next year, the Trudeau government expects to name its first Chief Science Officer, to advise the government on research priorities and other scientific matters.

And while the Harper government’s deficit elimination plan meant federal science jobs were trimmed, the Trudeau government has hired hundreds of scientists.

BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AFP/Getty ImagesNotably, the Trudeau government’s first act in office was to make the long-form census mandatory again.

Just before Trudeau held that Montreal press conference, his government concluded a new collective agreement with the union representing thousands of federal scientists. They got a small raise in that contract but, notably, they also got for the first time a clause protecting their ability to speak publicly about their research.

Some federal scientists complained that the Harper government “muzzled” them over fears their scientific work, particularly in the area of climate change, would be at odds with the government’s agenda.

Trudeau, in Montreal, said he “fundamentally” believes scientists have the “rights and responsibilities” to “challenge, to share their work, to disagree with each other, to disagree with people in positions of leadership, to challenge each and every one of us to do better, to think better.”

— David Akin, National Post

• Email: dakin@postmedia.com | Twitter: @davidakin

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MILLENNIALS BUYING HOUSES

Laura Pedersen/National PostHousing has remained relatively healthy since a new policy was introduced in October to apply an interest rate far above market rates for any mortgage backed by Ottawa.

The real losers of the Trudeau years could well be the very people who helped get him elected — millennials keen to get on the first rung of the housing ladder.

The impact of the Liberal government’s decision to add a “stress test” hurdle has not yet shown up in housing sales data. Housing has remained relatively healthy since the policy was introduced in October to apply an interest rate far above market rates for any mortgage backed by Ottawa.

But mortgage experts suggest it has been kept afloat by buyers who were pre-approved under the old rules and those who rushed into the market as interest rates began to rise. “With pre-approvals for up to 120 days, we could have closings as late as mid-February that escape the test,” said Will Dunning, chief economist for Mortgage Professionals Canada.

Industry watchers believe the new policy will have an adverse impact on the market sooner rather than later. The Ottawa-based Canadian Real Estate Association warned that 2017 will see a decline in real estate prices for the first time since 2008 — and it laid the blame squarely at the government’s door.

CREA expects the average price of a home to fall by 2.8 per cent to $475,900 next year.

Regulatory changes, which mean those seeking mortgage insurance must now qualify based on the posted five year fixed rate of 4.64 per cent, will disproportionately hit first time buyers, many of whom are millennials who backed Justin Trudeau in the last election.

If I have a mortgage for 95 per cent of the value of my house, and the value of the house falls by, let’s say 10 per cent, I have a big problem

While it is bad enough that many buyers will now be frozen out of the housing market, the fear among some economists is that a decline in house prices might trigger a broader crash in the economy.

Dunning notes that there are strong hints the government would like to see a drop in housing prices.

But he argues that if house prices fall at a time of high mortgage indebtedness, conditions would be ripe for economic disaster.

“If I have a mortgage for 95 per cent of the value of my house, and the value of the house falls by, let’s say 10 per cent, I have a big problem. It affects the way I act in the economy. If that happens to enough people, there is an enormous problem,” he said.

If Dunning is right, the impact of government policy on the housing market will be one of the big stories to watch in 2017.

— John Ivison, National Post

• Email: jivison@nationalpost.com | Twitter: IvisonJ

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HIGH-ENERGY MPs LEADING TEAM ‘T’

David Rowland/APMinister of International Trade Chrystia Freeland speaks at a press conference at the signing of the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement in Auckland, New Zealand on Feb. 4, 2016.

Trade Minister Chrystia Freeland

Much of the deal had been negotiated by the previous government, but new pressures and fears threatened CETA throughout the year, necessitating renegotiation and a lot of persuasion.

Tony Caldwell/Postmedia NetworkEnvironment Minister Catherine McKenna at the Ottawa River on Oct. 11, 2016.

Environment Minister Catherine McKenna

Catherine McKenna has shown herself to be a high-energy operator, who has been able to weather the storm on a tricky file.

She announced a plan to phase out coal, has been marketing Canada’s clean technology in China and has managed to defend pipeline decisions in parallel with articulating a clean-fuel strategy.

Graham Hughes /The Canadian PressTransport Minister Marc Garneau at Bell Helicopter in Mirabel, Que., on Dec. 21, 2016

Transport Minister Marc Garneau

At the start of his mandate, Marc Garneau was handed lemons — a department struggling with its finances and in the vice grip of the Treasury Board Secretariat. But he appears to have made lemonade.

Airline rules are shifting so that low-cost carriers can survive the Canadian market and a “passengers’ bill of rights” is being introduced.

Meanwhile, Garneau is navigating a moratorium on tankers carrying crude oil on the north coast of British Columbia. His department is also studying ways to improve cycling safety.

We reserve some judgment for if, and how, Garneau introduces measures to combat distracted driving, which is responsible for an increasing number of deaths in Canada every year.

But all in all, the transport minister is proving himself a productive manager lacking in bluster and scandal, unlike a few of his honourable colleagues.

— Marie-Danielle Smith, National Post

• Email: mdsmith@postmedia.com | Twitter: mariedanielles

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SAJJAN — THE MINISTER OF DELAYS

Fred Chartrand/The Canadian PressA little more than a year after being named National Defence Minister, the shine is off Harjit Sajjan.

He emerged on the scene as Justin Trudeau’s “Bad Ass” wing man, with accolades and expectations he would be good news for the Canadian military.

But a little more than a year after being named National Defence Minister, the shine is off Harjit Sajjan.

His mandate letter from the prime minister required him to launch a competition to replace the CF-18 fighter aircraft.

Instead, Sajjan championed the purchase of 18 Boeing Super Hornet jets as a stop-gap measure, delaying an actual competition to replace the CF-18 fleet for at least another five years.

It was a good move for his boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as it pushed off a government decision on the controversial F-35 stealth fighter until well after the next election.

Boeing/AFP/Getty ImagesA photo released by aeronautical manufacturer Boeing shows Super Hornet fighter jets during tests at an unidentified location.

Sajjan also had the job of helping renew Canada’s commitment to United Nations’ peace operations. While that intention has been announced, action on that front has still to materialize.

But in October, Vance backtracked, saying that no African mission was planned and any such claims were mere speculation.

However, a short time later, Sajjan reiterated that a number of African missions were being planned. Where and when Canadian troops are headed for UN duty could be announced sometime in 2017.

HandoutCanada's Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan, who served as an intelligence officer with the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan.

“The pensions, the wait times were unacceptable, and reducing the wait times is very important to me,” Sajjan explained.

— David Pugliese, Postmedia News

• Email: dpugliese@postmedia.com | Twitter: davidpugliese

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MPs WHO WERE FRONT AND CENTRE

Pierre Trudeau once famously dismissed backbench MPs as nobodies once they were 50 yards from Parliament Hill. That may have been a bit harsh. It certainly would have been in 2016 when several MPs who were neither ministers nor parliamentary secretaries made an impact that, in many cases, caught the attention of everyday voters far from Parliament Hill. Here’s an informal list of notable backbenchers, compiled from canvassing MPs, political staff and other Hill observers:

http://www.parl.gc.caLeft to right: Gary Anandasangaree, Francisco Sorbara and David Graham.

Liberals

It can be tough for backbenchers on the government side to distinguish themselves. All the glory, after all, is supposed to go to the prime minister or his cabinet ministers. But Gary Anandasangaree, a first-time MP from Scarborough-Rouge Park, has won notice in the House and in the community of Tamil Canadians, for which he has been a strong advocate. Anandasangaree has also championed a bill that would expand and protect a national park through the Rouge River valley. “He does a lot of good work in the background. Very thoughtful,”said one Parliament Hill observer.

Francesco Sorbara won a tight race in Vaughan-Woodbridge, beating Conservative incumbent Julian Fantino. That work ethic has been noticed by his colleagues. Plus, from his seat on the Commons finance committee, he’s smartly put to use expertise gained from years on bond trading desks on Wall Street and Bay Street. Sorbara has also been pushing resolution of a trade dispute on drywall that has driven up the cost of this vital building product in Canada. That’s not an insignificant issue for Sorbara considering the country’s largest drywall distributor is in his north-of-Toronto riding, which also happens to be one of the country’s busiest for new home construction.

Former political staffer David Graham became an MP last fall for Laurentides-Labelle. Not only does he know his way around the House but he is “constantly pushing the Liberal government to be more sensitive to the unique reality of rural Canada, something a Liberal government can’t have too much of.”

Other notable Liberals: Anthony Housefather (Mount Royal) and Arnold Chan (Scarborough-Agincourt) have been noticed for being “thoughtful and independent-minded debaters.” Chan, fighting cancer, has been “an inspiration.” First-time MP Deb Schulte (King—Vaughan) is “incredibly competent and hard-working.” John Aldag (Cloverdale-Langley City) won notice for his work on the medically assisted suicide file.

Two Nova Scotians earned a shout-out: Bernadette Jordan (South Shore-St. Margarets) for her work getting unanimous support for an ocean protection measure; and Darren Fisher (Dartmouth-Cole Harbour) for getting a private member’s bill all the way to third reading — a rare feat for a backbencher. His bill was aimed at reducing or eliminating the dumping in landfills of light bulbs containing toxic mercury.

Encouraging words were also heard about: Doug Eyolfson, Anita Vandenbeld, Frank Baylis, Joel Lightbound and Raj Grewal.

Tyler Kula/Postmedia Network//Nathan Denette/The Canadian Press//Megan VossPostmedia NetworkLeft to right: Marilyn Gladu, Gerard Deltell and Garnett Genuis.

Conservatives

Marilyn Gladu, the first-time MP for the southwestern Ontario riding of Sarnia-Lambton, was named by Maclean’s magazine as Parliament’s most collegial MP in her first year in the chamber and, at year end, her name came up again and again in that context. Taller than most of her male colleagues, and frequently flashing a million-dollar smile, she is the first female engineer to take a seat in the House of Commons.

More than any other first-time MP, former television journalist Gerard Deltell (Louis St. Laurent) is seen as shining brightest in the House of Commons — in both languages. “He is one of the most eloquent and substantive members in the House,” says an MP who is not a Conservative.

Not yet 30-years-old, Garnett Genuis (Sherwood Park-Fort Saskatchewan) is among the most loquacious of any MP and, some of his peers think, one of the smartest. “The guy does his homework. He’s just so well-prepared,” says an impressed Liberal MP.

Other notable Conservatives: A trio of young, female, first-time MPs — Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland), Rachael Harder (Lethbridge), Karen Vecchio (Elgin—Middlesex—London) — are making their mark in Question Period for a tough-as-nails approach matched with a reputation for getting stuff done.

Tom Kmiec (Calgary-Shepard) brings his A-game to Commons debates. Arnold Viersen (Peace River—Westlock) won unanimous support in asking the government to study the growing problem of violent pornography.

Alupa Clarke (Beauport—Limoilou) was once in the Canadian Armed Forces, in the artillery regiment, and is part of a new, young generation of Quebec Conservatives. John Nater (Perth-Wellington) is a new father, a first-time MP and “an impressive non-partisan.” He’s also a rare, fully bilingual southern Ontario Conservative.

http://www.parl.gc.caLeft to right: Nathan Cullen, Charlie Angus and Niki Ashton.

New Democrats

The bilingual British Columbian Nathan Cullen (Skeena—Bulkley Valley) was his party’s lead on the electoral reform file and he’s done an effective enough job there to win praise. But it’s the manner in which he fights the fight that wins admirers — even from other parties. There’s no mistaking it when Cullen gets hot about something, but he rarely gets personal, and he’s just as likely to make a point with wit as he is with a barb.

Charlie Angus (Timmins-James Bay) managed the rare feat of winning unanimous approval in the House for a motion asking the government to spend more and do more on health care for indigenous children. In 2017, expect Angus to hold the government’s feet to the fire on that commitment. He’s also being pushed by many New Democrats to run for leader.

Like Angus, Niki Ashton (Churchill-Keewatinook Aski) wears her heart on her sleeve and that passion impresses even her political opponents, many of whom hope she jumps into her party’s leadership race.

Wayne Stetski was once a mayor but now that he’s an MP(Kootenay-Columbia ), he has been found to be “studious and principled,” does his homework, and works hard to stay in touch with voters in his huge constituency in southern British Columbia — a constituency he won by just 509 votes.

Encouraging words were also heard about: Daniel Blaikie, Alexandre Boulerice and Karine Trudel.

— David Akin, National Post

• Email: dakin@postmedia.com | Twitter: @davidakin

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TRUDEAU BETS ON ‘GREEN GROWTH’

Darryl Dyck/The Canadian PressJustin Trudeau announces his environmental platform in Vancouver, B.C., on June 29, 2015.

Hardly a week went by in 2016 without a minister in Justin Trudeau’s government telling someone that it was not a choice between the environment or the economy, they were choosing to do both: Protect the environment and boost the economy.

At year’s end, that dual focus — environment and the economy — remained the dominant theme of the year and is likely to be so for the remainder of the Trudeau government’s first term.

Indeed, the government’s ability to demonstrate achievements against economic and environmental benchmarks will almost certainly be a key consideration when voters next go to the polls in 2019.

By the end of 2016, environmental activists could point approvingly to Canada’s leading role at two successive United Nations global climate change conferences: in Paris in 2015, and in Marrakech, Morocco, this year. And Trudeau managed to do twice in one year what Stephen Harper never did in nine: convene first ministers meetings to talk about climate change.

While neither first ministers meetings went perfectly for the feds, the Trudeau Liberals believe they were able to establish the “clean growth framework” they desired. Their agreement with some, but not all, provinces was “historic,” to use the description provided by Catherine McKenna, lead minister on the file.

Meanwhile, on the economy and energy file, there was near-simultaneous activity.

Just days before that first ministers summit, the Trudeau government signed off on two recommendations by the National Energy Board to increase Canada’s pipeline capacity for Alberta petroleum products.

The expansion of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, from Edmonton to Vancouver, got a thumbs-up from the Trudeau cabinet, as did a scheme to reverse the flow of an existing pipeline known as Line 9 that would take Canadian crude to Wisconsin.

Notably, the Trudeau government killed the Northern Gateway pipeline project that would have taken Alberta and Saskatchewan crude to the northern B.C. port of Prince Rupert.

The political strategy was clear: Find the happy middle in the national debate on the economy, pipelines and the environment.

If you didn’t like the pipelines, you would love Ottawa’s greenhouse gas reduction targets. Don’t like the pending national carbon tax? You’re going to love how the Trudeau government will make Canada even wealthier with those pipeline approvals.

The risk for the Trudeau government is that the political calculation, in the end, may be too clever. Rather than win bouquets for even-handedness, they may draw brickbats from all sides.

Trudeau won his historic majority by consolidating much of the so-called “progressive vote” — voters that might normally vote NDP, young voters, first-time voters and, crucially, indigenous voters. Many of those voters may not see the tradeoff so favourably. In the House of Commons, the NDP have seized on this, noting, for example, that Trudeau government’s greenhouse gas emission reduction targets remain the same as the Harper government it replaced.

This is the file, then, that will take the most care and attention for the Trudeau Liberals in the years ahead. If Trudeau truly believes Canada can have its cake and eat it too, he will be required to spend all the political capital he can muster.

— David Akin, National Post

• Email: dakin@postmedia.com | Twitter: @davidakin

29 Dec 16:20

Leave a Lasting Impression With These Trade Show Giveaways

by Joel Goldstein

people-show-chairs-gym

Trade shows are a great place to mix and mingle with distributors, retail buyers, and other customers. But, trade show attendees will probably walk by and interact with dozens of different booths, so how can you ensure they will remember you long after the event is over? Instead of giving them a standard pen or reusable tote bag, offer each attendee one of these giveaways:

USB Flash Drive

Regardless of what industry you work in, you can probably make use of a flash drive at some point, which is why this is one of the best trade show giveaways. This giveaway becomes even more useful if it doubles as a keychain, which makes it easier for attendees to tote around with them wherever they go. Don’t forget to add your branding to the outside of the USB flash drive, otherwise attendees may not remember where they got it from when they use it months down the road.

Phone Wallet

Tech-related gifts like a USB flash drive are always a big hit at trade shows, and so are other items you can use with your smartphone or computer, such as a silicone phone wallet. In case you aren’t familiar with this item, a silicone phone wallet is essentially a silicone pocket that sticks to the back of your smartphone and allows you to store small items such as cash, an ID, or a credit card. This is a great branding opportunity because if guests actually use the item, it will be with them whenever they have their smartphones.

Reusable Water Bottles

People are beginning to steer away from drinking out of disposable water bottles, which is why so many trade show attendees will love getting a reusable water bottle from you. Again, this is great for branding because if attendees make use of the item, it will be by their side throughout their day, so they will constantly be reminded of your brand. Plus, if you give away an item like this, guests will be pleasantly surprised (and impressed) that you chose to gift them with a pricier item rather than a traditional pen or stress ball.

Power Bank

Trade shows can go on for hours, which means attendees’ smartphones may start running low as they go from booth to booth to learn about new products. So, why not help visitors out by giving away branded power banks? Attendees can plug their smartphone chargers directly into the power bank instead of looking for an electrical outlet the next time they need to recharge. Although this is a bit pricier than other giveaway options, it will make busy attendees’ lives easier and make it more convenient for them to charge their devices, so it is sure to leave a lasting impression.

Have you ever attended a trade show? If so, what promotional giveaways did you offer to visitors? What items did you receive from other booths? Share your favorite and least favorite giveaway ideas in the comments below!

29 Dec 16:20

Sales Enablement vs. Sales and Marketing Alignment

by Jarrick Cooper

When sales and marketing work together, it results in increased productivity and profit. When they don’t, important business objectives can be missed.

Sales and marketing alignment and sales enablement are two buzzwords I’ve heard a lot lately, but what do they mean and how are they different? Why has it been a challenge in the past to get sales and marketing on the same page, syncing up to achieve common goals?

Sales and Marketing: The Step Brothers of Business

Historically, sales and marketing have been the stepbrothers of the business world, competing for the affection of their father and blaming each other for their shortcomings and missed goals.

The CEO is like the biological father of the sales team while the marketing team is like his new stepson. The CEO and sales team have a close relationship. Sales brings in new business, so it is easy for the CEO to measure the sales team’s contribution to the company. Marketing, on the other hand, spends most of its days strategizing new ways to generate leads for the sales team utilizing effective tactics—all of which costs the company. Sales makes the money, marketing spends it.

Dysfunctional Family Dynamic

Marketing pitches their strategies to the CEO, showing how each initiative and activity is part of a larger chain that all play an important role in capturing new leads and moving them through their buyer’s journey. The CEO thinks the marketing plan is too expensive and he is skeptical that marketing’s strategy will yield the lowest customer acquisition cost (CAC) and highest ROI. So the CEO cherry-picks tactics from the chain and rejects the rest, leaving marketing with a fragmented strategy but with the same goals and expectations.

That’s when the dysfunction begins. Sales goals are not met and Dad wants some answers. The sales team blames the marketing team for delivering too few or low-quality leads. The marketing team points to their insufficient marketing budget and blames the sales team for being lazy or poor closers.

Like I always tell my kids, complaining about the problem will never lead to a solution. Cue sales enablement and sales and marketing alignment to the rescue.

Sales Enablement

Merriam-Webster defines enabling as providing someone with means or opportunity or to make something possible, practical or easy. In this case, that “someone” is a salesperson or sales team and the “something” is the process of closing a deal.

For instance, let’s say Jill was recently hired in sales. She has quite a bit of experience in your industry, but not necessarily in selling. She needs tools—an email account, a phone, access to the CRM, sales scripts, and so on. She may also require training—courses, books, hands-on training and the like. The process of connecting her with these resources is essentially enablement.

Now that Jill is equipped with what she needs, she can send emails, make phone calls and start closing deals. When she understands the product, how to sell it, why the customer wants it, and what the organization values, she can make decisions that are congruent with her role and the company.

In short, sales enablement can be defined as the act of providing salespeople with the tools to make their job of closing deals easier. I recommend checking out HubSpot’s detailed infographic if you’d like a deeper dive into the intricacies and definition of sales enablement.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and marketing alignment—the act of aligning the goals, strategies, accountability and forces of sales and marketing—is the foundational component of sales enablement.

If sales and marketing are the stepbrothers of business, it’s not hard to see why it’s so hard to get them to align. There are several contributing factors. One is that marketing often tends to have a long-term mindset (because they’re looking to boost brand recognition and nurture leads), while salespeople tend to move at a fast pace, working hard to meet quotas.

Their roles can also be in conflict. Marketing wants to be strategic in their next moves. Sales wants to push toward quarterly goals. Some marketers tend to see lead generation as a numbers game, while sales argues it’s the quality of the lead that counts.

So, while sales enablement and sales and marketing alignment do not mean the same thing, sales and marketing alignment is an integral component to the success of a sale enablement strategy—ensuring that communication between sales and marketing stay open and transparent and that the two departments work together and share accountability to achieve agreed-upon goals.

Failure to align sales and marketing teams around the right processes and technologies cost B2B companies 10 percent or more of revenue per year, resulting in $1 trillion in lost revenue each year due to decreased sales productivity and wasted marketing efforts. It’s time to get your teams oriented.

Sales and Marketing Working Together

When sales and marketing teams work together to develop lead generation, demand generation, prospecting, lead nurturing, closing, customer retention and referral strategies and tools, goals and accountability align. When goals and accountability align, get ready for a more efficient sales and marketing process, happier stakeholders and a better-looking bottom line. The question is how to get there.

Every organization’s needs are different and each should develop their own tailored sales enablement and sales and marketing alignment playbook, but here are a few basic steps to get you pointed in the right direction:

Establish goals and KPIs. What goals and expectations do both departments have and what metrics will be measured to determine if the goals have been met? When marketing and sales are clear on each other’s objectives, they’ll gain a better understanding of the thought process behind the actions, and will be better able to help each other at every stage.
Identify ideal buyer personas. A combination of customer and prospect feedback and sales team input will form the basis for whom your marketing should be targeting, what messaging and offers will best resonate with them, and what channels are best for reaching them with your content. When marketing is expected to define buyer personas without input from the sales team, salespeople will always be able to blame poor close rates on marketing attracting the wrong types of leads.
Define a lead generation strategy together. In addition to helping to define the ideal buyer personas, the sales team should also provide feedback on the lead generation strategies coming from the marketing team. Marketing has a plan, but it might not complement what sales is trying to achieve. Sales wants to close deals, but may not understand how prospects were attracted in the first place. Collaborating on a unified strategy will improve communication on all fronts.
Determine how to identify a warm lead. The sales and marketing teams should work together to identify all the ways that leads interact with your brand and products and assign negative and positive point values to each of those activities. With that information and a bit of marketing automation, marketing can help sales identify which leads are most likely to be sales ready, allowing them to prioritize leads.
Define responsibilities. Traditional sales funnel models keep sales and marketing siloed. If both departments were responsible for revenue, and not just for lead generation or closing, they would work more closely together. This would also make lead hand-off a smooth and effective process.
Measure success. The sales and marketing teams should continue to meet on a regular basis—weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly—to report on the success of each department’s efforts. Are marketing’s efforts bringing in quality leads? Do the lead scores accurately reflect the sales readiness of the leads sales is talking to? Are there any sales tools or collateral that would help the sales team close more deals? Is the sales team hearing any frequently asked questions, pain points or objections that could be addressed with new marketing content? Are there ways that either sales or marketing could help shorten the buy cycle for their customers?
Practice positive reinforcement. If you are holding sales and marketing teams to arbitrary quotas, lest they will be fired or demoted, you are creating a culture of fear. At best your teams will resent you and likely move on from the company as soon as possible, at worst your employees will become desperate and resort to unethical behaviors that could affect your brand in ways that you may not be able to foresee. For your sales and marketing alignment machine to work, your teams need to feel comfortable opening up with each other and putting new ideas on the table. Your employees will get more fulfillment from their job and their happiness will shine through in their work. That translates to happy customers, creative sales and marketing strategies and optimal profits.
Optimize and iterate. Continue to evaluate the data. What strategies are working? How can you amplify those winning strategies or use those strategies as a framework for another sector that needs growth? Which strategies are not working and why? Keep a record of what’s been done and in what context to help establish a playbook that will make developing future strategies more efficient.

Sales and marketing are on the same team—they just don’t know it yet. Once they become aware of how each contributes to the other, they’ll become best friends.

29 Dec 16:20

85 Percent of Your Sales Depend on This One Technique

by John Nemo

Make sure you master this method of engagement on LinkedIn so that you can generate more sales leads, paying clients and extra revenue.

“About 15 percent of one’s financial success is due to one’s technical knowledge and about 85 percent is due to skill in human engineering—to personality and the ability to lead people.”

Dale Carnegie wrote these words in 1936 as part of his groundbreaking book, “How To Win Friends and Influence People.”

“Dealing with people is probably the biggest problem you face, especially if you are in business,” Carnegie also wrote.

And while much has changed in the way we conduct business since 1936, the ability to win over people remains to be the critical component to closing deals.

If you want to be successful in generating sales on LinkedIn, or any digital platform for that matter, you must understand and master the concept of one-on-one personalized marketing.

This means going beyond old school advertising like blasting out a press release, an advertisement, or an offer.

In order to be successful selling on LinkedIn you must understand people. Get to know what they’re passionate about, what their problems are and what they need help with!

Small Talk to Sales

And while this, in theory, is great — I’m sure we’d all love to grab coffee with and chat up all our prospects personally — time is a very valuable commodity.

Enter LinkedIn.

When you’re on LinkedIn, you can look at a prospect’s profile and you immediately know where they live, where they went to college, where they work and what their hobbies and interests are.

You have all the messaging icebreakers you’d learn in 15 minutes of small talk!

This is part of the skill in “human engineering” that Carnegie talks about. You have the ability to engage people at a personal, one-on-one level.

You also have an ability to break the ice and strike up a conversation around topics that the person is comfortable and familiar with without being salesy, spammy or sleazy.

Think of each 1-on-1 interaction you have with a prospect on LinkedIn like an online coffee meeting. You break the ice and begin the relationship by getting the other person talking about himself or herself.

How it Works

Like Google, you can leverage LinkedIn as a search engine for professionals to create these conversations.

Use LinkedIn search to find your ideal prospects, using keywords, such as someone’s job title, and then used LinkedIn’s advanced filters to refine your search to include where someone lives, where he or she went to college, etc.

You now have a customized list of your ideal prospects ready to go!

Best of all, LinkedIn has already delivered all the data points you need to start the conversation off with some small talk (where the person lives, went to school, where he or she works, etc.) before you jump into business.

Talk, Pivot, Close

You can pivot from the initial icebreakers (via your LinkedIn invitation and first messages) into a one-on-one conversation where you offer something of value to your ideal prospect.

The idea here is simple – you must earn the right to ask someone for their time and attention on LinkedIn.

You do that by providing some free tips, free advice, content, etc., that is aimed at solving one of the key prospects or pain points your ideal prospect has inside his or her business.

Because you’ve started the relationship off in a casual, 1-on-1 conversation style via LinkedIn, you can share your free tips or resources as a natural extension of the conversation.

For example, say I am targeting Business Coaches and Consultants.

After breaking the ice via my initial LinkedIn invite and bantering a bit via LinkedIn messages, I can say to a specific Business Coach prospect something like this:

“So I thought you might find this helpful – it’s a free resource guide for Business Coaches and Consultants looking to get more clients online. I’ll put a link to it below, and you can download it if you like. I’d love to hear what you think of it. And if not, no worries. Great talking to you and hope you have an awesome day!”

Because I’m offering something of value right away, and not asking for anything in return (a phone call, a meeting, etc.), I’m earning the time and attention of that prospect so I can make a bigger “ask” later on.

Sales Scale

Using third party automation tools like LinMailPro, LinkedIn instantly scales your ability to have and have scores of these online “coffee meetings” every day, with each one being targeted to your ideal prospects online.

And it all comes back to something Dale Carnegie talked about more than 75 years ago: Human engineering.

In spite of all the technology and reduction in face to face interactions in today’s digital marketplace, people are still doing business with people.

As Carnegie noted: “In the heyday of his activity, John D. Rockefeller said that ‘the ability to deal with people is as purchasable a commodity as sugar or coffee. And I will pay more for that ability,’ said Rockefeller, “than for any other under the sun.'”

LinkedIn offers a tremendous opportunity for you to build the “Know, Like, and Trust” values with your prospective customers – so make sure you take advantage!

29 Dec 16:20

5 Strategies for Selling to Multiple Decision-Makers, According to DealRoom's CEO

by joel@joelcapperella.com (Joel Capperella)

"Welcome to "The Pipeline" — a new weekly column from HubSpot, featuring actionable advice and insight from real sales leaders."

Nowadays, selling to businesses often means proving to multiple decision-makers that your product can make their jobs more efficient, provide a significant return on investment, and outdo competitors in functionality — all at a reasonable price.

And as someone who has experienced these challenges firsthand after developing project management software for the finance industry, I can tell you that getting there is anything but easy.

I worked hard to create software that can stand on its own merits. But I still have to defend those facts to multiple stakeholders on every sale. Luckily, I've uncovered a few strategies that make selling to businesses with multiple stakeholders smoother and more productive. Here are five of the most effective ones.

5 Strategies for Selling to Multiple Decision-Makers

1. Make sharing information easy.

Providing key information about your product in a clear, digestible, easily shareable way is central to effectively dealing with multiple stakeholders. Give your potential customers the ability to quickly share your pricing model and platform details with their colleagues — that will make it simpler for them to come to a final determination.

Start by creating straightforward, transparent pricing models with no hidden fees or complex up-charges.

Image Source

Prospects are naturally going to compare you to your competitors, so when they do, make sure you stand out with clear, honest pricing. Having concise-yet-thorough marketing collateral and one-pagers that outline how your product benefits your customers' processes can also go a long way.

Shareable content like this can give multiple decision-makers a clear picture of your product and value proposition quicker — offering them a deeper understanding of how your platform will suit their needs within your window of opportunity and facilitating a smoother multi-stakeholder sale.

At the end of the day, businesses want to make quick and informed decisions about which software to implement. Make the decision-making process easier for them by being transparent, genuine, and straightforward.

2. Verbalize key differentiators and benefits.

Continuously verbalizing your product's key benefits and differentiators with prospects will ultimately allow those stakeholders to more thoroughly, effectively, and accurately describe your solution to their fellow decision-makers.

Concisely explain what makes your product unique — in a way sophisticated enough to convey legitimacy but digestible enough to be easily repeated. Know your elevator pitch, and be able to seamlessly work it into your demos and conversations with prospects.

The software I developed allows teams to close complex financial transactions faster because we provide a project management solution — and our ability to clearly and accessibly verbalize how our software helps M&A teams manage deals more efficiently usually determines whether we're ultimately able to close.

For example, when my team is conducting demos or corresponding with potential clients, they clearly state that we, unlike other virtual data rooms, have project management capabilities to help close deals faster.

"Close deals faster" is a phrase we use repeatedly — because that's our software's mission, our most crucial benefit, and the ultimate basis of our value proposition. We want our prospects to walk away from every conversation they have with us understanding that that is what we will do for them.

Decide what you want your key takeaways from each conversation to be and verbalize them consistently. If you do this correctly, the stakeholders you speak with will repeat those key points to their fellow decision-makers and do a little selling for you.

3. Be willing to conduct multiple demos.

Having multiple decision-makers involved in the sales process means having more people to impress — more eyes that will want to be on your product. So when you're dealing with multiple stakeholders, you're going to need to conduct as many demos as necessary to close.

Frustrating as this may be, giving all the decision-makers involved in the process the chance to look your product over will greatly increase the likelihood of them ultimately choosing your solution.

Express the willingness and availability to demo your product — even if it's not asked of you. In doing so, you're presenting openness and approachability that your competitors might not be offering.

Additional content about your platform, like pre-recorded demo videos, can also go a long way. Those recordings offer an easy way to give stakeholders with tighter schedules or less availability the opportunity to see your product.

Another great type of content to have available is customer-led demos. Decision makers can see first hand how your customers in similar roles utilize your offering.

If decision-makers feel comfortable with your product and believe implementation will be smooth and simple, they'll feel more confident that your solution is right for them — creating that kind of familiarity is only possible if you've shown them how it works.

4. Answer questions effectively and directly.

Prospects want to be heard. So, naturally, you need to be willing to actually hear them. That starts with actively listening and paying attention to them during conversations and demos — positioning yourself to answer their questions directly, thoroughly, and helpfully.

We've all been there — looking to buy a product and asking questions about its functionality, only to get inadequate or indirect answers. That kind of situation is frustrating, and confuses or delays the decision-making process, and in most cases, the average person faced with it will explore other options.

After conducting a demo, your goal is to eliminate any lingering questions or concerns your potential customers might have. Be an active and perceptive listener, and genuinely prioritize their questions over perceived agendas.

For instance, if your prospects have a lot of questions surrounding a certain area of your product, make sure you revisit that subject before ending the conversation. Once you circle back to the area of concern, ask if they have any further questions.

Simple as that sounds, it can do a lot for you. It demonstrates that you don't mind answering questions again or providing additional detail. It also gives your prospects the space to bring up any unresolved doubts or concerns.

Noticing and analyzing frequently asked questions also helps you target questions they might not even know they have. It can also help to keep a log of questions asked during product demos.

Many of the same questions will be raised consistently — and documenting them can help you structure a page of frequently asked questions that can easily put recurring concerns at bay and expedite multiple prospects' decision-making processes.

5. Have empathy and be patient.

Empathy is by far the greatest tool I've used in my career. Empathizing with your prospects and taking the time to sincerely understand their motivations, pain points, and hesitations will make the sales process better and more equitable for all parties.

Practicing empathy also allows you to preemptively address potential customers' concerns before they become legitimate issues or roadblocks. Decision-makers are bound to worry about whether any solution they're considering will produce return on investment, make their businesses more efficient, and deliver results.

Leveling with those stakeholders around their uncertainties will foster trust and help you consistently close.

Empathy has been central to virtually every deal my teams have closed — but when I think about how important it is, one experience comes to mind. My team was working with a man trying to sell his large, multi-regional organization without the help of bankers. He was clearly overwhelmed and needed direction about how to best approach the deal.

After listening to him and understanding his situation, instead of simply trying to sell him a deal platform, my team and I provided him with free resources and project management tips. That helped take some of the stress out of his upcoming deal.

That demonstration of empathy was big for everyone involved. For us, we were able to stand out from other M&A tools and close the deal. For him, he was able to sell his company and retire.

At the end of the day, we all want to be successful and thrive in our fields.

These techniques have worked well for me as I've grown my business and will continue to be central to how I sell going forward. If you're selling a product you truly believe in, these five tips on selling to organizations with multiple decision-makers will improve your sales process and enable stakeholders to make better, more informed decisions for their businesses.

29 Dec 16:19

3 Ways to Address Your Growing Small-Business Needs in 2017

by Cosette Jarrett

As the year draws to a close, it’s a good time address your small-business needs, and to think about how to scale up operations for next year.

Although growth is a good thing, it can be tough to keep up with.

Keep reading for three valuable themes to help you effectively balance growth and your small-business needs for 2017 … without losing your mind or your profits.

Build a Solid Hiring Plan

According to a 2016 survey by PNC Financial Services, only 22% of companies plan to add more employees in 2017. On further inquiry, 28% of the surveyed business owners would rather add more work to the workload of their existing crew.

This might be a cost-efficient strategy in the short term, but it could negatively impact employee retention and overall operations in the long term. Overburdened employees are more likely to start looking for other jobs and quit working for you.

Keep in mind that your workforce—no matter your business size—will always be the lifeblood of your organization it’s how B Squared Media grew over 238% this year. If you are expecting significant growth for your business in the coming year, plan to add a few more people to your team.

To make sure your hiring plan is solid, ask yourself these questions:

1. What are my business goals for 2017? Your hiring plan for your various departments, including sales, operations, and marketing, must be aligned with the overall goals of your business. Make them as specific and measurable as possible with respect to your projected growth.

2. How many new employees will I need? Hiring new people to your team always requires additional resources. To figure out the number of new employees you’ll likely need, you need to take your budget and revenue per employee (RpE) into account.

3. Which areas of my business need more support? Investigate which areas of your business need more manpower to accomplish your company goals. For example, if your goal is to increase high-quality leads, you will need to hire more employees for your marketing and sales teams.

And don’t forget to put together a solid budget for the team to abide by.

Evaluate Your Growing Internet Needs

The internet connection undoubtedly plays a crucial role in keeping your small-business needs running like a well-oiled machine. Unstable connections could impede business operations and frustrate employees—even just a few hours offline could bring lost profits and irate customers who expect 24/7 support.

To help accommodate your thriving business in 2017, consider upgrading your business to a reliable internet connection, considering plans that align with your projected growth for next year.

You can evaluate these needs by asking the following questions:

1. How many employees need to be online simultaneously? One of the main factors that will affect internet speed is the number of users accessing the connection. Aside from the usual work computers, consider other gadgets that may be connected as well, like smartphones and laptops.

2. What will you use the internet for? Simple web browsing and email won’t require as much bandwidth as video conferences with clients. Apart from bandwidth needs, you may also have to assess your Cloud hosting and virtual private network (VPN) needs as well.

Get Your Website Ready for 2017

Your small-business needs should include a website that works like a storefront; it will either attract or drive away potential customers.

In 2017, the rising “experience economy” will continue to thrive, which is why you need to ensure your website provides the most optimal user experience possible. When you do this, your website engagement rates will likely soar, and prospects will be easier to convert to customers and then raving fans.

You can prepare your website for 2017 by doing the following:

1. Get rid of mobile pop-ups. If you have big, intrusive pop-ups installed on your mobile site, it’s high time you reevaluate this strategy because Google announced it will go after these sites.

Venngage’s digital marketing specialist Nadya Khoja recommends creating gated content through visuals to increase your email subscribers. An infographic is a good example of visual content.

Say you’re running a small flower shop in your locale—why not create an infographic on how to choose flowers for the right occasion that requires an email address to download?

2. Ensure fast loading times. Did you know that your website’s speed and loading times can impact your search engine ranking?

For small businesses like yours, load time is extremely important to consider if you’re trying to rank your website for local search engine optimization. You can improve your website’s page speed by upgrading your hosting plan and reducing file sizes that are larger than 150 bytes.

Unless you already have one on staff, hiring an expert to help you manage the site should be on your to-do list next year.

Address Your Small-Business Needs Soon!

While there is no one-size-fits-all strategy to successfully address business growth, implementing these tips will help your small business keep going strong and reduce speed bumps as it continues to expand and thrive through 2017.

What small-business needs are you finding it hard to address for 2017? Let us know in the comments section below — we’ll be happy to weigh in with some advice!

Rnordman

Shared posts

Gadgets Galore

Arm on the Rise

Cloud Computing: The Basics

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS)

Infrastructure-as-a-Service(IaaS)

Drawbacks of Cloud Computing

Taking the First Step

1.) By usage frequency:

2.) By favorites:

3. By recently viewed/recent actions:

4. By conversion:

5. By location:

Listen Up App Marketers: Basic Segmentation Is No Longer An Option

How do you segment your app users? We want to hear below!

1. You don’t know or remember my name.

2. You speak more than you listen.

3. You call over and over (and over and over…)

4. You’re not selling to the right person.

5. You look at your phone during our meeting … repeatedly

6. You aren’t prepared when I speak with you.

Check out this interactive guide for more “sales fails” — and how to avoid them.

1. Demographic Scoring Identifies Your Most Valuable Prospects/Customers

2. Behavioral Scoring Determines a Prospect’s Current Level of Interest

3. Account Scoring Reveals the Group’s Readiness to Buy

4. Lead Scoring Ultimately Drives Revenue

Catch up on this week’s content

Growth Hack #1: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em

Growth Hack #2: Get personal – Website

Growth Hack #3: Get personal – Lead generation

Growth Hack #4: Get personal – ABM

Growth Hack #5: Invest in customers

Growth Hack #6: Don’t forget about partners

Growth Hack #7: Zero attribution = zero spend

What is a Buyer Persona?

Why Buyer Personas Are Important

How to Create a Buyer Persona

1. Social today is the Swiss Army Knife of customer engagement.

2. Social listening data is at an all-time high.

3. We need to stop pigeonholing the capabilities of social media.

4. Social customer service is better than ever.

5. Tools and data are super accessible.

6. Most companies still could do much more with social data.

The Focus on Customer Acquisition

How Customer Support Can Boost Retention and Growth

1. Know who you’re talking to.

2. Nail the subject line.

3. Make the prospect your story’s hero.

4. Get to the point. (And get there fast.)

5. Position your follow up email and value alignment.

6. Be human (and unexpected).

7. Be relevant.

Be a Contender in 2017!

See you next year!!

Sales and Marketing: The Step Brothers of Business

Dysfunctional Family Dynamic

Sales Enablement

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Sales and Marketing Working Together

Small Talk to Sales

How it Works

Talk, Pivot, Close

Sales Scale

5 Strategies for Selling to Multiple Decision-Makers

1. Make sharing information easy.

2. Verbalize key differentiators and benefits.

3. Be willing to conduct multiple demos.

4. Answer questions effectively and directly.

5. Have empathy and be patient.

Build a Solid Hiring Plan

Evaluate Your Growing Internet Needs

Get Your Website Ready for 2017

Address Your Small-Business Needs Soon!