Rnordman

An old but good article on Social Media Examiner was shared recently about podcasting tips that I’d contributed to in 2012, about how to understand our podcast audience. Much has changed since that article, so I thought I’d refresh the advice for the present day. Mobile Still Matters The percentage of your audience that uses […]

The post 3 Digital Audiences To Understand For Your Podcast And Business appeared first on Christopher S. Penn Blog.

The future of Airbnb lies in creating memorable guest experiences, and brands will benefit by complementing these experiences in relevant, valuable ways.

Since attending Airbnb Open in Los Angeles a few weeks ago, I’ve been contemplating what Airbnb’s announcements around shifting toward experiential hosting mean for both guests and corporations. Guests will find authentic travel experiences that complement their hospitality choices, while corporations will find opportunities to partner with Airbnb and sponsor these entertainment and cultural adventures.

During the event, executives from Airbnb revealed a few interesting data points:

• The average business traveler stays at an Airbnb for six nights
• The average Airbnb host makes $7,530 per year
• Travel spending is nearly 10% of global GDP ($7.2B)
• Airbnb had 40M guest stays in 2015 (see graph below), in 34K cities in 191 countries

With guests staying for nearly a week at their hosts’ abodes, many are looking for immersive experiences in the local scene––activities and sights that can’t be booked through a travel agent or seen from a tour bus. There are already more than 600 experiences available to travelers through Airbnb! The company is also experimenting with on-demand car delivery for off-the-beaten-path travel, as well as prepared food delivery.

What does this mean to you? Corporations have the opportunity to connect directly with tastemakers around the world, inserting their brands and products into diverse experiences with lasting impact. Let’s explore a few of the potential industry opportunities:

• Consumer Goods: Airbnb is the world’s largest showroom, with the goods in hosts’ homes used to influence buyers as the level of trust between guest and host are high.
• Retailers: These new “experiences” mean that local retailers will be visited in cities, led by the hosts and tour guides.
• Hospitality and Travel: For hotels, this new offering is about the entire trip, and they’ll soon offer flight deals and cars, in addition to experiences and homes.
• Food: Food will be delivered directly to Airbnb locations, and continued on-demand food models will become important.
• Finance: Hosts are generating a modest amount of income per year, but need money to upgrade their locations, an opportunity for small loans.

What does this mean for all companies? Today’s modern customer is seeking experiences, they show off using digital technologies, and access to physical goods is easy with on-demand models, rather than ownership of a house, car, electronics and more. Established companies need to revisit their strategy to provide customers with experiences that connect to the real meaning of why customers want platforms that enable new adventures and more.

If you want to take your company to the next level, then you need to put a system in place that becomes predictable and reliable.

This system will attract more clients to your company, build your credibility with them, and get them ready to buy from you.

All while you are off doing what you do best.

So how does a system like this work?

To put it simply, it’s a three phase process to (1) drive awareness of your brand and your services to your target audience, (2) qualify members of your target audience as Leads for your company, and then (3) get those Leads into meetings to turn them into clients or product sales.

The real pros will add in fourth and fifth phases where you build in referrals, upsells and continuity programs as well.

1. Driving Awareness Of Your Company And Services

Does your target audience know that your company exists and what products and services you offer?

If they don’t know about you, how can you expect them to work with you?

This phase is where we target “cold traffic.”

Cold traffic is the people who we want to target that do not currently know who you are or about your products or services. They’ve most likely never visited your website before or signed up for anything that you offer.

In order to drive awareness and get in front of the right people, you need to create content on your website that will interest them, educate them, and be relevant to your products and services.

This content should be “problem aware,” meaning that it discusses the problem your audience is trying to solve. Since at this point they don’t quite know their solution options or who you are as a business, their intrigue level is focused on fixing a problem.

You can then create a second step of content that is “solution aware” and discusses solutions for a particular problem that your audience has. But they must know what the solution options are if it’s going to draw them in.

Once you publish that content on your website, typically on your blog, then you will promote that content.

There are many channels to promote your content, online and offline, but for now, let’s highlight one of the most currently successful and popular…

One of the best platforms for promoting content to your target audience right now is via Facebook ads.

Now, while Facebook Pages don’t help businesses reach their customers anymore with status updates organically (without paying), Facebook Ads are one of the best ways to get your message to your perfect target audience.

Since Facebook knows just about everything about everyone, you can target your audience very specifically.

Remember though, that Facebook is just one medium to reach your audience, you can and should test and measure other channels based on your target audience. And once you perfect one, move on and add another one.

Continue building your channels and your growth will start compounding to grow exponentially.

So why are you paying to promote a blog post?

This is the top of your funnel. It’s where you start to find out who is an interested member of your target audience.

By tracking the people who click through to your blog content, you can then start targeting them for your next step of the funnel and earn more rapport with them.

When they visit your blog post(s), they are showing you that they are interested in the topic that you are talking to them about. You are also showing them that you are a resource on the topic and are building credibility with them.

These people are now qualified (and educated) enough to move on to the next step of their decision making journey.

2. Warming Up Your Prospects

Now that we know who has clicked on your ads to read your blog post(s), it’s time to take them to the next phase of the funnel and capture their email address to start building a stronger relationship. (The tracking is done through pixels that are embedded on your website. Technical stuff you don’t need to worry about.)

This is done through what are called Lead Magnets.

“A lead magnet is an offer of an informational resource that’s provided in exchange for an individual’s contact information. They are created for the sole purpose of converting anonymous visitors to your website into leads.” from The Lead Magnet Bible

When someone opts in for a Lead Magnet, they are getting a little sample of what you have to offer. It’s the next step in earning their business by getting them to Know, Like, and Trust you a little bit more.

This also means they’ve given you permission to communicate with them in a more one-on-one way with email.

And email is where you are going to build your rapport and influence them to do business with you.

3. Turning Website Leads Into Sales

Now that you are communicating more intimately with your website lead through email, it’s time to build the personal rapport and earn a meeting.

Using marketing automation, this entire communication process can be done on autopilot. Don’t worry about needing to manage sending emails out every day to new sign ups.

Once someone downloads your Lead Magnet, you’re going to have an automated sequence setup that will deliver their Lead Magnet file and then walk them through an education process for what it’s like to do business with you. This is where you answer questions like:

• What are the key pain points that you solve for your clients?
• What makes your clients have a great experience?
• What are the key benefits that your clients receive when they work with you?

This is where you start showing off your real skill set and convincing Leads to want to hire you.

The best way to do this is through an interesting storyline, and told through the eyes of a client. That way everything that you are telling a story, or parable, and not giving the hard sell that is a turnoff for so many people. These parables should be told in a way that resonates with your ideal clients and engages them to stay interested.

When they learn how great your company is at helping people just like them, they’ll be ready to come in to talk about doing business together.

That’s where your sales team takes over and closes new business.

Testing, Adjusting, Growing Your System

The best part about having a system in place, is that now you have a trackable process to see what’s working and what’s not, and where to test making changes for improvement.

Building a successful funnel is a simple process, but one that takes time and hard work to perfect.

Make sure you are monitoring performance and making necessary adjustments.

Without a system though, you wouldn’t have anything to track, test, or change in order to grow your firm predictably and reliably.

Who doesn’t hate carrying around their laptop? Even the lightest ones weigh a couple of pounds and can be a huge burden to lug around the city. That’s where portable apps, ones stored on a USB drive, come in.

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Leadership in Teams often encourages brainstorming, but in 2012, an article in The New Yorker Magazine claimed that brainstorming doesn’t really work. The article was written by Jonah Lehrer, author of “How We Decide.” It threw cold water on works that dated back to the 1940s which had touted brainstorming as the supreme way to generate new ideas and to stimulate creative thinking.

Lehrer did allow for the preservation of one aspect of brainstorming. He cited research that showed that problem-solving and creative idea generation is best done collectively rather than individually. Collaborating in groups with representation from various disciplines and specialties is more likely to result in new ideas. He explained this by describing how complex our problems have become at the same time that our jobs and perspectives have become narrower and more specialized.

Leadership in Teams Makes Brainstorming Effective by Encouraging Dialogue

So what, exactly, is it that groups of people are supposed to do? It’s not good, old-fashioned brainstorming. Instead, it’s debating and looking at multiple angles and applying critical thinking to the problem at hand. In fact, it’s just the opposite of the post World War II approach to brainstorming which required a criticism-free zone as unedited ideas were offered within the group.

To be effective in engaging in this type of discussion where dissension is essential and criticism is valued, a group would need to be comfortable with conflict and able to trust one another. You can read more about how to get comfortable with conflict in this previous CONNECT2Lead Blog post and more about building workplace trust in this webinar on the BrightTALK website.

Leadership in Teams Creates a Safe Space for All Voices to Be Heard

In polite company, we’ve been taught that it isn’t nice to argue and it isn’t kind to criticize. How many new ideas and advances have inadvertently been suppressed because someone didn’t want to “rock the boat?” In the workplace, the person most likely to be ostracized in a group is the person who challenges established ways of doing things and doesn’t immediately go along with the group. It turns out that this person may be the group’s greatest asset, a resource who naturally mines for conflict and sees the value of debate.

In group settings, we’ve also been taught that the voices of some are more important than the voices of others. We hold back after an authority figure has spoken, not comfortable with the idea of countering this power voice. We may not mean to become sycophants, but by holding back we add no more value than that to the group.

Inclusive Leadership in Teams Prevents Group Think

There is actually a danger in too much agreement within a group. It’s a phenomenon known as “group think” that occurs when group members come to decisions too readily without looking at all the angles and considering enough options.

Group think happens when a strong voice overpowers or suppresses other voices. It happens when efficiency and speed are valued over effectiveness and big picture thinking. It happens when there is not sufficient trust built up within a group to make conflict accepted and even expected.

This movement toward embracing healthy conflict and challenging established thinking is validated in multiple sources. Consider these examples:

1)       Lencioni’s groundbreaking work on what makes work teams effective points toward a formula that starts with building a strong foundation of trust so that group members will engage in healthy conflict. He says that only then can members of the group fully commit, be held accountable and then drive results.

2)       The Kouzes and Posner research on the 30 behaviors of effective leaders calls out six behaviors that are related to “Challenging the Process.” These behaviors describe how leaders should stretch themselves, take risks, and search outside the “tried and true” to find new ideas and solutions.

3)       Recent research by the Corporate Executive Board found that the most successful salespeople challenge their client’s thinking and introduce new ideas. They do not shy away from conflict by offering only what’s been used and accepted by the client in the past.

4)       Adult learning principles tell us that adults, if they are to learn, must be given opportunities for critical reflection. In order to learn, adults need to ask questions and debate so that new ideas can be calibrated with past experiences.

5)       Best practices in business coaching also illustrate the need for “stirring the pot.” The most effective coaches ask the tough questions and promote self-discovery by challenging established mindsets.

Let All Voices be Heard for True Leadership in Teams

To generate new ideas and to stay a step ahead of competitors, businesses must devise new ways to solve problems and to innovate.  In our personal lives, we also have to accept that change happens with or without our willing participation – so it may NOT be a bad idea to develop good conflict skills and a backbone to engage in healthy debates.

Next Steps to Encourage True Leadership in Teams

Deb Calvert is a certified Executive Coach, Keynote Speaker, Certified Master with The Leadership Challenge®and Trainer. She is the founder of People First Productivity Solutions, building organizational strength by putting people first since 2006.     

The post Get All Voices In for True Leadership in Teams appeared first on People First.

Gmail: When you sign up for any online service, you usually need to add an email address. If you usually use a Gmail account, Deseat.me can scour your email to find everything you signed up for and offer you ways to delete your account.

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You are the average of the five people you associate with most. Choose your books and authors wisely.

One of the questions I ask the most successful people I interview or meet is:

“What book have you gifted most to others, and why?”  

Below is a mega-list of the most-gifted and favorite books of 50-60 people like billionaire investor Peter Thiel, Tony Robbins, Arnold Schwarzenegger, elite athlete Amelia Boone, Malcolm Gladwell, legendary Navy SEAL Commander Jocko Willink, Dr. Brené Brown, music producer Rick Rubin, chess prodigy Josh Waitzkin, Glenn Beck, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, and many more.

Several books appear more than once, which might be where you start your own collection.

Important notes on the list:

• Bolded books are “most-gifted book” answers.
• Unbolded books were recommended or mentioned by the guest, but not specifically “most-gifted.”
• Many of these answers were updated or added by guests AFTER their interviews, or the “guests” haven’t been on my podcast, so they are only found in Tools of Titans.

For the answers from 120+ world-class performers, and much more, please check this out.

Enjoy!

***

Adams, Scott: Influence (Robert B. Cialdini)

Altucher, James: Jesus’ Son: Stories (Denis Johnson), The Kite Runner; A Thousand Splendid Suns (Khaled Hosseini), Antifragile; The Black Swan; Fooled by Randomness (Nassim Nicholas Taleb), Brain Rules (John Medina), Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell), Freakonomics (Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner)

Andreessen, Marc: High Output Management; Only the Paranoid Survive (Andrew S. Grove), Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (Peter Thiel with Blake Masters), Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination (Neal Gabler), Schulz and Peanuts: A Biography (David Michaelis), The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World (Randall E. Stross), Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life (Steve Martin), The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz)

Attia, Peter: Mistakes Were Made (but Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts (Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson), Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard P. Feynman), 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works — A True Story (Dan Harris)

Beck, Glenn: The Book of Virtues (William J. Bennett), Winners Never Cheat (Jon Huntsman)

Bell, Mark: COAN: The Man, The Myth, The Method: The Life, Times & Training of the Greatest Powerlifter of All-Time (Marty Gallagher)

Belsky, Scott: Life’s Little Instruction Book (H. Jackson Brown, Jr.)

Betts, Richard: A Fan’s Notes (Frederick Exley), The Crossroads of Should and Must (Elle Luna)

Birbiglia, Mike: The Promise of Sleep (William C. Dement)

Boone, Amelia: House of Leaves (Mark Z. Danielewski)

Boreta, Justin: Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Oliver Sacks), Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion (Sam Harris), This Is Your Brain on Music (Daniel J. Levitin), The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera)

Brown, Brené: The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)

Callen, Bryan: Excellent Sheep (William Deresiewicz), Atlas Shrugged; The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand), The Power of Myth; The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Joseph Campbell), The Genealogy of Morals (Friedrich Nietzsche), The Art of Learning (Josh Waitzkin), The 4-Hour Body; The 4-Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss), Bad Science, Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients (Ben Goldacre), Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003 to 2005 (Thomas Ricks), The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11; Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief (Lawrence Wright), Symposium (Plato)

Chin, Jimmy: Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era (Eiji Yoshikawa and Charles Terry), A Guide to the I Ching (Carol K. Anthony), Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (Jon Krakauer)

Cho, Margaret: How to Be a Movie Star (William J. Mann)

Cummings, Whitney: Super Sad True Love Story (Gary Shteyngart), The Drama of the Gifted Child (Alice Miller), The Fantasy Bond (Robert W. Firestone), The Continuum Concept (Jean Liedloff)

D’Agostino, Dominic: Personal Power (Tony Robbins), Tripping Over the Truth (Travis Christofferson), The Language of God (Francis Collins), The Screwtape Letters (C.S. Lewis), Cancer as a Metabolic Disease: On the Origin, Management, and Prevention of Cancer (Thomas Seyfried), Ketogenic Diabetes Diet: Type 2 Diabetes (Ellen Davis, MS and Keith Runyan, MD), Fight Cancer with a Ketogenic Diet (Ellen Davis, MS)

de Botton, Alain: The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Milan Kundera), The Complete Essays (Michel de Montaigne), In Search of Lost Time (Marcel Proust)

De Sena, Joe: A Message to Garcia (Elbert Hubbard), Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand), Shōgun (James Clavell), The One Minute Manager (Kenneth H. Blanchard)

Dubner, Stephen: For adults: Levels of the Game (John McPhee); for kids: The Empty Pot (Demi)

Eisen, Jonathan: National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America (Jon L. Dunn and Jonathan Alderfer)

Fadiman, James: Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story; Tihkal: The Continuation (Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin)

Favreau, Jon: The Writer’s Journey (Christopher Vogler and Michele Montez), It Would Be So Nice If You Weren’t Here (Charles Grodin), The 4-Hour Body (Tim Ferriss), The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien), Kitchen Confidential (Anthony Bourdain)

Foxx, Jamie: Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (James Allen)

Fussman, Cal: One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez), Between the World and Me (Ta-Nehisi Coates), Speak Like Churchill, Stand Like Lincoln: 21 Powerful Secrets of History’s Greatest Speakers (James C. Humes), A Feast of Snakes; Car (Harry Crews)

Ganju, Nick: Don’t Make Me Think (Steve Krug), How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business (Douglas W. Hubbard), How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking (Jordan Ellenberg), Getting to Yes (Roger Fisher and William Ury)

Gazzaley, Adam: Foundation (Isaac Asimov), The Reality Dysfunction (The Night’s Dawn Trilogy) (Peter F. Hamilton), Mountain Light (Galen Rowell)

Gladwell, Malcolm: Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious (Timothy D. Wilson), Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of Jewish Families Who Built Great Department Stores (Leon A. Harris), Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; Little Drummer’s Girl; The Russia House; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (John le Carré), The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (Michael Lewis), The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande), all of Lee Child’s books

Hamilton, Laird: The Bible, Natural Born Heroes (Christopher McDougall), Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien), Deep Survival (Laurence Gonzales), Jonathan Livingston Seagull (Richard Bach and Russell Munson), Dune (Frank Herbert)

Hoffman, Reid: Conscious Business: How to Build Value Through Values (Fred Kofman), Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari)

Holiday, Ryan: Meditations (Marcus Aurelius), The War of Art (Steven Pressfield), What Makes Sammy Run? (Budd Schulberg), Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (Ron Chernow), How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer (Sarah Bakewell), The Fish that Ate the Whale: The Life and Times of America’s Banana King; Tough Jews (Rich Cohen), Edison: A Biography (Matthew Josephson), Ulysses S. Grant: Triumph over Adversity (Brooks Simpson), Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury)

Junger, Sebastian: At Play in the Fields of the Lord (Peter Matthiessen), Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari)

Kamkar, Samy: Influence (Robert Cialdini)

Kaskade: Lights Out: A Cyberattack, A Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath (Ted Koppel)

Koppelman, Brian: What Makes Sammy Run? (Budd Schulberg), The Artist’s Way Morning Pages Journal (Julia Cameron), The War of Art (Steven Pressfield)

McChrystal, Stanley: Once an Eagle (Anton Myrer), The Road to Character (David Brooks)

Miller, BJ: Any picture book of Mark Rothko art.

Neistat, Casey: It’s Not How Good You Are, It’s How Good You Want to Be (Paul Arden), The Second World War (John Keegan), The Autobiography of Malcolm X (Malcolm X and Alex Haley)

Nemer, Jason: The Prophet (Kahlil Gibran), Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu)

Norton, Edward: Wind, Sand and Stars (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry), Buddhism Without Beliefs (Stephen Batchelor), Shōgun (James Clavell), The Search for Modern China; The Death of Woman Wang (Jonathan Spence), “The Catastrophe of Success” (essay by Tennessee Williams), The Black Swan (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)

Ohanian, Alexis: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (Jessica Livingston), Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture (David Kushner)

Popova, Maria: Still Writing (Dani Shapiro), On the Shortness of Life (Seneca), The Republic (Plato), On the Move: A Life (Oliver Sacks), The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, 1837–1861 (Henry David Thoreau), A Rap on Race (Margaret Mead and James Baldwin), On Science, Necessity and the Love of God: Essays (Simone Weil), Stumbling on Happiness (Daniel Gilbert), Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (Edward Abbey), Gathering Moss (Robin Wall Kimmerer)

Randall, Lisa: I Capture the Castle (Dodie Smith)

Reece, Gabby: Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand), The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)

Richman, Jessica: The Complete Short Stories (Ernest Hemingway)

Robbins, Tony: As a Man Thinketh (James Allen), Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl), The Fourth Turning; Generations (William Strauss), Slow Sex (Nicole Daedone), Mindset (Carol Dweck)

Rodriguez, Robert: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (Simon Sinek)

Rose, Kevin: The Miracle of Mindfulness: An Introduction to the Practice of Meditation (Thich Nhat Hanh), The Wisdom of Crowds (James Surowiecki)

Rubin, Rick: Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu, translation by Stephen Mitchell), Wherever You Go, There You Are (Jon Kabat-Zinn)

Schwarzenegger, Arnold: The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (Boris Johnson), Free to Choose (Milton Friedman), California (Kevin Starr)

Sethi, Ramit: Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and Abuse of Persuasion (Anthony Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson), The Social Animal (Elliot Aronson), Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got (Jay Abraham), Mindless Eating (Brian Wansink), The Robert Collier Letter Book (Robert Collier), Never Eat Alone, Expanded and Updated: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time (Keith Ferrazzi), What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School (Mark H. McCormack), Iacocca: An Autobiography (Lee Iacocca), The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande)

Silva, Jason: TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information (Erik Davis), The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance (Steven Kotler), The 4-Hour Workweek (Tim Ferriss)

Skenes, Joshua: Cocktail Techniques (Kazuo Uyeda)

Sommer, Christopher: The Obstacle Is the Way (Ryan Holiday), the works of Robert Heinlein

Tan, Chade-Meng: What the Buddha Taught (Walpola Rahula), In the Buddha’s Words: An Anthology of Discourses from the Pali Canon (Bhikkhu Bodhi)

Thiel, Peter: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (René Girard)

von Ahn, Luis: Zero to One (Peter Thiel), The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz)

Waitzkin, Josh: On the Road; The Dharma Bums (Jack Kerouac), Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig), Shantaram (Gregory David Roberts), For Whom the Bell Tolls; The Old Man and the Sea; The Green Hills of Africa (Ernest Hemingway), Ernest Hemingway on Writing (Larry W. Phillips), Mindset (Carol Dweck), Dreaming Yourself Awake: Lucid Dreaming and Tibetan Dream Yoga for Insight and Transformation (B. Alan Wallace and Brian Hodel), The Drama of the Gifted Child (Alice Miller), Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (Sebastian Junger), Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (Angela Duckworth), Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise (Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool)

Willink, Jocko: About Face: The Odyssey of an American Warrior (Colonel David H. Hackworth), Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West (Cormac McCarthy)

###

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg!

For more answers, tactics, habits, and routines from 120+ world-class performers, please check out my labor of love Tools of Titans.

Tools of Titans is available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Books-A-Million, iBooks, Indiebound, Indigo, and others. If you found the above interesting, I guarantee you’ll enjoy the whole thing.

Thanks for reading!

A strong value proposition helps elevate first impressions with prospects and customers.

You are open for business. The building is immaculate: The shrubs are trimmed; the floors are waxed; every office is in perfect order. And look at you: Your smile is beaming; your shirt has just the right amount of starch; your shoes have the perfect shine. You look like a million bucks.

But did you know that how you sound might be a bigger factor in your success? You might have a catchy slogan and jingle for your ads. You might be prepared when someone asks “What do you do?” with a great elevator speech. However, that might not be enough.Let’s face it. In today’s fast-paced world, people are too busy to dig deep into you and your business. That goes for the daughter looking for the right long-term care facility for her mother as much as it does the Fortune 500 CEO in the corner office. Both are looking for one thing from you: value.

In her book “Selling to Big Companies” sales expert Jill Konrath defines a value proposition as “a clear statement of the tangible results a customer gets from using your products or services.” It is focused on your customer first, answering the question “How can you help me?”

By contrast, your elevator speech answers the question “What do you do?”, and a unique selling proposition helps you distinguish yourself from your competition. Both are focused on you, not your customer.

Here are some things you can do if you need to strengthen your value proposition:

Do your homework: How well do you really know your target audience? Do you know what the hot buttons are, and how to push them? Find out what value means to them. Learn to speak their language. That’s how you will stand out from the crowd.

Listen to your clients: If you are unsure or unclear about how to present your value to new customers, ask some of your existing ones. Find out from them what your strengths and weaknesses are. Learn why they chose you and the benefits they have received from making that choice. Take lots and lots of notes. This information is worth its weight in gold.

Make it tangible and specific: Don’t tell people you are the best. You might very well be, but don’t leave it at that. We are bombarded by superlatives so often that we have become numb to their effects. Give them the facts that clearly indicate how you are the best choice to fill their needs. Remember, it’s all about the customer here.

Once you have crafted your value proposition, use it everywhere anyone asks “What do you do?”. Use it at the Rotary Club luncheon and the dinner party. Use it to craft a new slogan, if necessary.

Use it in your on-hold message campaign, too. Did you know that more than 85 percent of callers prefer listening to a message on hold over silence? A strong value proposition on hold will not only keep callers on the line, it will reinforce the decision they made to call you in the first place.

We massively underestimate how much small actions, taken consistently over time, start to stack up when it comes to producing results. Because the action itself is seemingly small, it is difficult to recognize the accumulation of impact it makes over time. This makes it very easy not to take these small actions, consistently, in the first place.

We overestimate the value of massive action taken sporadically and inconsistently. A great expenditure of effort every once in a while does very little as it pertains to producing long-term results. Even though we know long term results are not achieved through massive action taken only occasionally, we still try to make up for lost time by cramming.

We overestimate the likelihood that a trend in one direction is likely to continue in that direction unabated. We believe that because things are improving, they will keep improving. Or because something is getting worse, it can only get worse, still. Progress (or regress) isn’t a straight line in either direction, and even the strongest trends are subject to reversals.

We underestimate the power of infusing work with meaning and purpose when it comes to producing results. We believe that money is a replacement for culture and that it is not necessary to inspire people when you are paying them for their work. We underestimate the importance of belonging.

We overestimate the power of rules and force to effect behavioral change, believing that human beings will do their best work when given strong direction alone. Because force is easier to use than persuasion, we rely too heavily on power, even when it is the weaker choice of weaker men.

We overestimate the value of money and underestimate the value of our health. Money is valuable and necessary. If given the choice to have too little or too much, it’s smart to err on the side of too much. Health is no different. If you are going to go too far in one direction, make an attempt to be too healthy.

Consistency and purpose are difficult to underestimate if we’re honest with ourselves, and that honesty is the first step to being consistent and purpose driven.

The post Underestimating and Overestimating appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Make sure you aren't making any of these costly ecommerce marketing mistakes

Competition is fierce in the ecommerce sector, so to get an edge, you need a planned approach, with clear priorities and a relentless approach to optimisation.

It’s likely Ecommerce Marketing is already a massive investment in your business and this will only grow in future as you look to compete. Creating a robust multichannel marketing strategy that balances your business goals with your available resources can be difficult to achieve, but when you succeed, the benefits are immense.

Over the last 20 years as we have consulted and trained with many Ecommerce businesses and we have seen many different mistakes which hinder growth. Yet there are some common mistakes we see often, which we have summarised here so you can compare against your approaches.

Strategy Recommendation: Plan, Manage, Optimise!

This is our mantra at Smart Insights and it is shared by many of the leading Ecommerce businesses which have a long-term roadmap, carefully orchestrated campaigns, the right toolset to build great experiences and use data-driven optimisation to stay ahead.

Maybe you aren’t making any of their mistakes and that would be great to hear! However, if you see yourself in any of these scenarios, following our advice will help you to change for the better before it’s too late. We go into detail about each mistake and how it can be avoided in our 10 common ecommerce mistakes guide which all Smart Insights members can access now. The top 10 mistakes we identified are:

1. No Goals for Growth or Roadmap

Shockingly, nearly half of businesses do not have a digital marketing strategy, but they are doing digital marketing. Perhaps this is not surprising since we also found that 44% of businesses didn’t have a marketing strategy to align their digital strategy with.

2. Not having a content marketing plan

The importance of content to commercial success online is ever increasing. As marketers, we love the potential of Content marketing. Not only is it a great way to communicate with your audience but when you get it right, it fuels and integrates many of the inbound marketing techniques like SEO, Social Media marketing, Lead Generation and email nurture campaigns.

3. Not knowing your customers

If you haven’t researched your customers or created personas, you won’t know what they want, which sites and technologies they use, or why they came to your website or store. By having the right insight into your customer’s needs, you can tailor your content (marketing messages/product descriptions) to your audience in a way that is relevant to them. To do this you should create personas of your 3-5 ideal customers.

4. No clear value proposition or OVP

Research published in Nature shows that on average a potential customer will spend 0.2 milliseconds on your site on your site before deciding that they will stay or leave and the most important tool to keep them is your value proposition.

Your value proposition and OVP is your promise/commitment to deliver specific benefits, solve their problems and tells the customer why they should buy from you. Without it your competitors are only a ‘Google’ away.

5. Not following the 70-20-10 rule for your digital media investments

The ecommerce industry is constantly evolving and the ways you can drive traffic to your websites are ever expanding, particularly through AdWords and social media. Competition for budget is tough and managing the budget is even tougher. Do you give more budget to advertising via Paid Search and Social Ads or invest in SEO & CRO? The biggest mistakes you can make is not investing in the channels that drive the most value to your business. Failing to innovate and depriving new channels of investment is also an easy mistake to make, and one that can be avoided by employing the 70:20:10 model.

6. Having an SEO strategy without understanding your competitors

Competitor research is a core part of Search Engine Optimization and involves studying websites that rank well for keyphrase targets. While it is common to consider which keyphrases you should target and prioritise, it is less common to research competitors in detail. We believe this approach Is vital since each keyphrase and industry can be vastly different in terms of what elevates a website to the top of the search results. While for one search term it could be down to high quality inbound links, for another the page content & technical structure.

7. Not using Retargeting to bring customers back to your site

So, you’re following the latest lifecycle marketing techniques and you’ve done everything right to get a potential customer to your site, but they leave without purchasing, this could be for various reasons, from them being in the research phase of the buying process to receiving a Whatsapp from a friend. If you’re not taking advantage of remarketing to bring people back, you are missing out on a massive opportunity.

8. Running your website without a structured CRO program

Why aren’t more businesses working on Conversion Rate Optimisation? The Smart Insights-TFM Managing Digital Marketing research suggests that the majority of businesses have limited or intermittent optimization. There is an ‘elite’ group of optimizers with a programme of frequent structured tests or continuous optimization of mobile or desktop experiences, but they are the exception, accounting for less than 20% of all respondents.

9. Optimizing the Customer lifecycle without a Multichannel Approach

Customer Lifecycle Marketing for ecommerce businesses with bricks and mortar stores involves a huge number of touch points across the customer journey. For you to service your customers’ needs your need to utilise a range of both online and offline strategies. We have developed an ecommerce lifecycle marketing model to help you identify any gaps in your marketing plan.

10. Not paying attention to the math

With the range of insights services available and the complexity of today’s ‘Martech stacks’ there is a danger we fall foul of ‘analysis paralysis'- where we have vast amounts of data but have no idea what it is telling us.

So, to help marketers understand the big picture we recommend you complete a regular weekly or monthly review of the current effectiveness of their digital marketing using Google Analytics with Google Docs Spreadsheets we have created the RACE Digital Dashboard. We use this combination ourselves drilling down into more detailed channel dashboards in our monthly reporting!

Download Expert Member resource – 76161

This guide steps you through the 10 most common and costly ecommerce mistakes, and what you can do to avoid them.

Access the 10 Common Ecommerce Mistakes

Somehow, we finally managed to make it to the end of 2016. Whether you had your best year ever or didn’t quite get to all the things you wanted to accomplish, rest assured that the winds of change will blow a whole new set of challenges and opportunities your way in 2017.

What are some of the changes content marketers are likely to encounter over the next 12 months and beyond? We asked a group of experts to set the stage for our expectations and prepare us for what’s to come. They share their views in our ninth annual e-book of content marketing predictions.

In this year’s edition, 60+ Predictions on Content Marketing in 2017, you’ll see predictions on which formats and channels will dominate the landscape, how increasing content volume might impact amplification techniques, which technologies are poised to revolutionize how your content engines function, and more.

For what it’s worth, my own predictions are mostly focused on the business side of our industry as it’s been a year where more media companies than ever are struggling to maintain their relevance and value under their traditional business models. In contrast, brands are picking up the slack and are pushing content forward through strategic acquisitions, diversified revenue streams, and by breathing new life into older content formats. Here are a few of my predictions:

1. Brands’ acquisitions of media sites, blogger sites, and other influencer sites will expand from “here-and-there” isolated occurrences to a full-blown trend “on steroids.” In 2017, we will see a number of large and medium-sized companies actively purchase media brands ripe with subscribers and content rather than building the platforms themselves.

2. In the wake of the election, paid subscriptions will substantially grow at traditional news companies. This will open up the opportunity for brands to start charging for their own content as more of them start to drive direct revenue from their content in the form of subscriptions, training, and events.

3. Custom print magazines have finally hit the bottom as a content marketing tool, so more brands will launch print magazines in 2017 as a way to cut through the clutter – a critical goal that has been proving increasingly difficult to do online.

More brands will launch print magazines in 2017 to cut through the clutter says @JoePulizzi. #cmworld
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Of course, these three trends are just a drop in the bucket. Take a look at a few more highlights from the new e-book:

Context will be the foundation of the next phase of content marketing. Brands will develop highly contextual content that goes beyond the screen into the “phygital” world, enabled by beacons, sensors, and the Internet of Things. They will develop methods for making highly personalized and relevant real-time messages based on triggers such as purchase history, the weather, physical location, and myriad more factors. Such campaigns are highly complex and technically demanding, but as one Disney executive once told me, “The more context there is, the higher the ROI.” Rebecca Lieb, analyst, author, adviser, conglomotron

Context will be the foundation of the next phase of #contentmarketing says @lieblink via @joepulizzi.
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As a result of poor organic reach of content, we’ve been seeing a rise in content advertising and paid content amplification, not only with channels like Taboola or Outbrain, but also on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and many others. I’m advising my clients to dedicate a portion of their ad spend toward amplifying content to highly targeted audiences. It works great with B2C, and it’s a terrific addition to any account-based marketing campaign for B2B companies. – Travis Wright, co-founder, chief marketing technologist, CCP.Digital

Dedicate portion of ad spend toward amplifying #content to highly targeted audiences says @teedubya.
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To effectively communicate in 2017, showcasing your brand personality will be a requirement. In fact, Facebook has changed its algorithm to reward brand communications that convey personality. So, if you plan on creating content in 2017, your brand communications should lighten up and loosen up if you want to break through the noise. – Juntae DeLane, founder, Digital Branding Institute

To effectively communicate in 2017, showcasing your brand personality will be a requirement says @JuntaeDeLane.
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There are two key trends on the horizon: The first is that brands will increasingly turn to acquisition to jumpstart their content marketing initiatives – both for talent and existing audiences. The second is that publishers/media companies will begin to more prominently disrupt – and displace – agencies to achieve that “trusted adviser” position. – Robert Rose, chief strategy adviser, Content Marketing Institute

Brands will turn to acquisition to jumpstart their #contentmarketing initiatives says @robert_rose.
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In 2017, content marketers will focus on non-fiction, not fiction. Millennials abhor falsehoods; as they become the dominant audience, storytelling will become grounded in reality. In addition, the rise of live video (a cause and effect of the non-fiction shift) will require brands to use documentary-style communication, warts and all. – Jay Baer, president, Convince & Convert

In 2017, storytelling will become grounded in reality says @jaybaer via @joepulizzi.
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Curious about past predictions? Check out our forecasts for 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016.

Want to see how these predictions unfold in 2017? Subscribe to CMI’s free daily newsletter.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 60+ Content Marketing Predictions for a Successful 2017 [New E-Book] appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Over the years, many organizations have invested in a new selling methodology that has evolved the sales approach from strategic selling to "challenging" prospects. But the organizations that adopt this strategy often run into one particular hangup — their sales professionals lack the business acumen skills needed to ask challenging questions and understand the answers they prompt.

There is nothing worse in the world of selling than asking an executive a great question and then not knowing what to do with the answer. In many cases, a salesperson in that position panics and starts spewing out product features that don’t match the need and are inappropriate in that conversation.

Based on years of research and working directly with over 20,000 sales professionals around the world from companies in many industries, here are five business insights that can help you — as a sales professional — think differently about your prospects and engage in more business-oriented dialogues.

5 Business Insights That Take Sales Conversations to the Next Level

1. Business Strategy and Value Proposition

Research and asking the right questions to determine a prospect‘s business strategy are central to your ability to effectively prepare for a sale. Business strategies aren’t one-size-fits-all — not every prospect has the same one. That means not all customers need or want your products in the way you might want to sell them.

In general, there are three different types of business strategies:

1. A low cost product or service approach
2. A customer-focused product or service approach
3. An innovative, state-of-the-art product or service approach

The very first thing you need to do is determine which one of those strategies your prospect is leveraging. From there, you can build out the questions and tactics that align with their value proposition and how they operate. Good questioning — built around your prospect's strategy — will provide invaluable insight into their needs, challenges, and opportunities.

2. The "Value Dashboard"

After understanding your prospect's strategy, you need to get a handle on the "value dashboard" their company offers its customers. A "value dashboard" represents the gauges by which a customer makes a decision, including price, level of service, quality, financial terms, supply security, and others. Your sales team needs to determine the reasons your prospect's customers buy, and then prioritize and quantify them.

For example, knowing that your prospect’s customers’ number one reason for buying is supply security — and the financial implications of that driver — provides you with a unique sales insight.

All of a sudden, you‘re not selling a product — you’re selling the capability of making sure the product is delivered on time so your prospect can deliver on time.

3. Financial Goals and Objectives

Like any business organization, your prospects have specific financial goals and objectives. You don't just need to know them — you need to know how to integrate those elements into your selling approach.

Is your prospect's goal to increase revenue? Increase profit? Reduce costs? Grow market share? Grow revenue from new products? There are dozens of financial goals and objectives your customer might be trying to execute on — your job is to sell the offering that will help achieve these goals and objectives.

4. Drivers of the Cost System

As with any business, your prospect's company is bound to be concerned about costs, expenses, and driving profitability.

You need to determine the critical drivers of your prospect‘s cost system. Is it cost of goods sold? Raw materials? Labor? Marketing? All of the above? By determining the critical components of your prospect’s cost drivers, you can better plan your approach and questions — allowing you to demonstrate how your product or service will help the prospect improve efficiency and management of those costs.

For example, if your product or service is a critical component in the production of an end product to consumers, what is the cost structure of that product? What do the end user consumers value? And how can your products impact the efficiency of production or the perception of quality received by those consumers?

Knowing these elements helps you engage in a differentiated dialogue.

5. Drivers of shareholder value

Above all else, you need to know the drivers of your prospect's shareholder value.

Every organization is in business to provide value to its customers and create value for its shareholders. You need to know these drivers so you can position the value of your product or service in a way that lets your prospect understand how your organization helps them to create value.

Drivers of shareholder value vary by industry and company. Typical drivers of shareholder value include free cash flow, revenue growth, margin growth, expense reductions, new products launched, product pipeline, and future capacity.

The best salespeople in the world conduct research and ask questions about shareholder value and, consequently, are able to position their product or service to help their prospects ultimately drive value.

Does Your Sales Team Have the Right Customer Insights?

In today’s complex business environment, sales professionals need to leverage their strategic selling skills and tools by putting customer business challenges and opportunities at the center of the dialogue.

Sales professionals need to understand their customers at a deeper level by building the skills and confidence to engage in executive business dialogues and more effectively position the value of their solution.

No matter what a company offers, the mission statement is the rally-cry for employees to come together for a “greater good.” Mission statements are a useful way to make sure that all different functions of the company are focused on a cohesive goal, as well as to brag about your offering to the world. When facing hard decisions on budgets or controversial ad placement, you can return to your mission statement to justify your choice.

It’s easy to get it wrong. There are some mission statements that are lengthy, meandering, and boring. Some companies don’t have a mission statement at all! If you are worried about re-working your mission statement or starting a new business and need a guide, I’ve compiled a list of golden rules to follow and examples of mission statements from companies who do it well!

1. Use simple language

This election cycle, newspapers made the argument that politicians should speak in simple, fifth-grade-level language to resonate with voters. Depending on your target audience, your company mission statement should also use appropriately simple language. You don’t want your employees or consumers consulting a dictionary when reading about your core values. Utilize short sentences with basic structure and vocabulary that could be understood by an eighth-grade graduate.

Airbnb’s Mission Statement

Belong anywhere.

Airbnb lets people offer their homes to strangers to stay in while visiting. Their simple, two-word mission is all they need to drive the point home.

WeWork’s Mission Statement

Create a world where people work to make a life, not just a living.

WeWork offers office space for small companies, traveling employees, freelancers, and startups. The space is usually open (no cubicles!) and is a great place to grow your business through networking with those who share the space.

Square’s Mission Statement

Make commerce easy.

You probably recognize Square as the little white card-swipe widely used at farmer’s markets or craft fairs. The business has been growing rapidly, spreading to brick-and-mortar stores as credit cards are becoming the norm in shopping transactions.

Toys R Us’ Mission Statement

Be the world’s greatest kid’s brand.

Self-explanatory! Who didn’t dream of a trip to Toys R Us as a kid? I still have my stuffed Geoffrey the Giraffe…

TED’s Mission Statement

Spread ideas.

A nonprofit foundation, TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) hosts conferences around the world to share ideas and “spark conversation.” You might know them as TED Talks or TEDx, probably in a university or city near you; the talks may be long and dive into complicated issues, but their mission only needs two words.

2. Show Your Unique Value

This is the hook for your prospects. When you are selling your product or services, let your customers know why you are the best choice out there – what their business will help you to achieve, as well as what you can help them achieve.

Imagine your company runs an international internet-based voice-call mobile app. And the mission statement is currently, “Talk more.” But…why?!

Instead, the mission statement could be reworked to include an inspirational or motivational element, such as, “Talk more. Share news, culture, and perspective from anywhere in the world.”

Burt’s Bees’ Mission Statement

Make people’s lives better every day—naturally.

Known for their distinct yellow-wrapped lip balms that can make you cry if you rub it under your eyes (a fun trick if you’re in fifth grade), they use natural ingredients to create eco-friendly cosmetics. Highly recommend their lip balm for lifeguards, not only does it turn your lips white, it really does work.

WordStream’s Mission Statement

Bring the power of online marketing to businesses of all sizes.

Our goal at WordStream is to empower businesses to tackle and conquer the digital marketing landscape. We have found that small and mid-sized businesses need the most help, which is why we offer a platform that makes digital marketing easier!

TOMS Shoes’ Mission Statement

Improving lives. One for one.

A for-profit company that gives one pair of canvas shoes or eyeglasses to a person in need when another pair is purchased. Though the “One for one” verbiage is vague, it embodies the mission of TOMS in a comprehensive way for their employees and customers.

Zappos’ Mission Statement

Provide the best customer service possible.

Zappos was created because the founder couldn’t find the precise pair of shoes he wanted to buy. Since 1999, it has been making shoe-shopping easier and letting us know that the customer is always right. In fact, Zappos has clocked record-long customer service calls, with one at 10 hours and 29 minutes. They call this the “WOW philosophy.”

Lowe’s Mission Statement

Help customers improve and maintain their biggest asset – their home.

Lowe’s value is obvious in their mission statement; the company was built around home improvement.

Amazon’s Mission Statement

Be Earth’s most customer-centric company where people can find and discover anything they want to buy online.

Amazon is the most convenient online space to buy anything and everything, but they are also known for providing excellent customer service.

3. Make it memorable

Ideally, your mission statement will become a mantra for your employees and consumers. At WordStream, each month we recognize employees who have embodied our core values, which has become a bit of a funny way to tease and encourage our team. When someone goes out of their way to help on a project, they could be met with a cheer, “Yeah, Michelle! Winning together!” At my last company, we would goad our managers with, “Are you being open, honest, and direct?”

Though it sounds silly, it’s a sign that your employees appreciate and embrace what the company ultimately stands for.

Cuisinart’s Mission Statement

Savor the good life.

The ultimate wedding present, famously used by Julia Child, is a Cuisinart food processor. I like the word “savor” in this mission statement, alluding to the culinary products Cuisinart sells—food makes the world go ‘round!

Life is Good Mission Statement

Spread the power of optimism.

Per Life is Good, “Life is not perfect. Life is not easy. Life is good.” The Life is Good community uses their “Superpowers” of good to spread optimism through this happy clothing line. They even have this fun diagram to show how you, too, can spread optimism!

Starbucks’ Mission Statement

Inspire and nurture the human spirit—one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time.

This mission statement is particularly memorable because Starbucks is so popular but also known for showing the power of the human spirit through their decorative coffee cups. Controversial opinion: I personally love the new holiday cup…

Walmart’s Mission Statement

Save people money so they can live better.

Like Toys R Us, this mission statement doesn’t need much explanation and if you’ve ever had cable television or shopped at a Walmart, this slogan is probably familiar to you.

4. Look at the bigger picture

The best company mission statements include the over-arching reason why the business exists and how they are bettering the world. Whether it is for the accessibility of information, saving the planet, seeking equality, or fighting poverty, the “bigger picture” can be the guiding principle for growth and engagement.

Ann Inc. Mission Statement

Inspire and connect with women to put their best selves forward every day.

Ann Taylor’s mission is not just to clothe professional women but also to encourage them to be the best. Feminism, yeah!

Google’s Mission Statement

Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

This may be the most well-known mission statement since Google is the biggest company, and possibly most impactful, on this list. Bigger picture, meet the G.

Aveda’s Mission Statement

Care for the world we live in, from the products we make to the ways in which we give back to society.

Aveda has salons, spas, training institutes, and hair products worldwide which strive to treat the “planet we live in with care and respect.”

Naked Juice’s Mission Statement

Making the whole planet feel better. One bottle at a time.

Naked Juice, the square-bottled smoothie drink company, has a mission statement with a high order, involving the whole planet, but shows the value and bigger picture well.

Warby Parker’s Mission Statement

Offer designer eyewear at a revolutionary price, while leading the way for socially-conscious businesses.

Like TOMS, Warby Parker also has a one for one policy, giving glasses to people in need with each purchase of full, but still reasonably priced, glasses. If the four people with shiny new Warby Parker glasses on our marketing team at WordStream is any indication, it’s working!

Please share your own company mission statements! We love to be inspired.

The dreaded job interview, everyone hates them. But here’s the key to having a great interview – you must show how, based on your past proven experience, you (over anyone else) can bring value to the company. Here’s some information your next boss will want to know:

1. Is this someone we want to work with for years to come?
2. Is this someone who can fix the problems we are having in this department?
   • If so, how? You must explain specific situations where your experience/skills have overcome situations that have cost your previous company money, or provided poor customer service
3. Can he/she bring the same success he has shown in the past to our company?
   • Does he have an action plan that is easy to replicate? Can he do it here?
4. What measurable benefits have you brought to your past employers?
5. What percentage of payroll did you save or revenue increased?
6. Have you raised the service scores by x percentage?
7. Are there any new SOP’s (standard operating procedures) that you developed that have become company policy?
8. Does she look at the “big picture” of the overall success of the business?
9. Will she fit in with the company culture, is she a bridge-builder?
   • Do people want to work with her?
10. What business or clients can you bring to this company?
11. Is she worth more than the salary we are willing to pay?
    • The company must feel that they are lucky to have you and getting the better end of the deal.
12. Is he a leader?
13. Can she motivate the team?

If you can show, prove, explain and document these traits and characteristics to a prospective employer you will make their hiring decision must easier.

Remember: there is no “agent” working for you during the interview. YOU must be the one to speak on your behalf. You must be your own cheerleader.

You may feel strange touting your benefits or skills, but you’ll feel much worse walking out the door after you didn’t get the job – knowing you should have said this or that. What do you have to lose?

Good luck.

*image courtesy of https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-expect-programmer-interview-jason-roell

Car insurance is tricky. Your policy price can fluctuate for seemingly random reasons, and the details of the policy itself can be confusing, too. To make matters more complicated, there are two types of insurance companies: publicly traded ones and mutual companies. According to ValChoice, mutual companies offer the best value for customers.

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The marketing strategies that play well in new business markets aren’t necessarily the same ones that work well in penetrating deeper into existing markets. To drive business leads in new territories, you have to utilise the approaches that match the needs and interests of the new prospects.

Trying to decide on the most effective strategies that your company can employ to interest business leads in new markets is not always a simple choice.

The difficult question is whether you should go after new markets or continue to concentrate your efforts on the areas you are most familiar with?

Do you focus on retaining and upselling to your existing customers?

Know Your Audience

The first key to expansion success is identifying the right new markets to enter.

Whether based on geography, demography, industry or some other factor, the right market is one in which there is a deep need for a solution that you offer.

Build a strong profile of the market that your solution matches. The greater the detail and understanding of the buyer, the greater your ability to effectively communicate with him or her.

Work With An Expert

When you enter new markets, particularly those in new geographic territories, it is important to align with ambassadors that understand new market buyers. This alignment allows you, first of all, to enhance the quality of the data you gather on this new marketplace.

“When bringing new products to new markets, we partnered with Internal Results to help identify, qualify and deliver engagement with the right people in the right roles across a number of geographic sectors.

We found this to be a productive and efficient application of resources, and their services helped scale and accelerate our approach to these markets.

The benefits included increased probability of new business; increased brand awareness; and better feedback on our proposition from key people and organisations within those new markets.”

Clive Bourke, President EMEA & APAC, Daon Inc.

Another benefit of partners implanted in the new marketplace is greater visibility and credibility with new prospects.

When partners carry the flag for your company and brands to business leads they know, your voice is likely to be louder.

Tailor the Message

Whether your solution is established or new, it is usually necessary to tailor your promotional messages to the new market.

The reason you haven’t yet tapped into this market is because its makeup and needs are distinct from current markets you serve.

Develop content messages that show a clear understanding of the motives and interests of new buyers. Speak specifically to the common problems that they face, and then offer information about how your solution represents a remedy.

By directly identifying the problem, you show sincere understanding and a genuine motivation to help.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel

In many cases, businesses achieve the best results by being different.

When applying marketing strategies to new markets, it is okay to look at models and strategies that have worked well for other companies.

You can attempt to replicate successful strategies yourself. Alternatively, you can partner with a firm that has helped other clients successfully push into new markets.

These companies normally have a well-defined approach to taking the right steps to infiltrate the new market. They also have databases with established contacts that they can filter to reach your ideal customer in the new marketplace.

Wrap Up

Breaking into new markets isn’t easy. It is hard to compete against companies that already have a comfort level in new markets.

But it is possible with effective strategies.

Chief among them is proper identification of the market, alignment with those that have a knowledge of the market, and a targeted message & strategic execution.

If you owned a retail store and a potential buyer entered your front door, would you ignore him or her? Of course not. Well, that's what many people are doing on LinkedIn, and then they wonder why they aren't getting any quantifiable results from using the site.

Think of your LinkedIn profile as your retail store. As with most retail stores, there's lots of competition for potential buyers and many different ways that people find out about your store before they waltz in the front door.

But once they choose to visit, are you reaching out and saying, "Hi, thanks for visiting; how can I help you?" Trust me on this one—from my experience, most people aren't doing this.
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How to welcome people to your "LinkedIn store"

There are two easy ways to recognize potential customers or connections—Who's Viewed Your Profile and your inbound invitations to connect.

Now, if you're not specifically in sales and are about to stop reading, please reconsider, because let's face it—we're all selling something. If you're not selling products or services, you're selling yourself or your organization every day. If you didn't have something to sell, you probably wouldn't be using LinkedIn.

Here are my best practices for recognizing and approaching potential buyers, particularly those who are in your target market.
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Who's Viewed Your Profile

View this list often, because if you're using the free account, you can only see the last five people who checked you out—and then only the information they've chosen to share with you.

However, if you're using the Google Chrome browser, here's a trick that will help you see the full list even though you don't have a premium account. Simply download this free special extension.

If their headline looks interesting, click through to view their full profile and ask yourself this question: Is there any information here (job experience, education entries, people you have in common, interests, etc.) that resonates with me or would help me to have an interesting conversation with them?" If the answer is "yes," invite them to join your network by using a five-star invitation.
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Inbound Invitations to Connect

Don't be too quick to hit the Ignore button here—even if you've never met the person. You don't know why they "walked into your store," so it's worth your time to figure out who they are and how you might be able to help them.

It's best to view your inbound invitations from your Pending Invitations page rather than your mobile device, because you'll have access to a lot more information about the person. On your phone you won't be able to see what people you have in common nor can you respond to a message without inviting the person to join your network. Messages are also truncated, so you may miss something important if you don't take the time to read the full message.

My article Is Opportunity Knocking at Your LinkedIn Door? will help you understand who to connect with and give you some examples of simple ways to respond when the right person has walked into your store.

If you start executing these best practices, I'm confident you'll begin to quickly identify the hottest prospects and reach out in a way that will improve your chances of success.

The post Are You Ignoring the Right People on LinkedIn? appeared first on Wayne Breitbarth.

Some salespeople develop a gut instinct for knowing when their prospects are losing interest. This “spidey sense” is highly useful: If you can identify when a good-fit buyer is about to slip away, you can devote some extra energy to reeling them back in. That’s far more productive than losing the deal and being forced to start from scratch with a new prospect.

Fortunately, you can pick up on a buyer’s declining interest without impressive levels of intuition. Certain phrases signal your prospect just isn’t that into your product. If you hear any of these six statements, you’re in trouble and should reassess your strategy.

1) “My schedule is jam-packed for the next few [days, weeks, months], so I’ll get back in touch as soon as it clears up.”

Prospects usually give a variation on the “busy” line when they’re trying to politely blow you off. If a project or issue is a true priority, they’ll make time for it.

If you commonly get this response when you’re first speaking to buyers, take an objective look at your emails, voicemails, and social media outreach. Are they personalized and helpful? Do they focus on your prospects, rather than your product, brand, and company? Are you using trigger events to identify buyers who need your offering right now? Answering “no” to one or more of these questions may explain why you’re not booking more meetings or calls.

If you typically hear this line after a formal presentation, you’re probably not connecting your prospects’ unique challenges and situation to your product. Buyers aren’t convinced by generic, one-size-fits-all messaging. To win their business, you need to investigate their needs and tailor your presentation accordingly.

2) “I’m not ready to bring in my boss.”

Many decision makers assign direct reports to do initial research and narrow down a wide range of vendors.

Salespeople should expect to work with junior stakeholders across multiple deals. But it’s a red flag when your point of contact won’t bring in the economic buyer. This reluctance shows she’s not interested enough in your product to spend her boss’s time discussing it, or that she’s not confident she can make the case to her manager.

To uncover her reasons for delaying, ask, “What reservations do you have about the product?” or “Are you open to moving forward?”

You can also take a more direct approach and say, “At this point in the conversation, my clients usually bring in their managers. Do you have any concerns stopping you from involving your manager?”

If you discover your prospect doesn’t feel optimistic she can bring her boss on board, give her the tools she needs to sell him. Ask her what his personal and professional goals are, then work with her to develop ways your product can help him accomplish those objectives.

In addition, determine the objectives her boss will likely have and coach your point of contact on addressing them. Maybe she suspects your product’s lack of customization options will concern him -- so you give her two testimonials from customers who used your offering as-is to solve challenges nearly identical to the one your prospect is facing.

3) “We don’t have the budget.”

Depending on where you are in the sales process, this objection may mean:

• “I don’t want to talk.” (Connect)
• “You haven’t demonstrated the product’s value.” (Demo)
• “I’m looking for a discount.” (Negotiation)

If one of the first statements out of your prospect’s mouth is, “I can’t buy anything right now, I’ve maxed out my budget,” or “Sorry, we have no funding,” it’s probably a brush-off. She may change her tune when she realizes your product’s ROI, so steer the conversation to value. You’ll know price is a real stopping point if it comes up again.

Sample responses include:

• “That’s okay. I don’t expect you to buy anything right now. Let’s explore whether [product] can help you [solve relevant challenge]. Can we schedule a follow up call on [date and time]?”
• “I'm not looking to sell you anything at this point. First, we should see if there's a good fit between our services and your needs. At that point, we can talk about pricing.”
• “It doesn’t benefit [rep’s company] to sell to someone who’s a bad fit. I need to know whether [product] will have a significant ROI for you before we discuss an agreement.”

Hearing this objection during the later stages of the sales process means you need to reestablish value. Try providing a free trial, sample, or relevant case studies to drive home the potential impacts of your product.

When your prospect says “We can’t afford this,” during the negotiation stage, it’s not always a sign you’re losing the deal. On the contrary, it’s possible your prospect is interested enough to look for a discount. If you’ve previously discussed pricing and it wasn’t an issue, consider adjusting the cost in exchange for a concession (like more favorable payment terms or an accelerated purchasing timeline). Alternatively, you can respond with silence. If they don’t need a discount, an awkward pause may lead them to backtrack.

If you haven’t talked about pricing until this point, determine whether the buyer is angling for a discount or truly doesn’t have the money. You can determine this by asking about the details of their budget: Who allocates it? When does it renew? Can you help them get executive sponsorship so they pay for the product sooner rather than later?

Try to establish the return her company stands to gain with your product. Where there’s a will, there’s usually a way: If your offering will significantly benefit her business, she can probably find the money somewhere.

4) “[Competitor] is [cheaper, more reliable, more advanced, more established].”

There are two likely reasons your prospect will praise your competitor. First, she might be trying to gain leverage. If you believe she favors a different seller, you’ll probably make greater compromises during negotiation. Second, the buyer may genuinely believe another vendor’s product is better.

In either case, you might be tempted to contradict her. But slamming your competitor won’t do you any favors. Instead, refocus the conversation by asking, “Why do you think so?”

If that doesn’t get you enough information, follow up with, “Is [price, reliability, X feature, reputation] one of your top priorities?”

Once you’ve clarified your prospect’s priorities, you’ll know whether your product is a good fit. If you can’t support her needs, your time will be better spent on other deals.

5) “Sorry I didn’t show up to our meeting. Something came up.”

Everyone deals with occasional last-minute plan changes. If your prospect misses a scheduled conversation, give her another chance.

But if she doesn’t show up a second time, consider moving on. Failing to show up without explanation shows the buyer doesn’t respect your time or authority. While she may have been interested enough in your product to start the sales conversation, it’s definitely no longer one of the most time-sensitive or important projects on her plate.

Keep trying to meet with her, and you’ll likely end up with unexpected gaps in your schedule.

Diplomatically walk away with a message along these lines:

6) “[Feature/product characteristic] is fairly important to us. Are you planning on [adding/offering] that soon?”

Your product might be an ideal fit for the buyer in every way but one. Unfortunately, if she believes the missing feature, capability, or option is crucial to her company or use case, you probably won’t win her business.

Is there a workaround you can suggest? For example, perhaps she’s looking for office desks that can be raised and lowered so employees can sit or stand as they’d like. Your desks are fixed height. However, because her order would be 300% larger than your average one, you can throw in 20 permanently standing desks at no extra cost. It’s not a perfect solution -- but it gives her employees the ability to stand while they work.

If you don’t have a workaround, explain why your product doesn’t come with that feature. Perhaps the buyer wants two times as much storage as your software provides. You might say, “We decided to cap storage at the current amount because none of our 1,000 customers are anywhere close to reaching the limit. Avoiding those unnecessary server costs allows us to keep your monthly rate low.”

Keep your ears peeled for these six phrases. While hearing them usually isn’t a good sign, it’s better to know your prospect is losing interest now -- when you still have time to re-engage them -- than later, when they’ve taken up more of your time just to go dark.

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

Even if a prospect is intrigued by your offering and the results you cite, they might be intimidated by the energy, time, and resources required to navigate the buying process — along with factors beyond their purchase like implementation.

That‘s why prospects need some degree of existing motivation to buy — and you need to distinguish the buyers that have it from the ones who aren’t inclined to act if you're going to ultimately close.

But how do you get there? Well, you can start by asking these questions.

Questions for Testing Whether Your Prospect Is Serious About Buying

1. “How have you attempted to overcome this challenge in the past?”

Prospects will often try internal or moderate measures before looking externally for help. If the buyer’s problem is relatively serious, they can probably describe at least one strategy they've used.

Follow up this question with, “What were the results?”

Their answer will tell you how pressing the issue is. If their solution completely flopped or the situation worsened, they're likely looking to switch things up. If the current situation is relatively stable, their appetite for change is likely weaker.

2. “Why is this a priority right now?”

Compelling events and deadlines usually make buyers highly eager for change. Your prospect might be reacting to an industry shift or new company initiative. Maybe they‘re responsible for achieving a goal before a specific date. Or perhaps they’ve realized the true impact an obstacle is having on their business.

Those reasons — along with any other timely ones — suggest the buyer is motivated to act. However, if they respond to this question with an answer like, “It’s our slow season,” or “I had some extra hours, so I figured I’d look into this,” you should be more skeptical of their desire to disrupt the status quo.

3. “Change isn’t easy. How committed are you to revamping your [business area] strategy?”

Use this question with prospects who respond well to a direct, simple conversational style. It will help you differentiate a buyer who’s unsure if they're ready to take the plunge from a buyer who’s fully bought in.

Note, this question doesn’t mention your product. Your prospect might be sold on the idea of buying a solution, but that doesn’t mean they're sold on your solution. Once you’ve established their appetite for change, you can demonstrate why your offering is the best for their needs.

4. “Here's what it takes for a customer to be successful with our product. This usually translates to X hours/week (or some other metric that shows the extent of the commitment). Is this something you're ready to commit to?”

For many products, the real work doesn’t begin until after buyers have signed on the dotted line. Some salespeople are loath to share this fact with their prospects, believing it will scare some off — and rightfully so.

But that’s actually to the rep’s benefit. Prospects who aren’t willing to put in the time and energy necessary to realize a product’s potential aren’t good fits. They’re highly unlikely to end up buying … and if they do, they’re going to be dissatisfied.

Just as you qualify your sales prospects for need, budget, authority, timeline, and so forth, you should also qualify for commitment. This question will eliminate buyers who aren’t truly dedicated to solving their business pain. As an added bonus, it sets appropriate expectations for buyers who are serious about addressing this issue.

5. “On a scale of one to 10, with one being ‘never going to buy,’ and 10 being ‘ready right now,’ what’s your timeline?”

A deal needs significant momentum to close. The buyer might seem excited about your product and its potential benefits, but if they're dragging their feet, their appetite for change isn’t great enough. To increase it, help them calculate the costs of inaction. What are the negative consequences of maintaining the status quo?

Ideally, your prospect will give an answer in the seven to nine range. That indicates they’ll be making up their mind fairly soon. Anything lower suggests this deal isn’t one of their top priorities.

6. “What’s your implementation plan?”

If your prospect is in the Decision stage of the buyer’s journey, they‘ve honed in on a specific solution type. Now they’re comparing individual vendors to see which product best fits their needs.

But making it to this stage doesn’t guarantee a purchase. To see how dedicated the buyer truly is, ask about their plan for implementation. If you’re selling a non-software product, ask, “Where do you see this product fitting into your [process/routine/existing toolkit]?”

Committed prospects will have some idea — if not a fully fleshed-out strategy — of how they’re going to introduce a product to their team or integrate it into their workflow.

When your prospect says, “I don’t have an implementation plan,” “I haven’t gotten that far yet,” or a similar answer, don’t automatically write them off. This gives you an excellent opportunity to add value and win authority. Offer to guide them through the implementation process or help them figure out how exactly she’ll use the product.

7. “Who else will be involved in making this decision? Do they know we’re speaking?”

Jeff Hoffman, creator of the YourSalesMBA™ training program, uses this question to determine how serious buyers are.

If your prospect is highly anxious to change, they'll bring in other decision-makers as soon as possible. The earlier they’re involved, the faster the buying process will be.

A prospect who’s less enthusiastic will probably put off this step. It’s a waste of time to involve their peers when they don’t know whether they want to pull the trigger.

If your prospect falls into the second camp, consider politely pushing back. You might say, “We’ve spent some time discussing [X challenge] and [Y objective.] It seems like accomplishing [results] would make a big impact for you. Is there a reason you haven’t brought in the other members of your team?”

Sometimes, you need to show highly motivated prospects your solution is the best for their situation. But sometimes, you need to prove they need a solution at all before you can show the value of your specific product. These seven questions will allow you to separate the first type of buyer from the second.

Author: Jeff Kupietzky

Variety is the spice of life, but when it comes to your email marketing campaigns, it’s tough to find the right mix of spice and substance to satisfy your subscribers’ expectations and needs.

These days, personalization is KING, generating higher transaction rates, open rates, and click-through rates, which means that customizing the content for each and every recipient is absolutely critical to getting—and keeping—their attention. After all, with 215.3 billion emails sent and received this year alone, it’s incredibly tough to cut through the clutter and stand out.

That’s where dynamic email comes in. Dynamic email delivers open-time personalization for every subscriber, with elements that update and refresh every time the email is opened. Using an automated marketing platform, marketers can send one-to-one marketing messages to hundreds and thousands of subscribers to drive a measurable uptick in engagement and ROI.

Here are seven dynamic, personalized elements you can incorporate into your emails to kick your campaigns up a notch:

1. Dynamic Surveys

Surveys can help you gather vital information about your potential and existing customers, such as their challenges, needs, and more. Instead of redirecting them to a web link, try embedding dynamic questions with radio buttons directly into your email so recipients can respond instantly, rather than having to click a link to a new page. PureWow, a women’s lifestyle publisher, uses a dynamic survey to gather more information from their new subscribers once they’ve opted in. With dynamic surveys, you can also provide your recipients with instant gratification by enabling them to see the immediate results of their input within the email. This comes in handy if you’re polling your subscribers and want to show them how their answers compare to those from other respondents. It’s quick and easy—for both you as the marketer to set up and the recipient to click and respond.

2. Deadline Countdown

When it comes to promoting limited-time offers, registration deadlines, or upcoming events, most email marketers rely on an urgent subject line to entice their recipients. By adding a dynamic countdown timer prominently at the top of the email that displays the live time remaining (which changes each time the email is opened), you can ratchet up the sense of urgency. In the example below from Hearst, the countdown in the yellow bar at the top based on how much time is left before the magazine offer expires.

3. Convenience Features

Anything you can do to make things convenient for your subscribers is a huge win for your engagement rates. For example, you could add dynamic features that let recipients click to instantly add an event to their calendar or send a direct message to customer service (rather than routing them to your “Contact Us” page).

4. Special Effects

Subscribers receive an abundance of email every day, and they’re becoming overwhelmed with boring email. Spice things up with special features like scrolling, zoom, fade, and image animations to wow them. With a dynamic email tool that integrates into your marketing automation platform, you can simply copy and paste a short HTML snippet into your template and then send it out to your subscribers. The impact more than justifies the minimal time and resources required to add the features.

In the email newsletter below from the Golf Channel, dynamic features are added to the black leaderboard bar and set of articles. They automatically scroll to a new set of content as time passes.

5. Videos

Another dynamic feature you can add to your emails is video content. You’ve probably already spent a lot of time creating videos for your website or social media channels. Why not leverage them in your emails as well? Embedding (muted) autoplay videos, like those on Facebook and Twitter, not only capture and hold attention, but research from Insivia indicates that viewers actually recall more of what they see in a video than what they read (95% vs. 10%). Captivating and memorable—what more could you ask for?

6. Device and Geo-Targeting

Nowadays, your buyers expect you to know them. And with increasingly accurate recommendation engines from Amazon and Netflix, these expectations are only rising. What if you could deliver on this and give your buyers what they need, precisely when they need it? With dynamic emails, this is within your reach.

For example, let’s say your company just launched a new mobile app. You could send an email that automatically recognizes each recipient’s device and uses dynamic content to route them to the appropriate app store to download your app. You could also use geo-targeting to connect them to a local sales rep or offer them travel and dining suggestions for a city they just booked a hotel in.

7. Social Feeds

B2B and consumer marketers alike are seeing the value of social media marketing, with 67.4% of internet users worldwide on a social network this year. If you’re marketing on social media, then it’s likely that you’re already working hard to deliver relevant content that engages and informs your audience. Embedding real-time social feeds—Twitter, Facebook, or even Pinterest and Instagram—in the middle or bottom of emails gives you a two-for-one engagement opportunity. With dynamic social feeds, subscribers can open and receive the email message, see your live feeds, and then easily click through to consume and interact with your social content, doubling your reach. For example, the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) integrates their Twitter and Instagram feed into their email newsletters to promote subscribers engagement on other channels beyond email.

With the ability to embed dynamic elements into every email to customize content—without having to rework the recipe every time—marketers now have an ultra-effective and efficient way to deliver highly relevant, one-to-one, personalized marketing at virtually any scale. Now THAT’S a tantalizing opportunity. Which of these dynamic features will you be exploring for your marketing? I’d love to hear in the comments below.

7 Ways to Bring Your Emails Back to Life with Dynamic Content was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 7 Ways to Bring Your Emails Back to Life with Dynamic Content appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Let’s be honest, social media is a jungle. Forget about the flood of apps, integrations, and add-ons, just figuring out which network you should invest in is overwhelming.

What if you could ask today’s most influential online marketers one question: “What social media tool is your all-time, desert-island, can’t-live-without favorite?”

That’s exactly what I did.

What follows are – by any list or metric – 50 of the biggest names in online marketing, their top social-media tool (after the infographic) … and why they love it.

Click to see the full infographic and list made by Venngage

1. Neil Patel: Entrepreneur and influencer, NeilPatel.com

“With BuzzSumo you can see what is hot in your space on social media and what isn’t. From there you can craft ideas on the type of blog posts you should write to generate traffic and leads. The best part about BuzzSumo is it also shows you who has shared the content so you can reach out to those influencers and ask them to share your content as well.”

2. Ann Handley: Chief content officer, MarketingProfs

“Instagram is my favorite social network because of its social storytelling simplicity. From fun personal accounts – like Small Chalk and Adam Padilla – to corporate brands, it connects more immediately and deeply with people than any other platform. I still haven’t forgiven them for introducing an algorithm. (Chronological was so much more in line with the ethos of the platform.) But I can’t quit you, Insta.”

3. Joe Pulizzi: Founder, Content Marketing Institute

“Right now in my career, I use social media as almost a pure response vehicle. And I won’t start any new social media apps, platforms, or tools until I’m 100% committed to it. My goal with Twitter (my favorite) is to keep in touch and communicate my appreciation to those people that support me. Once I built an audience on those platforms, my goals and execution changed.”

4. Sam Hurley: Founder, Optim-Eyez

“Start A Fire is one of my all-time favorite social media tools because it provides shared credit to both content publishers and the curators who spread their material. It’s very simple, quick to use, and integrates with other social sharing tools like Buffer. Your face will appear in a pop-up on the articles you share, along with a custom link where you can direct visitors back to your own best content.”

5. Mari Smith: Facebook marketing expert

“Native video is the top reaching post type on Facebook and gets three times the engagement of link posts and two times that of photo posts. I love using Animoto’s gorgeous templates, themes, and stock music. Its new marketing builder tool also makes it super-duper easy to add text overlays – vital for sound-off autoplay videos in the Facebook News Feed because 80% of video ads on Facebook are watched with sound off.”

Native video gets 3x the engagement of link posts & 2x that of photo posts on #Facebook says @marismith.
Click To Tweet

6. Ed Leake: Managing director, Midas Media

“When you ask these types of questions, marketers often overlook one big aspect of social – native advertising. As a paid click and data guy, I love Qwaya because it allows me to treat and optimize Facebook as I would AdWords: robust campaign structuring, split-testing, and automation tool set. If CTRs drop or CPC jumps … pause it. Might sound simple, but when you’re managing big accounts and budgets, it’s a godsend.”

7. Jeff Bullas: CEO, JeffBullas.com

“SumoMe is a hybrid tool that’s a bit like a Swiss Army knife. It’s helped me thrive and survive in the wilds of the digital world by creating social-sharing buttons – onsite, SMS, Flipboard, and WhatsApp – and tracking my social counts on blog posts. The feature I really love is its Welcome Mat: a pop-up that captures emails. In less than 12 months, it’s collected over 40,000 email subscribers.”

8. Murray Newlands: Co-founder, Due.com

“Most B2B companies on social media are missing a huge opportunity. Staff, customers, and clients won’t post positive comments unless they love you. Beyond that you have to get proactive and make sharing easy. Oktopost’s amplify and collaborate features are built to do exactly that: internally and externally. But love has to be the foundation.”

9. Cammi Pham: Partner, ThinkRenegade

“With the new Instagram algorithm change, consistently posting at the right time has become even more important. Grum makes it easier to upload, process photos, schedule, and add hashtags to the first comment from desktop. For hashtags, I use 80% fixed and 20% tailored. This gives my team more time to focus on real-time engagement, which is life or death on social.”

Consistently posting at the right time on #Instagram is important w/ algorithm change says @cammipham.
Click To Tweet

10. Jason Miller: Global content marketing leader, LinkedIn

“I like to keep things simple and streamlined: Less is more. So the tool that I use religiously is Elevate: LinkedIn’s employee advocacy tool. I use it to share, organize, and measure all the content I post across my main three social accounts: LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. I share daily from Elevate and track engagements.”

11. Neal Schaffer: Founder, Maximize Your Social

“eClincher is a comprehensive social media dashboard along the lines of a Hootsuite, but it offers some unique functionality. The feature that I most love is auto post with queues. Basically, it’s a killer feature for companies who have lots of evergreen content and want to share it on a periodic basis across a wide variety of social networks. You can choose to post from your queue as often or as little as you’d like and stop sharing on a certain date, which is perfect if you are promoting an event.”

12. Ross Simmonds: Digital strategist, RossSimmonds.com

“My favorite tool is Venngage. As someone who really likes experimenting with the potential of visual content and visual communication, having access to an infographics tool that is so easy to use speeds up my visual output. Whether you are creating graphics for social, SlideShare, or a presentation, Venngage is super versatile and intuitive.”

13. Shane Barker: Digital strategist, ShaneBarker.com

“Quuu is a hand-curated and content-promotion platform. I use the promotion side to distribute everything. Each article is reviewed by a real person before it is approved because the goal is to promote only the highest quality content. Once the article gets the green light, Quuu adds it to its huge distribution network, which is cool, as I can then see the amount of shares and clicks for each article.”

14. Michael Brenner: CEO, Marketing Insider Group

“Twitter remains my primary social media platform. But alone, Twitter’s unmanageable. That’s why I use Followerwonk to understand who my audience is, when they are most likely to engage, and to find followers who overlap with similar social profiles and influencers. Their analyze feature – which integrates with Buffer – tells you exactly when to post your most important updates for exposure.”

15. Pam Moore: CEO and founder, Marketing Nutz

“I love using  If This Then That (IFTTT) to enable native posting of images on Twitter that are originally posted to Instagram. You can set specific criteria by using hashtags or set it to post to Twitter automatically by default. IFTTT also offers a nearly limitless supply of social and cross-platform ‘recipes.’”

16. Andy Crestodina: Co-founder and director, Orbit Media

“This one is going to drive more traffic in less time than all your other tools combined. It’s like Buffer but it never runs dry. Posts scheduled in Edgar stay in rotation forever. Once you’ve vetted your best stuff based on historical data, set up Edgar to share on your network(s) of choice at least a few times per day. You just saved yourself six to eight hours per month at least.”

17. Rachel Pedersen: Social media strategist

“Ever wish you had a 24/7 graphic designer to turn your social media ideas into gorgeous graphics? Then you will love WordSwag! It is a mobile application that turns your ideas, quotes, and content into attractive graphics that can be shared on Facebook, Instagram, and anywhere. In less than five minutes you have a high quality and visually appealing graphic that will make your followers think you have a graphic designer ‘on call.’”

18. Michael Stelzner: Founder and CEO, Social Media Examiner

“Right now, I’m excited about Huzza.io because it lets me broadcast a live, weekly show that features up to six guests at one time … and simulcast it to Facebook. The platform provides real-time interaction, screen sharing, and more. I think one of Huzza’s most valuable features lets users subscribe to your show. Now your followers won’t ever miss an opportunity to tune in!”

19. Ann Smarty: Founder, SEO Smarty

“Viral Content Buzz is my most efficient social media promotion tool. I use it to promote every article I write. It works by putting my content in front of social media influencers who share it on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon. The result is a huge boost in social media interactions and higher traffic for my content. You can see my personal case study here.”

20. Tommy Walker: Editor-in-chief, Shopify Plus Blog

“TweetDeck is so much more than a way to publish on multiple accounts. With all of the filtering capabilities and advanced search functionality, you can build several dashboards that give you a real-time pulse on your industry, competition, and popular content. For example, when someone shares content from my blog, IFTTT will automatically add them to a list, which I am monitoring on TweetDeck. When looking at that list, I can see everything else people who have shared my blog are sharing.”

21. Josh Steimle: Speaker, writer, and entrepreneur

“Organic reach on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook keeps getting lower, especially as your following grows. The solution? Post your content more than once. Edgar allows me to create a library of content, a schedule for posting it, and then it cycles through the library. When it’s done, it starts over.”

22. Sujan Patel: Founder and CEO, Web Profits

“Social media is becoming more personal and customers are actually talking to companies. I’m not talking about comments or high-level conversations. I’m talking about customers ready to make a transaction. That’s why I love Facebook Messenger, Facebook has done a great job empowering business owners to communicate directly with their customers and with the introduction of bots, Messenger is going to have a big impact in the coming years.”

#Socialmedia is becoming more personal & customers are actually talking to companies says @sujanpatel.
Click To Tweet

23. Johnathan Dane: Founder, KlientBoost

“We’ve started using the LinkedIn Sales Navigator to reach out to decision-makers at companies that could be ideal clients. Once we’re able to pique their interest, then we ask them for a quick meeting … For lead generation, it’s phenomenal.”

24. John Rampton: CEO and co-founder, Due

“I really like Brand24’s dashboard to see every person that’s mentioned my brand on social media. I can then go and respond individually. This enables my brand to be on top of the good, the bad, and the amazing customers that are sharing feedback. You can even monitor your competition and take advantage of the potential customers out there that need your help!”

25. Steve Rayson: Director, BuzzSumo

“Keeping track and managing social mentions and messages is hard work. I love Agorapulse’s approach of helping you achieve inbox zero and that great feeling when you have cleared your messages. Agorapulse does more than bring together all your mentions and messages, it allows you to work effectively as a team to respond to everything.”

26. Nadya Khoja: CMO, Venngage

“Although Snapchat may not seem like the most trackable social media platform, it’s phenomenal for engaging with your audience and giving your followers a look behind the scenes at your company or personal life. The one measurable metric is views, so in order to keep them climbing, you need to be creative. Trust and advocacy are built on being an entertaining and useful marketer.”

Trust and advocacy are built on being an entertaining and useful marketer says @NadyaKhoja.
Click To Tweet

27. Gerry Moran: Global head of social media, Cognizant

“The key to every successful social media strategy is content that tells a story. However, the story doesn’t always get crafted in one sitting. It evolves from a collection of photos, animated GIFs, infographics, a line from a song, a saying from my grandmother, everyday pain points, scribbled design thinking on a white board, industry facts, etc. Evernote gives me a way to organize my storytelling making my social media strategy more successful.”

The key to every successful #socialmedia strategy is content that tells a story says @GerryMoran.
Click To Tweet

28. Jay Baer: Founder, Convince & Convert

“Rival IQ is a terrific tool to compare your own social media engagement rate and top-performing content versus your competitors’. Insightful and easy to use, it includes automated, custom reporting. One click and BAM – you have a PDF or PowerPoint deck with all the information you need to make better social media decisions. We use it daily.”

29. Brian Dean: Founder, Backlinko

“Click to Tweet gives your readers an immediate and easy way to share your content by creating one-click boxes of preloaded Tweets, hashtags, and mentions. Blog integration is super non-technical and they even have a Click to Tweet generator you can use to add links to emails and PDFs. More opportunities to share equals more shares. It’s that simple. I recently used it on this post and got 20% more tweets than my average.”

30. Joanna Wiebe: Creator, Copy Hackers

“Buffer! Three reasons. (1) You can install a browser widget that lets you Buffer any page or image you come across to be sent out immediately or at a later time. (2) The Content Inbox: I can enter the URL of a favorite blog and Buffer instantly creates a huge list of tweets from that blog. (3) The company is so transparent. I don’t expect every company to publish what they earn vs. what they pay people the way Buffer does, but it’s a warm-and-fuzzy sort of approach to helping disconnected folks like moi see the humans behind a software company.”

31. Glen Gilmore: Founder, Gilmore Business Network

“At the risk of following Joe Puluzzi, Twitter is also my favorite tool. However, I use it a bit differently than most by creating niche accounts to share and hone my evolving passions while creating community and influence – @TravelEsquire, @FinancialSM, @HealthcareSMM, @SocialMediaLaw1, @ChinaDigitalBiz, etc. Then I build Twitter lists to track key opinion leaders and the competition.”

32. Matthew Toren: Owner, iSmallBusiness

“Canva is a very handy browser-based design tool that makes it super straightforward for non-designers like me to create impressive images. Visual content has become so important for social media posts to help tell the story of your post and content. I’ve noticed that my visual content gets about 23% more clicks vs. non-visual. I love the fact that I can optimize the size for whatever social platform I need to use the design for.”

#Visualcontent is important for #socialmedia posts to help tell the story of your content says @matthewtoren.
Click To Tweet

33. Matt Heinz: President, Heinz Marketing Inc.

“Socedo is a fantastic tool that identifies new prospects on Twitter and automates engagement with them on your behalf.  I use it to generate 12 to 15 leads per day by matching B2B marketing-related keywords with offers of our best practice guides. If you’re doing it right, social demand generation is like paid search without the media costs.”

If you’re doing it right, social demand generation is like paid search w/out the media costs. @heinzmarketing
Click To Tweet

34. Kristi Hines: Freelance writer

“Sendible has most of the features you will find in other social media management tools: scheduling, automated sharing via RSS feed, analytics, team management, and keyword monitoring. What sets them apart is the number of networks they connect to: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram (via email reminder), Google+, Tumblr, Medium, Instapaper, Pocket, Flickr, Delicious, Slack, and more.”

35. Shayla Price: B2B content marketer

“Bit.ly is a must-have tool for your social media stack. The platform does more than just shorten links. You can use it to track links, measure performance from your campaigns, and learn which channels bring in the most traffic. I use Bit.ly to monitor the daily activity of all my marketing and growth efforts along with most of my clients so I can attribute and track my efforts.”

36. Everette Taylor: CMO, Skurt

“Instagram is a platform whose audience is growing fast, surpassing Twitter, and now has more users than Snapchat. Growing your brand and engagement on Instagram is becoming increasingly important. GrowthPup has been the most efficient tool to help grow my company’s Instagram account and engagement. It’s a completely hands-free experience, affordable, and you get real results … a marketer’s dream.”

.@Instagram’s audience is growing fast, surpassing Twitter, & has more users than Snapchat. @Everette
Click To Tweet

37. Brian Clark: CEO, Rainmaker Digital

“Our largest social audience is on Twitter and perfectly geared for content distribution. To be a bit more narrow, however, we’ve had some luck with two Twitter add-ons: (1) Twitter ads and (2) Twitter-Medium integration. The price of Twitter ads has come down while the effectiveness of Facebook ads has waned. But the most intriguing thing I’m exploring is the Twitter follower integration with Medium, which is a content-driven social network itself. Publication owners can now connect their Twitter and Medium accounts to basically import followers and build reach.”

38. Rand Fishkin: Wizard of Moz

“Next to BuzzSumo – and without sounding biased – my favorite tool is Moz’s own Fresh Web Explorer. It’s great for setting up mention alerts as well as finding content to share socially through keyword notifications. The mention authority feature works directly with Moz’s page and domain authority metrics and helps sort through all the noise you normally get with catch-all monitoring tools.”

39. Daniel Knowlton: Founder, KPS Digital Marketing

“I’ve been a big Buffer fan for the last two plus years. But Sendible has converted me because it incorporates more than five other tools I was using into one: from social scheduling (on steroids), to social-listening alerts, automated posting from an RSS feed, a built-in CRM, automatically recycling your chosen posts so that your content never runs out and loads more.”

40. Larry Kim: Founder, WordStream

“I’m big into audiences: figuring out what are the interests, behaviors, and demographics of your target customers. For this I use Facebook Audience Insights because it’ll tell you just about everything you’d ever want to know: job titles, education level, lifestyle, location, household information, purchasing behavior, and much more. By better understanding who your target audience is, you can more accurately create content that they’re likely to engage with.”

Understand your target audience to create #content that they’re likely to engage with @larrykim.
Click To Tweet

41. Scott Stratten: President, UnMarketing

“At the risk of being a curmudgeon, I don’t really have any favorite tools because I don’t use many. But I’m enjoying trying out Ripl right now. Visual content evokes emotion. And Ripl is the easiest tool that goes beyond static images and lets you create animated visuals to post in your channel of choice.”

Proud to have @scottharrison , founder of @charitywater as our guest on the UnPodcast! https://t.co/zyQvU22T8Q pic.twitter.com/BcsaKZQ8T3

— Scott Stratten (@unmarketing) September 10, 2016

42. Kevan Lee: Director of marketing, Buffer

“Pocket helps me batch all my social media reading. I can find interesting stuff, save it to Pocket, get back to work, then read it all later. Plus, it has some really smooth integrations with sharing directly to Twitter and Facebook or sending straight to Buffer. And it has its own recommendations area that might be one of the few remaining unknown areas to build a following and authority, not to mention collect content for curation.”

43. Diana Adams: Owner, Adams Consulting Group, Inc.

“Sophisticated marketers know that engagement is the most important (and hardest) metric to nail, and that’s where Post Planner comes in. It was built for engagement and gives you access to the most viral posts on Facebook and Twitter (regardless of your niche). Plus, it provides a huge list of status ideas. My favorite feature is the recycle button to load up evergreen content so it posts once a week or once a month … or whatever.”

44. William Harris: Founder, Elumynt

“The thing I love about Narrow is that it lets me scale my Twitter account intelligently. Rather than sitting at my computer, manually following everyone that tweets with a hashtag that I find relevant, Narrow is programmed to interact with hashtags, audiences of influencers, keywords and more, which allows me to stay focused on providing relevant content for my audience.”

45. Benji Hyam: Co-founder, Grow and Convert

“LinkedIn is great for prospecting. Before I do cold outreach, I look at the person’s profile and do as much research about them as possible. Simple touches like including common contacts, their job title, and past projects they’ve shared dramatically increase your chances of getting a response. Customize your messages and relate to them based on the information gathered. Above all, be personal not robotic.”

When doing outreach on @LinkedIn, be personal not robotic says @benjihyam.
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46. Jon Morrow: Founder, SmartBlogger

“Being completely honest, our teams don’t do a lot on social media. Most of our traffic comes from search, so that’s where we put our time and energy. We use BuzzSumo, Canva, and Yoast. However, given that my goal with social is simply to stay active – and to get the most out of the investment – Buffer is my go-to tool for scheduling updates. It’s easy to use, time efficient, and covers all my social-media bases.”

47. Monina Wagner: Social media community manager, Content Marketing Institute

“In social media, relationships matter. Repost is a simple yet effective tool that takes the challenge out of engaging with others by sharing content while giving credit. The app gives brands an opportunity to tell their story with user-generated content – creating a positive emotional experience, building consumer loyalty, and securing customer retention.”

In #socialmedia, relationships matter says @moninaw.
Click To Tweet

48. Chirag Kulkarni: Entrepreneur, speaker, and adviser

“The tool that I love is Crowdfire. For $10 a month, I can follow the most engaged followers of people in my industry (Neil Patel, Jeff Bullas, etc.) and because those top influencers have a large following of readers many of them convert and start following me. I can use an automatic DM feature to A/B test some of my most popular articles, which drives traffic to my website and gets me leads.”

49. Heidi Cohen: Chief content officer, Actionable Marketing Guide

“My favorite social media tool isn’t a tool. It’s a form of social media: a blog. Your blog is owned media you support with quality content. Done well you can optimize your blog for social media, search, influencers, and your business. On that front, two tools stand out. My favorite blog plugin is Yoast for SEO. And I love Feedburner because it distributes posts via email when they’re published. Like I’ve said before: ‘Hands down, email is the king of social media .’”

#Email is the king of #socialmedia says @heidicohen.
Click To Tweet

50. Nadav Dakner: Co-founder and CEO, InboundJunction

“Cyfe is an all-on-one business dashboard that allows marketers to aggregate data from multiple platforms under one roof. For social media metrics, Cyfe provides an easy interface for tracking, assessing, and evaluating activity, engagement impact and ROI. You can add preset widgets for each of your social channels, view real-time charts, access your KPI histories, and generate custom reports for your clients.”

Stay updated on the most effective tools to help your content marketing program run more effectively and efficiently. Subscribe to the free CMI daily newsletter.

Please note:  All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team.  No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post 50 Best Social Media Tools From 50 Most Influential Marketers Online appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Studies from the Alterra Group show that 97% of marketers report account based marketing approaches have the highest ROI. The IT Services Marketing Association (ITSMA) reports that 85% of marketers who measure ROI describe account based marketing as delivering the highest returns of all other marketing approaches. And, LinkedIn reports that social selling professionals that take an account based marketing approach gain 45% more opportunities.

Yet, most sales and marketing professionals fail to take an account based marketing approach on LinkedIn and on social media in general. For example, Single Point of Contact, a California-based MSP, was targeting real estate management firms with the same promises of reduced IT savings, increased security and other generic claims that other managed service providers were also discussing. They were making these generic claims without showing any proof and showing how and why they’re able to provide these benefits to targeted audiences.

On LinkedIn, the profile of the VP of Business Development was mainly a resume and there was no quantifiable, specific value being communicated to their targeted audiences. The firm had no case studies that they can use on their profile and in nurturing efforts to targeted prospects. The blog content was general in nature and did not show targeted audiences that they understood their specific issues, challenges and circumstances. And, they didn’t show how they can take their targeted audiences vision and turn it into a path to value (which you can only do with an account-based marketing approach).

Here Are the Steps We Took to Help Single Point of Contact Drive Demand with Specific, Targeted Audiences

1. Take an account based marketing approach to our client’s LinkedIn profile. We focused on pulling in prospects with relevant stories rather than just push out content – even on the VP’s profile where we show his unique business story and the results that his clients have gained under his direction. You’ll find case studies throughout the profile. So, instead of using the experience section as a resume, the VP now has content for different audiences with different needs. You’ll find a position that shows how he helped Shorenstein Realty (one of the largest, oldest, most respected real estate management firms in the US that was spending upwards of $750,000 on their IT infrastructure) cut IT Opex by 43%. By making the VP’s profile case study based, we show his relevance and how he is in tune with his buyer’s needs. By talking about Shorenstein Realty within his profile in multiple spots – an IT leader within a local SF Bay real estate management firm reached out to our client to connect and asked specific questions based on the content found inside the profile. Do you see the power of taking an account based marketing approach to your profile where you focus on what’s going to allow you to open the door to the targeted audiences that you are looking to attract? This SF Bay real estate management form ignored all previous communications up until now.

1. Take an account based marketing approach with their social content strategy. Now, building the foundation was only the first step. Single Point of Contact needed the content to further nurture relationships with interested parties. For example, as Single Point of Contact’s VP’s profile piqued interest by talking about his work with Shorenstein Realty, the company needed case studies to continue the conversation. And, the company needed case studies for other markets that they wanted to penetrate. Now, on the Single Point of Contact website, you’d learn how the managed service provider supports the broadband industry (another target market for the managed service provider). You’d see how they helped a law firm save $24,000 with just 1 fix (another big target market). Along with case studies, we provided them with blog post and LinkedIn publishing platform posts that would challenge IT leaders within these target industries and provide them alternative answers to their unique challenges.

1. Take an account based LinkedIn marketing and social selling approach – In many cases, your LinkedIn profile and your content will not drive demand enough to produce the ROI you want. It’s the next step actions you take and how you use the content to build and leverage relationships that will move prospects closer to the sale. That’s why we mapped out how Single Point of Contact should be connecting and building relationships with specific key decision makers within the targeted accounts that the managed service provider wanted. We mapped out content paths based on the specific issues that the targeted accounts were facing and how the prospects were reacting and engaging with the content.

Results of an Account-Based Marketing Approach on LinkedIn

Besides attracting a large real estate management company (when all previous attempts to gain their attention failed), taking an account based marketing approach to LinkedIn provided Single Point of Contact with:

• Engagement driving visibility
• Access to higher quality leads who saw the Managed Service Provider’s business value
• Increased lead conversions as IT buyers saw how Single Point of Contact can help them overcome IT challenges and create a path to value
• A strong foundation to build key relationships with enterprise decision makers

Now, take a look at conversions on the messaging you’re sending. Look at your connection conversions. If you’re getting ignored then chances are that you’re too general with your messaging (whether it’s on your profile or outbound messages) and your prospects aren’t seeing your specific, relevant value to them. Click here to read the complete case study to learn more.

The end of Q4 always seems to elicit a different mindset than the final days of Q1 through 3, and for obvious reason. It’s not just the close of another quarter — it’s the end of the year and a time to reflect on twelve months of performance before wiping the slate clean for a new year. For SDR’s and sales reps alike, an annual sales review is a formal opportunity for this reflection, a chance for both you and your manager (and the organization as a whole) to reflect on the strategies and results of the past year and determine whether or not any changes should be made upon return from holiday break.

However, without the right preparation and focus for these reviews, clear action steps and take aways can be elusive. The sheer volume of work done by an SDR or sales rep in a quarter makes it hard for you or your manager to dial in focus. Fortunately, if you’re part of a modern sales organization and you’ve been following this blog throughout the year, you’ve already put the solution in place: your sales metrics.

All year long you and your manager have been focusing on data-driven approaches to success, so why not use that approach with your annual sales review? Looking at a year’s performance comprehensively is really just a study of data based on your activities, wins/losses, and overall efficiency ratio. So, in order to crush your annual sales review, all you need to do is arm yourself with the right metrics and analytics that prove how much you’ve grown since your last review.

Arm Yourself With the Stats That Matter

The act of prioritizing the right sales metrics requires you to determine which metrics best quantify the effectiveness of your daily actions and activities. In many cases, these metrics will likely already be clear to you and your manager as they should be the KPIs your performance is evaluated on throughout the quarter. In the event that you must determine these metrics for yourself, they should tie into your core responsibilities. For example: that may mean total call volume for SDRs or closed pipeline for AEs. They represent your daily records and are the best indicator of your average performance over time.

If your manager has prepared for this review, they will bring all these metrics to the table themselves. However, showing your manager that you’ve been focusing on these repeatable and predictable behaviors, can go a long way toward proving your worth and potential forecasting for the new year. It also never hurts to have a second set of eyes on those numbers. Even sales managers have been known to make mistakes from time to time.

Prove Your Sales Efficiency Rating

SalesLoft CEO, Kyle Porter, defines the number one metric in sales development as the sales efficiency rating. The idea here? Let’s say you and your fellow rep have both created 30 sales accepted leads a month. Each of these 30 appointments are equally qualified, and they’re equal pipeline opportunity. On the surface, both of you have given the organization an equal amount of value. However, these metrics don’t tell the whole story.

The number to focus on here isn’t the 30 qualified appointments, it’s the number of accounts you had to approach to get those 30 appointments. If it took you approaching 400 different accounts, while it took your fellow rep 3,000, then technically, you are performing at a more efficient rate.

Why does the number of accounts matter? The obvious reason is that you’re saving resources, cost, and time required to approach a high number of accounts. Second, you’re not scorching the earth as you goes through your prospecting activities (unlike the thousands of accounts being burned by your less-efficient counterpart). The most important aspect here, is when you’re prospecting — and touching people with more personality, more customization, more intentionality about converting that account — you’re not eating up all of the other prospects the other SDRs could be approaching.

The point of this efficiency rating system is to prove that you’re creating a modern sales environment that’s scalable, more predictable, more cost effective and efficient, and doesn’t cause harm to the organization in the long term. These are all very attractive things to bring up as both your manager and the organization as a whole are looking at budgeting for the new year.

Separate Your SMART Goals from Your OKRs

There’s a difference between the goals you’re expected hit and the lofty goals you hope to hit. Objectives and key results (OKRs) are the latter. OKRs are an example of high-quality, measurable goals to strive for throughout a quarter. But, the keyword here is strive.

Traditional sales goals are realistic — a set of metrics designed for success based on attainability. A common model for traditional goal-setting is SMART, or Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-bound, according to a study by Leadership IQ. That same study found that only 15% of employees are motivated by these “attainable” goals, leading to a lack of confidence due to the confinement of the SMART model.

OKRs, on the other hand, empower modern sales professionals to set more aspirational, lofty goals. According to a similar study at BetterWorks, the progress set in motion by OKRs due to these more ambitious goals creates an environment built for achievement through measurable and time-bound key results.

Going into your annual sales review should be exciting — if you’re armed with metrics to prove your performance value over the past year, this is your time to shine. Sales metrics and analytics are in invaluable piece of the modern sales puzzle, and embracing them will only improve your skills year over year. Use these strategies going into your annual sales review, and into 2017, and be prepared to experience a scalable process for personal success.

—

Sales organizations have always been data-driven. That’s why we wrote ebook, “The Essential Guide to Sales Analytics.” Download your free copy of the guide today!

The post Use Metrics to Crush Your Annual Sales Review: Motivation Monday appeared first on SalesLoft.

Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, Periscope, LinkedIn … the list of platforms used by marketers goes on and on. Why the intense focus on social media marketing these days? It’s where your customers are: 74% of adult internet users are active on social media and 55% of buyers use social media sites when researching products. When your customers are on social media looking to learn more about you, it’s important that you’re there to make a good impression.

Most marketers are already well aware of this fact: 92% of marketers agree that social media is an important part of their business and 97% are using social media as part of their marketing strategy. 64% of sales teams use social media to reach their sales quotas, and 61% of B2B marketers use it to build leads. In fact, 31% of all traffic to websites is driven by the top 8 social media sites which together serve about 4.2 billion active monthly users.

This infographic from Social Media Marketo breaks social media marketing down into 12 key steps that they say will help your business build a killer social media strategy.

So what’s the best way to approach social media? Let’s see what Social Media Marketo has to say:

12 Simple Steps for an Effective Social Media Strategy

1. Define target audience. What age, gender, location, income, and education groups are you targeting? Tools like Alexa and Google Adwords are helpful for research. The fuller the profile, the more accurate the targeting.
2. Research buyer persona. These are fictionalized personas that can help you humanize your customers and develop an understanding of them. You can use a site like http://MakeMyPersona.com to figure out how to best target your audience.
3. Research influencers. There’s a reason why we call them influencers – they influence! And if you can get one on your side, the results can be priceless. Spend some time researching influencers in your industry or field. Find one that tends to share top content and would find your offerings relevant, then connect with them on social media and work on building a relationship by sharing their content. You can use BuzzSumo to track key influencers.
4. Identify social media platforms used by buyer persona. BuzzSumo can help you identify which platforms have the highest number of shares for specific keywords, or search the sites on your own. You can also survey your existing customers and see which sites they tend to use the most.
5. Look at your competitors’ preferred social platforms. Where do your competitors tend to hang out online? How has that been working for them? Are they building engagement? If they’re not, is it because the platform lacks the audience or because their strategy is poor? You may be able to get an edge!
6. Produce content that addresses buyer persona pain points. Potential customers often post their questions or concerns online, and spending some time researching them can give you great insights into what they need. Look at forums or sites like Quora to track down their comments and then produce content that answers their questions or offers solutions.
7. Create a content bank. Develop videos and tutorials, write blog posts and whitepapers, and create infographics and images. The content should be consistent, relevant, interesting, and valuable to your audience. Mix it up – not all customers will respond to the same content types, so it’s good to offer a variety!
8. Engage and build relationships. Aim for a genuine 2-way relationship by asking readers for feedback and showing interest in their interests – what sort of content would they like to see? How can you help them solve their problems?
9. Maintain a consistent content publishing cycle. Even if you’re not writing all of the content yourself, try to post regularly. It’s fine to share relevant industry expert content with your readers as long as you credit the source. In fact, sharing influencer content is a great way to build those important relationships, as mentioned above. So share away!
10. Invest on getting more social followers. Building a social media following takes time and effort. Liking, retweeting, favoriting, sharing, posting relevant ads, and engaging with your audience is an investment and one that will pay off if done properly.
11. Automate sharing with tools. Use a tool like Hootsuite to automate your social media activity. This is an amazing timesaver and can save you the hassle of posting to each site individually as well as allow you to easily schedule posts in advance.
12. Evaluate your results and improve your strategy. If your strategy isn’t working for you, you need to tweak it. Look at your analytics and figure out which pieces of your social media marketing are failing you and why. If a certain type of post isn’t doing well, think about tweaking it. If a piece of your content gets a lot of positive attention, try sharing it in a different form like an infographic. A good social media strategy is responsive and dynamic, so consider it a work in progress.

Great tips for crafting an amazing social media strategy! Is there a holy grail digital tool that your company swears by when it comes to social media marketing? Which platforms are performing best for you? Let me know in the comments!

As a sales manager, director or VP, you may occasionally struggle to determine what is stopping your salespeople from meeting your standards.

You want your sales team to succeed, but you might be wondering:

“Is my team reaching their full potential?”

“What is stopping them from being more productive or closing more sales?”

With that in mind, let us talk about 6 common pain points for your salespeople, and along the way, we will also discuss tactics and sales training ideas you can use to help them overcome those pain points.

Biggest Pain Points for Your Salespeople

1. Spending too much time in meetings

While the occasional meeting is understandable and often necessary, bogging your sales team down with too many meetings can be detrimental to their performance.

Think about it like this: Any time your salespeople spend in a meeting is time they could instead be spending selling your company’s products/services to customers.

So when a salesperson is forced to attend a large number of unnecessary meetings, he or she may become frustrated and suffer from lackluster sales results.

To help your salespeople in this area, make sure you only schedule meetings when necessary. Ask yourself whether or not the meeting topic could be better handled as an email. If it could, then you can cancel the meeting, send a quick email and let your salespeople keep doing what they do best: sell.

Also, when you do need to hold meetings, make sure you have a clear schedule/agenda for them and stick to it. Your salespeople should have a good idea of what will be discussed in each meeting and how long the meeting will last so they can plan accordingly.

2. Dealing with too much administrative work

Administrative work is another thing that will keep your salespeople from doing what they do best. That includes tasks like:

• Processing and tracking orders
• Updating the CRM
• Creating sales reports
• Creating presentations
• Making the necessary preparations before talking to customers
• Handling various paperwork

One study showed that salespeople only spent one-third of their work time actually selling. Twenty percent of their time is spent on CRM/administrative work/reporting.

This is a major problem.

It is easy to understand how a lack of time with customers can lead to less-than-impressive sales results.

One solution is to have your salespeople hand over administrative tasks to an administrative assistant. Even if you have to hire a new employee for this role, it could be worth the improved sales you may see as a result.

Another option is to streamline the admin work process. For example, you can ask your salespeople which administrative tasks take up the most time and then create a solution or implement software to help them save time with those specific tasks.

Regardless of what action you choose to take, it is a good idea to open up a conversation with your salespeople on what tasks hold them back from selling more. You might end up discovering it is an easy problem for you to resolve, which results in your salespeople spending more time talking to customers.

3. Handling customer service and/or technical support inquiries

This is another major time-waster for salespeople, and it often happens when they feel they should take ownership of every issue their customer faces. While it is good for salespeople to look out for the best interests of the customer, they must also be willing to delegate when appropriate.

Check in with your salespeople, and make sure they have confidence in the customer service/technical support employees at your company.

Remind them of the process for directing a customer to customer service or support, and see that they implement that process on a regular basis. They should not be spending a great deal of time handling requests that are better suited for another department.

4. Chaotic processes

If your salespeople are struggling with basic tasks, like entering and processing orders, they will struggle to work productively. That is why it is crucial for you to regularly analyze the processes and systems in your sales department to see where you can make improvements.

Figure out if there are certain processes or programs that confuse or slow down your salespeople. If you find that there are, look for simplified solutions. You may even want to bring in a sales logistics expert to make the processes in your sales department more streamlined, thus allowing your salespeople to work more productively.

5. Lack of sufficient training/information

Often, struggling salespeople lack training in one of two areas:

1. Sales
2. Product/service information

When a salesperson does not receive adequate sales training, his sales results will suffer.

You never know – he could be missing a key part of the sales process and might only require a bit of sales training to improve his results drastically.

For example, a salesperson may be struggling to sell because he does not know the correct process for closing a sale. In this instance, you could offer sales training just on how to close a sale that would help improve his sales results.

Salespeople who do not understand the product/service they are selling will find it difficult to sell. Your salespeople should understand the features and benefits of whatever they are selling so, they can communicate those features and benefits to customers confidently.

To help them accomplish this, use your best sales training techniques to make sure every new hire receives training on the products/services they are selling. Also, create a centralized location where they can quickly reference any additional information they might need while talking to customers.

That way, they can easily fill in any knowledge gaps and feel confident enough in their product/service knowledge to close the sale.

6. Lack of qualified leads

If your salespeople cannot obtain qualified leads, they will have a hard time selling. A qualified lead is much more likely to make a purchase than a cold lead.

So, ask yourself whether or not the lead generation tactics at your business are conducive to generating qualified leads. You may want to meet with the marketing team to make sure they are on the same page as the sales department as far as qualifying leads.

Final thoughts

Remember, not every pain point here will necessarily apply to your sales team specifically. As a sales manager, you must always be willing to pinpoint the problems your salespeople are facing.

Talk to your team and find out what is causing them to struggle. Only then will you be able to come up with specific solutions that will help your sales team’s performance.

The post 6 Common Pain Points for Salespeople and How to Solve Them appeared first on SalesDrive, LLC.

Criticism that comes from a boss, via email is quite possibly the worst kind there is, not least of all because the words arrive unaccompanied by the smile or the hand on a shoulder that the critic might use IRL.

One potential solution is for managers to deliver all their feedback in person, and with a giant grin on their face.

Another, easier solution? Use the word "yet" in emails to soften the blow.

That's according to Jocelyn K. Glei, author of "Unsubscribe: How to Kill Email Anxiety, Avoid Distractions, and Get Real Work Done." In an interview with Business Insider, Glei explained why this word works like magic in an email conveying critical feedback.

She cited research by the psychologist Carol Dweck, who is known for her ideas about "fixed" and "growth" mindsets. Someone with a fixed mindset thinks their abilities are innate, and they can't change their strengths and weaknesses. Someone with a growth mindset thinks they can develop new skills through challenge and even failure.

Those who adopt a growth mindset, Dweck has found, are generally better positioned for success.

In her 2014 TEDx Talk, Dweck mentioned a high school in Chicago in which students got the grade "Not Yet" when they didn't pass a course. "You understand that you're on a learning curve," Dweck said. "It gives you a path into the future."

Managers can employ a similar strategy. Glei gave an example of how a boss might use the word "yet" in an email. Instead of saying, "I don't think these designs are where I want them to be," you'd say, "I don't think these designs are where I want them to be yet" (without the italics, of course).

In the first instance, Glei said, the recipient might feel like they failed. In the second instance, it "automatically shifts to this mindset where they are on a timeline, making progress."

The idea is to help cultivate that growth mindset in your employees, so that they don't give up. Instead of interpreting your comments as reflective of their general intelligence and abilities, they'll know that you have confidence that they can try harder and do better.

Ultimately, Glei said, it's all about "keeping people really motivated."

SEE ALSO: Yes, you should be using exclamation points in your emails — here's why

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How to craft the subject of your emails so that people will open them

The concept of freedom is woven into the fabric of the United States. Wars were fought in its name, and politicians frequently toss the term around without much thought about its meaning.

It’s perhaps ironic that the country this year plummeted to 16th on a list ranking countries by economic freedom. For context, the U.S. ranked No. 2 back in 2000 but has since lost ground to countries such as Canada, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

While the U.S. has dropped in the rankings, “economic freedom” is a bit of a nebulous term. It attempts to calculate the degree to which residents of various countries are free to live and conduct business transactions without government interference. The index is based on data from five areas: government size, property rights, sound-money access, international trade regulations, and rules governing business and labor.

Losing Our Freedom

Market issues are the biggest contributors to the United States’ descent down the charts — most notably our government’s failure to protect property rights. This change is driven by government overreach and changing policies related to government takings, eminent domain, and so on.

This pattern is deeply disturbing. We’ve become a nation where governments and politicians choose winners — certain businesses — in the market and provide them with favors. The scales have been tipped at the expense of citizens and consumers.

Diverging Approaches

Proactive avoidance can be helpful in dealing with government overreach, but there are no contracts or investments capable of nullifying sweeping political decisions. Entrepreneurs are left with three options: abide, evade, or alter.

1. Abide: This is more of a “no choice” option. Abiding entrepreneurs take whatever comes their way and react accordingly and as is expected of them. It’s not exactly a way of dealing with the problem, though some entrepreneurs might decide to simply disregard the issue if they feel change is impossible.
2. Evade: Evade is an interesting option because it involves numerous potential strategies. Entrepreneurs attempt to be nimble and keep their options open by renting office space rather than buying it or leasing vehicles rather than purchasing them. This approach might include moving to a different state or country that offers more beneficial institutional frameworks.Herein lies the true danger of diminished economic freedom: Companies could be tempted to leave because of government interference. Why should a CEO invest in a U.S. factory and deal with perpetually shifting regulations when she can instead open a facility in Mexico or Canada?
3. Alter: When political institutions and policies get out of hand, entrepreneurs sometimes choose to become involved in politics. Entrepreneurs generally aren’t well-equipped for political dealings. Instead, they should consider partnering with lobbyists and other political minds to spur change.If all else fails, entrepreneurs can always attempt to buy political favor via campaign contributions. This behavior can rapidly spark a political arms race, as competitors must follow suit or risk being left behind.

Freedom might be one of the core tenets of the U.S., but the country appears to be losing its economic liberty. Research by the Montreal Economic Institute indicates economic freedom facilitates entrepreneurship more than government programs, though many politicians meddle with the market through regulations and incentives. Entrepreneurs are left to accept changes as they come, minimize risk through evasive action, or fight back by altering regulations. As a result, resources that could have benefitted consumers are put to other, lesser uses.

Everyone who knows me knows I’m obsessed with unicorns – not just the magical beasts you’ll often find hanging out near rainbows but marketing unicorns.

What’s a marketing unicorn, you ask? It’s one of those magical campaigns that’s so effective it performs in the top 1-3% of all marketing campaigns.

Marketing unicorns are so special that, even though they’re rare, they end up delivering almost half of the value of your overall marketing efforts. For example, here on the WordStream blog, our top 50 articles drive as much traffic as thousands of others (the marketing donkeys) combined. I call it the Unicorn Marketing Power Law.

This is why it’s so key, as a marketer or business owner, to find your own unicorns and make the most of them. There are unicorns in every corner of the online marketing world – unicorn ads, unicorn blog posts, unicorn webinars, unicorn emails. These are the campaigns with exceptional click-through rates, conversion rates, open rates, and engagement rates.

So if you find a unicorn, CLONE IT! An idea or piece of creative that does well in one online marketing channel is bound to do well in your other marketing channels as well. As I’m always fond of saying, you have to go all in on your unicorns.

I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting with different online marketing strategies this year. Below you’ll find the best of the best – my top 10 favorite online marketing strategies that create and exploit unicorns to give you the best possible bang for your buck.

Check it out and share – I’ll provide a little more detail into each of the 10 strategies, which include strategies for SEO, PPC, content marketing, social media marketing, remarketing, and more, below.

My 10 Most Unicorn-Worthy Online Marketing Strategies

#1. Aim for super-high organic click-through rates

Does organic CTR matter? YES! Now more than ever! If you want to compete in the new SEO reality, you’ve got to raise your click-through rates and other engagement factors. Here’s our process:

• Find content with average or below-expected CTR for its rank
• Ditch boring titles and test emotional, relatable headlines that promise value
• Improve intent match to reduce bounce rate and pogo-sticking
• Bonus: Data indicates raising CTR can move up your rank!

#2. Aim for super-high ad click-through rates

CTR isn’t just important for SEO (duh). It’s also incredibly important for paid ads, because ads with high engagement rates get better placements at a lower cost per click on Google AdWords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads and pretty much every platform. Here’s what you need to know about raising your ad CTR:

• Tactics like Dynamic Keyword Insertion are boring and don’t create unicorn ads
• Ads with the highest CTR focus on four key emotions: anger, disgust, affirmation, and fear
• Bonus: High CTR ads usually have high conversion rates too!

#3. Forget everything you know about conversion rate optimization

Sorry to burst your CRO bubble, but the classic A/B test is a fairy tale – too often, we get super excited about early leads, but they tend to disappear over time. Either the test hadn’t reached statistical significance, or people were responding to novelty, but the effect didn’t last.

Here are a few more CRO truth bombs for you:

• Aggressive CRO often increases lead quantity but reduces lead quality
• To really move the needle, change your offer to something truly irresistible
• Brand familiarity has a massive effect on conversions – so try remarketing!

#4. Remarketing is great … but try Super Remarketing!

Maybe you’ve noticed (ha) that in the current online marketing landscape, it’s harder and harder to get your content noticed. The competition is insanely fierce! That means everyone’s attention is spread thin. But all hope is not lost, aspiring unicorns!

• With a smart social ad strategy you can promote your content to the perfect audience for pennies
• Use social media remarketing to increase engagement by 2X to 3X
• Then step it up with Super Remarketing: the awesome combination of remarketing, demographics, behaviors, and high-engagement content

#5. Hack RLSA for a Unicorn Surge of Leads

Regular old, plain-flavor RLSA is kind of a shell game: You’re basically cherry-picking your cheapest leads from a larger pool. Yes, you save money, but your lead volume is greatly reduced! Most people don’t want that, right? We want more leads AND lower costs.

Here’s how to use RLSA to get both, AKA Operation Unicorn Surge:

• To reduce cost per lead AND increase volume in competitive markets, try Super RLSA!
• Bias people toward your brand by using social ads to dramatically increase the size of your cookie pool

#6. Get your Facebook organic reach back

Newsflash, Facebook organic reach sucks. In fact, we recently discovered it’s even worse than we thought!!

The good news is, you can recover your reach! Here’s how:

• Use preferred audience targeting to target organic posts like ads
• Use Larry’s Unicorn Detector Pyramid Scheme
• Invite people who like your content to follow your page
• Post video content for way higher engagement rates – the key to organic reach

#7. Outsmart your competition!

Try these brilliant competitive advertising strategies:

• Target users whose interests include your competitors
• Disrupt your competitors’ videos with YouTube ads
• Use your competitors’ brand names to keyword target your Gmail Ads
• Download and target your competitors’ Twitter followers

#8. Use social ads to make an impression on influencers

Not a big name yet? No problem!

Here are some crazy awesome ways to use social ads to fool people into thinking you’re a big deal:

• Build awareness of your personal brand by targeting ads at specific employees and specific companies
• Write an awesome guest post for an influencer, then promote and amplify so it makes a splash
• Tag your fave influencer and do an engagement campaign
• Become a trending story on LinkedIn Pulse

#9. Learn how to REALLY run a Twitter lead generation campaign

Forget Twitter’s advice for running lead gen campaigns – it’s totally wrong! Do this instead:

• Twitter Lead Generation Cards look too much like ads and charge you for useless engagements
• Never use automatic bidding – it’s a trap
• Instead, use funny images, emoji, advanced targeting options and don’t forget conversion tracking!

#10. Master the art of Medium publishing

There are insanely good reasons to republish your content on Medium – like reaching a much bigger audience with minimal effort. Here’s how to make the most of the Medium platform:

• Don’t just republish your post – make it go hot! Include a powerful image immediately after the headline

• Promote your post – if you get 200 hearts in a day, your article will trend and pageviews will skyrocket
• Follow people who engage with your content to build your audience

That’s it – my absolute favorite online marketing strategies of the year, all of which I’m going to keep using next year too.

Now go and find your own unicorns!