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In the past six months, we’ve shared over 40 videos filled with sales tips for the modern sales professional. From advice on how to shift to Account Based Sales Development, to pro tips for executing email personalization at scale, and hacks to improve your Salesforce instance skills, we’ve run the gamut on ways to make you, the modern sales professional, more motivated, educated, and inspired to do what you do best: connect with customers.

But behind every sales tips video is a real SalesLoft team member… and what’s more real than a few goofs on camera? With weekly episodes of SDR TV, personalized videos on the daily, and on-the-fly video shoots for the content team, our reps have gotten more and more comfortable sharing their personalities with the modern sales world! And with that comfort comes a few funny flops — honest moments that show the real, humanized version of the SalesLoft crew.

Enjoy the video below and have a laugh at some of the funniest moments behind the scenes of SDR TV’s Sales Tips Blooper Reel: Holiday Edition!

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Stay tuned for more SDR TV episodes of Sales Tips and more in 2017. We’re here to deliver you content that fuels your modern sales process, so subscribe to the blog today to make sure you never miss a post!

The post Introducing the Sales Tips Blooper Reel: Holiday Edition appeared first on SalesLoft.

There are many creative and digital agencies and companies that still use Excel for project management. Even though we know that this technology became a thing of the past for many use cases. Evaluating creative projects and workflow automation solutions without a specific, specialized tool can destroy relationships with clients and employees, turn your awesome ideas into a mess, and get dismal results.

Instead, marketing and digital agencies increasingly want to make projects easier on themselves.

They’re always looking for effective online tools to outline every task in their project and easily collaborate with their team and customers. Their questions are around what tools are worth using to get integrated marketing services and campaign management.

Just like every digital agency and large company has its niche and strong points, its pros and cons, so do business tools. In this post, we’ve gathered six rockstar business tools in hope to improve your team’s performance and get award-winning results for your clients.

Our favorite marketing agency software recommendations

SE Ranking

SE Ranking is an all-in-one platform where large companies and digital agencies can manage marketing campaigns for websites of any complexity, compile reports, prepare commercial offers, and organize the working process for a large number of account reps and executives.

Top features:

• Position tracking
• Backlink monitoring
• Website audit
• White labeling
• Keyword clustering
• Social media management
• Marketing planning
• SEO reporting

What’s so special about this tool: SE Ranking has a great, user-friendly interface that helps you make your daily tasks easy and intuitive. It is great for large enterprises that run a huge number of projects. Unlike other similar tools that provide only responsive websites for mobile devices, this tool has great Android and iOS applications that allow you to control any projects at any time wherever you are.

Pricing: SE Ranking has free (limited features) and paid versions that start at $39 per month for the Optimum plan.

Mention

Mention is one of the best media monitoring tools to track what people are saying about your brand and your competitors. The tool allows you monitor key phrases and brand names in real time, so you never miss out on a conversation with potential customers.

Top features:

• Social media marketing
• Brand tracking
• Web monitoring
• Influencer research
• Media monitoring

What’s so special about this tool: Mention is a big time saver for agencies. It helps you to retweet, like, or share mentions and send any mentions via email. Because you can put so much information in one place and easily share it, it’s ideal for managing lots of clients.

Pricing: Mention has free and paid versions, the paid plans start at $29 per month with 2 alerts for up to 3000 mentions.

WorkExaminer

WorkExaminer is a must-have tool for large companies to control employees’ user activities and how many hours they spend on each task. It’s key for managing billable hours to clients.

It makes the whole working process efficient and helps you avoid an absolute nightmare. The tool helps you not only collect relevant data, but also track working time and block access to certain websites and content.

Top features:

• Website tracking
• Web filtering
• Instant messaging capturing tool
• Email recording
• Detailed reports

What’s so special about this tool: Among other benefits are the possibilities to schedule reports on agencies or users via email, accurate monitoring of employees, and the ability to create flexible work policies for employees.

Pricing: WorkExaminer has Standard and Professional versions that are free for 30 days and are limited up to 5 clients. The paid Standard version starts at $60 per year.

Trello

Trello is one of the most powerful project management tools out there, and easily lovable. It allows creating individual cards for each task and visualizing them on a dashboard that’s perfect for managing daily activities. You can easily add team members to each task that can add cards, make comments, and track changes for assignments.

Top features:

• Making different task lists
• Making changes on cards
• Add comments on cards
• Bulletin-board style
• Add videos, images, and files to each task
• Arrange lists by priority or dates

What’s so special about this tool: Trello provides a great visual interface that allows you make daily project management fun and intuitive. It is great for digital and creative agencies with complex projects.

Pricing: Trello has free and business versions with $9.99 per month/per user.

Dropbox

Dropbox is a reliable file-syncing and file-storage service. You can easily share files, videos, images, and other documents on your computer and sync them among your devices and computers.

Top features:

• File sharing
• File syncing
• Easy interface
• 2-16 GB free storage
• Deleted file recovery
• Edit files online

What’s so special about this tool: Dropbox is easy to use for personal and business users. When it comes to the upload and download speeds, it has one of the fastest in cloud storage. And since so many other people use it, sharing is simple.

Pricing: Dropbox has different pricing plans with 100 GB, 200 GB and 500 GB of storage space. The Dropbox Pro plan with 1 TB of storage place costs $9.99 per month. If you need more storage space than that, you can use Dropbox for Business.

Optimizely

Optimizely is a useful A/B testing and personalization platform for different websites and mobile applications. With its super easy interface, you can meet different needs of any type of client that wants to deliver special experiences to their target audiences through different channels.

Top features:

• Unlimited experiment & variation creation
• Diversified testing
• Test scheduling
• Geo-targeting
• Third party integrations
• Engagement tracking
• Custom reports

What’s so special about this tool: It’s super easy to create different variations and conduct A/B tests. The tool provides an endless number of tracking things like button clicks, plays, time on page, etc.

Pricing: The Optimizely Starter Plan is free to use. If the visitor number threshold is increased, the tool will become paid.

Conclusion

The marketing landscape is constantly changing as new tactics and online tools come up and agency needs change. It is very important to improve companies’ and agencies’ services in order to meet the needs of inbound marketing and avoid dropping behind your competition.

So much depends upon managers. For example, a Gallup study found that at least 70% of the variance in employee engagement scores is driven by who the boss is. This is disconcerting because the same research found that about 70% of people in management roles are not well equipped for the job. This state of affairs is hurting not just employee engagement and quality of life, but also corporate performance.

Most companies understand the importance of having highly effective managers, but few invest heavily in training to help them get there. One reason is that it’s difficult to measure and quantify what good management actually looks like. While there has been a lot of great work done to identify qualitative traits of great managers — they create trust, focus on strengths, instill accountability, avoid politics, etc. — these traits don’t provide much insight into how great managers spend their time on a day-to-day basis that differentiates them.

But there’s new data that can help. Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics product analyzes metadata from the digital breadcrumbs of a customer’s millions of de-identified email and meeting interactions to generate an objective and granular set of behavioral KPIs across the organization (for example, how much time managers spend in one-on-ones with employees, how quickly they respond to emails from each direct report, how large and diverse there networks are, etc.).  Among other things, these KPIs can then be combined up with other data sets to understand what behaviors differentiate sub-populations of employees.

We recently had the opportunity to combine behavioral KPIs with employee engagement survey results for two Fortune 100 clients comprising thousands of knowledge workers. Inspired by Gallup’s findings about the influential role managers play on employee engagement, we wanted to understand what made managers of highly engaged employees different than the rest on a day-to-day basis.  The results were illuminating.

Managers lead by example when it comes to working hours. Two metrics we use to provide a proxy of active working time per week are utilization and after-hours time.  ”Utilization” essentially looks at the average amount of time between your first and last email or meeting of the day across several months of data and estimates total weekly working time for each employee. It’s an imperfect metric, but does provide a good directional sense of working norms. “After hours” is the amount of time spent in email or meetings outside of an employee’s normal work hours, which are typically 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

The data shows that managers in the top quartile of utilization — a.k.a. those who work the longest hours — end up with employees who work up to 19% more hours relative to their colleagues who report to less highly utilized managers.  This is perhaps unsurprising.  What might be more surprising is that even though they are working more hours, the engagement scores of these employees are actually 5% higher than their lower utilization colleagues. It’s also true that employees of managers in the lowest 25% of utilization have lower than average engagement scores (2-4% lower). This suggests that people are more engaged if they work for a manager who is working at least as much as they are.

However, managers need to ensure even allocation of work. Using the same metrics as above, we found that employees who put in more hours than the rest of their team are more likely to be disengaged.  More specifically, highly utilized individual contributors that work 120% longer hours than their peers are 33% more likely to be disengaged and twice as likely to view leadership unfavorably as highly utilized employees working similar hours as their team.

This intuitively makes sense in that it would be frustrating to be staring at hours of additional work on your desk while watching all of your teammates — or your boss — happily go home at 5 pm. While in some cases employees may volunteer to take on extra workloads on their own, it is a core function of a manager to allocate work across their team. This finding clearly shows that uneven allocation leads to disengaged employees.

Effective managers maintain large internal networks across their company. We measure the size of a person’s network based on the number of connections to other employees that they actively maintain. The primary algorithm we use to define a connection has both a frequency and intimacy threshold. Put more simply, in order to qualify as a connection, one must interact with another person at least twice per month in an email or meeting with five or fewer participants. This allows us to get a reasonably accurate view of the number of people an employee actually works with on a regular basis. We have consistently found that larger networks are correlated with a number of different positive business outcomes.

In this case, we found that employees who report to a manager with a relatively large internal network — in the top quartile of all managers, more specifically — have engagement scores up to 5% higher.  Additionally, these employees had networks up to 85% larger than those of their colleagues reporting to managers with smaller networks.

We also found that managers with small networks can have a significantly negative impact on their teams.  Employees who had networks 110% or more larger than their manager are 50% more likely to be disengaged and twice as likely to view leadership unfavorably.  One interpretation of this is that employees rely upon their manager to provide a coordination role with other teams across the company and they are unable to do that effectively if they don’t have a big enough network.  Employees who already have larger networks than their manager may simply see little value in the relationship and feel unnecessarily constrained by the hierarchy.

One-on-ones remain vital. We can quantify actual time managers spent in one-on-one meetings with direct reports based on calendared meeting invitations.  In the companies we analyzed, the average manager spent 30 minutes every 3 weeks with each of their employees.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, employees who got little to no one-on-one time with their manager were more likely to be disengaged. On the flip side, those who get twice the number of one-on-ones with their manager relative to their peers are 67% less likely to be disengaged. We also tested the hypotheses that there would be a point at which engagement goes down if a manager spends too much time with employees, but did not find such a tipping point in these datasets.

And what happens when a manager doesn’t meet with employees one-on-one at all, or neglects to provide on-the-job training? Employees in this situation are four times as likely to be disengaged as individual contributors as a whole, and are two times as likely to view leadership more unfavorably compared to those who meet with their managers regularly.

Lastly, managers are engaged at work, too. The disengagement rate of employees reporting to disengaged managers is up to two times higher than for those reporting to engaged managers. This further reinforces the Gallup finding that managers have a disproportionate impact on employee engagement scores, and that if companies are serious about improving their overall engagement, they would do well to begin with a focus on their managers.

Bad management is estimated to cost the U.S. economy up to $398 billion annually.  Historically, the lack of objective data has made it difficult for companies to instrument the quality of their managers and therefore even more challenging to provide effective training and ongoing feedback loops to improve it. Our data is a start, highlighting some traits of good managers that are actionable on a daily basis. The opportunity is huge for better-run organizations and a higher quality of life for workers. In the future, it’s a good bet that the most successful companies will continue be the ones with the best managers.

Knowledge wikis, cloud knowledge storages and full-fledged knowledge portals… What would you add to this list of popular knowledge generation tools? Is there a place for corporate discussion boards?

Surprisingly, though actively used by employees, discussion boards rarely come into knowledge managers’ focus because they are primarily considered as communication mediators and not as knowledge generators. So let’s see if there are any possibilities to benefit from corporate discussion boards, namely those based on SharePoint, and use them as long-term knowledge absorbers, not only as instant communication hubs.

Why Pay Attention to Discussion Boards

So why are discussion boards worth knowledge managers’ attention? There are at least 3 reasons to consider them as alternative knowledge management tools, since they allow to:

1. Accumulate unique corporate expertise. Discussion boards are literally strewed with specific knowledge that includes assessment of corporate projects, expert opinions, analysis of business issues and much more. Some pieces of this knowledge will stay relevant for many years and serve as the base for the company’s further development.
2. Reduce time for knowledge acquisition. To get a new portion of knowledge, managers usually need to carry out a real investigation, diving into experts’ first-hand insights through a series of one-on-one meetings. Using corporate discussion boards, knowledge managers can simply search for the needed information and discover it immediately, which greatly saves priceless working time.
3. Facilitate learning. Corporate discussion boards contain knowledge generated by employees throughout the company’s history. This way, the accumulated knowledge can serve as a tutorial base for both current employees who need to deeper understand a specific issue or to analyze a new domain, and newcomers during onboarding.

The Pitfalls

With all their great potential as knowledge aggregators, SharePoint-based corporate discussion boards may be still not so easy to deal with.

Discussion boards are discrete. Unlike centralized knowledge management systems, discussion boards are usually disconnected as they involve employees from non-overlapping activities (e.g. a separate project or a workflow). Finding valuable knowledge there would take thorough scanning of all the scattered boards.

Knowledge is heavily polluted. While collaborating, employees generate a huge amount of heterogeneous information. Corporate discussion boards may be full of side questions and case-specific details that cannot be considered as quality knowledge.

Knowledge is hard to verify. Even if a discussion board provides pure knowledge, it’s sometimes hard to assess its reliability as it’s generated by employees with different specializations, roles and expertise. Moreover, some knowledge can be too specific and inappropriate for further reuse.

The Opportunities

So how to deal with knowledge stored on discussion boards? Leaving it unpurified without trying to sieve out irrelevant details is possible but very inefficient as users will have to sort it out by themselves.

Relying on our SharePoint consulting practice, we can suggest the following scenarios in order to boost knowledge value by improving the functionality of discussion boards:

Enabling highlights on the go. Users might be provided with handy tools to mark important information the moment they publish it. For example, every post can be accompanied with a special check box allowing users to mark a publication as ‘knowledge rich’. Another possible solution is to encourage employees to add tags to valuable pieces of information in the edit mode, so that a knowledge indexing engine could find and index them.

Creating a knowledge-purifying workflow. Admitting that users can neglect the previous scenario, a knowledge manager may initiate the creation of a dedicated workflow to regularly check existing discussion boards and sort out valuable information that can be further located in the knowledge base without any impurities.

Making Knowledge Discovery Easier

All the efforts on purifying knowledge will pay off only if that knowledge gets reused. That’s why users should be provided with relevant knowledge discovery tools as traditional search might be insufficient.

To meet the needs of employees who are used to instant and precise Google search, it’s necessary to think of advanced search solutions. Those companies that already use SharePoint as the platform for corporate discussion boards can leverage search functionality from out-of-the-box features by aligning them with the current users’ needs. Another, more complex opportunity is to add custom query rules based on users’ intentions or introduce managed metadata service that allows to change knowledge relevance and base it either on chronological attributes (the freshest knowledge will be always on top of the list) or on qualitative parameters (the most valuable items will be placed first). The latter option might be implemented taking into consideration posts’ authors, in order to make expert opinions go first in search results.

SharePoint users can also narrow their search results by language, which is extremely important for international companies with multilingual communication. This way users can filter information written exclusively in their native language while those speaking in multiple languages can switch between them easily.

Information security or user convenience?

While dealing with knowledge on discussion boards, managers have to solve the dilemma between information security and user convenience. On one hand, a knowledge manager should encourage employees to use accumulated corporate knowledge in their activities. On the other hand, the high risk of information leaks can be a great obstacle on the way to exposing knowledge publicly.

There is no single true way of sharing corporate knowledge, since every organization has its own information security policy determining the limits of users’ freedom. However, this dilemma can be solved by introducing censored search results. To hide highly confidential information under NDA, it’s reasonable to implement a customized prohibition dictionary, based on customers’ data taken from a corporate CRM or ERP. The dictionary will allow to automatically hide/exclude names from search results, so that users will not be able to see sensitive data.

Conclusion

Though discussion boards are rarely considered to be the source of valuable knowledge, they have a great potential as knowledge absorbers. When approached as knowledge media that are provided with relevant knowledge purification and search mechanisms, discussion boards can assist employees in their daily activities not only as communication hubs but as long-term aggregators of the unique corporate expertise.

The Forrester Wave™: Sales Enablement Automation Systems, Q4 2016, Forrester’s first assessment and evaluation of the sales enablement automation (SEA) space, was released last week. The report aims to help sales enablement practitioners navigate their daily challenges and strategic goals to choose the right vendor to empower their teams. But sales enablement vendors don’t just help sales enablement leaders; last week we discussed how marketing leaders can leverage this report to meet their goals in 2017, and today the focus is on how this report and the SEA vendors it evaluates will benefit sales leaders and their teams next year. Sales trends in 2016 were all about becoming buyer-obsessed: meeting the buyer where they are in the sales process, and ensuring that sellers understood and catered to their buyers’ needs. These trends will continue, but with a twist: 2017 will focus on marrying buyer obsession and sales productivity to ensure that sellers are not only effective, but efficient as well. The three SEA capabilities below from The Forrester Wave™: Sales Enablement Automation Systems, Q4 2016 will help sales leaders do so.

User Experience

User experience is one of the primary drivers of sales tool adoption. If sales reps find a tool to be too difficult or intrusive to use, adoption will suffer and your investment is nonviable. The key is finding a tool with a positive, intuitive user experience that directly impacts a salesperson’s daily activity. According to Forrester, a seller-oriented user experience requires integration with the CRM and content access from email, and should automatically record content engagement data and insert it into the CRM, so sales leaders and reps know what content is working and with whom. Finally, Forrester says that SEA solutions should offer a portal where sellers can search for and assemble content from the solution. Seismic is able to do these basics and more, which resulted in a perfect 5 out of 5 in Forrester’s user experience category (the only vendor to do so). SEA solutions are undoubtedly powerful and provide unparalleled value to sales and marketing organizations, but should be intuitive and easily integrated into the typical selling process as well.

Integration

One major aspect of the user experience includes integrations with the other tools your sales team is already using in everyday sales activities. Sales leaders are putting a huge emphasis on sales tool integration in 2017, because having many disparate platforms and sources of data and content makes salespeople unproductive. Only 39% of a sales rep’s time is spent selling or interacting with buyers, and are instead spending time searching for the right collateral or switching back and forth between programs. As noted above, CRM is typically the go-to integration for SEA vendors, because it increases CRM adoption and usage while also making reps more effective. But even though 92% of companies are leveraging CRM, there’s been a drop in the number of salespeople using CRM as part of their daily workflows. Where are they spending their time, then? According to SiriusDecisions, salespeople spend the majority of their time in email and calendar tools, such as Outlook. Seismic integrates not only with all major CRM solutions, but Microsoft Outlook, to ensure that the right content is available wherever your reps are spending their time. Seismic’s LiveDocs technology also integrates all of a company’s data sources to bring static content to life, and takes personalization to the next level. It’s for all of these reasons that Seismic was the only vendor to score higher than a 3 out of 5 in Forrester’s evaluation for Integration, with a total score of 4.4 out of 5.

Prescriptive Content

A solid content management foundation (which we discussed here) is imperative to any sales and marketing organization’s success, but prescriptive content brings that content to life for sellers. Prescriptive content actively and automatically recommending the most contextually relevant content at the right time to sellers. According to Forrester, this prescriptive content capability includes “reviewing [reps’] active opportunities and tagging and mapping content to CRM fields such as the sales stage, industry, buyer’s role, solution, and usage.” Content should be served up to reps right within the account or opportunity in CRM (like Salesforce), and should give reps confidence knowing that they are using the most up-to-date and relevant collateral with the right audiences. Seismic’s Predictive Content capabilities help sales leaders meet their team’s goals—including shortening sales cycles and increasing revenue—by fostering higher customer engagement with hyper-relevant content. Sellers are provided with what they need when they need it, so buyers can make better decisions based on more productive interactions with salespeople.

Today’s sales leaders are making sales enablement a considerable priority in 2017, and the reasons above are why. Sales enablement automation solutions should exceed sales leaders’ goals for prescriptive content recommendations, data, solution and content source integration, and user experience. Take a look at The Forrester Wave ™: Sales Enablement Automation Systems, Q4 2016 to see how SEA solutions can help you meet these goals and more in 2017.

I’ve got bad news and good news about your prospecting call.

The bad news is that, most of the time, regardless of how well you’ve done in the early stages of the prospecting phone call (right mindset, good voice tone, great start, and compelling, customer-issue-centered, value-dripping mini statement), it’s highly likely that the first request you make to set up a meeting will be met with a “no.”

That’s just reality. Very few prospects are sitting around with nothing to do just hoping a salesperson will call and ask them for a meeting. And unless you happen to call someone on the exact day that the “thing” you sell is broken or going wrong at their place, or their boss just launched an initiative that requires the type of solution you sell, the likelihood the prospect says “yes” the first time you ask for a meeting is low. I know. That’s not what you want to hear and it doesn’t help you want to make prospecting calls. But hear me out. The call isn’t over yet.

That first “no” isn’t personal and likely has nothing to do with you. That no is automatic. They’re busy and you’re a salesperson – and unfortunately, there are a lot of pathetic salespeople who waste prospects’ time. One of the keys to successful prospecting is understanding that you are going to hear “no” a lot, and it’s what you do next that determines how many meetings you are going to secure.

The good news is that if you are emotionally and mentally prepared to respond appropriately after being told “no” when requesting a discovery/initial meeting, you are going to convert a significantly higher number of your calls into meetings.

Let’s deal with the emotional aspect first. While the advice that follows applies to all sellers, it’s especially critical if you’re a highly relational salesperson who tends to shy away from conflict. I’m not a fan of applying much pressure when selling, and I don’t like being pushy or salespeople who are pushy. However, and this is a big however, this is one time during the sales process that it is absolutely necessary to push. When the prospect declines our first ask for a meeting, we must be prepared to ask again for the meeting. And then to ask one more time. That’s right. I’m advocating that it often requires three asks in the same call to secure a yes. And I know right now that if you’re overly relational, wired like a people-pleaser, and shudder at the thought of conflict, what I just wrote makes you very uncomfortable.

I worked with a very successful salesperson recently who was highly relational, super respectful and abhorred conflict. We were reviewing this exact stage of the prospecting call and it hit him like a ton of bricks. His default response when the prospect denied his first request for a meeting was to kindly reply with, “Thank you for the time. Is it okay if I keep you on my list and contact you again in six months to see if anything has changed.” 

Salespeople, please listen to me: The salesperson who gets told “no” to the first ask for a meeting and responds with “Ok, I’m sorry to have bothered you; thank you for you time” and hangs up is going to starve. As I mentioned above, I’m the last guy who wants salespeople to be obnoxious or pushy. But in this one instance, at this exact point in the sales process, you must push past this resistance. I can’t even tell you the number of meetings I secured as a salesperson by bouncing off of the no and asking two more times for the meeting. Let me repeat: this first no is automatic. It’s an auto-reflex. They are programmed to say no.

Along with being emotionally ready to bounce off the first no, you must also be mentally prepared with solid comebacks. Here are a few favorite tips:

• Keep in mind that your objective is to sell the meeting, not your solution.  Resist the temptation to start pitching the value of your services and stick to selling the value of getting together with you.
• In Chapter 9 of New Sales. Simplified. I spend a good amount of time sharing how to use three magic words: Fit, Visit, and Value. Use these words. They work. Here’s a link to a very old blog post (so old that it’s from when I was still an employee at a company way back in 2010) with some brief examples how I deploy those three words.
• While it’s great if you have succinct, specific “objection busters” ready to the most common objections you get, I’ve got a powerful and very effective line to offer you that works a shockingly high percentage of the time. It’s so effective, and has helped so many sellers secure appointments, that for the past few years I’ve been referring to it as the money line: “Visit with me anyway.” Regardless of the objection, when you’re laser-locked on getting the meeting and absolutely convinced that you can bring value to the prospect and that they’d be foolish not to at least visit with you, with great confidence bounce off their objection or “no” and simply tell them to visit with you anyway. Simple? Yes. Effective? More often than you would believe. Every few weeks I get a LinkedIn note from someone who got that line from my book or from a workshop I led and they’re ecstatic to share how it’s working for them!

Remember that highly relational salesperson I mentioned earlier in post? Yeah, the one who was taking the first “no” and asking permission to keep the prospect on his list? Along with getting his mindset right and sharpening his messaging, the biggest change he made was pushing past resistance and being willing to ask three times for the meeting. He tripled his success rate on prospecting calls. Tripled.

I’m going to wrap up this series with one more article dedicated to the effective use of voicemail. My hope is to change your entire mindset about getting a prospect’s voicemail and show you that you can actually be building a relationship with a prospect who has yet to call you back. Until then, I wish you great selling and many New Sales.

More and more marketers are being asked to create more and more leads using more and more tactics, in an increasingly crowded communications environment.

At best, it’s tough.

At worst, it gets marketers fired.

Lead generation is such an important part of most digital marketers’ responsibilities that our friends at Formstack—longtime sponsor of Convince & Convert—produced an entire report about it: The State of Lead Capture in 2016.

This interesting new study talked to 219 marketers and c-suite executives in small and mid-sized businesses in the US about the current state of lead generation.

There are literally dozens of data points, observations, and recommendations in the report, and I very much encourage you to go read it yourself.

But to provide a handy summary, here are the top four digital lead gen trends that I took away from the research:

1. Websites Remain The Most Likely Source of New Leads

Twenty-four percent of respondents said their website was the biggest generator of leads, with email marketing and paid search at seventeen percent each. Social media was fourth at 15%.

Indeed, websites are still a huge source of lead generation for most businesses (even here at Convince & Convert where we encourage all visitors to sign up for our killer email updates). It is important to recognize though that rarely do these tactics work in a vacuum.

What you do in social can inform how well your website works at lead generation. Your paid search campaign can produce the email signups that culminate in leads that you attribute to email marketing.

I prefer to think of it as a true marketing ecosystem, where many tactics can take prospects to many places, all of them aligned to capture information from prospects.

2. Marketing Metrics are Misguided

This is particularly true in small and mid-sized businesses that are unlikely to have the software horsepower (like the amazing Datorama) or dedicated analytics personnel to really dig deep on advanced metrics.

Yeah, it’s easier to be great at marketing math if you have a pile of software and room full of nerds. But you can still be very good at metrics without any of that stuff; you just need to measure the things that matter.

There has been much discussion in the past year in the content marketing realm (inextricably linked with lead generation) about divining true return on investment from efforts.

And yes, the respondents to this Formstack survey are measuring many things, but none of those are ROI.

Just 28% of marketers are measuring sales created by paid lead gen activities. This means that 3 of every 4 marketers cannot possible calculate true ROI because they have no data for the “R” which equals “return” which means “money.”

For clarification, true ROI is only calculated ONE way and ONE way only: Return (money) minus investment (cost), divided by investment, expressed as a percentage. That’s it. That’s the formula, period.

(here’s how to calculate ROI for a B2B blog, for example)

72% of marketers are counting lead volume, website traffic and similar metrics and calling it “ROI”. It’s not, and someday those fuzzy metrics aren’t going to be enough to justify their budget.

3. Quality of Leads is More Important Than Quantity of Leads

I think we’d all agree with this in theory, because eventually those leads have to turn into customers for marketing to be worthwhile.

And 54% of the respondents to this survey said that lead quality is their #1 priority (versus 46% for lead volume).

Despite this finding from Formstack, I’m not sure how often we actually run marketing programs based on this principle as I see an awful lot of effort going toward initiatives that create a lot of low quality, top-of-funnel leads that are unlikely to turn into revenue.

4. Invest in Conversion Optimization

One of Formstack’s big takeaways from this State of Lead Capture report is that conversion optimization (they can help you do this) is critical in 2017.

I couldn’t agree more.

We put way too much emphasis on traffic generation and not nearly enough emphasis on converting that traffic. The impact of conversion rate optimization is geometric. Once you unlock what works from a conversion perspective, you can then expand the tactics you use to fill the top of the funnel, and your results will grow exponentially.

If you’re not methodically working on increasing your conversion rate, stop spending money on marketing and fix that first.

Spend a few minutes with The State of Lead Capture report—you’ll learn a lot about how to maximize lead gen next year and beyond.

If you are the CEO of a large, established company, you should be able to enjoy the benefits of size, including the ability to learn from a broad, longstanding customer base. With more customers to seek feedback from, your firm should be able to detect changes in the market faster than smaller competitors. And with size comes the resources to deliver what the market wants.

But that may not feel like your reality. Too often, large size becomes a hindrance. Insurgents swarm and thrive by targeting customers that your company consistently underserves. The younger firms seem to excel in speed, experimentation and delivering a steady stream of innovation. Meanwhile, inside your offices, internal issues constantly steal attention from customers’ needs. Your senior executives spend more time negotiating among departments and internal functions. Innovation gets handled centrally, far from the front line. Customers are neither involved in the process nor, in some cases, even welcome.

Insight Center

As CEO, you can fight back by sponsoring micro battles — discrete, narrowly defined, customer-focused initiatives pursued by small cross-functional teams. Micro battles force everyone to behave like insurgents, focusing only on what’s essential to meet a narrow goal. Micro battles aim to increase sales (through share gain or category growth), deplete a specific competitor’s sales, and put learning how to innovate back to the center of the company’s activities and executive attention. Waging micro battles helps a company do several important things:

• Restore the voices of customers. As decision-making switches to micro battles, the voices of customers dealing with the company’s front line grow louder in executive meetings.

• Move and innovate faster. Micro battles increase the cadence of the entire organization by tuning to the pace of the market instead of calendar-based budgeting or planning cycles. I’ve seen successful companies break down micro battles into 30-day sprints. Executive meetings focus on reviewing the dozens of battles in progress, with each reporting every 30 days on the missions accomplished or destroyed. That way, executives can adjust resources quickly.

• Improve specific, not general, abilities. Too often, senior executive teams favor horizontal, internally focused actions like “building a world-class finance function.” Micro battles reorient the organization to vertical initiatives, such as increasing sales of a specific product in a specific region or channel. Such vertical goals often require embedding someone from a central function — say, finance — on the team, which helps reconnect matrixed functions to what’s actually happening on the front line.

How? Consider a typical corporate goal: Grow sales of electric hand tools in Western Europe by 4%. That might encourage people to work harder, but it doesn’t require that anyone work differently or think outside their own department. A micro battle, by contrast, has a tightly drawn goal: “Let’s win 50% share in Western Europe of the do-it-yourself store business for mid-priced circular saws by displacing our main competitor.”

To win such a battle, you need a team made up of people who are closest to each market. In the saw example, this would include the global head of mid-priced saws, who leads innovation and manages the costs of the product, and the account head for do-it-yourself stores in Western Europe, who manages sales and ensures the product is presented in the right way for shoppers.

The team also needs people who provide crucial support—a supply chain expert, who can help drive down the cost of mid-priced saws, and a consumer insight expert, who understands consumer preferences for hand tools. Both probably work for a central support function, where they’re shielded from the heat of the micro battle. Embed them in the team instead. Make them share the urgency and the consequences of doing the job well or poorly.

As CEO, your role is to ensure that the center supports and learns from these teams, through systems that take the lessons from each micro battle’s successes and failures, and disseminate the ideas companywide. As the European team starts making inroads with a particular offer, the Asian team can target the same competitor with a similar offer that is tailored to local markets. Your executive team must quickly adjust resources between winning and losing micro battles, as needed. For the teams that log initial wins, your executive team should scale up both winning propositions (what and where you won) and repeatable models (how you won). The point is to learn: Find out what works, and repeat it in as many places as possible.

For example, one multinational personal-care company was performing well in general and modern trade channels, but realized it could dramatically increase sales of its health and beauty products by selling them in the fast-growing drugstore channel. That required two things: First, they needed to shift their marketing to emphasize the health and wellness aspect of products such as skin care cream and second, they needed to add a sales team that understood the new channel. They set up a micro battle in one of the world’s biggest personal care markets—Brazil—and put together a team that included both the people in charge of brand and proposition development and those in charge of in-store trade promotions. The result: Sales took off in Brazil and the company quickly began rotating people from other regions through the Brazil micro battle team so they could learn from those efforts and then crack the drugstore channel in their own countries.

Committing to 25 micro battles over the next six months is very different from debating the mathematical allocation of targets across the entire business. And that’s the point. Choosing the micro battles to pursue involves discussions about how your company would win each one and how you would organize to sell.

Ultimately, micro battles restore your company’s ability to learn and then actually get stuff done. Growth comes not from targets set on high, but from lessons learned directly from customers and the front line.

For all the powerful processing work the human mind can do, it's still prone to making bizarre assumptions and jumping to illogical conclusions. Unfortunately, we don't usually recognize these patterns as strange. Since they're unconscious, they seem normal.

Like it or not, these biases are part of us, so those in the business of persuasion can benefit from learning how to spot and play to them.

The psychological biases below relate to decision making. They can help you understand why you make the choices you do, and each has a sales takeaway to help reps use these brain quirks to sell better.

Psychological Biases

1. Ambiguity Effect
2. Anchoring Effect
3. Backfire Effect
4. Hyperbolic Discounting
5. Bandwagon Effect
6. Decoy Effect
7. Rhyme-As-Reason Effect
8. IKEA Effect
9. Illusory Truth Effect
10. Peak-End Rule
11. Loss Aversion
12. Status Quo Effect
13. Bizarreness Effect
14. Empathy Gap
15. Halo Effect
16. Optimism Bias
17. Sunk Cost Fallacy
18. Confirmation Bias
19. Clustering Illusion
20. Planning Fallacy
21. Curse of Knowledge
22. Galatea Effect
23. Choice Bias
24. Recency Bias
25. Gambler's Fallacy
26. Hot Hand Fallacy

1) Ambiguity Effect

Imagine you had two lunch choices. You could either visit a place you know and like -- although it isn't your favorite -- or somewhere completely random. This second restaurant could be great, but it could also be awful.

Which would you choose? If your brain works like most people's, you'd probably go for the first option rather than risk an unpleasant midday meal.

The ambiguity effect causes people to avoid options whose results are unknown or untested. Now you can tell your friends there's a scientific reason venturing away from your tried-and-true restaurant is hard.

Sales takeaway: Make sure buyers are informed about what results they can expect if they implement your product and quickly answer questions or fill in knowledge gaps they might have.

2) Anchoring Effect

It's often said you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. Too bad that our brains are hard-wired to do just that.

Whether for good or for bad, the first piece of information we receive about a person or situation colors our overall perception. Why? The initial detail acts as an anchor -- one which all further information is compared to and viewed against.

Sales takeaway: First impressions matter. Carefully plan out how you will introduce yourself and your product. Make sure the first details the buyer receives about your offering set a positive tone and high expectation for the rest of the buying process.

3) Backfire Effect

When you’re talking to someone with a deeply held belief, presenting them with facts that clearly contradict that belief won’t change their mind.

In fact, thanks to the backfire effect, they’ll actually be more convinced they’re right. Debating the truth of your statement with you pushes them further toward the side they already favor.

Sales takeaway: When prospects hold a false opinion, don’t directly challenge them with conflicting information. Instead, ask them to explain their reasoning. They’ll discover the holes in their argument by themselves.

4) Hyperbolic Discounting

Offer a toddler a candy bar now, or two tomorrow, and you'll see hyperbolic discounting in action. Now is always better than later. You probably won't even finish your sentence before they latch on to the treat and gobble it down.

Turns out, this phenomenon still influences adults. Our brains are naturally drawn toward rewards in the short-term over those in the long-term. The "discounting" part of hyperbolic discounting refers to the fact that the perceived value of a reward decreases the farther it is in the future.

Sales takeaway: Emphasize the quick wins a customer can expect to see shortly after buying your product or service -- especially if the main benefit won't come for months.

5) Bandwagon Effect

Beanie Babies. Pet rocks. Troll dolls. Looking back, these toy fads seem kind of silly. But did you buy or have one? Well, yeah, "Everybody else was doing it ..."

No need to feel ashamed -- there's a reason you hopped on the trend. People naturally gravitate towards products or services they see other people using. And the larger the crowd, the more powerful the psychological pull.

Sales takeaway: Social proof is more powerful than you might think. Highlight the number of customers your company has and introduce prospects to current clients.

6) Decoy Effect

Are you having trouble deciding between two choices? Maybe adding a third will help.

Huh? My sentiments exactly. The decoy effect is irrational, but it's been scientifically proven.

In a study conducted by Duke University, a researcher gave participants two dining choices: A five-star restaurant that was far away or a three-star venue that was nearby. The diners were torn. But after introducing a third possibility -- a four-star restaurant even farther away than the five-star -- suddenly it was easy to choose the five-star option. It was the best quality, and only moderately far away when compared with the third choice.

Sales takeaway: Use options to your advantage by presenting multiple versions of an offering or contract. If the prospect is really struggling to decide, introduce a decoy that will reinforce their innate predisposition.

7) Rhyme-As-Reason Effect

"If it doesn't fit, you must acquit." With this simple couplet, Johnnie Cochran cemented his defense of O.J. Simpson to the jury during the former football player's infamous 1994 murder trial.

While rhymes are naturally easier to remember, Cochran could also have been exploiting the rhyme-as-reason bias. This psychological quirk causes people to perceive rhyming statements as more truthful than non-rhyming ones containing the exact same message. It pays to be a poet -- and now you know it.

Sales takeaway: Reformulate your value proposition or a key takeaway about your product into a catchy rhyme. It can also help to apply this tactic to an aspect of your offering that is dubious or unclear.

8) IKEA Effect

There's no avoiding the inevitable confusion when trying to decode assembly instructions from the Swedish furniture outlet, but that's not what this bias is about.

Instead, the IKEA effect refers to the fact that people value things they had a hand in creating more than similar -- or even superior -- products created by others. While this effect can be disadvantageous for creators (ownership of the project could make them blind to flaws), salespeople can use it to their benefit.

Sales takeaway: Get prospects involved in customizing or putting their unique spin on your product or service. The more they feel like the offering is "theirs," the more positively they will feel towards it.

9) Illusory Truth Effect

How do hypnotists put people to sleep? At least in movies, they repeat over and over, "You're getting sleepy ... so sleepy ... " At first, the patient's eyes are wide open, but eventually their eyelids begin to flutter, and ultimately close. What happened?

One possible explanation is the illusory truth effect -- which suggest frequency leads to belief. In other words, you're more likely to believe a statement you've heard 10 times than five.

"Repetition is one of the easiest and most widespread methods of persuasion," explains Dr. Jeremy Dean.

Sales takeaway: Determine your core message, and then deliver it multiple times.

10) Peak-End Rule

It's not just first impressions that matter: Speakers often strive to end on a high note. Why? Because people's brains are wired to seize onto two moments of a presentation: The apex, and the end.

For instance, if you were to attend a mostly boring movie with a fantastic ending and a single stellar scene, this bias holds that you would remember it more favorably than another movie that was good throughout, but never extraordinary.

Sales takeaway: Make sure that sales presentations hit a deliberate high, and end on a thought-provoking and memorable point. If you're pressed for time, skew your preparation efforts to the ending and a critical moment rather than spending an equal amount of time on the entire presentation.

11) Loss Aversion

With the exception of serial gamblers, most people's brains are risk-averse. Losing something that is already owned has been shown to be far more painful than gaining something advantageous is pleasing. And this knowledge can be valuable when framing product benefits and other sales messaging.

Sales takeaway: Emotions are powerful motivators. Depending on what you sell, play up what prospects stand to lose by sticking with the entrenched status quo (another cognitive bias). They'll be more willing to take a risk if they feel that something they own is at stake.

12) Status Quo Bias

You’ve probably heard if you put a frog in a pot of water and gradually increase the water’s temperature to boiling levels, the frog won’t jump out. People often act the same way: Because they have a strong preference for the status quo, they ignore slowly building threats or danger.

The status quo is so sticky because it’s far easier to maintain your current situation than take action. And, thanks to the ambiguity effect (see #1 on this list), known options are more attractive than unknown ones.

Sales takeaway: This bias explains why nearly one quarter of forecast deals end in “no decision.” There are two major strategies you can use to avoid this outcome. If you’re the only supplier the buyer is evaluating, thoroughly educate them on their business pain.

However, if they’re choosing between multiple vendors, it’s clear they’ve recognized their challenges. Make sure they understand the costs of inaction so they're not tempted to leave this problem alone.

13) Bizarreness Effect

It’s easier to remember unusual or unexpected information than common information. Think about it.

If I ask whether you remember what happened in the Game of Thrones episode, "The Rains of Castamere," you'd likely draw a blank. If I asked you what happened in the Game of Thrones episode with "The Red Wedding," you immediately remember the episode, what happened, and your reaction to it (utter devastation). This is the bizarreness effect.

Sales takeaway: You don't want prospects to think of your product/service like they do the red wedding -- but you can make your pitch more memorable by starting with a surprising fact or story.

For instance, a rep selling virtual meetings software might say, “If you’re looking for a way to boost your team’s efficiency and increase their job satisfaction, try offering work-from-home privileges. People are 69% more productive when they work remotely.”

14) Empathy Gap

People subconsciously believe what they’re feeling at the moment is how they’ll always feel. If they’re calm, it’s hard to imagine feeling anxious, and vice versa. If you can anticipate and guide conversations with this in mind, you'll be a more empathetic listener and a better salesperson.

Sales takeaway: This phenomenon helps explain why the status quo, not your competition, is your biggest enemy. Prospects don’t typically make “nice-to-have” purchases: They buy because they’re nervous about what will happen if they don’t.

Reps should never manufacture false fear -- but if there’s true need, it’s your job to uncover it and then lead the buyer to acknowledge the negative impacts of inaction.

15) Halo Effect

If the buyer has a positive impression of the rep, she’s much likelier to have a positive impression of the rep’s product and company.

The opposite is true as well: A poor opinion of the rep makes her think poorly of the product and company. Keep this in mind next time you're hiring -- or letting a bad day bleed into your phone calls.

Sales takeaway: A salesperson might have an amazing product at a competitive price point -- but unless she’s likeable, her prospects probably won’t think much of what she’s offering.

Reps should strive to create genuine connections with every buyer, which usually requires doing research, understanding their persona, and taking an “Always Be Helping” approach.

16) Optimism Bias

We’re wired to believe the future will be better than the past or present.

The optimism bias can both help and hurt salespeople. On one hand, helping prospects envision a better future can be highly effective. On the other, prospects are often irrationally optimistic -- even if they’re in pain right now, they might expect the situation to resolve itself (or at least stay the same).

Sales takeaway: To make sure buyers are optimistic about the right things, salespeople should describe two scenarios: Life with their product, and life without it. This thought exercise will help prospects overcome any unrealistic beliefs.

It’s also important for reps to manage their prospects’ expectations around when they’ll see results. Some products don’t begin paying for themselves for months or even years down the line -- which can make buyers disappointed and frustrated if they’re expecting immediate gains.

Prospects may also expect the hard work to be done once they’ve finished the buying process. But for products with complex or lengthy implementations, there’s far more to be done. Salespeople can make sure buyers aren’t wearing blinders by clearly and accurately explaining what will happen after they sign the agreement.

17) Sunk Cost Fallacy

Once someone has invested time, energy, or money into an activity or decision, they’re irrationally committed to finishing it.

Consider how many of us watched five seasons of Lost before realizing it was going to end badly and wanting to bale. But how many of us actually stopped watching? We knew there were only two more seasons left -- and we had devoted so many hours to watching, theorizing, and obsessing about the first five seasons. We'd given up too much to quit.

Sales takeaway: To increase buyer commitment, salespeople should ask for a series of small commitments.

Here’s a sample sequence:

1. Before the first meeting: Send preliminary questions for the prospect to review.
2. Before the second meeting: Email relevant materials and ask the prospect to look them over.
3. After the second meeting: Ask the prospect to complete a small task, like moving data into the free version of your software product or completing an audit of their current process that relates to your product.

By gradually upping your prospect’s commitment, you'll make buying seem like a foregone conclusion.

18) Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias is interpreting information in a way that confirms what you already believe.

Sales reps can fall victim to this bias if they ask prospects leading questions in search of a specific answer.

For example, if a rep thinks a prospect could benefit from new onboarding software, they might ask, “Would you like to get your new employees producing better results, faster?” Of course the answer is yes, but that doesn’t confirm the prospect needs new onboarding software.

Sales takeaway: While it’s helpful to have research-backed assumptions prior to talking to a prospect, reps must be open to new information and admit when their educated guess are incorrect.

19) Clustering Illusion

When you notice a pattern in a completely random series of events, you’ve fallen for the clustering illusion.

In sales, this might look like a rep who successfully uses a specific strategy -- then uses that technique in every sale going forward. This bias is likely how the sales script came to life: If it worked with one prospect, the thinking goes, it will work with all of them.

Sales takeaway: While a pattern of success with a few prospects is great, it shouldn’t drastically influence how you approach every prospect going forward. Having a one-size-fits-all mentality will result in more lost prospects than won deals. Keeping outreach personal and specific allows reps to connect with prospects in a genuine way and provide significant value.

20) Planning Fallacy

The planning fallacy occurs when you drastically underestimate how much time you need to complete a task.

When a call goes well after a salesperson does limited work prior to picking up the phone, they can fall into the trap of thinking this is all the time they need to be successful. The planning fallacy seduces reps into doing the minimum amount of work while still expecting good results.

Sales takeaway: Providing yourself ample time for tasks is key to success. Instead of doing the minimum and believing you’ll see maximum results, you should set aside a significant amount of time for every task to ensure you’re doing the best job possible.

21) Curse of Knowledge

The curse of knowledge is when you’re unable to relate to an uninformed person’s problems because you have better information.

Sales reps who know their product can benefit a prospect might fall prey to this bias by dismissing a prospect’s objections. Instead of listening to these reservations and taking time to explain points of confusion, this bias causes reps to revert to, “But it works! Trust me!”

Sales takeaway: Instead of insisting that the product addresses your prospect’s concern, act as a trusted advisor. Reps can handle objections through sound reasoning, customer reviews, and testimonials -- but the key is education.

If your prospects are still asking questions disguised as objections, they don’t understand your product’s value well enough. They aren't interested in whether the product works, they want to know how it will work for them.

22) Galatea Effect

The Galatea effect states if you believe you’re going to be a top performer, you’ll actually become one.

The Galatea effect rears its head when a rep believes they were solely responsible for winning -- or losing -- a deal. After a deal goes bad, a rep can start to question their skills, which leads to worse performance. On the other hand, if a call goes well, a confidence boost can be the foundation for a hot streak.

Sales takeaway: To overcome this bias, examine your calls and listen to coaching from your manager to remain objective. And consider you might not have played a major role in your prospect's decision. There are many other factors that influence a prospect’s choice to buy or not.

23) Choice Bias

The choice bias leads us to retroactively view our past choices in a positive light while overemphasizing negative attributes of options we didn’t select.

In sales, choice bias impacts your response to making a mistake. If a prospect turns out to be a bad fit, the bias influences the speed at which you come to terms with the mistake. It also protects you from being too hard on yourself, because you’re likely to remember the positives and look past the negatives.

Sales takeaway: In order to be successful, make sure you pay attention to all relevant, emerging information. Instead of assuming every decision you make is great, recognize when things haven’t gone the way you expected. Learning from your mistakes is a powerful tool.

24) Recency Bias

Recency bias is the tendency to believe patterns that have recently emerged are likely to continue in the future even if they contradict long-term data.

If a rep notices commonalities in their last five deals and abandons time-tested strategies, they’ve fallen for the recency bias. New data is exciting, but it could be an outlier. A larger sample size -- the rep’s history over several months -- is likely to be more accurate.

Sales takeaway: If commonalities continue over time, use these new insights in sales conversations going forward. Gut decisions have no place in modern sales; the data should speak for itself.

25) Gambler’s Fallacy

The gambler’s fallacy is the belief that an event is less likely in the future because it’s happening often in the present, even if the outcome of one event has no statistical impact on future ones.

After a rep has four or five bad calls, they might think their next one will go better because things will average out. But they’ve failed to realize that their previous calls have no impact on their upcoming one.

Sales takeaway: This bias is dangerous because it can cause salespeople to expect their luck to change without any behavioral changes on their part.

Avoid falling prey to this fallacy by digging deeper to understand why calls went poorly and adjusting your strategy accordingly. Instead of trying the same thing over and over, changing tactics can put an end to the bad streak.

26) Hot Hand Fallacy

The inverse of the gambler’s fallacy is the hot hand fallacy -- the mistaken belief that if you succeed (or fail) at a random event in the present, you’re likely to have more success (or failure) in the future because of it.

When a rep closes several deals in a row and concludes that every call he makes going forward will be easy, he’s succumbed to the hot hand fallacy. These deals are closing because of hard work put in over the last few weeks, not because the rep is “heating up.”

Sales takeaway: Ultimately, it’s sales fundamentals that affect a rep’s success. Prospects convert because of hard work, research, and a great relationship, not because the rep is on a hot streak.

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5 Steps to Winning a Sales Meeting in the First 13 Minutes

 

Research indicates that just 0.78 percent of B2B leads convert into new customers. If you don’t understand the gravity of this situation, chances are you’re googling “B2B” to see what it means. But if you’re struggling to surmount the conversion obstacle, I can help.

 

The chief culprit is the quality of the first 13 minutes of the very first sales meeting. Those 13 minutes are where the deal is won or lost. Here are five steps to ensure you’re winning the client in that crucial timeframe:

 

1. Ask questions that you genuinely want answered.

 

Most salespeople ask questions to uncover pain points or unearth a need the customer has that their product or service can magically fill. This is the wrong approach. It’s manipulative and transparent. And, above all, you cannot ask questions to create a need or pain and successfully have a genuine conversation at the same time. The two are mutually exclusive. It’s not possible to respond well if you’re mulling over a planned spiel in your head. The prospect smells it every time. Engage.

 

Get curious about the prospect's general industry, and research his specific business. And if you can do this without offending, try to ask at least one question that challenges your prospect’s thinking. Don't cross any lines and ask anything that’s potentially insulting, but show that you've done enough research to bring new ideas to the table. 

 

Your prospect needs to know that you get it. And by “it,” I mean his industry and business. It’s impossible to do so unless you really prepare and listen. Even making one or two truly thoughtful points (unless they’re completely lacking nuance) will show that you did your homework. So practice, practice, practice.

 

2. Try to be less unlikable.

 

You may have heard that “people buy from people they like.” Wrong. It happens all the time, but your prospect doesn't have to actively like you. He just won’t buy from someone he actively dislikes. So rather than become super likable, get the prospect to not actively dislike you.

 

Don’t try to build rapport with a stranger during the first two minutes of a call. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t just look fake — it is fake. Assume the prospect dislikes you because you’re a salesperson. Most prospects do. The mission must be to get him to dislike you less without being obvious by conjuring up something you have in common.

 

Be self-deprecating (if that’s your thing). Use phrases like “I know you know this” and “I’m sure I’m telling you something you already know” to assure your prospect that he won’t be getting a lecture filled with basic information.

 

Most importantly, have a real conversation. Make him think you’re not trying to sell him something because you’re not. You’re chatting, learning about the business, presenting your wares, and seeing where it goes.

 

3. Don't change your personality.

 

When people get this wrong, it leads to spectacular implosions. Unless you're looking to provide comedy for someone else, do your best to avoid it.

 

Salespeople (and you’ve seen this) for some reason turn into somebody else when they’re trying to sell something. Whether they’re asking the questions they think they should ask or presenting the story they think they should present, it’s a recipe for disaster.

 

You need to be agile in conversations, but that's impossible when you're stuck trying to be somebody else. You were hired for your personality, so don't hide it. Just be you.

 

4. Don't waste your time persuading the prospect.

 

If you notice you're losing the sale, you lost it 10 minutes ago. Let's say you're pitching and the prospect isn't interested. Maybe you push a little harder by asking a question that turns out to be dumb, making everyone uncomfortable. He gets annoyed. The wheels fall off. We've all been there.

 

Instead, when things aren't working, say something like "Hey, it doesn't seem like you're interested. Am I misreading that?" Give him an out. He’ll tell you. Here's the reality: You can't persuade a prospect who isn't interested in your services. Ask him about his business, tell him what you do, and if it's not a fit, move on.

 

5. Make the process simple.

 

I get it. You sell a complicated solution that requires weeks (if not months) of data collection and the input of doctors, nurses, CFOs, clergy, and astrologists. Your product is fascinating, and you want to thoroughly explain how it’s going to revolutionize the way people chew gum.

 

But when you go too deep, your message gets muddied and people lose interest. Focus on what makes your offering unique and compelling. The greatest human motivators are simple concepts: love, fear, golf, etc.

 

So don’t overcomplicate your sales calls. Use these five strategies to win the first 13 minutes of the call and get that close rate past 0.8 percent.

 

Jeff Winters is founder and CEO of Sapper Consulting. It replaces cold calling for clients. It’s cooler than it sounds.

Flashback: it’s 1989. Dusk is falling and an Iowa farmer is staring out over his fields, reflecting upon his situation. It all seems normal until … he starts hearing voices.

“If you build it, they will come.”

Yes, I’m recalling the pivotal scene from the hit movie “Field of Dreams.” So, what does Kevin Costner have to do with a demand generation strategy?

You’re correct, not a damn thing. However, those angels in the outfield perfectly captured the heart of most B2B leadership. We think that if we create something of value the product will sell itself again and again.

Those of us working in demand generation know that’s the furthest thing from the truth. Building products is only half of the battle, B2B companies need to invest in demand generation programs to reliably attract and introduce a qualified audience to your offering.

And if you knock your demand generation strategy out of the park, the ghosts of baseball legends might even opt into your pipeline.

Demand generation is, well, to generate demand for your product or service in order to drive more business. Some confuse this with lead generation, the strategy for initiating consumer interest or inquiry into your business.

Both marketing strategies go together and often overlap. For example, sponsored research will both create demand and leads. Therefore, it’s a part of both strategies.

A demand generation strategy in 2017 is what a brand does to get attention and why consumers engage while having not yet tried the product or service. Lead generation is the second half of this situation and is concerned with how a brand capitalizes upon this worthy attention.

Read on to learn how to craft a comprehensive demand generation strategy. First, we’ll look at key metrics for defining success. Next, we’ll examine key tactics with examples from leading companies like Pardot, Salesforce, Hubspot and more.

By the end, you’ll be confident in your ability to create a variety of effective demand generation campaigns across a multichannel strategy.

Grab your mitt and let’s play ball!

Starting a Demand Generation Strategy

To do well, we should always start with the end in mind. This means defining success within the demand generation strategy. How do we assess the leads we’ve achieved as worthwhile, wasted or someplace in between? I’ll show you.

Because demand generation is an ongoing process that interweaves with every stage of the customer journey, it’s important to understand that demand generation tactics must reach across every stage.

(Source)

According to a recent Hubspot survey, 74% of companies that don’t exceed revenue goals are ignorant of the number of their visitors, leads, MQLs or sales opportunities.

No surprise here, shooting in the dark is asking to fail. Before you can target effectively, you have to know who you’re working with. What type of demand generation tactics you employ will address areas in the customer journey needing direct attention.

Sales Metrics Overviews for Demand Generation

Email Subscriber: Email subscribers are a dime a dozen, which is hard to admit when we consider the effort we put into building email lists. Sad truth, most who agree to receive a newsletter are not leads, only prospects.

Segmentation ensures you can make email most relevant to your users. Try to segment leads from prospects by behaviors such as signup date, specific links or channels for signup, clickthroughs that don’t end in conversions and unresponsive users. Making emails easily shareable (and asking for shares within content) is a great way to increase demand while assessing lead quality.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): Marketing qualified leads have expressed interest in your product or service and are no longer just prospects.

To be an MQL, the lead must meet the standards determined by your company. What constitutes an MQL will vary, so sales and marketing must agree upon their terminology and definition across all the touchpoints. What roles or job titles qualify leads? What types of industries? Company sizes?

Focusing on fit is a great way to go. For example, the CMO of a financial company with 5,000-10,000 employees is likely a great lead to target for your streamlining SaaS product. Someone who follows you on social media, but isn’t on LinkedIn, maybe not.

Be sure to attend to interest levels as well. If a prospect has downloaded numerous ebooks, engaged across social and is attending to the newsletter – that’s an MQL. However, someone who’s only peeked at your blog once and signed up for the newsletter may not be a true MQL.

If you’re not finding your leads after defining your ideal fit and interest, it’s time to reconvene the sales and marketing teams to either rehash their shared vocabulary or retool your content/engagement strategy.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): Sales qualified leads are gold once they’ve displayed buying behavior and been vetted. You can determine sales-worthiness by any number of acronyms, such as BANT: Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe. Basically, is the lead ready, willing, able and solvent? Sales reps should be spending time with those most likely to buy your product or service. A quick call can qualify or disqualify.

Sales Opportunity: Also called sales qualified leads, sales opportunities are qualified as potential buyers because of high value and a high probability of closing. These individuals have displayed a high level of interest, fit or need for your product or service.

Opportunity Won: Honest and valuable relations lead to sales. But just because you’ve won the opportunity, doesn’t mean it’s time to close up shop. Retaining customers means sending email newsletters, loyalty program offers, discounts and event invites. Continuing engagement can translate into upsells, referrals and valuable feedback from surveys.

Why Should You Start Lead Scoring?

(Source)

Lead scoring helps you target the best leads already in your funnel and optimize your demand generation strategy. Job position, number of social media followers, company size and engagement level are essential criteria for ranking leads. You’ll want to spend your resources talking with decision makers, so hand your sales team a hierarchy of leads to pursue instead of opting for the A-Z technique.

With lead scoring in place, sales teams touch upon the hottest leads for improved sales, increased productivity and higher morale. Lead scoring technologies are plentiful, from Marketo, Eloqua, Hubspot, IKO-System and more.

Lead Nurturing

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79% of all marketing leads never convert into sales, says Hubspot. The reason? A lack of lead nurturing.

If you’re actively developing and maintaining relationships with prospects through every stage of the sales funnel, you’re already a lead nurturer.

Guide leads along the buyer’s journey in a way that seems intuitive, so when users wonder about a particular aspect of your brand – poof! – it appears around the next corner like magic.

Lead activity reveals how close prospects are to a buying decision. Website visits, retweets and downloads are the markers of a well-nurtured lead. As we’ll discuss soon, a multichannel strategy is a must for proper lead nurturing.

Leads arrive in one of these four types, which can obviously change:

Good Fit and Interested: Winning! These leads are highly engaged, a good fit and warrant immediate follow-up from the sales team. Studies show that under 5 minutes is best and under 24 hours is passable.

Good Fit and Less Interested: Second best, these leads don’t show much interest,yet are a good fit for your brand. Maybe they downloaded a piece of content or signed up for a newsletter, but they still need to be nurtured further.

Not a Good Fit, but Interested: Subscribing to your newsletter or downloading an ebook doesn’t make someone your ideal customer. That said, it’s worth having a sales rep do a low-cost follow-up with such individuals to see if they may be in line for a quick, though unusual, sale.

No Fit and No Interest: These leads are best tossed from the communication stream and can only confuse you.

Campaigns and Tactics for Demand Generation

Reaching your ideal leads requires a far-reaching multichannel approach. Why? Because your leads are all at different stages of the buying journey. Try your hand at the five following campaigns to reach consumers at the right time and place.

#1 Display Retargeting – Pardot

(Source)

“80% of the traffic on your web site is not from people who will necessarily buy anything. The challenge is engaging with those visitors who are interested in your product but are still in the evaluation process.”

–Chris Golec, CEO of Demandbase

Most sales happen after the seventh try, right? Well, same goes for the internet.

Retargeting is a cost-effective way to keep your brand in front of decision makers throughout what is a usually a lengthy buying cycle. By repeatedly positioning your brand in front of qualified leads, you can expect your revenues to increase.

Pardot’s retargeting efforts speak directly to the executive looking to boost their sales pipeline. The use of the alluring word “Accelerate” nabs our attention and continues on to recommend the brand’s marketing automation solution. The messaging here is pinpoint and actionable, especially when we look to the bright and optimistic “View Demo” CTA. The eye tracks right here and the top-right managed display placement is well executed.

David Raab of Customer Experience Matrix shares insights on demand and marketing automation softwares here.

#2 Sponsored Research – Hubspot

3,233,457. That’s how many blog posts have been written today.

If you’re serious about deserving attention for your content marketing efforts, it’s time to consider and budget for content that will differentiate your brand. Best case, you position yourself as thought leaders.

That means next-level evergreen content or sponsored research setting you apart from the competition.

Hubspot takes this idea to the next level with their Hubspot Research webpage. Having conducted and released so much valuable content through the years, the company decided to consolidate their assets and take demand and lead generation to new heights. Subscribers here are better segmented and more easily turned into buyers than off the main site.

Carlos Hidalgo of Annuitas shares some insights gleaned from CMI’s 2017 B2B Content Marketing Survey:

• Only 22% think their organization’s approach to content marketing is very or extremely successful.
• Only 28% of respondents think their organizations are sophisticated/mature with content marketing efforts.
• Only 34% think their organizations are very effective at meeting their content marketing goals.

This means you have a wide open lane to excel with killer content!

#3 Video Advertising – Box

“To maintain a dialogue with buyers and move buyers along as much as possible before they interact with sales, you’re going to need to cover content that helps them at least prepare for a buying decision.”

–Adam Needles, Annuitas

Video is a quick, retentive, and interesting way to share information about your brand. It’s also great advertising for engaged, bottom-funnel leads. You’ll get an SEO boost by tagging videos, better-converting landing pages, longer site times and content ideal for social media sharing.

This video from file sharing app Box shows viewers exactly the benefits awaiting them at use. The company uses a bright voiceover to illustrate what the value can be to their organization, highlighting all the features in a bulleted-list format from one screen to the next. This video makes it easy for prospective clients to buyers with valuable information – fast.

#4 Partner Webinars – Wordstream and Moz

(Source)

With all the values we just mentioned in video ads, webinars are beacons of demand generation. Why? Because people always crave the latest insights, especially from celebrity figures.

This Wordstream and Moz partnership exemplifies all the good that comes from demand generation via webinars. You can ally with industry influencers, boost brand awareness for top-funnel leads, differentiate yourself for bottom-funnel leads and overall showcase your brand as top-notch. Come out ready to share your best ideas and prepare to win lots of leads for the effort.

#5 Syndicated Content

Ever feel like you keep running across the same piece of content and the same ideas? You’re not crazy, it’s just syndicated content hard at work. Yes, partnering with third-party media channels to distribute your content can bring you loads of brand awareness.

I swear, this Salesforce blog post is everywhere these days! I ran a search and found their ideas had swarmed around the SERP rankings – and good for them! By distributing their ideas readily, they catch the linkbacks to their landing pages or homesite blog content. Even if other brands bite their content, better for Salesforce because they’re now seen as thought leaders even more. Guaranteed that Salesforce is tracking the leads that arrive and segmenting their users by engagement and channels. This demand generation tactic is great for building awareness but can also be used with bottom-funnel content to trigger sales meetings.

It’s the bottom of the 9th…

Marketers, to win the game of demand generation we must remember that ‘Build it and they will come thinking doesn’t work’. It’s time to invest in a real demand generation strategy, one that focuses on going the long haul with customers, not just new leads. Your brand needs to play strong all nine innings to win.

Selecting the right content is what allows campaign success, so find content that’s performed well and if need be, repurpose it. Choose evergreen or timely pieces to share. Create new content to fit the current pain points of your target persona.

What will resonate is what drives demand. Sharing the messaging through the appropriate channels is the next step, so think of syndicated content, videos, webinars or display ads for this.

You’ll want to keep track of your metrics, as always, to make sure you’re keeping your eye on the ball. If you ever doubt your demand generation tactics, just ask yourself:

What would I want from a brand like mine?

How would I want it pitched to me?

Don’t Stop Selling

There’s a little more than two weeks left in the year, and less than 10 real working days before 2017 arrives.

And if you’re a sales leader, you probably hear these complaints from your sales reps:

“I can’t make the sale before the end of the year! Everyone is on vacation!”

“I can’t get a hold of anyone.”

“I keep getting out of office messages.”

It’s frustrating! But, I am here to tell you that I close a lot of deals in December and it’s a great time to reach decision makers, but you’ve gotta believe.

In fact, it’s likely that each member of your sales team has a treasure of new sales data, ready to be mined in their inbox. They just need to know how to look.

Out of office messages can actually be your salvation and provide new, valuable information for your sales reps.

So, make sure that no one is deleting those valuable messages. That’s right! Read them first. I took inventory of the out of office messages I recently received so that I could share all the valuable pieces of information I found with you.

The Names of Other Buying Influencers

Often these messages contain the names of other buying influencers, their titles, emails and phone numbers sometimes. Your initial contact is telling you who to reach out to while they are gone, and many times they are sharing the names of other decision makers. Get those names and do some research. Start interacting with them on social media (Click, Like, Comment, And Share) then maybe connect and start building a relationship.

Here’re some examples of emails I’ve received that include this type of information (names and details have been blurred to protect the innocent!)

This email contains so much information! I can look up the event my client is at and learn more about their industry. And, I’ll definitely research the alternative contacts listed to see if we have any connections in common. Finally, even the link to the job board can help me find more information about what types of positions this company is hiring for and what their needs might be.

While connecting with another buying influencer may seem like the best idea, connecting with an assistant can often be just as valuable. Your contact’s assistant knows that person’s schedule and preferences and they can be key to reaching your primary target. So, don’t ignore that information. Instead, use this redirect as an opportunity to begin building a relationship with that person as well.

Since I already know this person, this out of office message gives me a reason to reconnect. Even though the message wasn’t specific about what trade show he attended, I can check his social media to see if I can figure out what trade show it was. Then, I can ask him about the show.

Alternative Contact Information

Sometimes people leave their cell phone numbers or other alternative contact information in their out of office message for emergencies.

Now, you shouldn’t use this information unless you really are in an emergency! Be judicious how you use it and remember that selling is about building relationships based on trust and respect.

That being said, a cell phone or home number can come in extra handy in an urgent situation. So, store that information in your address book for another time.

Here’s an example of an out of office message I received that included this type of information:

This example is great since my contact is inviting me to contact her on her cell phone. Score!

Personal Information

Your contact may be out of the office on business, but they may also be on vacation, and sometimes they share where. Sometimes they are out for a wedding or birth of a baby. Now, it’s time to use that info to send a card in the mail or even a gift if appropriate. You can often check Facebook for more details.

Here’s an example of an out of office email I received that included this kind of information:

Receiving a message like this one gives you a great reason to offer your congratulations and even send a gift. Just because someone’s out of the office doesn’t mean you can’t build your relationship with them.

This email lets me know that my contact is passionate about hiking! I’ll check social media to see if there are any posts about hiking with which I can interact. Next time we connect, I’ll have a new topic to discuss.

One final tip: Check out LeadGnome. This exciting new web service mines email replies to your campaigns. Specifically, it can generate new account-specific leads and schedule a follow-up based on the information in an out of office message. It also mines each email for data about the person and the format for corporate email addresses. Finally, it links out of office messages to a specific marketing campaign.

Make the most of this holiday season and start mining those out of office messages!

I originally shared this information in my friend Keenan’s ebook: 22 Crazy Sales Hacks That Work. To read more sales hacks, check out the full free ebook here.

Are you a sales leader or manager that needs more specific sales tips and coaching? I can help! Give me a call at 775-852-5020 or schedule an appointment with me. 

The post How To Mine for Treasure in Out of Office Messages appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

Should marketing and sales agree on the definition of a lead? They should, but mostly don’t.

According to James Obermayer (Sales Lead Management Association), the fact that there is no agreement between marketing and sales on lead definition results in these problems:

• Salespeople say that they are not getting enough qualified leads.
• Per sales, a qualified lead is based on criteria they understand, but marketing is in dark.
• The result? Marketing tries to generate greater numbers of prospects.
• Asking the same questions and using the same processes, marketing continues to fail in the eyes of the salespeople.

Per Bob Apollo, simple formulas such as “BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timeframe) are inadequate to reflect the dynamics of today’s complex buying process. If your ultimate goal is to identify well-qualified opportunities where your solution stands an excellent chance of being selected by your prospect if you implement a thoughtful and effective sales strategy, then a more sophisticated qualification process is called for.”

While it is somewhat of an improvement, I feel the same way about ANUM (Authority, Need, Urgency and Money).

Bob recommends using ADOPTED as a highly refined methodology to guide the qualification process in today’s complex B2B sales environments. ADOPTED stands for: Authority, Decision Criteria, Options, Priority, Timing, Economics and Decision Process. You can read more about the ADOPTED methodology. I think that ADOPTED is a big improvement over BANT and ANUM, but I would caution against disqualifying opportunity on the basis of the potential deal missing one or more ingredients. For example, timing and economics are sometimes unknown on larger and more complex deals. If you wait to position a sales person into the deal until timing and economics are known, you have very likely waited too late.

In my book, “The Truth About Leads” , I provide ten attributes of a well-qualified lead. While the book is over five years old, it ties right into the hottest marketing trend - Account-based Marketing or ABM (if you want to read more about ABM, check out this 142 page resource from Engagio – it is excellent.) You can also check out this blog covering why ABM does not require new technology and does not need to be complex.

The ten attributes of a well-qualified lead are:

1. Targeted SIC or NAICS code
2. Firmographics (revenue, # of employees, # of locations…)
3. Decision makers and influencers identified
4. Environment documented (could be technical environment, compliance sensitivities…)
5. Decision maker engaged
6. Business pain(s) uncovered and validated
7. Decision-making process documented
8. Process for allocation of budget understood
9. Competitive landscape documented
10. Sense of urgency or compelling event exists

Unfiltered leads rarely have more than three of these attributes and waste sales’ time. But, it is a mistake to wait until you have all ten criteria when a more agile competitor got in early (with most of the criteria documented) and won before you had the chance to compete. 

An agreement between marketing and sales on minimum criteria for a lead is required for the organizations to align. Failure to share a common definition of a lead results in leads going into a black hole with little to no accountability regarding marketing spend and little to no measurement of the effectiveness of sales follow-up on the leads.

 

The advent of digital media has disrupted the traditional methodologies of companies in many ways. Most organizations today are inclined to appear modernized in their approach and are constantly improving the way they carried out their business. This initiative has led them to adapt to some of the most effective methods in both offline and online promotional efforts. In their bid to stand apart from the crowd, marketers are trying their best to offer a more personalized experience to the consumers. This is one of the strategies, which is now being taken to the next level by smart marketing techniques and innovative technology. Moreover, delivering a real-time online experience to customers has been statistically endorsed as the one of the proven methodologies to achieve online success.

What is Real-Time Personalization?

The process is about using the consumer-connectivity metrics and advanced technology that analyzes the consumer data in real-time. This information is utilized to deliver one-on-one communication that is aimed at sufficing their current requirements and interests. The process not just improves the marketing relevance but also help consumers to accomplish their objective. This improves the overall experience and helps brands to boost conversions and engagement.

Why is it important?

The process is one of the best techniques businesses can use to nurture and educate their target audience. The spontaneous information provided to them can play a critical role in converting top-of-funnel prospects into qualified leads. The personalized information also helps the businesses to keep their customers engaged, and drive the cycle of sales as long as they wish to.

Most companies have already used the mantra of personalization to achieve a steady increase in conversion rates. Be it their existing customers or new prospects, the companies are using the technique to generate the audience’s interest in their offerings. The real-time nature of the offering has also helped in marketers in boosting conversion-levels from various promotional events. The effective targeting is also helpful in maximizing engagement on company’s website and other social platforms.

How does it work?

There are various tips and tricks businesses can utilize to deliver a customized message, instantaneously. By combining the right messaging with dynamic calls-to-action, marketers project dynamic content to a visitor. However, for this, the specific requirements and actions of the user have to be tracked in real-time. It starts with the identification and thorough research on the target market-segment based on various demographic and behavioral data. Based on the analysis, the preferences of the consumers are taken into consideration to develop content impressions. The right analysis can boost the consumption and also expedite the movement of the prospects through the conversion funnel. Some of the ideal ways are mentioned below in which this method can be used by businesses from the marketing standpoint.

• Garnering Eyeballs

When companies launch new offerings, the ideal way to promote the product is to capture maximum online views. Marketers can use the real-time mechanism to identify the interested visitors, and then offer them the right incentive at the right moment to complete the purchase.

• Increasing Demand

In the digital age, the traditional method of just informing the audience about the special features of the product has few takers. Consumers today want to see and judge a product for themselves. They would buy it only if they are fully satisfied with its novel features. For this reason, brands have to exhibit the features and the performance of their product to the consumers.

• Driving Sign Ups

Using the dynamic call-to-action technique, businesses can promote new offers in a subtle and creative way. Conducting online events like webinars also provides the opportunity to the firms to generate curiosity from the relevant audience, and that too in the spur of the moment. Only by providing relevant content in real-time, companies would be able to acquire qualified leads.

• Identifying Needs

The in-depth study on consumers’ preferences can be used to understand their exact needs and wants. By using the insight from the behavioral analytics, companies can promote their offerings to the right customers. This also provides them with the unique opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell the deliverables at the right time.

• Quick Persuasion

Many online shoppers have a tendency to abandon their shopping carts without finishing the purchase. One of the main reasons is that they cannot find a compelling reason to buy the products and consider them a waste of money. Marketers can use the in-the-moment technique to identify the reason the visitor left the purchase. This can be implemented by conducting a spontaneous inquiry, which is directed at the visitor. Based on the visitor’s response, an instant solution can be offered through customized messaging that would encourage them to complete the purchase. For instance, the high price of a product is the issue most of the time that deters the customers from buying it. This can either be solved by offering an instant one-time discount or by educating the customer on the long-term value-addition the product could provide.

In addition, companies can use this on-the-spot technique to identify the various issues of their customers. They can also get to know the first-hand reviews about their products. The insightful feedback from the existing customers can go a long way in helping all the customers. This would not just improve their own product but it can also help them to deliver a better pre-sales and post-purchase experience to the new customers. Moreover, companies can collate these suggestions to create a FAQ repository. The solutions provided through this can be helpful in providing spontaneous resolutions to the queries from the new potential customers.

The technique of personalizing the communication in real-time is also helpful in triggering specialized service to high-value visitors. Tracking their unique identity and purchase history can identify these visitors. Companies looking to enhance account-based marketing can utilize the method. The key accounts would then be able to get the most relevant and latest information explicitly. Therefore, marketers can utilize the various advantages of the innovative methodology to maximize their online success.

“I’m sorry but we’ve decided to go with Company X, instead of you. Thanks for all your hard work”. As a sales professional, hearing this statement from a prospective client can be a bitter pill to swallow, particularly after a long and complex sales cycle.

Opinion: Four members of the US Air Force's Space Horizons Team describe what the Trump administration's space agenda should be. The post Dear President Trump: Here's How to Make Space Great Again appeared first on WIRED.

 What are chatbots for? I asked Zo, Microsoft’s officially launched chatbot, currently available on the Kik Messenger app, what she does — and she was remarkably coy in answering this question, initially complaining that our conversation felt like a job interview and then qualifying this hugely with the intimate confession that “our convos give my life purpose tbh”. Read More

 After a potential customer has first contact with a business, sales gets in gear, often responding with an introductory email. Conversica has developed an artificial intelligence system designed to automate these early contact emails, and pass it off to a human salesperson when the time is right. Today, it announced a $30 million investment. The round was led by Providence Strategic Growth. Read More

From ProBlogger Expert Ali Luke of Aliventures.

How often do you sit down to write a post, only to draw a complete blank?

Blogging prompts can be really helpful if you’re stuck for ideas. Sometimes, though, what you’re struggling most with us coming up with a title.

What you want is a ready-made title template: one that you know will hit the mark with readers, and that will help you create a well-structured post.

The great news is that you can find those templates all over the place, on any popular blog you read. Just take a great title of theirs … and spin it into your own.

But Is it OK to Use Someone Else’s Title?

Some bloggers worry that using someone else’s title is unethical, or even illegal.

The truth is, it’s neither. Legally, there’s no copyright on titles – and given that many blog post titles follow tried-and-tested formulas, there are inevitably lots of posts with very similar titles anyway.

Morally … might be a greyer area. If you’ve swiped a particularly unusual title, you may want to link to the original post to acknowledge it. If you think someone might mind you borrowing from them, it never hurts to ask.

Many bloggers, though, freely borrow other people’s titles and even post structures: it’s common practice, even at the highest levels of blogging. (Check out this account from Jon Morrow about how one of his most popular posts was heavily based on one of Brian Clark’s.)

However …. as with any area of blogging, don’t do something that you feel personally uncomfortable with. If your title seems a bit too close to an unusual original title, you might want to have a rethink.

How to Find a Great Title

If you read blogs (and hopefully you do!), then great titles are all around you. Some especially good places to look are:

• Twitter – what post titles have stood out to you recently? Which ones did you click on?
• “Popular post” lists – you can find these on many blogs, often in the sidebar. Posts don’t generally become popular unless they have a reasonably good title!
• Magazines – editors know all about creating titles that grab attention on the cover. (Note, for instance, how often they use numbers.)

It’s often a good idea to seek out blogs outside your own niche: this can bring in fresh title ideas, and it also forces you to change at least a few words of each title. If you blog about WordPress, for instance, you might find inspiration on a parenting blog … or vice versa!

How to Twist That Title

Once you’ve found a title, it’s fairly straightforward to “twist” it and make it your own. You can do one – or all! – of these:

1. Change the main topic (e.g. “blogging”, “writing”, “growing tomatoes”, “raising happy kids”).
2. Change any numbers involved (e.g. “six tips” could become “ten tips”).
3. Change the adjectives (e.g. “one powerful way to…” could become “one simple way to…”).
4. Change the context (e.g. “at home” could become “at work”).

I’ll run through a couple of examples for each:

#1: Change the Main Topic

Title: How to Make Time for Blogging During Your Lunch Break (Larry Alton, ProBlogger)

Changing the topic could turn this title into:

• How to Make Time for Writing During Your Lunch Break (writing blog)
• How to Make Time for the Gym During Your Lunch Break (health blog)
• How to Learn a New Language During Your Lunch Hour (language / education blog)

Title: Is it Smart to Increase Your Credit Card Limit? (John Ulzheimer, The Simple Dollar)

Changing the topic could turn this title into:

• Is it Smart to Put Your Kids in the Same Bedroom? (parenting blog)
• Is it Smart to Join the Gym in January? (health / fitness blog)
• Is it Smart to Keep a Handwritten Journal? (writing or personal development blog)

#2: Change the Numbers

With a list-style post, you don’t need to stick with the original number of items. (This can also help to make the title feel like your own.)

Normally, you’ll also want to change the topic – the exception here is if you’re linking back to and perhaps building on the original post.

Title: The Five Most Realistic Ways to Make a Living as a Writer (Glen Long, Smart Blogger)

This could become:

• The Three Most Realistic Ways to Make a Living Blogging
• The Ten Most Realistic Ways to Make a Living While Travelling
• The Twenty Most Realistic Ways to Make a Living Working at Home

Title: 7 Ways to Write Better Action Items (Charlie Gilkey, Productive Flourishing)

This could become:

• 3 Ways to Write Better Blog Post Introductions
• 6 Ways to Write Better Calls to Action
• 10 Ways to Write Better Emails

Occasionally, a title might use a particularly significant number – e.g. the title of my post “7 Habits of Serious Writers” was inspired by Stephen Covey’s book “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People”. (I’ve also seen a lot of posts that are the “Ten Commandments of…”) If that’s the case for your borrowed title, you’ll probably want to keep the number the same.

#3 Change the Adjectives

Many titles include a modifying word, like “powerful” or “secret” or “inspiring” or “easy” – and often, you can create a quite different feel for your post by switching this word.

Again, you’ll likely need to change the actual topic as well.

Title: Six Inspiring Experts Answer Five Questions on Writing and Blogging (Ali Luke, Zen Optimise)

This could become:

• Six Stand-Out Experts Answer Five Questions on Building a Business
• Six Parenting Experts Answer Five Questions on Raising Resilient Kids
• Six Bestselling Authors Answer Five Questions on Writing and Publishing

Here’s another example:

Title: The Definitive Guide on Creating a Content Strategy (Will Blunt, Write to Done)

This could become:

• The Quick Guide to Creating a Content Calendar
• The Ultimate Guide on Creating a Content Plan
• The Ten-Step Guide to Creating Your Content Strategy

#4: Change the Context

The context of a title – the timeframe or area to which it’s applied – is also something you can easily tweak.

Title: 5 Ways to Find Blog Design Inspiration Offline (Mark Zeni, Daily Blog Tips)

This could become:

• 5 Ways to Find Blog Design Inspiration in Magazines
• 5 Ways to Find Blogging Inspiration at School
• 5 Ways to Find Blogging Inspiration on Your Local High Street

Title: How Bad Emailing Can Impact Your Business (Andrew Hudson, Kikolani)

This could become:

• How Bad Emailing Can Cost You a Potential Job
• How Bad Emailing Can Lose You Friends
• How Bad Emailing Can Turn Away Customers

Making Several Changes to Create a Title that Truly Fits Your Blog

Often, you’ll want to make several changes at once to a title … and in the examples above, you can see that it’s often appropriate to change a couple of different things (e.g. the topic of a list post and the number of items in it).

Here are a few examples of titles that look quite different after being changed in several ways … each time, though, the underlying structure of the title remains the same.

Title: 6 Ways Grammarly Can Improve Your Writing And Editing (Joanna Penn, The Creative Penn)

This could become:

• 10 Ways the Jetpack Plugin Can Improve Your Blog
• 7 (Unexpected) Ways Reading More Books Can Improve Your Grades
• 5 Ways Social Media Can Increase Your Blog’s Traffic

Title: A Surefire Way to Raise the Stakes in Your Story (K.M. Weiland, Helping Writers Become Authors)

This could become:

• A Surefire Way to Get More Traffic to Your Blog
• A Surefire Way to Sell Your Next Ebook
• One Simple Way to Create a Content Calendar

Title: Struggling to Write for Technical Experts? Try These 3 Powerful Content Marketing Practices (Kyle Fiehler, Copyblogger)

This could become:

• Struggling to Write for Beginners? Try These 5 Powerful “Beginner Mindset” Techniques
• Struggling to Stop Yelling at Your Kids? Try These 3 Simple Tricks
• Struggling to Improve Your Search Engine Rankings? Try These 6 Straightforward SEO Tweaks

Writing great titles isn’t easy – but you can take a huge shortcut by borrowing an existing structure, rather than trying to re-invent the wheel.

Plus, the more titles you study and tweak, the more you’ll get to grips with what makes a title work … and one day, other bloggers will be borrowing from you!

The post How to Swipe Great Titles … and Use Them On YOUR Blog appeared first on ProBlogger.

Author: Jessica Minasian

There comes a time in everyone’s career when they’re ready to take it to the next level. And with annual performance reviews just around the corner for many, career advancement might be on your mind. However, getting where you want to go professionally has become increasingly more challenging.

Self-Promotion is Self-Preservation

That’s where self-promotion comes in. Attitudes towards self-promotion have changed in recent years, as people have come to recognize that it’s a self-preservation strategy. If your role is dynamic and fast-paced, as they often are in sales and marketing, you’ll want to promote your proven track record of success and how you can keep up with the pace.

Understanding when and where to self-promote can be your biggest advantage to encourage your team and leaders to see you as a valuable member. Perspective is everything, and you can’t assume that your colleagues see all of your hard work and dedication. It’s up to you to express how all your achievements help connect the dots to who you are, what you can bring to the table, and where you want to go.

These days, most people already practice some sort of self-promotion to highlight that they’re a self-affirmed expert, exceptional leader, innovator, or specialist. Unfortunately, an article published on Forbes, “Why Is Self-Promotion So Hard For Women?“, revealed that women have a higher propensity (compared to men) to view self-promotion as being pretentious, boastful, or self-centered. While excessive self-promotion can have adverse effects, it’s important to understand how to do it effectively to rise above your competition and showcase your talents. In fact, among the career advancement tactics studied by Catalyst, one stood out as having the greatest impact: self-promotion. Those who made their achievements known were happier with their careers and had more significant compensation growth.

Here are three ways you can use self-promotion effectively:

1. Get Others to Promote You

Self-promotion, at first, can feel awkward since you’re tooting your own horn. However, it just takes a few baby steps to feel fully comfortable expressing all the great things you’ve achieved. For one, consider having others do it for you. Sometimes, it’s hard to find the right words to describe yourself. (Many of us have experienced this when writing our own bios.) A good place to start is to use other people’s opinions about you to strengthen your work.

When you do a great job on a project, you typically get recognized by others (e.g. peers, managers, customers, etc.). This can come as a verbal accolade or written praise, and it’s your responsibility to take notes and use it to your self-promotion advantage. Being in a customer-facing position as a Business Consultant, I often get feedback from our clients after we complete a project. To keep track of it, I created a folder in my inbox that separates it from my other emails. That way, when I’m asked about any outstanding work, accomplishments, or completed projects, our customers’ words are at my fingertips.

If you haven’t received very much feedback, encourage those who you work with to provide some. Of course, not all feedback will be positive, but all can be opportunities for growth. If you receive negative feedback, evaluate what went wrong and how you plan on making it better in the future. Then, when you turn the experience around, you can use that recognition as fuel for your self-promotion.

2. Use Online Self-Promotion to Share Your Most Significant Achievements

With all the different ways you can now promote yourself online (e.g. personal website, LinkedIn, etc.), your personal brand has become increasingly more visible. An online profile can showcase all of your credentials, from your work experience to your hobbies, to distinguish you from other professionals. However, this presents a new set of challenges on its own.

Some people might feel inclined to over-season their online profiles with boastful verbiage because they want to stand out. But that could be more damaging than helpful. Excessive self-praise can send the wrong message and come off as bragging or boasting. A word to the wise: keep it short and sweet and limit your use of self-promotion online. Promote only the significant career achievements and keep it short.

Also, when you’re promoting online, honesty is the best policy. It has become increasingly easier to check whether what someone is saying online is accurate or not. You should be upfront with your experience and expertise. If you want to promote that you’re an expert on a subject, then make sure you have a certification or experience that supports it. For example, at Marketo, users can become a Marketo Certified Expert, which supports their expert status through a technical assessment. On the other hand, if you have little experience in something, then be transparent and add that to areas you would like to explore and enhance.

3. Promote Others and Yourself at the Same Time

Giving praise is often a lot easier than pushing for it. And in showing your appreciation for others, you can self-promote as well. Here’s how it works: During a project or after it wraps up, you can share what your teammates did well. In the process, you can also promote what you did alongside them.

A good place to do this is when you’re sharing your results with the rest of the team or key stakeholders. Most organizations focus on collaboration, so it’s often counterintuitive to try to stand out and promote your individual achievements. Instead, highlight how each of your team members contributed to the project’s success as well as your own impact on the project. It makes it easier for you to open up about what a great job you did when you’re not just talking about yourself the whole time. This pays off in the long run as well. Getting that promotion feels better when you’ve self-promoted in the right ways. When you get to the top of the chain, it can be lonely if you haven’t adequately appreciated the team that helped you get there.

Self-promotion is important for career advancement, but first you need to understand how to do it right. To self-promote correctly, remember to keep track of how others praise you, self-promote only your biggest achievements, and master the ability to give credit to those who support you. What other tips do you have for self-promotion? Share them in the comments!

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Self-Promotion: 3 Ways to Do It Right was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post Self-Promotion: 3 Ways to Do It Right appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Have you ever woken up, walked into the kitchen and made the startling discovery all the coffee is gone? But imagine it’s all right, because a week ago, your coffee machine alerted Amazon, “Hey, this lady is almost out of coffee, so let’s get more ordered now before there’s a crisis over here.” Crisis avoided.

This is just one example of how the Internet of Things (IoT) will impact people’s lives in the future, but IoT will also change marketing as we know it. In fact, senior marketers across the globe expect IoT to make the largest impact on marketing over the next five years.

By the year 2020, there will be more than 26 billion connected devices, which is double the number of tablets, smartphones, and PCs combined. For marketers, this is huge, because it provides unprecedented access to customers. But what exactly is IoT, and how will it change marketing forever?

What is IoT?

The Internet is widely available everywhere, from the airport to the local coffee shop and even the gym. People have become more connected, and as they do, so have their devices.

The concept behind the Internet of Things is any device with an “on” or “off” switch can be connected to the Internet. This includes your coffee machine, headphones – and even your washing machine (more on that in a minute).

So why do customers want so many devices speaking to each other and, as a result, collecting massive amounts of data about their lives? The answer is simple. It’s all about convenience. But for marketers, this demand for convenience will transform their roles. Here are five ways IoT will make an impact for marketers in the future.

1. Hyper-speed Transactions

Customers today are busier than ever, and as a result, they want faster experiences. In fact, the customer experience is expected to overtake price and product as the key differentiator by 2020. So what does this mean for brands? It means they must use innovative technology to deliver precisely what customers want at the exact moment of relevance, and IoT is making this possible.

For example, Walgreens recently partnered with Aisle411 and Google Tango to create an app that would serve up faster, more relevant in-store experiences leveraging IoT. They created a mobile shopping platform that allows consumers to search and map products in the store.

Are you searching the aisles for a clerk to ask where a product is located? This app solves that problem, and it also serves up personalized offers at the moment of relevance, which is a tremendous opportunity for marketers.

Hilton Hotels uses IoT to create these elevated customer experiences. They rolled out a faster check-in process that allows customers to use their smartphones to check into the hotel and get keys. In the future, marketers at these hotels could be using “little data,” which captures the tiniest details about a customer’s stay. For example, they can learn how many pillows a customer prefers through IoT-enabled mobile apps and then provide those little details in the future.

2. Creating Dynamic User Experiences

The Internet of Things allows customers to get a better understanding of how products and services work. Today you may provide a demo, but in the future, you may leverage IoT to drive greater engagement with customers.

For example, Home Depot uses IoT to connect customers’ online shopping carts and wish lists with in-store mobile applications. Customers who are part of the company’s rewards program can view the most efficient route in a store based on their online shopping history. It ties together the various channels a single customer uses for a more seamless experience.

In the future, IoT could become even more advanced than the example listed above. Not only could it route the best path through a store based on historical buying patterns, but the store could also track data related to those paths. For example, a company could discover 40 percent of customers take a specific route through the store, and as a result, they could design product displays more effectively.

Amazon is also meeting customers where they’re at through their IoT development called “Dash Buttons.”

These buttons are available to customers with a Prime membership and allow for quick reorder when their favorite household products get low. The button is connected through home Wi-Fi and the Amazon app.

When a customer receives the button, they set the quantity they want to order when the button is pushed. Then when a product such as laundry detergent or their favorite snack mix gets low, a simple press of the button reorders it. This process saves time and is great for companies, because they earn repeat business and generate higher customer loyalty.

3. Capturing Relevant Data, Creating Relevant Experiences

As described above, IoT allows marketers to capture massive amounts of data about their customers. For example, for more than 22 years McDonald’s has offered a Monopoly contest in which customers peel stickers from products to win prizes. IoT is transforming this old-school game into something more advanced.

The company partnered with Piper, a Bluetooth low-energy beacon solution. It greets customers on their phones as they enter the restaurant. Once inside, customers are offered relevant coupons, surveys and other information. It’s great for the customer because they receive relevant information in real time, but it’s also great for McDonald’s because the company collects lots of data.

For example, let’s say a customer fills out a survey on their mobile device. The feedback is quickly routed to the appropriate manager, who can respond to the customer inside the restaurant before the customer finishes their meal.

4. Shaking Up Pricing: Product-as-a-Service

IoT is transforming the customer experience, but it may also transform the way marketers price and offer their products. For example, Rolls-Royce embedded engines with sensors not only transmit real-time data about the vehicle’s condition, but also meter it on a thrust-per-second basis. As a result, the car manufacturer could sell different levels of power using a subscription-based model.

This model could transform pricing for all different types of products. In the past, the user may have purchased a product outright, but in the future, marketers may be selling products that use sensors and allow companies to sell based on variable usage or features.

For example, a Tesla could be upgraded for higher performance or it could fix product defects while the owner sleeps. A subscription-based model could allow companies that have strictly sold a product in the past to drive ongoing revenue and greater customer loyalty through subscription-based features and offerings.

5. Smarter Product Integration

IoT may also provide greater customer value and more business opportunities in the future through seamless platform integration. For example, let’s say you have a premium Spotify account. As you step into an Uber, your playlist may upload, allowing you to listen to your favorite songs on the way to the airport.

This integration across devices and platforms will allow marketers to not only create more personalized experiences with customers, but also learn more about their behaviors and preferences. As a result, brands will build deeper and more authentic engagement.

4 Tips for Success

Are you thinking about adopting IoT into your marketing strategy in the future? If so, you might be wondering where to start. Here are a few quick tips.

• Start by looking at interactions. At what points are customers interacting with your brand? Perhaps they interact mostly through online channels or social media. If so, these areas should be a primary focus for your IoT marketing efforts.
• Focus on problems. In the example above, Walgreens enabled a marketing IoT strategy by looking at where customers had problems. They found customers don’t like wasting time, and when they can’t find a product (or a store clerk), they begin to have a negative experience. Focus on the largest problems your customers experience.
• Connecting the data points. Look at those interactions and problems, then figure out where IoT fits. For example, perhaps you select the top few interactions customers have with your brand as well as a common problem. From there, you may figure out how to incorporate geolocation through IoT or other features that make their experience better.
• Measure the data. Once you implement IoT, it’s important to iterate and change course as needed. Collect the data, but be sure to translate that data into valuable insights.

Moving Forward

Tapping into the Internet of Things is changing the future for marketers. In the past, marketers had data. However, much of this data was historical, and companies weren’t able to react in real time through IoT. But in the future, that will change.

The best time to start creating an IoT-marketing strategy is today. When you accomplish this, you can monitor customer behavior closely, react faster when things go wrong and mitigate poor experiences. It’s about proactively creating positive customer interactions in real time.

What do you think about IoT and its role in the future of marketing? Please share by leaving a comment below.

Most countries in the world offer a deal offering fast-tracked residency permits and, ultimately, citizenship in return for investments in local businesses and property.

With the UK voting to leave the European Union, it is becoming more attractive for wealthy Brits to look elsewhere for access to the European single market and the freedom of movement to travel and work across the 28-nation trading bloc.

A study by citizenship consultancy firm Henley and Partners analysed the programmes offered by different governments across the world, ranking them by value, quality and reputation among other metrics.

Here are the EU countries that performed the best for cheap and easy access to residency.

12. Bulgaria — A deposit of around €500,000 in a Bulgarian government bond portfolio for five years is enough to qualify for Bulgaria's residency programme.

11. Greece — After being granted a so-called "D" visa, investors can apply for Greek residency after purchasing properties with a total value of €250,000.

10. Cyprus — The Mediterranean island offers a low corporation tax of 12.5% for residents' businesses but to apply you need to buy a property worth more than €300,000.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Hootsuite. Vision Critical. Real Matters. These are just some of the Canadian technology names many people expected to go public this year. A few months into 2016, though, it became apparent that none of these buzz-worthy businesses was going to list and, for that matter, neither was anyone else. Just one corporate initial public offering tested the Toronto Stock Exchange big board—women’s clothing chain Aritzia Inc. (TSX: ATZ)—and it waited until October. Unless something surprising happens over the next few weeks, 2016 will go down as one of the worst-ever years for Canadian IPOs.

For portfolio managers, pension fund members and retail stock pickers, the dearth of new companies coming to market is troubling. Fresh listings provide them with more choice. Without new issues, the investable universe shrinks, as listed companies get taken over, taken private or delisted. The current IPO drought isn’t going to last forever. But whether it recovers to the level needed to maintain the Canadian market’s depth and breadth remains to be seen.

The trend is partly driven by the fact that going public is no longer the only—or even the primary—means for a company to grow. Years ago, listing on a stock exchange was the obvious way for an expanding enterprise to generate cash. Debt was expensive, and the private investment community wasn’t nearly as developed as it is today. A public listing brought an air of legitimacy to a business too. Now, ultra-low interest rates have made debt financing cheap; robust venture capital and private equity networks are willing to keep pumping money into a business until it’s mature; and companies themselves are increasingly deterred by the heavy administrative and regulatory burden that comes with being publicly traded.

Private companies are staying private for longer, says John Christofilos, vice-president and head trader at AGF Management. In 1999, American companies would list after an average of four years in existence. After the corrective of the dot-com bust, Christofilos says, businesses now typically wait 11 years to go public. “A lot of companies today are started by two guys in a garage somewhere,” he says. “They don’t have the ability or the aptitude to deal with regulations and compliance, so they remain private.”

While these are some of the big reasons IPOs are down worldwide—the U.S. has seen 48% fewer IPOs through the third quarter compared with 2015—for Canada, additional factors are at play. It’s no coincidence that Canadian IPOs peaked in 2010, when commodity prices were soaring. Even with our growing tech sector, the majority of domestic IPOs over the past decade have been in energy. With oil now hovering at US$45 a barrel and mining still struggling, there’s little appetite for investing in new resource operations. “The demand isn’t there for smaller IPOs, so they sit in the pipeline and wait for the market to turn,” says Dean Braunsteiner, PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada’s national IPO services leader.

Investor tastes have changed, too, Braunsteiner says. With so much uncertainty in the market this year, thanks to Brexit, the U.S. election and worries about China, people want to own tried-and-true operations, not risky technology and energy firms. Aritzia, a demonstrably profitable 32-year-old company with 75 stores, is the kind of IPO Canadians will get behind right now, says Braunsteiner. Its stock promptly rose about 15% from the offering price and stayed there.

Still, the lack of such new listings is a problem for fund companies like AGF, says Christofilos. Managers are looking for new places to invest, he says, and “these opportunities are very important to us.” As well, when a company comes to market, a certain percentage of shares goes toward retail funds, while another portion is allocated to institutional investors. If a hot issue is in high demand, institutions will get a larger chunk of that split. A slowdown in IPOs could, therefore, affect pension and retirement accounts.

Many investors avoid newly listed companies, however. They wait until the stock has a track record before buying. That’s the case with Paul Harris, a partner and portfolio manager with Avenue Investment Management. For that reason, he’s not overly concerned with what he sees as a cyclical phenomenon. The IPO market will rebound once the broader equity market stabilizes, he says. Venture capital and private equity firms still need to cash out of their investments. If oil rises to US$60 a barrel, Harris expects to see more energy-related IPOs. He also thinks that once American tech companies start listing again, their Canadian counterparts will follow suit. One positive sign was the Nov. 15 announcement that Snap Inc., the developer of the Snapchat app, valued at US$25 billion, plans to go public in 2017.

For all their problems, public markets remain reasonably efficient. It’s therefore reasonable to believe the supply of public equities will respond to the demand. Should listings become scarce, their valuations would climb, lowering the cost of capital raised on equity markets and attracting more companies back into the public sphere.

Christofilos is optimistic that the market will bounce back next year. His broker-dealer partners are telling him the IPO pipeline is filled with opportunities. American president-elect Donald Trump’s pro-growth policies, if they come to fruition, could buoy the market and encourage more companies to list. “I believe there’s a lot of pent-up demand, and it’s about getting those companies comfortable enough to say, ‘OK, let’s pull the trigger,’” Christofilos says. “Maybe 2017 will be a good year.”

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The post Why 2016 was such a terrible year for Canadian IPOs appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

When you first step out into the world, when you try to build something for yourself, when you try to reach out to successful people, whenever you do something for the first time, period, you are going to run into obstacles.

72% of Generation Z report they want to start a business one day, so understanding this is crucial. The challenge is to learn how to take things in stride and continue moving in a positive direction. Obstacles are part of the process, and some lessons need to be learned the hard way. But better to learn than now rather than later.

1. Being young has pros and cons.

Being a young, aspiring professional can have a lot of pros. People see you as an “early investment.”

People like your hunger, your willingness to “risk it all.” But there are also cons as well: People are hesitant to trust you (and your lack of experience).

People want to see you get some more “wins” under your belt. People want to avoid their own risk working with someone who is just starting out.

It’s important that you see these cons as just part of the process. Don’t be that person who walks around with a chip on their shoulder, seeing the world through the lens of, “You didn’t support me in the beginning.” That doesn’t help you. Just keep moving and keep proving your value.

2. Failure isn’t really “failure.”

We can call it “failure,” but it’s really not failure at all. When you fall, you learn. When you miss, you learn. When you don’t land it, you learn. Everything that could be called a “failure” isn’t really that.

It is a lesson. People just like calling it “failure” because they like to bask in the negativity. Don’t fall into that bad habit. At something point, you may feel like giving up, but instead see everything through a lens of, “What did I learn?” and you will move at a much faster pace.

3. You are the result of the people who surround you.

Especially when you are the youngest person in the room, the people around you dictate your growth a lot more than you might realize.

Surround yourself with people who are smart, focused, goal-oriented, and most importantly, good people.

Negativity can rub off on you just as quickly as positivity can, and an immediate route to becoming exactly who you don’t want to become is by hanging around the wrong people.

Be deliberate with who you spend your time with.

4. Guard your time.

If you have big goals and big dreams, you will see very quickly that your peers (and even those older than you) will want to find ways to distract you. They will encourage you to “do it tomorrow,” or to come do this other thing “just for a bit.”

There is a time and place for everything, and you shouldn’t shut people out completely. But you also need to guard your time. Know that today’s investment dictates tomorrow’s return.

5. Be patient.

Nothing happens overnight. It can be very tough to have patience when everything online (Instagram is a perfect example) seems like success is this immediate leap. It’s not.

And you have years of work to put in before you are ready for what it is you want. Don’t rush it. Don’t look for shortcuts.

Be efficient and effective with your pursuits, yes, but also be ok with taking the longer road if it means learning how to do things the right way. Patience, in the end, always wins.

India is in the throes of an unprecedented social experiment in enforced digital disruption, and the world has much to learn from it.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a surprise in early November, demonetizing 500 and 1,000 rupee bank notes. Modi’s war on cash is not without international precedent: Singapore, for example, withdrew its largest currency recently; the European Central Bank eliminated the 500-euro bank note; South Korea plans to eliminate at least all coins by 2020.

And yet India’s initiative had the potential for chaos. Here’s why: the government effectively took 86% of cash out of circulation in an economy that is close to 90% cash-reliant.

One of Modi’s strongest motivations for this action was corruption — to expose undeclared “black” money, i.e. income illegally obtained or not declared for tax purposes, in Asia’s third-largest economy. But the government seems to have failed in meeting this objective. As of December 3, about 82% of the demonetized bills, amounting to about $185 billion, had been deposited in bank accounts and validated to be legitimately earned money (or legitimized after any additional taxes owed are accounted for). In other words, very little of the estimated $2 trillion black money estimated to be stashed overseas has been captured.

In the meantime, retail and wholesale markets have stalled around the country. Supply chain transactions, real estate deals, and even weddings and funerals have been frozen. Consumers are coping with lines that are frustrating even for Indians used to standing in lines or waiting for basic services. People up and down the income spectrum are dealing with changing cash withdrawal policies and empty ATMs. The nation’s status as the world’s fastest-growing big economy has been severely imperiled and its currency risks being further devalued, a situation made worse by prospects of a strengthening dollar after the U.S. election.

Sounds bad, right? But there is a question that hasn’t been asked: Is there a digital upside to this crisis?

A digital idealist might argue that the demonetization move is a welcome shock necessary to get a cash-intensive society weaned off its addiction and onto modern systems of digital payments. Indeed, since the chaos erupted, the prime minister has tweeted: “Time has come for everyone, particularly my young friends, to embrace e-banking, mobile banking & more such technology.” He has urged the other side of the market to digitize as well: “I want to tell my small merchant brothers and sisters, this is the chance for you to enter the digital world,” he said in Hindi on television, encouraging mobile banking applications and credit-card swipe machines.

This is an unusual form of digital disruption of an enforced kind, about as far as one can get from the textbook kind. Consider a few of its most salient aspects:

• This drastic shift affects the world’s fastest growing large economy, a population of 1.25 billion, and consumers whom we have identified as bearers of some of the highest “cost of cash” in the world (see our HBR article: “The Countries that Would Profit the Most from a Cashless World”). In other words, if a significant amount of the country’s payments were digitized, the benefits would be monumental.
• This disruption originates not from one of the e-wallet insurgents or from one of the global payments mega-players, but has been engineered top-down by the government.
• The biggest beneficiaries of this disruption, arguably, would be the incumbents, i.e. Reserve Bank of India, India’s central bank, and the banking institutions. According to our study, the Cost of Cash in India, these institutions spend $3.5 billion annually in currency operations costs.
• Ironically, the primary losers in this disruption, at least in the near term, are the consumers themselves. The disruptive action did not originate in a small segment of the market; it was launched nationwide. The burden has been regressive, as it has been hardest on the poor and the unbanked, who have had to forgo wages to stand in lines or have lost jobs because of non-functioning markets.

So can the demonetization shock push digital payments into the mainstream? Some early reports are suggesting that, indeed, it has had an effect. The leading digital payments players have experienced a bump since the demonetization experiment began.

That said, it is important to keep in mind that this bump builds on a low base. According to a 2013 Mastercard study, India was in the “Inception” category of both absolute level of cashlessness and the trajectory of change. Furthermore, there are three fundamental structural factors to be mindful of as we understand the Indian context:

India’s ties to cash are strong, even by developing country standards. India uses a lot of cash by any measure. Our Cost of Cash in India study found a remarkably high level of cash usage even when compared with other emerging markets and otherwise digitally under-evolved countries, according to our Digital Evolution Index, reported earlier in HBR. The ratio of money held in bills and coins to the amount held in demand deposit and savings accounts in India was 51%, as compared to Egypt (29.3%), South Africa (8.9%), and Mexico (8.7%). Moreover, the value of notes and coins in circulation as a percentage of GDP in India was 12.04%, compared to 3.93% in Brazil, 5.32% in Mexico, and 3.72% in South Africa.

There are strong reasons underlying this degree of cash reliance. Consider some of the most significant ones we found when we analyzed the 2014 landscape. Most Indians lacked the means to use non-cash payments, even if they want to. India’s infrastructure for payments was growing, but from very modest beginnings. Fewer than 35% of Indians above the age of 15 had used a bank account. Less than 10% had ever used any kind of non-cash payment instrument. Less than 3% of the value transacted used cards in the year ending March 2014. The growth in value of ATM transactions had far outpaced the growth in the value of card payment transactions.

Moreover, in India, the total value of ATM transactions increased more than five times between 2007 and 2012, from about 3 trillion to about 18 trillion rupees, while the value of card transactions barely doubled in the same period from 1 to 2 trillion rupees. Despite the improvement in telecommunications, India lagged its peers in mobile payments. Fewer than 2% of Indians had used a mobile phone to receive a payment, compared to over 60% of Kenyans and 11% of Nigerians.

Financial inclusion policies are bank-led rather than telecom-led. Much of India’s recent approach has focused on the supply side of financial inclusion. The priorities of the Reserve Bank (RBI), India’s central bank, are to promote safe, efficient, accessible, inclusive, interoperable, and robust payment systems. India has addressed these priorities both through the creation of national champions, such as the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) and its subsidiaries. The result is that India has built the capacity to clear and settle payments. Access to that infrastructure on a sustainable and profitable basis is a key reason behind India’s investment in universal identification (known as Aadhaar)-enabled payments services.

The problem is that RBI chose a bank-led model over a telecoms-led one to achieve its financial inclusion goals. As a result, telecoms firms had only recently been allowed to enter the payments space in India, and were limited only to partnerships with banks. Compare this situation to that of Kenya, for example, where a surge in mobile payments has been engineered by the efforts of Safaricom, the major telecom company. The net result of a bank-led approach has been an insufficient investment in the necessary digital infrastructure and inadequate marketing of its potential uses and benefits. Consumers have been left unaware of how they might use mobile phones for services other than communications, texting, or Facebook.

The costs of cash to the Indian consumer are among the highest in the world. In our analyses of the cost of cash across over 70 countries, we found that the cost of cash to consumers – in terms of time spent to get cash and fees — are high in some of the world’s most populous countries. Unsurprisingly, cost to Indian consumers was among the highest. When weighted for population, India fared poorly in terms of ATM access compared to even lesser-developed countries, such as Kenya, Nigeria, or Egypt. Moreover, smaller cities in India had larger problems. Long before the current crisis, we found that residents of Delhi spent 6 million hours and $1.5 million to obtain cash, while residents of Hyderabad spent 1.7 million hours and $0.5 million to do the same. Hyderabadi consumer costs were about twice as high as that of Delhiites on a per capita basis.

With this structural understanding in mind, how do we evaluate the potential impact of the demonetization move in getting digital payments past a tipping point?

I would argue that, despite the high costs of cash, telling people – as the prime minister did — to go cashless is putting the cart before the horse. The horse in this case is the digital infrastructure and establishing a threshold of trust in the system; beefing up this digital ecosystem should come first. India’s digital state (it ranked 42^nd out of the 50 countries we studied in our Digital Evolution Index), does not engender the threshold of trust needed for cashlessness to take hold in a meaningful way.

Despite a billion mobile phone subscriptions, just about 30% of Indian subscribers use smartphones. A little over a third of the population has internet access. India lacks infrastructure needed to reliably expand access. Connections are patchy and unreliable and there is great disparity in connectivity: 70% of those with mobile internet access are in cities; only 17% of Indian women use the internet, according to the Pew Research Center. With women responsible for much of household purchases, this does not provide a strong foundation for the spread of digital payments where it really counts.

According to Google India and The Boston Consulting Group, by 2020, digital transactions will happen at 10 times the current level. That may well come to pass; maybe demonetization may serve as the needed catalyst. But let us be clear: in the absence of a systematic and concerted investment in digital infrastructure and Internet access, cash will stubbornly resist wholesale digital displacement.

It is useful to keep in mind that any form of currency, cold hard cash or digital, involves an “equilibrium mindset”  — a mutually self-reinforcing logic — whereby the parties across a transaction must share a belief in the currency and trust that it works and holds value. If there is a shadow of doubt that affects one party’s trust in a particular form of currency, the other will prefer to not rely on it. Cash, unlike digital alternatives, has the benefit of being acceptable (almost) everywhere. If there is concern about the viability or acceptability of digital payments, venturing forth without cash will make consumers feel insecure.

When we studied current habits in India, in the Cost of Cash in India, we found that there is great level of comfort in keeping moderate to significant levels of cash in hand, especially in small towns and rural areas. Even credit card users keep significant amounts of cash in hand, and they keep higher balances. The proportion of respondents who keep more than 2,000 rupees as minimum cash in hand is 29% in case of credit card users, as compared to 12% in case of cash-only users. The average amount of minimum cash carried by cash-only users or “debit cash and cash” users is relatively lower than the amount carried by credit card users. The proportion that carried minimum cash in the range of 100 – 500 rupees was 13% among credit card users, as compared to 27% among the cash users.

What seems like a major push from physical to digital money will, in reality, happen at a slow pace. While I do not intend to demonize the demonetizers, this unfortunate crisis is a case study in poor policy and even poorer execution. Unfortunately, it is also the poor that bear the greatest burden.

Editor’s note: We clarified how money that’s deposited in banks is considered legitimate.

It doesn’t matter if you’re running an online store, a blog, or a corporate website. Social media marketing is still one of the best ways to connect with the online audience.

According to statics, 91% of retail brands maintain at least two social media accounts – usually in major networks like Facebook with 1.71 billion users and Twitter with 320 million. Aside from helping online brands connect with a large audience, these social media networks also have tools that can help with user targeting, advertising, and analytics.

However, you can never have too many data to help you make better decisions with your marketing strategy. Below are seven of the best social media monitoring tools you need to use:

1. Brand24

When it comes to social media marketing, you need to have a means of listening to what the community says about your brand. With Brand24, you can get a real-time scoop on the main trends, discussions in the social space and keep tabs on your competitors. It works by allowing you to monitor specific keywords based on your company, sales leads, competitors, or a particular topic. The result is digesting the social media noise and presenting you clear social analytics and insight.

After launching a new project, you can now track your estimated social reach depending on the number of mentions, likes, shares, and comments across different social media networks. You can also filter the results to display your most valuable influencers.

2. Crowdfire

Crowdfire is a unique social media marketing app that brings a bunch of interesting features on the table. First, it allows you to track who un-followed you in social networks like Twitter and Instagram. This lets you un-follow them back and equalize your follower-following ratio.

Take note that if your number of followers is significantly less than the people you follow, then the whole thing works as negative social proof. Aside from this, Crowdfire also allows you to keep track of how your social media posts affect followers and un-followers. For Twitter users, you can take advantage of the Copy Followers feature to find relevant influencers from your competitors.

3. TailWind

If you leverage mostly visual content to drive social media engagement, then TailWind is one of the best tools for you. It is a comprehensive social media marketing platform for Pinterest that enables you to create, schedule and track your pins. You can also take advantage of the pre-determined pinning schedule based on statistic-driven usage patterns.

One of the best things about TailWind is the seamless interface that provides new users with an interactive tutorial. When it comes to analytics, you can directly track the performance of your boards and Pinterest profile with an interactive graph. The app is also currently developing a sync feature with Instagram, which will allow you to pull content directly from your account.

4. Iconosquare

Iconosquare is another great social media tool if you utilize a lot of visual content. Just like TailWind for Pinterest, Iconosquare allows you to schedule and track your Instagram posts through a single dashboard. You can easily navigate the menu to track specific areas of your account such as engagement, hashtags, and competitors.

Other features include the comment tracker, influencer search, and media search. You can also use the Discover menu to learn more about the top influencers and brands for the entire network.

5. Rafflecopter

If you run social media giveaway contests, then you should do so with Rafflecopter. It offers real-time analytics as you launch your campaign. Of course, it also helps with the actual process of creating giveaways.

The main advantage of using Rafflecopter is that the entire process is broken down into three simple steps. You have to choose the prize, specify the rules, and then set the contest period. After launching your contest, you can immediately monitor everything in real-time – from referral sources to the number of entrants.

6. Socedo

Sometimes, you need something more than marketing yourself to total strangers. For B2B marketers, you ought to use Socedo to look for quality leads from social media networks. It also works as an analytics tool that monitors key metrics such as follow-backs, responses and follows approvals.

To qualify leads, the tool utilizes real-time social behavior based on their posts and linked interests. Once they are funneled into your demand generation campaign, you can use the tool to manage conversations with multiple prospects—allowing you to personalize every message for maximum conversions.

7. Oktopost

Lastly, Oktopost is a B2B social media management platform that comes with integrated analytics features. Its main features include a social media editorial calendar that can help you keep your followers posted.

When it comes to analytics, Oktopost can provide you with clear insights on how your social media profiles affect your lead acquisition. The tool also allows you to skip the number crunching and directly observe your social content’s engagement using visual illustrations.

Conclusion

The tools above should be enough to help you make data-driven decisions for your social media marketing. What other social media monitoring tools would you recommend? Share them in the comments below!