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The longer you’ve been in sales, the more you might be neglecting sales fundamentals. What’s more, the longer you’ve been in sales, the more you’ve developed old-school ways of selling that may no longer serve you well. There’s a balance to strike between tried-and-true and learning what’s new.

That’s why it’s important to pause and “sharpen the saw” every so often. No matter how experienced you are, there’s always a little tweak that can help you up your game. The worst mistake you can make is to get complacent.

In this broadcast, you’ll get 100 quick tips for sharpening your saw. Some are sales fundamentals that never change. Some are refined techniques. Any one of them could boost your sales effectiveness.

Excerpts from this archived broadcast about sales fundamentals from CONNECT! Online Radio for Sales Professionals^®

 “I like the way Stephen Covey explains it. If you can imagine someone in the forest cutting down a tree using those long saw just going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth trying to get the tree cut down. Imagine now two people or maybe four people with two trees that are being sawed upon, trying to get these two trees to come down. One tree is going to come down sooner than the other and, in fact, it might be the people that have been the most experienced, who have honed their skills and used their tools the longest, it might be that set of individuals who take longer to get the tree down and that’s because they might be working with a dull blade. The saw may not be as sharp as the one next to them….”

“Think of that metaphor if you are, let’s say, an experienced salesperson. You’ve been at this a long time. You have rich skills and experience that helps you make sales.  What does it take to accidentally allow your saw to become dull? It doesn’t take much. Regular use of any tool can cause us have shortcuts and cause us to forget things that we’ve known before. It can cause us to become complacent or over-rely on some of our skills. That translates into not having the sharpest saw.”

“Whereas those eager new sellers come in fresh out of training with lots of enthusiasm… They may actually have a bit of an advantage. So this is all about, no matter what your level at in selling, it’s about sharpening your saw and refining those sales fundamentals occasionally.  ”

There’s more to learn! Tune in to find out more on sales fundamentals and sharpening your saw with Deb Calvert.

This is just the start! Listen to the rest of this no-bull broadcast. There’s no better way to maximize your windshield time than by listening to CONNECT! Online Radio for Sales Professionals^®. We’ll help you cut out continuances, put an end to pending and stop stalling out in sales.

The post Are You So Busy Trying to Sell that You Neglect Sales Fundamentals? appeared first on People First.

There are a lot of titles that are also good team leader skills.Among the most honorable titles in the world, I’d include Mentor and Coach. For me, these come just behind Wife and Mom.

Common Themes Among Good Team Leader Skills

What those four roles have in common include the following:

• These relationships rely heavily on trust.
• Each of these roles bears tremendous responsibilities that shouldn’t be taken lightly.
• People who misunderstand these roles can hurt those who depend on them.
• Sometimes, people take on these roles because they are “supposed to” rather than they want to.
• Most people never get training before taking on these roles.
• Looking back, others may say that the person in this role made a real difference in their life.
• To do well in these roles, it’s important to put the other person’s needs ahead of your own at times.

Sadly, there is one other thing they have in common. None of these terms has a universally accepted definition or standard. The titles mean different things to different people. As a result, the titles and the responsibilities associated with them, are often treated rather casually by the titleholders.

Titles Aren’t Indicative of Actual Good Team Leader Skills, However.

At the same time, the people on the receiving end of these titles may have a more serious meaning they are inferring from the title itself. Here’s an example:

I cross paths frequently with a person who calls himself a business coach. He has no training in the field of coaching, no credential. He is, however, a good listener and idea-generator. He is interesting and has worked with professionals in a variety of industries during his storied career. Naturally, people see him as competent and it makes sense to them to seek out his advice.

Because he doesn’t know better, this colleague “coaches” in a way that is very directive, telling people what to do in the situations they describe to him. His solutions work often enough that he can be considered successful as an advice-giver. Unfortunately, I am aware of two recent examples of his approach backfiring. In one case, the person he “coached” applied his advice and was terminated from her job. She had not told the “coach” all the details of the situation, and he had not asked for those details. In another case, a senior manager expressed frustration that members of his team were becoming overly reliant on this “coach” and going back frequently for advice rather than learning from coaching sessions and developing so they could autonomously make decisions.

In both examples, everyone involved (except the “coach”) was unpleasantly surprised and felt varying degrees of betrayal. The coach’s response was “They’re grown ups, and they need to figure out what to ask for and when.” The expectations were not established and communicated on the front end, and the job description of coach was never clear.

Defining What the Good Team Leader Skills of Coach and Mentor Are

The way I define “Coach” is different from what this colleague does. I would call him a Mentor, not a Coach. Mentors teach what they know and are subject matter experts. Coaches extract what others know and help them to see and apply it in new ways. Coaches promote self-discovery while Mentors promote established practices. Both resources are helpful to anyone looking to grow and develop. But it is important to enter either relationship with common expectations so no one gets led astray.

Knowing the difference is important, but it’s not the main point here.

Making a difference is what both coaching and mentoring are all about.

Being able to understand what the Mentee or Coachee needs and wants to accomplish is an imperative first step. Being able to put their needs ahead of your own will sometimes be necessary – my colleague, for example, has a need to teach what he knows but that is not always what his clients are needing.

Good Team Leader Skills Mean Taking These Roles Seriously

Effective Mentors and Coaches earn their clients’ trust because they do keep the clients best interests in mind. They take their roles very seriously, looking for ways to support and challenge their clients so that the outcome is development. The best Mentors and Coaches have a strong desire to help others, and they do this work because they want to help (not because they have to or feel like it is the next logical step in their career). Because they have a passion for the work of mentoring or coaching, they develop themselves, too, studying the best practices of Coaches and Mentors. They may even pursue a credential or certification to ensure they have had adequate training and skills practice before experimenting on others.

Like the role of Mother or Wife, the role of Coach or Mentor can be deeply gratifying. The investment of yourself in the role and in the people you touch makes a difference. You may not see it right away, but if you’ve done well it will come eventually. Just keep paying it forward.

Next Steps to Increasing Good Team Leader Skills

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 Add These Two to Your List of Good Team Leader Skills! appeared first on People First.

If you managed to land your first 100 customers, congratulations! You’ve already made it further than the majority of startups ever will.

The road to 100 was brutal, but it’s just the beginning. Now, everything’s about to change. What got you here won’t get you there. To make it to 1,000, you’re going to need a new set of skills, strategies, and processes.

It won’t be easy, but it is possible. To prepare your business for 10x growth, you’re going to need to master your metrics, ramp up your sales, and optimize your marketing. Ready? Let’s start at the top.

Master your metrics and segment your data

In their early stages, most startups don’t care about data. Those that do care learn pretty quickly that when they only have 25 customers, metrics aren’t very useful.

Even in the range of 100 to 1,000 customers, you often won’t have enough data to reach statistical significance. It won’t be perfect data, but it’s the best data you have, and that’s much better than just guessing.

Brute force may have gotten you to 100, but it won’t get you to 1,000. As soon as you hit triple-digit customers, all growth should be centered around data.

The five most important startup KPIs

Just like salespeople have a set of core metrics they need to track, so does your startup. Here are the five KPIs you need to focus on to sustainably grow your startup from 100 to 1,000 customers.

1. Churn

Most startups assume churn only tracks the customers who cancel their subscription, but there are multiple types of churn, all of which need to be measured.

2. Lifetime value

The lifetime value metric measures how much revenue you get on average from a customer from the moment they start paying you, to the moment they stop paying you. Like any SaaS metric, there are many ways to calculate LTV, and you can read more here.

3. Acquisition cost

How much do you spend to acquire new customers? Keep in mind that even “free” exposure, like content marketing, has a price tag. Find a way to calculate the cost of the time you invest.

4. Monthly recurring revenue

For an accurate look at your MRR, calculate the following: Profits from upgrades, profits from new buyers, losses from downgrades, and losses from cancellations.

5. Revenue per customer

This is a little different from lifetime value. This metric measures the revenue an average customer will create over different periods of time, including daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annually.

There are hundreds of KPIs you could track and, as your business grows, probably should track. But those five will create a strong foundation to grow your startup from 100 to 1,000 customers.

How to segment your data

To truly unleash the power of your data, you need to segment it into customer groups. For example, if you have a user base in the US and Canada, you’d want to measure the metrics above separately for each location.

Here are the seven most common ways to segment your customer data.

1. Location

The geographical location of a customer. This could be as broad as “country” or as specific as “city”.

2. Industry

The market a customer operates in. For example: Healthcare, marketing, or legal.

3. Size

The overall size of a customer, measured in revenue, customers, or employees.

4. Channel

How a customer found your product. For example: Facebook ads, word of mouth, cold outreach, or content marketing.

5. Frequency of usage

On average, how often is your product used? Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Not at all?

6. Behavioral

What specific problem do your average customers use your product to solve? And which features do they utilize the most? Which do they ignore? What features generate the most support tickets? What features are most requested?

7. Cohorts

Cohorts are customers with specific shared experiences. For example, businesses with 1–15 employees that were founded in the last three years.

Again, those seven segments are just a start. When categorizing your customer base, separate them into as many categories as is relevant for your startup.

Why segmentation matters

Correctly segmenting your data will deliver more actionable insights than just looking at your overall data. Here’s an example of what it might show you:

• Your Canadian customers have a higher lifetime value and lower churn rate.
• They focus primarily on the analytics features in your product.
• You acquired the majority of them through blog posts.

With that information, you’d know the most profitable way to grow your startup would likely be to target the Canadian market with high-quality blog posts highlighting your product’s analytics capabilities.

Product recommendation: If you use a billing system like Stripe or BrainTree, check out ProfitWell. ProfitWell is a powerful, free data tracking and analytics tool which automates much of the process described above.

Ramp up your sales efforts

Most early-stage startups don’t have a dedicated salesperson. Instead, sales outreach is usually handled by the founder(s). Once you hit the 100-customer mark, it’s probably time to hire your startup’s first salesperson.

When it comes to building your first sales team, there are two things you should know.

1. Hire talent, not experience

Your first sales hire shouldn’t be a senior executive; they shouldn’t even be an experienced salesperson. Instead, your first hire should be someone with talent and potential, not an impressive resume.

You want junior reps with less than two years of experience who have the following traits:

• An entrepreneurial spirit
• A balance of competitiveness and compassion
• A high tolerance for rejection
• A desire to learn and be coached

For startup sales, talent trumps experience. Find candidates with potential, give them the opportunity and tools to succeed, and they’ll go far.

2. Stay involved in the sales process

Because you’re hiring junior reps, they’ll need guidance and supervision. That means whoever has been handling sales needs to stay involved in sales. The difference is, instead of being a salesperson, they’re going to be a sales manager.

The first few months should be spent ensuring you can train your team to replicate your results. Once that’s been established, you can take a slightly more hands-off approach, but you should still check in every day.

Can’t wait to get out of sales? It may be awhile. You can consider hiring your first VP of Sales once you’ve hit the 1,000-customer mark but, until then, stay involved.

Take your marketing to the next level

It’s not yet time to make your next marketing hire. Instead, it’s time to build systems and processes. Whoever has been responsible for the marketing so far has probably been doing it the Nike way: they “just did it”.

Develop step-by-step processes that other people can eventually take over, run with and improve upon.

That established, you’ve got two options to scale your marketing: Keep doing what you’ve been doing or start exploring new channels. Let’s take a closer look at each.

Approach #1: Do more of what you’ve already been doing

List all the marketing channels you’ve used to get your current customers, then break down those channels to really understand how they work.

For example, let’s say blogging has yielded good results for you. To better understand this channel, you’d want to:

• Calculate the cost/time it takes to create a post.
• Break down each step of the process.
• Measure how many viewers your average post attracts.
• Measure how many of those viewers eventually become customers.

Then use that data to estimate your customer acquisition costs (CAC). Once you understand your CAC, you can make informed decisions on how to best optimize your existing channels. For example, should you spend more time on blog posts? Less time? Should you outsource it altogether? The data will tell.

In marketing, whatever got you to 100 can get you to 1,000, but you need to understand those channels from top to bottom.

Approach #2: Start experimenting with new channels

Want to expand into new channels? Still don’t hire a new marketing specialist for this role. Marketing generalists are hard to find, and you don’t know enough about your market to hire a specialist.

Instead, run a few small in-house experiments and measure the response. If a channel looks promising but you don’t know how best to use it, seek guidance from colleagues, mentors, and online courses like those available through Digital Marketer.

With the resources available today, it shouldn’t take long for anyone with a basic understanding of marketing to master a new channel.

But keep in mind …

Regardless of the approach, you’re still entering uncharted territory. You might think, “We’re just doing what we’ve always done,” but that isn’t entirely true. You might be in the same channel, but it’s going to require a totally different mindset and methodology. A lot of people who are great at “doing it” aren’t great at building a system around it, and you should approach this as a new skill set.

Click here to secure your free copy of our soon-to-be-released B2B customer acquisition guide for startups!

Focus on THIS to 10X your customer base

If you’ve gotten to 100 customers, you’re in a good place. You’re further than most startups ever get and have a reasonable chance of building something of lasting value. But as your business grows, so will the demands on your time:

• You’ll want to do way too many things.
• Your customers will want you to do way too many things.
• Your network will want you to do way too many things.

There’s going to be an overwhelming amount of stuff on your plate, and it’s easy to get overwhelmed and discouraged when you can’t stay on top of it all.

You’ll have to start saying no to yourself and others in order to stay focused on what really matters: Your customers. The bigger you grow, the louder the noise. Learn to tune it out.

“If you’re competitor-focused, you have to wait until there is a competitor doing something. Being customer-focused allows you to be more pioneering.” — Jeff Bezos

As a founder, it’s your responsibility to prioritize your customers. Start today by reaching out to them; all of them. Find out:

• Why they’re using your product.
• What they like and dislike about it.
• What they want next.

You got your first 100 customers, but it’s those 100 customers that are going to help you get the next 900.

And remember: You’ve already accomplished something great. You’re on your way to something spectacular. Take it one day at a time and don’t get pulled in too many directions. Stay the course and you’ll get there.

Want more actionable advice on getting B2B customers? We'll soon release a guide that covers all that! Click below to secure your free copy!

Recommended resources:

Podcast: How to grow from 100 to 1000 B2B customers
This post was inspired by a conversation Hiten Shah and I had on our podcast, The Startup Chat. Listen to it here!

How to get the first 10 customers for your B2B SaaS startup
In the early stages of your startup? Your business isn’t ready for the strategies above. Start here instead.

Early B2B SaaS growth: How to go from 10 to 100 customers
10 to 100 is one of the first real test of a startup’s sustainability. Learn to pass the test here.

From 1k to 10k customers: 4 steps to scale your B2B startup in new markets
Get ready to go further than you've ever gone before. This is how you achieve 10x growth, or scale your B2B startup from 1k to 10k customers.

The Affordable Care Act has had a massive effect on the US healthcare industry. Consumers want their healthcare insurers to stem increases in premiums, deductibles, and co-pays. And these demands, along with increased enrollment, additional regulatory compliance, and tighter operating budgets have all added to the pressure on healthcare supply chain executives to improve efficiencies.

When healthcare logisticians were asked about the biggest area of opportunity to drive cost out of their supply chain, as part of the 2015 "UPS "Pain in the (Supply) Chain Healthcare Survey," nearly seven in 10 cited "optimizing their transportation costs," and six in 10 checked off "gaining better inventory visibility."

So it's no surprise that those parties across all facets of the healthcare industry are exploring a variety of options to cut costs and boost supply chain efficiencies. Here are three such options — and at the core of each of them is a collaborative model that can help transform your supply chain.

1. GPOs for healthcare providers

Increasingly, healthcare providers are working with group purchasing organizations (GPOs), which use collective purchasing power to get discounts from vendors, ultimately saving their members money and introducing efficiencies. GPOs can be especially beneficial for midmarket companies that don’t have the same bargaining power as enterprise-level companies.

In using GPOs, “some healthcare providers are seeking to reduce their inbound and outbound transportation costs," says Todd Ebert, president and CEO of the Healthcare Supply Chain Association, a trade organization that represents 14 regional and national healthcare GPOs. "Others are looking at evolving their supply chains from just focusing on materials to considering a broad range of issues, including the entire lifecycle of the product.”

GPOs also help make the most of the cost of healthcare supplies by providing consulting services to their healthcare provider members. For example, GPOs educate them about how products can drive the most value, including storage, labeling, and product usage recommendations. They even analyze product data and make use of recommendations to support improved patient outcomes. And they also may include the services of a reliable third-party logistics provider, such as UPS, that contributes special expertise to the healthcare industry.

According to the Healthcare Supply Chain Association, GPOs save hospitals and freestanding nursing homes 10% to 15% off their purchasing costs annually. Overall, this means GPOs help hospitals save up to $33 billion each year through lower product prices.

2. Space sharing and transportation cost management

On the other side of the equation are healthcare manufacturers. They’re facing the same supply chain challenges as their customers.

“Unfortunately, most suppliers have been slow to react to changes in the healthcare supply chain, which is moving from a push to a pull model,” says Gerry Romanelli, executive vice president of business development at TRIOSE Inc., a non-asset-based logistics provider specializing in managed solutions for hospitals and health systems nationwide.

“We’re seeing forward-thinking manufacturers looking at ways to share ‘space’ with customers or even non-healthcare traditional distribution models,” he adds. “Many are looking for ways to eliminate trunk stock and oversupply on hospital shelves.”

Strategies for sharing space can include storing inventories directly on hospital campuses, Romanelli says. Manufacturers are also reducing their inventories by handing off product sooner to speed ownership-transfer cycles and decrease touchpoints in their supply chains. When manufacturers deliver a product earlier to the customer, they get paid sooner.

Traditionally, transportation costs have been higher than they might be, with staff that order materials frequently requesting urgent deliveries when not necessary. “They are partnering with companies like TRIOSE and UPS to help control inventory and optimize the mode of delivery to eliminate waste,” Romanelli says. In other words, if it’s not needed urgently, it won’t arrive by UPS Next Day Air.

3. Price/data transparency

Many healthcare manufacturers are using data to collaborate with their customers and GPOs on a deeper level. One way is price/data sharing because it helps to validate any gains made in cost efficiencies and ultimately leads to better price transparency. If manufacturers have better visibility into supply chain costs, they also have insight into what their partners — such as suppliers — can do to lower their costs, such as transportation, raw materials, and even their own suppliers.

“Some suppliers are offering to operate with a model of total transparency to help reduce the overall cost of operations,” says Chris McDown, senior vice president of sourcing operations for Vizient Inc., a GPO and performance-improvement consulting firm for healthcare providers.

Vizient has seen some suppliers offer to operate within this model of total transparency, which provides greater visibility into the costs of their operations. In one example, a supplier collaborated with Vizient on behalf of a group of the GPO's members and established a baseline of the total costs associated with their product and service. Then the supplier agreed to partner with this group to share a percentage of any cost improvements they realized together.

This approach incentivized the members to work in collaboration with the supplier to find efficiencies that lowered supply chain operations costs. This initiative has proved to be very successful for that supplier and those members and demonstrates again the cost savings that can come from collaboration across the supply chain.

But the quest for greater efficiency isn’t all about the supplier swallowing the biggest pain pill, McDown says. “The approach has incentivized the members to work in collaboration with the supplier to find efficiencies that lower supply chain operational costs,” he notes.

In this new era of healthcare complexities, finding ways to increase supply chain improvement has become a necessity. And it requires true collaboration between providers and manufacturers — all in the name of improving healthcare delivery to increase value to patients and lower costs.

Discover what it takes to achieve a flexible and efficient supply chain. 

This post is sponsored by UPS. To read more from UPS, click here.

Join the conversation about this story »

In an increasingly competitive online marketplace, average websites don’t make much of a difference. Consumers are looking for a buying experience that’s special.

Whether it’s a unique product or a service in demand, sales will still suffer if the site provides anything less than a satisfying user experience. Many businesses are drawing plenty of traffic, but losing 95 percent of sales.

In a digital world, your website is your primary marketing tool. A well designed website draws more quality leads and provides greater visibility for your business. But a poor website leads to missed opportunities that rivals may capitalize on.

What follows are some productive strategies you can use to enhance the user experience on your site, and with it the chances of converting more visitors to sales.

Responsive Design

One important consideration is whether your site is mobile-friendly. The majority of mobile users search for products and services online, or do price comparisons in making the final decision. Websites that are too slow to load on phones or tablets, or too ungainly to display, will have mobile users quickly moving on. The last thing you want is to frustrate users by forcing them to do a lot of zooming or scrolling on their small screens.

That’s potentially millions of leads you could be losing. Having your pages built in a responsive design means that they can detect what device/OS is accessing them and adjust accordingly, whether it’s a Windows laptop or an Android phone. Creating a responsive site may take some extra money and effort, but if you’re appealing to a larger portion of users, you’ll be getting more conversions.

Address the Need

When most people decide to purchase from you, it isn’t just because your product looks good or the price is a good deal. They buy because the product or service fills a need in their lives. Lists of features and benefits help to establish value, but what clinches the sale is clearly pointing out that your product fills an emotional need.

If you’re selling home insulation, don’t focus on the quality of the insulation, but on how it can save money on energy bills. Gather feedback from your customers to see what need they are trying to fill. Request and analyze customer testimonials so you figure out WHY they decided to purchase. Use these testimonials to demonstrate how you deliver on that need. The buying decisions of 88 percent of users are based on testimonials.

Include a CTA (Call to Action)

Many websites make the mistake of just giving a sales pitch but no sense or urgency. A good CTA prompts the visitor to follow through on the selling you’ve done. A CTA should tell the customer exactly what they should do next, such as making a call or submitting a form.

To make it even more immediate and convenient, this next step should be coded into a CTA button. Click-to-call or click-to-chat buttons could connect users with your sales team in a second or two. The CTA button should be clearly displayed and feature a clear, compelling message like “Call now for discounted price!” or “Let’s do it!”.

Test your CTA buttons

Boring CTA buttons are easily ignored. As suggested here you can try varying the text, style, and color as you please. Do some experimenting to find out what works best. This can be in the form of A/B testing, where you use two variations at once to see which is driving more conversions; for instance a yellow button on one page and a blue button on another. Fancy borders, intriguing backgrounds, or unusual shapes can also make a button stand out.

You could also use imaging buttons and a bit of JavaScript roll-over action to transform the button to another image that conveys reward or provides additional inspiration through new slogans or incentives.

If you want to make the most of these ideas, don’t focus on selling a product; focus on providing emotional value to the customer. Your conversions will be much higher if you can connect on a personalized level with your customers. The more engaging you make the website experience, the more likely they are to follow up on your offer.

Businesses have come a long way from implementing conventional methods for successful operation and completion of tasks. With the evolution technology, various tools are increasingly being implemented to make the processes swifter and more efficient. This has helped in improving the productivity of businesses considerably.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of these tools that many businesses have benefited from. The rise of automation and machine learning have powered the increased adoption of artificial intelligence by businesses.

We are already using Artificial Intelligence in our daily lives. One of the common examples is Apple’s Siri, a digital assistant that can make calls, perform Internet searches, play songs, send messages and so on for us. AI has turned out to be an indispensable tool for all. Let’s take a look at the ways in which AI will transform businesses.

Increased Efficiency

The concept of robots is based on Artificial Intelligence. Deploying these robots to complete business tasks could mean that more work will be accomplished in less time. Additionally, the algorithm will ensure complete accuracy. AI can be used to complete the routine and repetitive tasks that do not require creativity. This will help in speeding up processes.

This will free up enough time to focus on other critical tasks that may require more manpower. For example, those in sales can spend more time in interacting with their clients face-to-face and closing deals instead of spending that time for completing paperwork.

Enhanced Predictive Analysis

By deploying Artificial Intelligence, companies can perform predictive analysis of various requirements based on the data collected and generate products accordingly. Based on this idea, the engine business of GE aircraft shifted its business model to selling engines as a service from selling machinery.

Along these lines, partner director of engineering and machine learning at Microsoft Corporation, Debi Mishra pointed out, “The primitive maintenance prediction of these aircraft engines and the data on these engines is an incredible intellectual property. You take the data and analytics it generates, you take care of the maintenance, and all of that is something you can package, and then you are selling that as a service.”

This effect could also transform the e-commerce industry. For example, retailers can create new products based on the customers’ design preferences and purchasing history. “Imagine a world in which as you interact with what’s available in the inventory on an e-commerce site, you’re telling the commerce site what you’re interested in,” said scientist, Babak Hodjat, “By virtue of that interaction, you’re actually enabling the system to come up with a design that can be 3-D printed and be completely custom designed for you.”

Solving Problems

While solving customers’ problems is one of the primary goals of business, many fresh queries and problems stand in their ways to arrive at the solutions. Every business process is accompanied by a series of concerns and doubts. This is where smart technologies like AI can come in handy. A self-learning and self-configuring system can help in coming up with the necessary solutions, thus reducing the burden on the employees.

One of the best examples is IPsofts’s Amelia which is an Artificial Intelligence platform. Amelia can interact, understand and learn just like a human being in order to solve problems. She can apply context to understand the differences among the various uses of a single word to understand its implied meaning.

“At present the effects of IPsoft’s Amelia are largely being felt by larger companies which are the first to adopt and implement new systems and embrace a shift in working practice,” commented Jonathan Crane, CCO of Ipsoft.

Adding Value to Wireless Networks

With the implementation of AI, the effort that goes into the support and management of wireless systems can be reduced. AI can allow the companies providing apartment WiFi, WiFi for businesses etc. to monitor the network, analyze real-time performance, comprehend normal operation and devise solutions to any problems that may arise.

One of the best examples of this is the new WiFi router that has been launched which can interact with other Google WiFi routers to modulate the strength of the wireless network for providing the best coverage to the connected devices.

Owing to its various benefits, AI has become extremely valuable for a number of industries and it is expected to revolutionize the way we do business.

Few people have more experience with CEO successions than Ram Charan. For more than three decades, Charan has been involved in CEO searches in the United States, China, Japan, India, Brazil, and Europe, as a director, an adviser, or a member of the selection committee. Charan recently shared best practices on CEO selections in an article for HBR, The Secrets of Great CEO Selection. In a telephone interview, edited and condensed below, Charan shared how the succession process doesn’t end the moment a new chief executive is appointed: setting your CEO up for success is as important as finding the right CEO in the first place.

HBR: You’ve written about how directors must not assume the succession process is complete once the new executive takes over. Can you elaborate?

Charan: In almost all cases, people coming into the CEO job have not ever had the CEO experience. For most, it is a quantum leap to go from a division or function to being the CEO of an entire company. Therefore, to set a new CEO up for success, the first thing they will need is context on the big picture, perhaps with the exception of CEOs who have already been on the board, or somebody who has been a CEO of a similar, but smaller, company — these people already understand the landscape.

But for those who are coming from a divisional function, the content of the job has changed overnight. And that content needs a very wide cognitive bandwidth, because a large part of the job is dealing with externals and outside scrutiny — this is often the first time a CEO deals in a very real way with shareholders, with the board, with being a corporate representative for customers, for the government, and for international governments. The complexity of the job and the coordination activities are exponentially different. The time demands are huge. CEOs must figure out which way to take the business, which critical issues to focus on, and how to get commitment from both inside and outside the company.

People spend their entire careers preparing for this job, but until you are in the saddle, you really don’t know how well prepared you are for the task at hand.

How can new CEOs get the support they need to make this quantum leap?

Insight Center

CEOs need to become much more aware of what assistance, coaching, problem-solving skills, additional networks, and wisdom are necessary to move forward. Most CEOs are intelligent people with a good track record. They’re keen and ambitious. So, have some faith in them. It’s not a good idea for the board to be imposing about who should be a mentor, a consigliere, or a coach. Let the new CEO decide what he or she needs — their effectiveness will be heavily dependent on the people they surround themselves with. I have enough evidence — over 50 years’ worth — that this approach works.

You’ve written about how it’s important to accept that every CEO pick will have weaknesses, and that ensuring a CEO’s success requires acknowledging that you have to plan for their imperfections. What are some of the things boards can do to account for some of those weaknesses upfront?

There is no such thing as a perfect person. But ask yourself: What are the real skills and talents of this person, and how does this fit with the job requirements at the moment?  Then, ask what’s preventing this person from succeeding. Once you know the answer to that, there are a number of ways to work at the problem. The most effective way is to have one of the CEO’s direct reports compensate for areas of weakness. Keep in mind that this person has to be a very trusted person, whose ambition is not to create instability for the CEO.

A second option is to find a board director who is sincere, who has the right expertise, whose ego is contained, and who knows he’s not running the company, who can become a sounding board. And sometimes, you need to find a trustworthy third party who can be an unbiased sounding board.

What happens when a board begins to worry that they’ve made a mistake in hiring a CEO? How much of a grace period should a new CEO get?

This is a major issue. And there are really two issues at play here. First, a mistake was made. Second, a change has to be made. And the board has to deal with both.

Let’s start with the mistake that’s been made. In most boards, there are usually one or two directors who are first able to detect that a mistake has been made. But they proceed cautiously and don’t talk about it in the board room until more evidence emerges. Instead, they watch for signals that the CEO’s presentations about performance don’t align with actual performance numbers. Then, they watch for the CEO to signal to the media about low performance metrics. Here, the board chairman has a huge responsibility to be a liaison to the CEO, to build a trustworthy relationship, and see how the board can help. In doing so, of course, they can find out if maybe the CEO is just not a good fit. And once this idea begins to roll in the minds of one or two directors, others will begin to see it. Most of the time, a board will want to give clearer goals to the CEO about what is expected, and wait one more years to see results, during which they begin to come to conclusions about whether to extend the contract or to let the CEO go. It takes most boards about two years to cut their losses.

Should someone on the board be raising issues with CEOs more quickly, and more directly?

Every business is complex. Boards of directors, in most cases, meet four to six times a year. They’re often not full-time directors. Many lead directors are external chairmen, and are not quite investing the time that they’re supposed to invest.  Most directors don’t know the business that well. So it takes some time to make major decisions like whether or not to let a CEO go. But the board is ultimately accountable for and responsible for these decisions.

Growth in Southeast Asia's biggest economy is accelerating.

Underpinned by strong economic reforms, the improving outlook is attracting increasing amounts of foreign money. And with a weak currency potentially providing an attractive entry point, it could be time for investors to take a closer look. 

Here are the key numbers you need to know:

_{Sources: 1. CIA World Factbook, July 2016 | 2. The World Bank, World Integrated Trade Solution database | 3. Statista | 4. Bloomberg, October 2016 | 5. World Federation of Exchanges}

If you’re looking to access the Indonesian market, consider the iShares MSCI Indonesia ETF (EIDO), or broaden your search to other countries.

EXPLORE: Research other countries in the Worldviews series

MORE: Here's one central bank with plenty of dry powder

READ: Indonesian stocks' greatest weakness may now be their greatest strength

This post is sponsored by iShares^® by BlackRock^®.

Visit www.iShares.com or www.BlackRock.com to view a prospectus, which includes investment objectives, risks, fees, expenses and other information that you should read and consider carefully before investing. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal.

International investing involves risks, including risks related to foreign currency, limited liquidity, less government regulation and the possibility of substantial volatility due to adverse political, economic or other developments. These risks often are heightened for investments in emerging/developing markets and in concentrations of single countries.

The iShares Funds are distributed by BlackRock Investments, LLC (together with its affiliates, “BlackRock”).

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Research about productivity teaches us one clear lesson: Multitasking doesn't work.

So what are busybodies of the 21st century to do? 

According to users on the question-and-answer site Quora, there are a range of daily behaviors people can tweak — even just slightly — to free up lots of extra time during the week.

Get ready to be your most efficient self.

SEE ALSO: 11 habits the most influential people share

Automate as many of your daily tasks as possible, so you can focus on bigger things.

"Let's see what are the things you could automate:

-Don't love going to the grocery store every week? Use Instacart

-Don't love going to the gas station every week? Use FuelPanda (Disclosure: I am a co-founder)

-Don't love cleaning your house every few weeks? Use Handy

-Don't love cooking every day? Try different Food delivery services

-Don't love washing clothes? Use Washio

-Don't love doing small online errands? Use Fancy Hands

-Don't love paying bills? Use Auto pay on your account

-Don't love thinking about what to wear each day? Wear the same type of dress every day

Once you automate everything that you don't love, then the rest is beautiful!"

-Pavan

Follow the "Two-minute rule": If something takes very little time, just get it done.

"If you can do something (like replying to an email, or a house chore) in 2 minutes, do it now. Planning it for later, remembering it, doing it in the future will take 5 minutes or more."

-Marius Ursache

Think of your ability to make good decisions as a limited resource, because that's what it is.

"Don't think that willpower will help you when you get in trouble. Make important decisions in the morning and automate everything possible (delegate, batch etc.). US presidents don't have to choose their menu or suit color every day — otherwise their willpower will be depleted at that late hour when they should push (or not push) the red button)."

-Marius Ursache

There is a graphic which circulates the internet, listing TEN REASONS employees stay with a company.

All these attributes sound very noble. The term “employee engagement” sums up all 10 words. Certainly, your company’s staff can identify with some of these attributes. But how many of you out there can attest that your employees feel all 10?

This is part of a bigger question we at gothamCulture often ask: “How do we help companies elevate their performance to this new level?” A final question is, “How do we make it stick?”

gC endorses Lean methodology. Lean is a common sense approach to increase customer satisfaction, decrease costs, and improve the quality of products and services, concurrently. In order to accomplish this, organizations must create full transparency and be clear about what drives their overall performance.

Where most organizations fail is that they don’t consider the workforce. For those of you in early discussions on Lean, I’ve created the graphic below to describe what you need to make your workforce think more Lean, and substantially improve your company’s performance.

The central horizontal pillar is what your organization does—your core competency. It may not be a smooth process to start. Lots of distinct steps. But one of the best ways to improve it is to ask your workforce, in a facilitated manner, what it will take to do so. The best part is this: It costs you NOTHING.

When management is looking for improvements, they’re typically looking for fewer, bigger initiatives which can be project managed from the top down. Smaller, more sustainable improvements come from the bottom up.

Start Thinking Lean:

1. Pick a process to focus on. Product quality results from a strong process. If you improve the process, you cannot help but improve the product. Quality gets built in, not added on.
2. If you can involve the people who work on your processes daily, with coming up with ideas for changing the process, they will feel empowered and trusted and valued.
3. You have to set up a simple feedback loop so people know their ideas are being considered. It can be a suggestion box or a fancy website. But it must be transparent.
4. Ideas should be vetted by management, but only after the 1^st level supervisor goes through them with the team and makes an initial decision.
5. Ideas don’t need to be limited to just your location or from other locations.
6. Employee recognition is the key to priming the pump and keeping the ideas coming!

“Simple enough, so why don’t companies get there?” The biggest hurdle may be nothing more than the word LEAN itself!

Previously, I’ve written about barriers that can keep an organization from adopting Lean. When you tell your workforce that you’re looking into a Lean initiative, their first thoughts may be on headcount reductions or budget restrictions. Lean could be interpreted as meaning “no fat” or “trimmed”.

In theory, Lean means “no more than you need to have / an ideal amount.” At gC, we call our Lean initiatives “Prime”. The term ‘prime’ has wonderful connotations which empower organizations we help:

1. of first importance; main. (prime effort)
2. of the best possible quality; excellent.
3. a state or time of greatest strength, vigor, or success in a person’s life. (prime of life)
4. make (something) ready for use or action, in particular. (prime a pump)
5. prepare (someone) for a situation or task, typically by supplying them with relevant information.

How to Get Lean

Specify Value: Know who your customer is and what they consider value-adding.

Map the Value Stream: Start with the first touch point in your process, and work all the way to the final customer. How long does it take to add value? Identify everything else as waste.

Establish Flow: Remove wastes and harmonize the time to produce through workload leveling and standard work. Eliminate bottlenecks as they appear and shift.

Implement Pull: Once flow is created, start to produce only what is needed to the customer’s tact. Do not do extra. Build quality in and eliminate rework.

Work to Perfection: A lean journey is never complete. Reexamine, refine, re-implement.

The heart of Lean methodology is to decrease waste, so we must have the proper metrics in place to measure the effectiveness. If you’re still at a loss on what to track, I propose that Return on Invested Capital becomes the single, best, top-level metric you can use today.

By following these five steps and tracking the proper KPI’s to measure your progress, your company can reduce waste, increase performance, and successfully adopt a Lean methodology. But don’t forget about the people side of the equation in the process. Make your people the PRIME focus of your lean effort.

To make the kinds of strategic decisions that will grow their firms, professional services executives continually have to play budget tug-of-war: what stays? what goes? That’s why when it comes time to making marketing spend decisions, it’s critical to know what B2B marketing strategies really contribute to new business growth.

In a recent Hinge study on Visible Expertsâ„ , we found that B2B marketing strategies that raise the spectrum of visibility are the most effective at bringing in new business.

What are these strategies?

• Link Earning
• Social media
• Speaking engagements
• Networking
• Email marketing

Although each strategy helps build visibility in different ways, it’s important to pay attention to how they work together. The efficacy of these methods in raising your visibility is directly tied to how interconnected they are.

Let’s take a deeper look at each B2B strategy.

1: Link Earning

Simply put, link earning is the process of associating your thought leadership and educational content with other reputable websites. By encouraging others to link to your content (or share it), you drive traffic and boost your website’s authority—and, your firm’s visibility.

Search engines love shared content, and their algorithms account for the extent to which link building (which I really think of as link earning) is taking place. Over time, this kind of organic linking has an upward effect on your web authority, and is rewarded by search engines giving your site higher page ranking.

There are two basic approaches for earning links: guest posts, and shareable content.

Guests posts are just that: your blog posts or articles, published on another firm’s blog or online publication. By placing a link back to your own website within the content of your guest post, you create links back to your site and, in turn, build visibility with a relevant, extended audience.

Shareable Content is content that can be easily shared online. What makes one piece of content more shareable than another? There are actually four kinds of content that fall into the “most likely to be shared” category:

• Lists: Content with titles that suggest some sort of list or prioritization is widely popular. After all, who doesn’t need help prioritizing? First, lists tend to be succinct and easy to scan. Also, lists feel valuable and the person reading (and sharing) them feels they, too, are adding value by sharing. Through testing, we’ve found the most effective, optimal lists are ones between a few to five entries. If you need to list more than five things, then 10 is a widely recognized and accepted number. However, the point isn’t so much the number of items on the list, rather the list itself. Content written in a list format tends to get widely shared and generates a lot of links back to you. Win-win.
• Research: Content based on research is also very shareable. Whether you produce a post about your own research or are citing someone else’s research, this type of content has a healthy following because it’s often the chance to showcase a new opinion, a provocative angle on an established theory or even new evidence around a slightly more controversial topic.
• Opinions: This type of content lets you express your opinion on recent or current events, like a news story that is well-known to the public. If you are fortunate enough to have news that aligns with your area of expertise, even better. Opinion-based content is a great opportunity to contribute both your content and your opinion on a highly relevant and timely topic, which tends to be linked to and shared widely. Nothing makes readers happier—and more willing to share—than finding someone else with a similar opinion.
• Videos: Because video is such a compelling way to humanize your expertise, it’s an extremely popular kind of content to share and garner you links. Video is also very engaging. It provides a nice break from all the reading executives have to do on a daily basis. And with the technological capabilities of today’s smart phones, videos are within reach of just about anyone. Less formal than a firm overview video, casual blog-type videos are easy to create and a great way to capture interest and create a flood of links back to your firm’s website.

2: Social Media

One of the biggest benefits of social media is that it’s just like networking, but without the scheduling conflicts, cost considerations, or geographic barriers. In today’s world, social media is online networking and among the top B2B marketing strategies that win new business.

How?

Consider some of our recent research findings:

• 60% of professional services buyers check you out on social media before they buy from you. Primarily via LinkedIn, but don’t rule out other social channels, as they are increasingly a credible part of the professional services story and buyers are relying on these channels more and more to determine if you are the expert for them.
• 17% of non-client referrals come from social media. That’s referrals from people who have never worked with you, but know about you via your online presence, which includes your website and yes—your social media presence.
• 18% of professional services millennials, between the ages of 25 and 34, won’t even refer a provider who is not active on social media. And considering the fact that millennials are soon going to dominate the workforce, this percentage is sure to grow.

Bottom line: You will get more referrals and potentially win more new business if you are on social media, but you stand to lose out if you aren’t on social media.

3: Speaking Engagements

In our own research, we found that 9 out of 10 of Visible Experts use speaking engagements as a marketing tool. And often, it’s one of their most effective B2B marketing strategies for building visibility and winning new business. In fact, almost one–third of all non-client referrals stem from speaking engagements.

There are several ways to uncover speaking opportunities. To start, search online for industry events that match your expertise, which is something most professional services executives probably do already. But you can also reverse engineer your search by looking at your competitors. Go to their websites and looking at any past or upcoming events where they are scheduled to speak. It is a great way to uncover events that could be of interest to you, particularly if those events are putting your competitor in front of your target audience.

4: Networking

Let’s turn our attention back to networking. Although social media is an important networking tool, traditional networking is still critical. More than 8 out of 10 firms have received a referral from someone they have not worked with, so increasing your visibility through networking—one way or another—is another key to building visibility and winning new business.

The first rule of networking is to make sure to do your due diligence. Who will be attending? Who was a speaker last year? Who is speaking this year? Pre-planning lets you be ready to add value when you talk to these folks, create a memorable impression and to grow your network.

The second rule is that the networking experience can’t be about you. It must be about what other people attending the event get out of meeting you. Rather than asking for referrals, focus on the value others will take away from having met you. This experience is what will lead all those new contacts to remember you when their peers ask, “Do you know anyone who does [insert your specialty here]?” Your new contact will be far more likely to remember the conversation they had with you if you make yourself valuable—and your expertise visible—while networking.

5: Email Marketing

Last but not least—email. Often considered a necessary evil, email is a viable, and very powerful, tool for building visibility, especially if you approach your emails strategically and with your end-user in mind.

There are two types of emails to consider:

1. Educational emails provide content that is meant to be informative. These emails give something of value to the reader without asking for anything in return. Because educational emails are highly valued by your audience, they should make up about 80% of the emails that you send out.

1. Offer emails are for when you want the recipient to do something, such as download a presentation or paper, and you are hoping to move them to a deeper level of engagement. Whether this engagement is a meeting or trying out one of your services, you want them to take a specific next step.Although offer emails should account for the other 20% of emails, you wouldn’t want to send these until you’ve created value for your audience. And offer emails should only go to folks who have already downloaded several pieces of your content. Unless specifically requested, you absolutely would not want an offer email to be sent to someone you just met at a networking event.

Here are a few tips we’ve discovered for highly effective email marketing:

• Ensure the look and feel of your email reflects your brand at every touchpoint.
• Ensure they are mobile friendly.
• Segment your distribution list so you can be strategic about which emails go to which list.
• Remember the 80/20 rule. No matter how many or how few emails you send out, the balance of them (80%) should be educational, while the remainder (20%) are offers.
• Make sure you have a way for people to unsubscribe.
• Consider the subject line carefully. To encourage high open rates, go with 40 characters or less, and be very clear. Subject lines aren’t the time to be too clever or leave too much up to the reader’s imagination. Just say what the email is about. Trust us, the payoff will be there.
• Lastly, be aware that there are certain trigger words that can send your email straight into the spam or junk folder. Words like “cheap” or “sale,” and sometimes even “free,” when placed in the subject line can signal the email is spam and it won’t get through the filter.

____

By following these five B2B marketing strategies, you will be well on your way to building real visibility and growing your business.

Have you used any of these five B2B marketing strategies? We’d love to hear how they worked for you in the comments.

By Mark Schaefer

I get a lot of requests every day from people who want to “pick my brain.”

I can’t possibly spend so much time giving free advice, and yet I’m a softie who hates to tell people “no!” So I created a place on my site where people can buy an hour of my time and get instant marketing advice for a small amount of money. This decision has had two results.

First, indeed it works! 90 percent of the people who seek free advice from me go away and I can still be kind about it.

Second, the 10 percent who sign up because they value my time has provided an endlessly fascinating challenge. It’s fun working with so many diverse businesses and a dizzying array of marketing problems. While this is not part of my core revenue stream, it allows any business owner or fan from the blog to get a piece of my time. And I enjoy staying touch with people in the “marketing trenches.” It’s a way for me to learn, too.

Most of the time, the core issue these business leaders face boils down to one problem: There are so many overwhelming marketing options, they don’t know where to start. I’ve been offering this service for more than three years and I have a 100 percent success rate at helping people get on track.

Here’s my secret to success:

I demonstrate that there really aren’t that many marketing options at all. In fact, most of the time your market strategy is dictated to you and you have little or no choice about what you need to do grow your business.

The dictated marketing strategy

Every good marketing strategy begins with research and data. And the first task should be a comprehensive study to determine where you fit in your market eco-system. I help businesses think through factors like:

Competitive position. Are you the leader? A follower? A disrupter? Do people buy from you because you’re the only option?

The way you go to market is often pre-determined, in part, by the position you occupy in the marketplace. For example, Chevy has been running comparison ads against the market leader in truck sales, Ford. That is a classic approach for a company that is a follower, but usually not something you would do as a leader.

Rules of engagement. Are your competitors killing each other with discounts and aggressive sales strategies (like car dealers), or is there a country club-like atmosphere where each company has found a way to co-exist (like dentists)?

Entry barriers. Is there a high threat of constant technological disruption (like in retail) or a low one (like the timber industry). Is it easy to start a company to compete with you, or is there a high barrier from costs, patents, infrastructure, etc.?

Source of growth. Is your growth coming from organic demand (like global smartphone sales) or by taking marketshare in a fairly fixed or declining marketplace (like milk consumption).

Speed of innovation. Is your profitability tied to the ability to constantly iterate and create new products (like food and packaging), or is to eke out profits by focusing on business efficiency (like generic drugs).

Customer acquisition. How do you acquire your customers today? Is that changing? Is there room for innovation? Do your competitors have a digital presence? Is personal selling a critical component? Advertising? Is SEO the key to growth?

Regulatory environment. Do laws and regulations dictate how you can go to market (like wealth advisors) or is it an open market (like yoga instructors).

Supply chain and distribution channels. Are there opportunities to gain a competitive advantage through new ways to create your product and fulfill orders? In my case, I have innovated by giving people access to trusted marketing advice at a push of a PayPal button. Amazon is an example of a business growing through supply chain and distribution innovation. Whatever company is first with drone deliveries will certainly have an edge.

Finding your “beacon”

The general areas you need to explore vary according to the structure of your industry, but by walking through these factors, it quickly becomes apparent that your marketing options are not arrayed like a complex spider web. No, they look more like an illuminated beacon at the end of a runway! The fact is, for most businesses, there are only one or two ways to go. For my customers, discovering this truth is liberating!

The real complexity may come in on the execution side. How do you choose to innovate and enact the strategy once you have focused on your primary option?

But in terms of WHAT you do, it’s probably not as complicated as you think. Focus on where you can actually maneuver in your marketplace, rather than on the large number of options that probably won’t make a material difference to your business.

What do you think about these ideas? What am I missing that would help explain the dynamics in your business?

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world.  Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon. 

Illustration courtesy Flickr CC and Ben Garney.

The post Your marketing strategy is not a decision. It’s decided for you appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

        

Comments

• By: LUSH #KeepItOn – #CBUS111: Content Creation by LUSH #KeepItOn – #CBUS111: Content Creation
• Really a superb point Ana. Thank you SO MUCH for contributing ... by Mark W. Schaefer
• The problem that I usually come across, when advising ... by Ana Isabel Canhoto
• Awesome, glad I could help! by Mark W. Schaefer
• The structure that you added to the process makes a lot of ... by Eisaiah Engel

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Many startup companies are intimidated by the idea of courting high-profile companies. It is actually very important to try and make your brand known to large enterprises because having high-profile clients can lead to more exposure and better sales.

The cybersecurity industry has simply never been more relevant. The reality is that cybersecurity is an area that touches all facets of life and business because cyber threats can occur in any digital setting. One only has to look to the many high-profile data breaches that have happened in recent years to understand how important it is to take proper security measures. Many of the companies that have been attacked actually had expensive and sophisticated digital security measures in place. However, those measures simply weren’t enough. This is why large enterprises are so important if you own a cybersecurity startup company. These enterprises are always looking for innovative companies that offer something different than what is already on the table. There are some key reasons why you shouldn’t skip big businesses as you try to build a client base. Aiming high could help you to turn your startup company into a staple in the IT world. The bottom line is that marketing dollars spent on attracting big companies won’t be wasted.

An Opportunity to Be Seen as an Innovator

Coming in as the underdog or the new kid on the block is a great strategy when you’re trying to break into the tech world. If you offer cybersecurity options, it can definitely be hard to compete with the big brands out there. However, positioning your brand to be seen as an outside voice is a smart strategy because people are always looking for solutions that come from outside the box. You can court clients based on the fact that your enterprise offers innovative strategies that have never been done before. This will add value to your brand because potential clients may find that the solutions you offer solve problems and provide tools that current solutions simply don’t. In addition, the ability of a startup company to offer great service and personalized attention can make that company seem very attractive to wary IT managers who are tired of dealing with faceless representatives from popular cybersecurity firms.

Exposure

Having one high-profile client can really open doors. Taking the time and effort to heavily pursue high-profile clients is a worthwhile endeavor that can pay off generously. The reality in the tech industry is that hype is a big deal. Companies are always looking over their shoulders to see what competitors are doing. If one major company or enterprise chooses to go with a startup company, this will definitely make others sit up and take notice. In fact, you might say that closing a deal with a big brand is one of the best forms of advertising you could possible hope for as a startup company. This is why it’s important to be as flexible as possible while negotiating with high-profile clients early in the game. Making a deal with a big company early in the game should be seen as a way to elevate your profile instead of just a method of making money.

Financial Incentives

The bottom line is that big companies and enterprises have the capacity to pay out large amounts of money to the companies they work with. Signing a cybersecurity contract with a few large enterprises would be enough to keep most startup companies in the position to stay in business and grow. This is an important thing to keep in mind as you court large businesses. While they may not be willing to sign a large contract with a startup company that’s unheard of, they may be willing to use a specific product or service that you offer as part of your overall product line. This should be enough to satisfy a startup owner for a while. If a company is pleased with the way your startup delivers on a small matter, there may be room for a larger contract down the line. The goal is to offer such impeccable service and performance in small matters that your startup company is up for consideration when a high-profile company needs additional services.

As a marketer, you determined your company’s buyers when you created your marketing strategy—you researched their priorities and pain points and crafted content that will resonate with their professional needs. But nothing stays the same; business models change, companies merge and search for a new direction. And the personas that once were your marketing strategy’s main focus are now outdated.

Buyer personas are only effective if they are accurate. Updating them should be a routine part of your marketing strategy, to ensure your content is effectively reaching those who need it most. Let’s look at key indicators that you should revisit your personas to determine whether they are still the right fit or if you need to create new personas.

Buyout or Merger

When companies combine, it’s likely they are bringing together two different sets of strategies and even different ideas for implementing similar strategies. Expanding business services will open the doors to buyers who may not have been relevant to one company or the other.

For a successful merger to happen, it’s smart to revisit who each company originally targeted and determine the still-relevant personas and the personas that no longer work with the merger. Such a drastic shift in business will impact where the newly blended company focuses future efforts.

In this case, it may help for representatives from both companies to work through this together. A discussion about why each persona is important can help determine whether it will continue to be relevant to future marketing campaigns.

Shift in Business Strategy

Perhaps your company is changing its direction. Similar to companies merging, it’s important to re-evaluate whether the current personas are still relevant to the future path your company will take.

Start by discussing with those directly involved about defining your company’s new direction. Learn more about which audience will be affected and who the company hopes to target with the new strategy. Compare this against your current personas, and determine whether this is in alignment. If not, you will need to update your personas.

Keep in mind it is common for business strategies to change, and change often. Because of the nature of change in the business world, consider whether the change is so extreme that you need to create new personas from scratch or can rework the current personas.

Products or Services Change

If your company is introducing a new product line, you need to make sure you’re targeting the right personas. Expanding your offerings increases the number of buyers to target. For example, perhaps your products previously only targeted women and you’re adding offerings for men.

This is a clear prompt to create a new persona (or more than one, depending on the product). You will need to conduct buyer research on your new audience, which has different needs, goals and pain points from your original audience. Once you’ve developed your new buyer personas, compare them against those already in place. Noting these differences when creating content will help you connect with your new audience. In the above example, men and women make very different purchasing decisions, which means it’s important to incorporate those factors into your personas for future content.

Or perhaps your company once offered many product lines but has decided to focus on fewer products. You will need to revisit your original personas and consider narrowing down, combining or eliminating some of them to align with the fewer products.

Other Triggers

If there are no major events in your company’s immediate future, it’s important to revisit your original personas at least yearly so you can keep up on the latest trends that affect them, and incorporate new information you learned while shaping your marketing strategy for them throughout the year. You could uncover new research about your personas or unearth information that makes a once-relevant persona obsolete.

This may also happen when attending a trade show, conference or other industry event with thought leaders sharing their ideas that could shape the future of your personas. Keep this in the back of your mind when listening to others speak about your industry and think about how they tie back to your personas. Is there a big change coming? Could it wipe out or add a persona?

A good time to do this is at the end of the fiscal year when you’re wrapping up the current year and looking at the year ahead in many other areas of the business. When developing your goals for the upcoming year, review your personas to establish whether these goals will help meet the needs of your prospective buyers as represented by your personas.

Remember that personas should evolve with your business and the direction it’s going. Reviewing them regularly will help you create content that is more likely to generate qualified leads and make readers feel you understand their needs.

There's one month left in the quarter. I guarantee almost every salesperson who sends out a contract today will use the last day of the year as the expiration date.

It might seem logical to give your prospect several weeks to review and sign your proposal, but this is a huge mistake.

The Problem With Giving Prospects a Long Time to Sign

Salespeople typically opt for expiration dates several weeks in the future because they don’t want to put too much pressure on buyers. Even if the rep has gotten buy-in from every stakeholder and worked with her prospect to navigate the internal buying process, she still may need several weeks to actually fulfill a purchase.

So why am I telling you to shorten your timeline? Although the buyer might be eager to get his hands on your product so he can benefit as soon as possible, it’s human nature to delay decisions until they’re immediate.

In other words, if it’s March 1 and your proposal doesn’t expire until March 31, your prospect won’t seriously consider it until March 25. You’ll spend the next few weeks twiddling your thumbs. When the end of the month rolls around, you’ll have to nag the buyer to get his signature. That means kindling urgency all over again.

The Expiration Date Reps Should Use Instead

Next time you send a proposal, choose an expiration date six days out. If your average sales price is relatively low, your prospect probably won’t balk at this timeframe. Salespeople offering complex solutions, on the other hand, will typically encounter some resistance from the prospect.

That’s not worrisome. In fact, reps can play this reaction to their advantage by doing one simple thing: Making their request smaller.

Here’s some sample dialogue to show you how it’s done.

Rep: “This contract expires on December 4."

Prospect: “That’s too soon. I still need to write the implementation plan.”

Rep: “Okay, I understand. Thanks for telling me. What can you accomplish by December 4?”

Prospect: “I can probably come up with a draft of the plan.”

Rep: “I’ve got some ideas that’ll make the transition faster, smoother, and cheaper. If you shoot me your draft on December 4, I can look it over and add my suggestions.”

Prospect: “I’d really appreciate that.”

Now this salesperson has a commitment from her prospect on the original date she wanted. The buyer is far likelier to make progress on the purchase in the next week than if the rep had chosen an expiration date one month away. Ultimately, she’ll close far more quickly.

Make sure you’re using this technique with the proper intent: Accelerating the overall speed of the deal. The goal isn’t closing within six days (unless that’s how long it normally takes prospects to review your proposals). If you’re closing a complex deal, go into this conversation anticipating you’ll need to alter your request to fit the six-day timeline.

That’s also why you shouldn’t extend the expiration date when prospects say six days isn’t enough time. This response defeats the purpose: You might as well have given them more time in the first place. The idea is that you stick with your deadline but downsize your request.

If you’d rather make a specific request than ask what your prospect can get done by a certain date, that’s fine too. For instance, you might say, “How about you send the contract to legal by that date?”

Because you started with a bigger ask, this alternative will seem more reasonable to your prospect than if it had been the first one you’d put on the table.

Using this technique makes you appear more confident and shortens your closing time, and it helps your prospects reap the benefits of your product more quickly.

Want more sales advice? Check out Jeff's Your SalesMBA™ blog.

57% —that’s how far the average B2B buyer is through the purchase decision cycle before engaging a team member in sales. Statistic courtesy of CEB Global.

With nearly 60% of your customers engaging first with your content, then with your team, there’s still only 88% of B2B marketers that consider themselves to use content marketing as part of their business strategy. But yet, content is the foundation upon which your business is built.

From the story you tell on your corporate website, through to the sales messaging you use to engage prospects, all the way through to the learning materials you produce, you’re producing content.

It’s time to level up—Make content marketing tie directly to your business objectives.

Majority of businesses still neglect the importance that brand story, customer experience, and having a documented roadmap for their content efforts have in achieving strategic business goals. As a result, most content marketing efforts end up being experimental, or “just get it done” marketing, with no clear ROI insights.

The goal of content marketing is to create opportunities for people to become aware of the solution you provide and how you provide the solution— to convert awareness into revenue. Revenue keeps your business going. However, just creating content to “get it done” or drive traffic to your website is simply not enough to ensure your content is making an impact in your business.

Become a data-driven marketing team with proven content ROI

Making decisions based on a gut feeling or intuition isn’t going to amplify your content ROI 10x. To ensure scalability and optimize impact of content, you have to have a strategic plan that defines the direction and decision-making process that motivates your long-term goals. Having a defined strategy for what you’re going to achieve, why, and a high-level roadmap to get there helps ensure you’re minimizing risks of being too experimental while opening your team up to potentially untapped opportunities.

The graph below highlights the 4 core stages to move beyond the “get it done” mentality to a proven, ROI-generating content team. To move through each of these stages, we’ve elaborated on our top 10 best practices with getting started tips, templates, and more.

1. Make marketing easy to understand for everyone in the organization

If you ask 10 different people what content marketing means to your organization, you’ll get 11 different results. Outside of the marketing team there’s often not a clear understanding of the eventual outcome your content is aiming to achieve.

What’s the goal of content? A simple, yet challenging question that most businesses rarely ask themselves. The answer is easy—to gain more customers and keep them.

Many businesses, especially marketers, get caught up in daily tasks of producing content that they lose sight of the outcome they’re hoping that content will achieve. To move content marketing from just a concept or department within your business to a strategic driving revenue force you have to move perceptions of marketing away from just the department that manages your brand.

Getting started:

1. Define a common language and set of terminology that’s commonly used within marketing. Share this list with your entire organization. Creating a universally understood language means everyone can relate to what you’re saying. It’s also beneficial for new hires! Documentation helps those who join ramp up that much quicker.
2. Document how content trickles through your business functions and how your marketing team is leveraging content to drive revenue.
3. Create content goals that everyone understands as critical to the business’ success. Share progress bi-weekly with updates on key projects that are making an impact on business success.

2. Move away from vanity metrics like likes and shares—Make revenue your key metric

From the first interaction through to conversion, everyone in the organization is working to get or keep revenue. Think beyond likes, social shares, or time on page. They are great beginner metrics, but when you think long-term, the ultimate goal isn’t to get 1000 shares in a month. It’s to land X% more sales. Track revenue.

Content marketing engages, informs, and educates your buyers and customers to help your business make money.

You’re not just promoting a webinar to meet your content output quota, but what’s the actual goal you’re hoping to achieve? Is it to raise brand awareness that will ultimately lead to X amount of revenue? Build your pipeline of leads to help with funnel conversion into sales targets? By answering this, you’re able to understand if your content is taking an approach that’s in it to win or just influence vanity metrics.

Content doesn’t just build thought leadership, but it brings revenue to your business.

Getting Started: To move from basic content output to a more strategic, insight-driven strategy, ask yourself 5 simple questions.

1. Why are we creating content?
2. Who are we hoping to connect with?
3. How and when will we interact with them?
4. What do we want them to do?
5. How will we know we’ve achieved our goal?

If you’re having a tough time proving the ROI of content marketing, remember that it generates 3 times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing, but costs 62% less when done right with a clear strategy, focused tactical plan, and north-star objective guiding decision-making along the way.

3. Define your audience, who you’re customers are not, and eliminate what’s not working.

Targeting real people with real concerns means you’re not just “winging it” when creating content and making assumptions of what makes your audience make decisions. Visualizing the individual who’s absorbing your content helps you ensure it’s not just relevant, but not jargonistic. Speak directly with your audience, not just at them.

Begin by asking yourself these questions:

1. What informs the individuals within these groups to buy or make a decision?
2. What problem(s) does my company’s product, services, or offerings solve?
3. What does my audience not care about that I should avoid focusing on?
4. What is the goal or purpose I’m hoping to achieve through marketing content to them?

Leverage this free persona building template to start documenting your target audience, what pains they’re experiencing, and how your content can provide a solution through a captivating brand story.

4. Avoid the shiny new ball syndrome—tie decisions to core business objectives and what’s effective

It’s really easy to get distracted by a new trend or idea and forget about the strategy or tactical plan you have in place to make your goals happen. But that’s exactly why goals exist—to keep you focused. If a new idea is really going to help, be sure to elaborate on exactly why and what it will be replacing that was already in your roadmap.

Continuously adding new ideas without removing projects that you’ve already committed to can lead to team-fatigue and burnout. Worse, it can muddy clear progress towards your goals.

Getting started: To keep strategy top-of-mind and ensure new ideas fit your objectives leverage this creative brief template.

Putting in the work to tie an idea to your strategy will ensure you’re not just winging it because it’s the “latest new trend.”

5. Create a yearly tactical plan

This is where execution happens. You’re supporting the strategic plan you created and making it actually happen. Who’s going to be doing what, when, and what methods of production are you going to use to get there. From strategy to calculated actions, tactical planning typically involves small-scope actions that help bring the organization closer to achieving their long-term strategic mission.

Thinking on a yearly timeline helps you be pro-active. It’s also a good time frame to avoid getting bogged down in administrative work every week of who’s doing what.

Getting started:

1. Break your year down into quarters or months: what are you focusing on in each section? Brand awareness, lead generation, or perhaps reducing churn via learning opportunities? Focus on a higher level business goal that other departments are also working on and make your initiatives collaborative.
2. Focus on themes and outcomes, not necessarily granular projects, or tasks. Going to granular, such as defining you’re going to put out 300 blog posts, can make you focus more on delivery quota and less on actual impact your efforts are making. The type of initiatives you do and the content produced should be left for monthly planning.
3. Define a content mission: what your content is working to achieve regardless of how or where it’s delivered. A content mission answers what you’ll be publishing, who it’s for and why your audience will care.

6. Supplement your yearly plan with monthly team meetings to discuss wins and roadblocks

It’s important to make changes in real-time, or a frequent cadence to course correct. Here’s a sample agenda for a monthly meeting:

How are our goals progressing?

• If something is off-track discuss:
  • What roadblocks are preventing us from moving forward?
  • Any potential risks we need to mitigate now that might come up next month?
  • Is there anything that didn’t work this month that we can stop doing?
  • Is there something that we need to start doing to make our goal happen?

• If something is on-track discuss:
  • What has made this successful this month? Is there anything we can learn for other projects or should document for future reference?
  • Any potential risks we need to mitigate now that might come up next month that will impede the continued success of this?
  • Is there something that we can do to take this to the next level?

Be sure to leverage any data available that can help guide your decision-making. Here’s two products that have free plans that can help provide content marketing insights related to how visitors interact with your content and brand:

Heap

Heap automatically captures every user action in your web or iOS app and lets you analyze it all retroactively. Clicks, taps, swipes, form submissions, page views. You’re no longer limited by events you remembered to log upfront. In addition, they have an event visualizer that means you don’t need to be an engineer or developer to become data-driven. Capture analytics that matter to each campaign with conversion reports and an elegant interface that makes wanting to look at numbers enjoyable.

Hotjar

Ensure the content you want your visitors interacting with and spending the most time with is actually getting viewed. Understand what users want, care about and interact with on your site by visually representing their clicks, taps and scrolling behavior or find the biggest opportunities for improvement and testing by identifying on which page and at which step most visitors are leaving your site.

7. First meaning, then modelling—Write content for a purpose and think beyond the website

We often arbitrarily break content down to groups, sections, and bundles without answering first, “Why would a user want this content?”

By answering what it achieves you’re able to define a content goal, then focus on authoring and laying out your content. Remember that not everything you write carries equal weight. Be sure to layout content that speaks to all sections of your funnel, and to all your audiences.

Quick tips to creating easy-to-digest, meaningful content:

• Keep the bulk of your core message to the first 600 words. Searches often favor posts that are longer, however content consumers will bounce from your content if they don’t get what they need within a few seconds. Keep your strongest message visible upon entry.
• Use headers and sub-headers—keep discoverability top-of-mind. Not only does it make your page look less like a “blob” of text, it helps distinguish what you’re talking about where. Scanners may not want to read everything. Tie in a reader through clear sections to help them see exactly where the content they’re looking for is on the page.
• Bold important parts of a sentence. Key takeaways in non-header elements should be bolded. This causes the readers’ eyes to go directly to the point and backtrack to the full message.
• Write like you talk. This isn’t a research paper. Writing is about building community—have a conversation with your reader, don’t make them get out a dictionary.

8. Make it easy for your audience to love you—don’t forget about usability

When was the last time you went through your own subscribe, onboarding, or sales nurture workflow? With the rise of content marketing, experience and UX are falling behind and thought of as a secondary factor to marketing success. However, we’re not stopping to ask how easy it is for our customers to access our content or want to be our customer.

Getting started: Add a happiness metric—One of the most important metrics that content marketing should measure. It builds loyalty, trust, and maintains a healthy relationship. If we’re asking customers to go through hell to learn or grow with our brand, how can we expect them to be happy?

Marketing efforts are often focused on vanity metrics—likes, engagements, followers—but when was the last time you stopped to ask, “Are my customers… happy?”

Review your call-to-actions, forms you make your customers submit, and what painful friction points cause drop-offs. What can you tweak to be less painful? Small improvements that create happy interactions go a long way in driving long-term revenue.

9. Don’t treat strategy, creation, content performance, and goals for your content as separate or silo’d initiatives.

Everything you do overlaps and influences the other, like dominoes. Your strategy informs your execution, your execution is influenced by analyzing your performance, and your goals help keep you focused. Here’s a snippet from our upcoming resource on strategic content marketing to visualize the impact each has on the other.

Most marketing campaigns master the tactical part of marketing, but fall short on amplifying their efforts due to a missing strategy or “north-star” goal. Ignoring the link between actions you’re taking and the impact they have on your business overall is a difficult way to prove ROI for your content output. Conversion rates are only meaningful if they’re accomplishing the right goal for your business.

Getting started: Whether you’re just getting started with a content marketing campaign, or looking to take yours to the next level, ask yourself what your efforts are helping move forward, why, and how you’re going to know you’re successful. Use these questions to guide your discussion and planning:

Strategy (Answers the who and what)

1. What pain are we solving?
2. Who are we solving this for?
3. What opportunities are we potentially missing?
4. What’s our business’ value proposition?
5. What’s our brand identity?
6. What’s it trying to accomplish?
7. What’s the market telling us about our buyers habits?

Tactics (Answers how)

1. How are we going to communicate our brand image?
2. How will we inform our target customer?
3. How do we define “quality”?
4. How will we support our strategy and “realize” our goal?
5. How are going to educate our audience?
6. How are we going to show we’re the best solution?
7. What’s our budget?
8. How will we maintain interest of our community?

Objectives (Answers why bother)

1. Why are the defined tactics most important?
2. Why this niche and not that niche?
3. Why is this strategy/tactic helping us move forward?
4. What goal is it moving forward?
5. What contributions is our content making to our overall strategic business mission?
6. Why this particular campaign/strategy over another?
7. Why will this help us iterate and improve our strategy?

10. Don’t forget about teamwork and the rest of your organization

It’s really easy to get lost in numbers, feel the stress of needing to produce and prove your content is making an impact; so much so that you forget to focus on your team and internal culture. Including your entire organization in content can lead to perspective sharing and new ideas that take your strategy to the next level.

This doesn’t mean that anyone should be able to freely publish content, you should stick to your internal workflow structure to ensure your brand messaging and goals are aligned. However, every employee in your organization should be able to, and more importantly, encouraged to participate in the content process.

Getting started:

1. Ask different team members from all departments to pitch a content brief.Have them join your weekly brainstorming session and present a topic of interest to them. Hold a lunch and learn to walk through filling out the brief and why each section is important to the content creation cycle.Having each department walk through the same creative process as the content team can also work to build empathy and help your organization understand the role content plays in business success. Team building and ROI win!
2. Add a bi-weekly feedback session that’s open to your entire organization.
   Everyone in the team spends time with different customers, at differing amounts of time. Each team member can bring something to the table that is unique.If your team is continuously providing feedback directly from customer interactions, you’re making changes based on real-time data. Gain new perspective for content ideas while the collaborative environment can be great for team building.
3. Create a culture where it’s okay for anyone to spend work time contributing to the content creation cycle.
   Setup your team for success by providing brand guidelines, a documented strategy, standards necessary for publishing, and who’s responsible for what in the event of a question.Don’t silo individuals into strict ares like “drafter” and “editor.” Doing repetitive tasks is a sure way for someone to loose their creative spark and get bored.

Remember, content marketing is about consistency

Create a cadence and rhythm that works not only with how your audience consumes content, but with what is sustainable with your resources and internal operations. While monthly may work with certain content deliverables like Webinars or eBooks, your audience may expect weekly educational pieces on how to improve their operations and workflows before jumping into your solution. Staying top-of-mind is important for any great content marketing effort, but you can’t do it at the expense of producing boring, or meaningless content.

Sticking to a regular schedule of content distribution and committing to that schedule is more powerful than just creating content for content’s sake. This is because of the power of predictability in maintaining a schedule.

Humans naturally feel more comfortable when something is predictable. Predictability breeds trust.

Content marketers need to stop trying to be the only thing our customers are listening to, because that’s just wildly unreasonable, and set a time with our audience that they’re dedicated to listening to us. This starts with content predictability.

What’s that one thing you dread most when managing leads in your funnel? If you answered “following up,” you’re not alone.

Making that first touch with a lead is easy. You’re sending a cold email, making a cold call, or taking the next steps with an inbound lead. But being persistent is a different story. It takes repetition to break through to some leads, especially with the dramatic increase in content that passes through their inbox every day. Sometimes the only way to stand out from the crowd is to repeat yourself – more than once.

So how do you follow up with leads the right way? We’ve got three of your top questions below, answered.

1. How do I follow up without saying “I’m just following up”?

HubSpot hit the nail on the head with their 23 Better Alternatives to the “Just Checking In” Email article. The critical reason why “just following up” or “just checking in” are such poor emails – and receive such poor response rates from buyers – is that they don’t offer anything of value. It’s obvious you’re following up, since you’ve just sent them an email. What is the value to the buyer if they open it?

Of course, sending any of the example emails from HubSpot’s list would take a bit of research, or at least an understanding of your customer. And that’s why “just following up” is so popular – it doesn’t take any effort. However, your leads can smell your lack of effort a mile away, so it pays to take the time to put a little more thought into how exactly you follow up with them.

In addition to HubSpot’s list above, you can take a look at Pardot’s Anatomy of a Successful Sales Follow-Up Email blog post for more ideas on how to follow up, without saying you’re following up.

2. How frequently should I follow up with a prospect?

Typically, a salesperson will touch – that is, contact via phone, email, social or other method – a lead 1.3 times. But this isn’t optimal. In fact, if salespeople increase the number of touches to six, they increase the chance of making a contact by 70 percent.

Too many salespeople drop a lead early, missing out on the chance to develop it into a contact and an eventual sale. Try following up at least six times before giving up! People will make a purchase from you when they’re ready to buy, not when you’re ready to make a sale. So by repeatedly following up, you’re more likely to hit them when they have become a warmer lead.

3. When an inbound lead comes in, how many times should I follow up before dropping it?

PersistIQ lists four major mistakes businesses make when handling inbound leads:

• Not delegating them
• Not qualifying them
• Not conducting research before reaching out
• Not personalizing communication when following up

These four mistakes combine to make many businesses shut down or deprioritize their inbound lead gen, when in fact it would just take a few tweaks to make the program a success.

For instance, many sales reps will follow up with an inbound lead once (and it’s best if that first call is made 5 minutes after the lead comes in), and drop it. However, just like outbound leads, persistence is essential to turn that lead into a contact.

The following methodology might sound aggressive, but it’s been proven to work by the folks at Intelliverse.

Try following up immediately after the call with an email and LinkedIn request, and then another one or two calls later that same day. Then, call a few more times, in the morning and afternoon, the following day. If you still have not made contact, try the same routine the third day. And, if there is still radio silence, log the lead and follow up with one to two calls and emails every week, until you touch base.

From ProBlogger Expert Sam Nordberg.

Online courses are all the rage right now, but sadly, there are some staggering figures when it comes to completion… and not in a good way.

Seth Godin shared on Tim Ferriss’s podcast once that most online courses have a drop off rate of 97%, and even his own courses have a drop off rate of 80%.

80%?! That means that only 20% of the people who sign up for the course actually get through to finishing it.

The thing is, Seth is not alone though.

Studies over the years show that completion rates of online courses are traditionally very low. Here in Australia, Government Statistics showed that just 7% of students who used the VET FEE-HELP loan system, completed their course between 2010 and 2013.

Yes, just 7%.

With all of that in mind, it is important to take some time when planning your course, to consider how you can help your particpants complete it.

Why would you want to increase your completion rates?

Participants who complete your course in full (and with that, implement along the way) are going to get much better results than those who drop out after just the first couple of modules. You get the satisfaction of watching them take what you have taught them, and use it to make changes to their life in some way.

That’s a pretty good reason to want to increase your completion rates.

PLUS

Better results for your participants means better word of mouth referrals for you, an increased number of people sharing your course and better testimonials.

And this in turn, leads to better sales for your next intake.

All good things, right?

Increasing your participants’ completion rate isn’t just great for you participants (they actually learn something and get good results) but it’s better for your business.

So how do you increase your completion rates?

Lack of motivation, life getting in the way, getting stuck somewhere, and feeling like they are all alone are some of the key reasons why participants might purchase a course and then never get around to completing it.

With those things in mind, below are just some of the strategies you can look at increasing completion rates for your courses. You don’t need to use all of these. Instead you can go through and select the methods that best suit your course and your participants.

• Break the content into tiny steps
  Overwhelm can be a key component to students giving up on a course. They see the amount of work they should do, or the sheer scale of things that they have to learn, and decide (even subconsciously) that it is all far too much work.
  Make sure that you break all your content down into tiny little steps, so that each step is easily actionable, and participants can get small wins quickly.
• Drip feed the content
  Another way to help reduce that sensation of overwhelm, is to drip feed your content to your participants. This means only giving them access to one bit at a time, with content released each day, week or month depending on your course.
  While this helps to reduce overwhelm, it also stops those who are doing well from pushing through faster, which can be a bad thing.
• Drip fed email support
  If you are going to provide all of the content up front, consider drip feeding email support instead. This can be an automated series of emails that touches base with the participant, reminding them of where they should be up to by now, and what support is available to them if they get stuck.
• Include less content
  One of the most common problems I see when people are creating their own courses, is in their desire to give massive value and over deliver, they send huge amounts of content out.
  More content isn’t always the best way to help your participants… in fact, less really is more.
  Focus on sending smaller bits of content that are easily actionable, rather than feeling the need to send them everything you know.
• Get them to take action as they go
  Have you ever put something off? And the longer you put it off, the bigger the task seems?
  The same is true for your audience. This content is new to them, and possibly a little scary. The longer they wait to take action and implement, the worse it is going to seem.
  Every time you send out little tiny steps, get them to take action and implement.
• Increase they ways they can engage with each other
  Online learning can be lonely, but it doesn’t have to be. Allowing your participants to get to know each other gives them a real sense of community, an opportunity to connect with each other, and even support each other through the course.
  This engagement can come in many forms, including group calls, a forum or even a private social media support group.
• Increase the support on offer to them
  Sometimes people just need help. Simple as that.
  This support might come in the form of Q and A sessions, coaching calls, emails, phone calls, or even just questions answered in a forum.
  Make sure your participants know how much support they have available to them and make it easy to find.
• Badges or certificates for each module We all like the feeling of instant gratification. Rewarding your participants at the end of each module or activity can be a great way to keep them motivated, especially if it is a long course. This could come in the form of badges which unlock on their profile, based on how much they have completed so far, or even just downloadable certificates for important modules.
• Certificates on completion
  Sometimes, it’s all about the paperwork. This is especially true when your participants are studying towards something specific, such as a certification or recognised role.
  It doesn’t have to be that formal though. YouTube issue certificates to people who complete courses within their Creator Academy. It gives you a nice feeling, something to show off, and a reason to start and work towards the end of the next course.
• Surprise bonuses along the way
  Working towards something that you know is there, is all well and good, but isn’t it nice to be surprised along the way? Look at ways in which you can reward those who are particularly active, who engage and who implement. This could be automated, for example, everyone who gets to the end of module 2 gets a reward they weren’t expecting.
  Or this could be spontaneous, such as a reward in your Forum or support group for someone who has gone above and beyond.

Online courses don’t have to have terrible completion rates. Using a combination of different strategies and methods is the best way to help your participants get the results they wanted when they first signed up for your course.

Are you using any of these?
Got any other ideas for helping increase your completion rates?

I’d love to hear from you.

The post Increasing Your Completion Rates – How to Get Participants to Finish Your Course appeared first on ProBlogger.

      

A lot of organisations now recognise the value of partnering with a lead generation specialist.

Because meeting with decision makers and influencers closes business deals faster.

And having your own salespeople searching for the right organisations and trying to set up meetings with the relevant bodies takes time.

We all know this. The question is why are some companies working with lead generation specialists and others not?

Let’s look at the facts and outline some of the issues facing organisations like yours.

Lead Generation Is A Priority For Companies

There are numerous research reports with B2B professionals all pointing to the fact that lead generation is a priority for their organisation.

One such report is the Lead Generation Trend Report by Holger Schulze, the Founder at B2B Technology Marketing Community on LinkedIn.

Holger found that it is the quality of leads that the majority (68%) of B2B professionals put as their priority.

This is because over 53% of B2B marketers spend more than half their marketing budget on lead generation.

However, in relation to driving actual revenue, 64% of respondents say that marketing leads only contributes 25% or less to overall revenue.

So, if the money B2B marketers are spending is only bringing in 25% of revenue, the pressure is on to bring the figure up considerably.

Image property of LinkedIn Group Partner Technology Marketing

Expert Led Services

A lead generation specialist firm should be able to provide you with expert-led services.

This includes sales reps that aren’t just sales professionals, but they also have a lot of experience working in the fields in which you operate.

Here at Internal Results, for instance, all of our sales professionals are very experienced in tech areas such as enterprise content management, e-learning, cloud adoption, cyber security, networking, telecommunications and many start-up technologies.

Because you need to have peace of mind that the people representing your company have the expertise and sales experience to be able to discuss these topics with your target prospects.

Extension Of Your Team

Because of the combination of sales background and industry experience, a specialised firm functions as a virtual extension of your team.

Dedicated experts in lead generation are familiar with or take the time to learn the ins and outs of your industry, business, competition and customers.

In essence, you get an outsourced team of experts who share your same goals and vision for success.

This collaboration means you don’t have to invest a lot of time motivating, explaining or clarifying details as you would with a more generalised partner.

Dedicated Tools and Resources

A lead generation specialist firm normally invests in dedicated tools and resources that other firms can’t or won’t spend money on.

As a company that specialises in technology, for instance, Internal Results provides reps with technology and tools that ensures our lead generation specialists have the ability to see what companies are surging for specific technology topics.

Access to these tools isn’t the only advantage.

Our reps have the technology and tools to help you identify and target the most qualified possible leads for your business using intent data.

Intent Data focuses on the signals that indicate a person is in-market for your product or services.

This is crucial because it will speed up your sales cycle as you are meeting with business buyers who are currently looking to speak with organisations like yours.

Added to this is the availability of over 61 million B2B contacts globally, that can be filtered by any number of options including job title, function, level, industry, number of employees and more.

These tools and resources give B2B companies the high-quality data and audience insights that are so important to effective lead generation.

And as you can see from the image below, when asked “How would you rate the overall effectiveness of your lead generation efforts?”, only 16% of B2B professionals rated theirs as very or extremely effective.

Image property of Lead Generation Report by Holger Schulze.

Room For Improvement

Competition is fierce in your market and your company sales targets are rising year-on-year.

You need to ensure your salespeople are meeting new prospects and closing deals, not spending their time looking for new leads.

Because when it comes to getting the best B2B sales leads, quality always trumps quantity in lead generation.

Why? Because the higher the quality of the leads you drive, the more efficiently your sales team can convert them into satisfied customers, right?

And that’s exactly what we do for our clients. Day in, day out.

We get them face-to-face meetings with decision makers and influencers.

Because these are the people who will decide whether or not they will do business with you.

Using a lead generation specialist that has a unique prospecting methodology and the right technological tools can help you find the companies who are actively looking for products & services like yours.

This is crucial because it will speed up your sales cycle as you are meeting with business buyers who are currently looking to speak with organisations like yours.

* Main graphic used from Lead Generation Trend Report by Holger Schulze

Only a few years ago, the conventional wisdom held that startup founders should offer a substantial part of their product as “free forever,” which would lead to viral adoption and – maybe, eventually, hopefully – revenue. There have been some phenomenal freemium success stories, too, namely Hootsuite, Yammer, Slack, Evernote, SurveyMonkey and Dropbox.

But things have started to change. Venture capital is no longer an unlimited commodity. SaaS startups are under greater pressure to prove that they have a sustainable revenue model and can generate paying customers, not just free users who drain scarce resources.

Startups have also had more time to test freemium and determine whether, how and when it moves the needle for their business. They’ve learned that giving away free product does work in certain instances or for certain businesses, like companies chasing a market with millions of potential users or ones that have deployed a product-led growth (PLG) strategy.

Unfortunately, most enterprise SaaS businesses do not have these characteristics and should steer clear of a classic freemium model. For these businesses, having a free offering attracts too many people outside of their target market who would never convert to a paying customer. Even worse, by showcasing an attractive free version, they shoot themselves in the foot when they try to move upmarket and close 5 and 6 figure deals.

Looking at Google Trends data, interest in freemium has fallen substantially over the past two years, and is down to only 25% of its 2015 peak.

This decline is backed up by survey data from SaaS operators. In its 2015 annual survey, Pacific Crest asked SaaS operators how much of their company’s new ACV was driven by freemium leads. Three-quarters of companies generated no new ACV from freemium, and only 9% derived greater than one-quarter of their new ACV from freemium.

In other words, freemium has pivoted from being at the core of a SaaS company’s revenue model to just another lead gen tool in the marketing toolbox, albeit one with some pretty significant downsides.

What Comes After Freemium

With classic freemium decreasing in importance, SaaS entrepreneurs need to get more creative with how they generate leads and new business. Sometimes that means turning back to old-school tactics that have been around for decades. Here are four approaches to offset a failing freemium model.

1. Free trial

The consumerization of IT has conditioned buyers to expect to play around with a product before being locked into a long-term contract. This has in turn led to the popularity and effectiveness of free trials or “try before you buy” strategies. Free trials, as opposed to freemium product versions, showcase premium features that are disabled when the trial expires (the user fails to pay). This creates a much stronger incentive for the user to convert from free to paid. The same Pacific Crest study that debunked the effectiveness of freemium shows that free trials remain as essential as ever. Of the SaaS operators that were surveyed, 30% said that free trial leads drove greater than one-half of their company’s new ACV.

2. Tailored, hyper specific free products for lead gen

What’s so appealing about free products is the potential for viral adoption and rapid, cost-efficient growth in product usage. Companies like Clearbit have cleverly tapped into those benefits with tailored, hyper-specific free products that appeal to their target buyers without cannibalizing their paid offerings. One of Clearbit’s free products, the Logo API, generated tremendous buzz among developers on both HackerNews and Product Hunt, and they’ve seen repeat success with other free products. Unlike a classic freemium product, which gives free users the keys to the castle, Clearbit’s Logo API only makes one of Clearbit’s 85 data points available for free.

3. Product qualified lead (PQL) engines

As HubSpot’s VP of Product Christopher O’Donnell explains, “Freemium fell short in B2B and from its ashes rose the PQL.” He recommends combining the velocity of freemium or self-service offerings with the higher deal sizes that come with an inside sales team. One way to achieve this is to sell entry-level versions of a product to individuals or teams within larger enterprises as part of a land-and-expand business model. These offerings create a self-funding customer acquisition engine that allows companies to more seamlessly break into large companies from the bottom up before eventually selling an enterprise-wide deal.

4. Anti-lean startup approach

Rather than starting out with a minimum viable product, getting it out the door quickly and then monetizing later, some companies are reversing the playbook and becoming “anti-lean” startups. These companies, including AI personal assistant x.ai, take a more thoughtful and ambitious approach to building their products. The happy consequence: their products solve a clear need, stand apart from alternatives and attract customers that are willing to pay for them. With x.ai, it took almost three years to get the product to market, but they “launched to a pool of eager customers willing to pay,” and according to CEO & Founder Dennis Mortensen, “the sky’s the limit.”

Do you offer a freemium version of your product? Why or why not? We’d love to hear from you and learn about your results!

The post The Slow Death of Freemium – And What Comes Next appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Every company has their own process when it comes to getting employees trained and acclimated to the job, and many swear by the ‘sink or swim’ method. Ostensibly, this method does hold a lot of promise: it allows employers to see who’s doing well quickly and it gives the employees who can handle it a sense of accomplishment when they’re able to complete the workload. But you may miss out on some of the advantages select new hires offer because you only see certain skills rather than the full package, and you may cause the succeeding employees to resent the cut-throat attitude.

Here’s why you might want to start slow instead.

Manage your expectations knowing they’ll encounter roadblocks

It’s always hectic at the beginning of a new job, and this is especially true if you have an organization that has a lot of contingencies. For example, let’s say your fulfillment processes differ depending on whether or not you’re dealing with a high-level or low-level client. Some businesses have dozens of nuances that come up on a daily basis, and this is going to be a lot for even the most experienced candidate to remember and become familiar with. This can negatively impact an employee’s performance before they even have a chance to begin their first sale.

Assign a dedicated sales mentor or trainer

Instead of giving new employees a lecture they’re likely to forget or teaching them everything in abstract terms, appoint one person to help employees get up and running. This person should be organized and, above all, should enjoy helping other people do better in their jobs. New employees are not going to want to approach three different co-workers they just met the day before to ask what they fear are embarrassingly amateur questions. This way, new hires have a chance to develop a real relationship with someone right away, and they can grow in confidence knowing they have a resource that works every time.

Start with low-hanging fruit

No matter what type of sales your company does, the process is an exercise in patience. The average salesperson spends about six hours to make one appointment. Depending on what type of sales you do though, there are certain accounts that are easier to close than others. Sometimes it makes sense to have the employees get their feet wet with a win rather than several defeats.

Humans can maintain their motivation if they manage to consistently accomplish small goals, and the initial uplifting feelings can be just what they need to propel them into the more difficult and time-consuming accounts later. Look at it as an investment in their overall future.

Remember that turnover impacts the customer experience

Starting slow will help to guarantee that your employees stay with the company. Turnover does not sit well with clients, regardless of how adaptable or flexible they seem. Even if a salesperson only stays for a month or so, they’re likely to have come into contact with a customer and that can wind up making buyers nervous about company practices. Facts and stories get lost when you have several people working with an account, and it’s a frustrating experience for everyone. When employees feel their employer is looking out for them, they are far more likely to look out for the clients as well.

The good news

Thankfully, it’s likely you won’t feel like you’re settling for subpar employees who are unable to keep up. Of all of the jobs in the U.S., 13% of them are sales positions, meaning this is a skill that employees value and want to excel at. After weeding out talent that underwhelm during the interview process, you may refocus your efforts on starting slow with those who already have the experience and fortitude that will allow them to arrive at your organization ready to nurture leads and close sales.

Marketing Automation works best when you are constantly innovating

You, yes you. You're that marketing manager that is using your automation platform to do all your basic tasks. But you're not using it for anything else. Why? I don't know. There are so many elements of marketing automation you could be using, I imagine you don't know where to start. So I'm going to tell you where to start.

Marketing automation isn't going to take your job anytime soon.

My favourite expression from the unaware marketer is "oh but marketing automation will put me out of a job". I can assure you, used correctly, it will not. However, if you continue to use a marketing automation platform like a brain, that is to say only use 10% of it, you could be out of a job for not producing the results you anticipated from your MA platform.

It amazed me in the recent annual report that Smart Insights on marketing automation in 2016 shared that 85% of respondents found that tracking a provable ROI from their automation platform was a challenge. Yet 65% said the main benefit of MA was its ability to identify better quality leads. There's a link we're missing here people.

So what I want to do today is sit down and talk you through what you could be achieving with your automation.

Let me set the scene for you...

Your managing director has demanded that you achieve another 60% growth in sales in the following quarter. You, the overworked and understaffed marketing manager, panic. You quickly go into what we call "campaign brain", developing a set of objectives and briefs that cover every possible marketing angle you can think of.

You then divide this by what your team can do, how much you can automate (you'll probably only automate the email campaign, you don't have time to do anything else) and often throw the rest to an agency (social media, lead generation, events, PR...etc.) All so you can deliver the impressions, traffic, and conversions that are expected of you.

Three months later, you use a wide range of unaligned monitoring tools to try and analyse the results of your campaign. Except you're manually reporting on everything because your marketing methods were not all housed under one roof. And you can't attribute what happened in the buyer journey past the first and last click because none of it marries up.

Sound familiar? No wonder you can't find the link between where your higher quality leads are coming from and the ROI of your marketing automation platform. Many of you are only using the platform for a sliver of the marketing process.

You're using marketing automation as if it's just a lead nurturing tool.

The report by Smart Insights and CommuniGator shared that a welcome series of emails or auto-response to registrations were the most commonly used email marketing automation techniques adopted in 2016. Upsell, nurturing and triggered campaigns were also popular, which is good. But again I ask the question, is this really ALL you are using your marketing automation for?

What about the targeting elements? The fact that you can create an advanced find marketing list on any of your CRM data values you wish and build a whole campaign tailored JUST for that audience? 30% of you don't use targeting at all.

Many of you have started using landing pages for lead generation, in fact, a whopping 78% of you. But you don't use rule-based personalisation of content or offers within your email marketing. Personalisation has been cited as one of the KEY elements to engaging and converting prospects in 2017.

The fact of the matter is, if you don't adopt these features, your marketing will always be one step behind. Do you want to continue to be that overworked marketing manager that is always creating reactive marketing campaigns? Or do you want to be a proactive marketing specialist who can pre-empt when the goalposts are about to shift? If you want your marketing to be able to engage with target audiences in real-time, you need to be using your marketing automation to its full potential.

You need to align your marketing strategy and software.

I get it. You're scared that your marketing automation won't do what you want it to. Come the three-month mark your marketing campaign has achieved exactly zilch. Nothing. Nada. So you keep doing the same old things because at least you'll know that you'll get the same old results.

Be brave, marketer.

Now is not the time to be creating static marketing lists and batch blasting the same templated email newsletter you always have. If you want your marketing to succeed, you have to be doing new things all the time. Innovating, creating new messages, reinventing your brand...keeping pace with the changing demands of your consumer.

Instead of wasting your marketing budget on media buying, content production, agency relationships and reporting processes, you need to be focusing on your strategy. More importantly, how it can align with your marketing automation software. Once you have this in place, you won't be scared to take on the machine that is marketing automation and you'll be able to start using proactive, rather than reactive, marketing techniques.

But I don't know where to start!

I know. One of the key highlights from the 2016 B2B marketing automation report for me was the top two challenges marketers face. Namely, the fact that 55% of you have limited knowledge, particularly when it comes to skills for setting up rules, lead scoring and email sequences. Teamed with the 43% of you who said they struggled to develop a strategy for marketing automation, I know that you need a clear plan with goals.

I'm going to give them to you.

First, I want you to answer me a couple of questions.

1. If you're in marketing, are you responsible for the creation of content in your campaigns?
2. Have you, at any point in your career, been a copywriter?

Now the majority of marketers I speak to will say yes to the first question. Only a very small percentage will say yes to the second question. Yet, as our Head of New Business Marketing at CommuniGator will tell you, content forms the centre of most marketing strategies. From lead generation to lead nurturing, you need a lot of supporting content.

There are four key steps she always promotes, both within our own marketing and to our clients. Use these as baby steps to creating your own strategy.

Step 1: Review your personas

If you are having a face to face conversation with someone, it's easy to tell when they become bored of listening to your voice. Their eyes wonder, their body language changes and they simply stop the conversation. You don't have that luxury with digital marketing. So you need to know who you are talking to. Review your current customer base, their top target data and how their customer journeys went in order to know who you should be talking to and HOW to talk to them through your content.

The more personal you are with them, and the more targeted you make your email campaigns around these personas, the more effective your marketing will be. Failing to personalise your emails with details such as their first name and what they've interacted with in the past will see your conversion rates be lower and your sales slower. USE these tools – we've included them in the marketing automation platform for a reason!

Step 2: Create a content structure that matches your funnel

We all know the sales funnel. Your lead nurturing technique should match this funnel. So, for example, we use four levels:

• Intrigue (blogs, infographics, hints and tips, videos)
• Discover (whitepapers, guides, best practices)
• Consider (feature pages, solutions, case studies)
• Decide (offers, prices, demonstrations)

Each topic that we focus on (lead generation or marketing automation for example) will have all the content around it split into these four tiers. If you don't have that much content, you can simply focus on one topic stream at a time.

Do a content audit. See which content pieces fit into which level under which topic stream. (I imagine a table would help here to get started). This will help you pinpoint areas that you need more content and what level you need. This way, you're not creating content for the sake of it all the time.

With the average content production costing around £3-5K, you should be squeezing every last opportunity out of your content as you can. Don't be afraid to reuse it in any number of campaigns. If it draws the leads in, keep repurposing it.

Step 3: Put your content into lead nurture streams

We've talked about how at least 40% of you have adopted triggered workflow campaigns within your marketing automation, which is great. This content strategy works WITH that. Align your email rules as per the four levels. For example, a lead goes into a new campaign at the intrigue level. They read your blog posts for a couple of weeks and once they establish a certain lead score within your platform, they are moved onto the next level of the campaign 'discover'. On it goes until they are at the decide stage and ready for a sales call or message.

This is all achievable within your marketing automation platform, you just need to include these rules in order to optimise your marketing performance.

Now this could be implemented for any number of campaigns. Perhaps you want to target all of your contacts that have a particular CRM and want to work on their lead generation for example. Or you could run this automation for a large scale, quarterly campaign.

Experiment!

Start off with a small campaign (perhaps an event promotion campaign) and see for yourself how it works within your marketing automation. Once you see it performing, you'll be able to implement it across your marketing – becoming that proactive marketer we talked about earlier. We have seen CTR’s in email streams go from sub 1% to an average of 11% (in some tiers 50% plus!) with this strategy.

Step 4: Create a content treasure box

As we mentioned, there is no point creating constant content that will go to waste. Instead, focus on the topic streams your audiences are interested in and the levels you need to convince them throughout their buyer journey. The brilliance of a content box is that it can help you align your entire marketing strategy, no matter how many channels you use.

Not sure what I mean? Ok, here's another example for you.

You have a report on marketing automation for 2016. This is the backbone of your treasure box. You then create an opinionated link bait piece to entice readers in, (such as this article). You create a number of blogs and soundbites to support it, social media posts, case studies, a stream of email messages. Eventually, you have what we call a content treasure box that can be implemented into any campaign.

So you remember that story of the managing director that set you a seemingly impossible task? Now you don't have to run around like a headless chicken planning a campaign that doesn't align across each channel. Instead, you build one around your content boxes, with a TARGET AUDIENCE in mind and run as much of it through your marketing automation platform as you can.

What you can realistically achieve with your marketing automation platform

Social media, tracking which website visitors come to your landing pages based on which emails they interacted with....everything. It CAN be reported on from within your marketing automation platform. Because your platform is designed to encompass all marketing activities, not just your email.

Don't be the lazy marketer who automates campaigns that could go through a standard email marketing provider. Be bold. Be brave. Be better than your competitors. Don't be afraid to TRY. Make your marketing automation push itself. That is the only way your marketing will succeed in the digital marketing world.

Download the full annual report here

Effective selling isn’t about finding people who are interested, talking to them once or twice, and then closing the deal. It’s about building relationships with prospects. In fact, at least 80% of all sales require five or more follow-ups. Despite that, a typical salesperson only tries to reach out to a potential customer twice; 44% of all sales reps give up after only a single follow-up.

If you want to be a successful salesperson, you must be diligent about reaching out multiple times and connecting with your prospects regularly. Occasionally, you’ll need to dig through your dead leads and try to re-engage them again. Now could be a better time for your prospect, and the odds are good that you’re the only salesperson who’s stuck with them this long.

Of course, you can’t simply reach out to an old lead and ask them if they’re ready to buy. You need to be a little more elegant than that. Here are five ways you can reconnect with cold leads and develop warm relationships with them:

1. Leverage your content

A strong reconnection is low-pressure. Your first goal is to get top-of-mind with prospects. Content is a great way to do just that. If you have a recent blog post or whitepaper that could be relevant and useful, make sure to send it their way along with an explanation of how you think it can benefit them. To improve on this outreach strategy, you can start segmenting your dead leads and create content specifically for each segment.

2. Highlight new features

When you’re updating an existing product or launching a new one, it’s the perfect time to resurrect dead leads. Look through your book of business and see who might find the new feature especially useful, and let them know about it. To make it easier for yourself in the future, tag leads in your CRM that request a particular feature. Later, this allows you to pull their information quicker when you’re finally able to fulfill their needs.

3. Make it about them

Reconnecting with dead leads doesn’t always have to be about your company. It can be about their business too. Set Google Alerts for their companies and follow them on social media. When you notice positive news about them, such as the opening of a new office, a recent fundraise, or the launch a new product, send them a brief congratulatory note. It reopens the lines of communication and shows that you care about building a relationship, not just closing a single sale.

4. Find new connections

It’s not unusual to learn that you’re not making much headway into a company simply because you don’t have the right contact. With dead leads, it’s often a good idea to simply try and find new connections. You can be honest and simply use your existing contact as a foot in the door: “I’ve been talking with John about this, but we haven’t had the chance to work together yet. That said, I’d love to discuss this opportunity with you too.” Considering that most corporate buyers require more than one person to sign off on a purchase, making more connections is always a good idea whether a lead is cold or not.

5. Get out of your rut

If you call somebody every business day at 2:30pm in the afternoon and never get an answer, it could mean that they aren’t interested. However, it could also mean that they go for an hour-long walk every afternoon at 2:00pm and turn off their phone. The point is that if one method isn’t working, you need to switch it up. Try leaving a voicemail, reaching out over email, sending a message through LinkedIn, delivering snail mail, and whatever else you have at your disposal. If they don’t answer their phone during normal business hours, send a message before their workday starts or shortly after it ends, when they may have more downtime.

Reviving dead sales leads can be a major undertaking. Thankfully though, the odds are good that you have at least two or three great potential customers on your list. Just remember to follow the advice above to be able to successfully recapture value from those lost relationships.

Motorola used to be one of those giant corporate conglomerates that employed 150,000 people, many at a massive campus in Schaumburg, Illinois. But it hit hard times, and over the last several years it sold off chunks of itself and became Motorola Solutions.

Motorola Solutions is still a huge company. It employs around 14,000 and generated $5.8 billion in revenue over the last four quarters. But it has sold the huge campus and moved to new headquarters in Chicago.

As part of its move and cost cutting, Motorola is unplugging its data centers and going all-in in the cloud.

Its cloud of choice is Amazon Web Services, Leo Wang, head of cloud computing, told Business Insider.

"When we first we started, we were moving just one data center, our Schaumburg data center," he said. "Within 6 to 7 months, we moved more than 200,000 servers, and 150 applications, and we had more than $2 million in computer yearly spend moved over to AWS."

And they liked AWS so much, they decided to move everything else into it, worldwide, over the course of the next two years, Wang said. 

"We save millions per year. We invested millions initially but the long range savings will be significant, and we have a more aggressive plan next year and the year after."

Choosing Amazon wasn't automatic. In fact, Motorola already had a smaller contract with Microsoft to use its competing cloud, Azure. But Microsoft wasn't able to turn that into a bigger sale.

Why Microsoft didn't win

Motorola Solutions sells radios and communications equipment to government agencies like police, fire, other emergency services.

They chose Azure because Azure had a crucial government security certification known as Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) and Amazon didn't.

So when Motorola opted to move everything to the cloud, the IT folks looked at Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.

"Amazon had better technologies in almost all areas. It is much more mature in terms of functionality. They excelled in every aspect that we needed from the cloud perspective and from the customer service perspective, but they didn’t have the CIJS compliance," Wang said.

But CIJS certification was a deal breaker, they told Amazon.

"Initially, they were hesitating. They were not interested in having this certification because they were so big in the market," Wang says.

But they agreed to look into it and decided to get CIJS, realizing it could open up new government markets for its cloud. Amazon is already making a name for itself pursuing government cloud business with its "GovCloud," a highly secured section of the AWS's services reserved for government use.

"Once they realized the importance of this certification in this industry, they invested. In a few months they were certified, and they created a Gov Cloud for us," Wang said.

By doing this, Motorola was able to launch a brand new app for its law enforcement customers on AWS that lets them store camera footage on AWS. This app has the potential to be huge for Motorola and AWS, Wang believes.

Amazon isn't known for its customer service, but Wang can't sing AWS's support praises any louder.

"Andy Jassy personally came to our office and had a detailed look at what we had. They put a lot of attention to us," Wang said.

In comparing AWS's support to that from Microsoft, he called it "very different," saying, "With AWS we are very tightly engaged with them in almost all efforts. We have meetings, we share our concerns, we have follow up, and a consultant works closely with us, and works closely with the product team."

Amazon's big gotcha

There is one big downside to choosing Amazon: it's harder to keep track of costs.

Like all cloud providers Amazon charges for the actual time each machine (known as an instance) is used. That's a benefit over buying servers, which a company pays for if they use them or not.

But if a company is not carefully watching its Amazon usage, it could run up a huge bill.

"In the cloud, it’s so easy to create resources, but the right governance over the usage is needed for you to get the price benefits. You need to be able to start and stop that instance only when the app is running." Wang said. "If you simply spin up the servers without proper governance, you could end up paying more."

AWS doesn't make this task easy.

"AWS, their pricing model is very complicated, that is a drawback," Wang says. He has complained to AWS about it and believes "they are improving in that area."

There are hoards of apps that will monitor Amazon usage. Motorola doesn't use them. Instead, it hired a cloud consultant, 2nd Watch, to help it move to AWS, size everything properly, train the IT staff and set up its own internal systems for watching usage, Wang says.

Downsizing Oracle

One bonus for moving to the cloud is that Motorola has a chance to look at its big expensive apps, like Oracle's database, and ditch them.

"In some of the instances, if we can use AWS [databases] instead of Oracle, we are doing that," he said, though he's not ready to dump Oracle completely. "Oracle is still our big partner."

This is a huge concern for Oracle these days, as Amazon rolls out more database alternatives and has created a tool that helps a company move its database from Oracle to Amazon's homegrown one.  

Avoiding hard feelings

One last thing Motorola needed to work on was getting the IT staff on board. No one lost their jobs because of this move, Wang says. That's because Motorola had an outsourcer called CSC managing its infrastructure. With AWS, it won't need CSC.

But there's still some jealousy among the staff.

"My team is very excited because they are the core cloud computing team, doing the work. Some other IT teams are feeling left out. I can sense that kind of feeling," he said.

So, Wang says, he's working on eventually getting the other IT folks trained on the cloud. And people are excited to learn all the latest, greatest cloud tech. It's good for their careers. "I will help them and they will help me, too."

SEE ALSO: 12 cloud computing skills worth over $113,000 a year salary

SEE ALSO: Programmers are having a huge discussion about the unethical and illegal things they’ve been asked to do

Join the conversation about this story »

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Are you achieving your goals for the customer experience? If not, you’re probably not measuring in the right way. Learn what that way is.

Goals:
Companies want to give and get value through the customer experience – what are your goals? Some companies seek to deliver proactive customer service. For others, it’s about increasing customer loyalty or selling more through each customer interaction.

To achieve your goals, you’ll need to measure the fine-grained elements of your customer interactions. Only an up-close view – not a high-level view – will show you how to actually improve.

Where most companies get it wrong (really wrong) is they spend copious resources tracking the consequences of their customer experience (dashboards, Net Promoter Scores, etc.). But, they barely consider the factors that cause those experiences.

Outcome Metrics: They’re Indicators…But Too Simplistic
Outcome metrics are your results. For example, after a hotel stay, you might get a survey with the Net Promoter question: “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” Your answer – if you answer at all – will be a result of your experiences at the hotel.

Outcome metrics, whether satisfaction or Net Promoter Scores, allow you to track progress over time. They’re indicators of general performance, but they’re too simplistic – and they don’t show you how to improve.

Elemental Metrics: The Actionable Alternative
The customer experience is complex. It consists of broad factors, such as connection and timing, which break down into smaller elements: smiles, frowns, word choices, answer clarity, and more.

These small elements comprise the customer experience – and they’re what you can actually change.

To uncover gaps, opportunities, and areas to improve, you need metrics that track your performance with specific elements.

Quick Example:
Imagine you own a coffee shop and want to sell more coffee. A number of factors and elements are involved:

• Product: Do customers like the coffee? Is it burnt or bitter?
• Timing: How long do customers wait? Is there music in the background, so it doesn’t seem so long?
• Connection: Did the cashiers focus on each customer? Or were they busy talking to each other?
• Competition: Was a coffee shop on the next block offering free pastries?

You’ll increase sales revenue if you improve underlying factors like coffee quality, wait time, and cashier attentiveness. But if you only look at your sales numbers, nothing will change.

Think of it like training to run faster.
To get results, you have to improve factors like flexibility, endurance, and nutrition.

Each factor is comprised of myriad elements. For example, flexibility depends on muscle strength, activity level, and body temperature. Improve each element, and you’ll run faster. But simply measuring your speed (the outcome) won’t tell you what – or how – to improve.

While you CAN’T run faster overnight, every day you CAN add 20 minutes of endurance training, 15 minutes of stretching, and eat healthier foods.

Satisfaction vs. Wow:
To manage the customer experience, you’ll need to work at an elemental level – but how often you examine your elements depends on whether you seek to satisfy or wow.

• Satisfaction: If you’re the market leader, achieving satisfaction may be enough – and while you’ll monitor your performance on key elements, a quarterly review is probably sufficient.

• Wow: In a competitive market, or if customer experience is one of your differentiators, you’ll have to “wow” your customers. This requires measuring and optimizing the fine-grained elements of your customer interactions – and doing so at least monthly.

Bottom Line: To lead through the customer experience, you’ll need to stop relying on outcome metrics and embrace complexity by using elemental metrics.

There is only one thing that will allow you to successfully compete against lower prices. That one thing is the perception of greater value.

Valued

The impediment to higher prices is the perception of value. The question is what do you do to justify the higher price that your prospects perceive as something worth paying more to obtain?

Some of the prospective clients you call on will perceive the ability to lower their costs overall as an outcome for which it is worth paying more. Let’s say by spending 10 percent more on what you sell they reduce their overall cost structure by 15 percent. This is easy math, and it’s an easy justification to spend more if your prospective client values that 5 percent enough to change.

Your high trust, high value, and high caring approach may provide your clients with a greater experience, and one that gives them the peace of mind of paying more to have a smart, value-creating, future-oriented partner helping them solve problems. This level of service and relationship is widely valued.

When the perception of greater value exists, it isn’t difficult to command a higher price. There are two cases when selling a higher price is difficult.

No Differentiation

When you can’t differentiate why your dream client should pay more, they are right not to pay more.

If you can’t clearly explain what you differently, how that makes a difference, and why your prospective client should pay more, they are not going to pay more. Commanding a higher price means being different in way that makes a difference. The difference that you make is what creates the perception of value.

What do you that makes you different? Why do you do it differently? How does what you do differently create greater value for your clients.

Of course, there are some tough cases who simply don’t perceive what you do as something for which they would invest more.

Not Valued

It is critical that you perceive that what you sell creates greater value for your clients. If you don’t believe, there is no reason for your dream client to believe either. You transfer your confidence or your doubt to your dream client. That said, some of your prospects won’t perceive what you do that is different or how it makes a difference as having greater value worth paying more to obtain.

You might be able to produce far greater results requiring less effort by your client, and yet, to them, it may not rise to the level worth paying more for—even when you can validate the ROI with strong evidence.

What you sell may have longer life, requiring your client to repurchase less often than they would with what your competitors sell. If, however, they don’t care about how long what you sell lasts, they aren’t going to pay more.

Your higher price may even lower their overall costs by more than your prospective client can imagine, dropping serious profit on their bottom line. Still, they may not care enough to pay more, even to make more money.

You will come across prospective clients who are woefully penny-wise and pound foolish. Your only hope for convincing these hapless souls to do what is in their interests is by discovering something they do perceive as greater value for which it makes sense to them to pay more.

The post The Only Way to Sell at a Higher Price Than Your Competitors appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Think with Google regularly offers insights that marketers can use to create better campaigns to reach more of their customers.

By looking at data straight from the search giant itself, you can better make choices that will get you results faster without having to invest as much money or other resources.

The latest Google research looks at how people use their mobile devices, both for accessing online content and for other informative and entertainment purposes. Here’s a look at what the latest research from the search leader shows:

Typical Daily Usage

Do you have a smart phone? If you do, you are among the majority.

Google says that 80 percent of people use a smart phone.

This may come as no surprise to you since you likely rely on your smart phone to do everything from check your email to pass the time at the doctor’s office playing Candy Crush. And you likely see a lot of other people doing the same thing at grocery stores, playgrounds, baseball games and more.

Google says that 27 percent of people only use a smart phone, while 57 percent of people use more than one type of device to get things done. That may mean that they have another type of phone also, or that they use a tablet and a computer as well.

Google says that 14 percent of people only use a computer to access data.

None of this information means that desktop search is dead – certainly not – but it does mean that mobile search is more important than ever before. You must start putting more effort into developing and refining your mobile search strategy.

Mobile Search

Desktop search may still be important, but it is quickly losing its place to mobile search.

In fact, Google’s latest data shows that more searches are being conducted on mobile devices than on desktop. The reason for this is that many people are using their mobile devices for information they need right away while they are on the go, such as the hours of a store or restaurant, directions to a place, online coupons while shopping, the presence of nearby gas stations, and so on.

Google says that nearly 40 percent of people are searching on their smart phones each day for information to address immediate needs.

Google identified the topics most likely to be searched on mobile devices. Health searches included information about colds and flu, sunburns and cold sores, for example. Parenting searches looked for information about maternity issues, new parenting issues, and teething. Beauty searches involved information for nail care, hair styling, manicures, pedicures and more.

It is easy to see why these searches happen. You are at a playgroup with your baby for example, and you notice your baby has a weird sore on his mouth or some strange discharge, so you look up the symptoms on your phone. You take a look at your nails while you are on your lunch break and realize you are sorely in need of a manicure, so you do a quick search for nearby salons to make an appointment.

It is important that you understand the way people use their mobile devices and why so that you can create the information they want and position yourself to easily be found.

Mobile Web vs. Apps

CodeFuel conducted its own research on online behavior to better understand how users interact with content.

One of the findings in our free ebook is that more people prefer to use mobile web browsers (23 percent) to accent content than to use mobile apps (only 15 percent).

Our data also showed that the majority of users prefer to find content through Google, followed by other content websites for discovery. When they use content websites, they have a few identified as favorites that they visit daily.

If users are presented with ads, they will be more likely to engage with the ad if it has interesting or relevant content or if it comes from a website that they know and like.

Our research – and the research of many other companies – confirm what marketers have known for some time: User experience is paramount. Whether you are trying to brand yourself or increase your conversions, the only way to be successful is to create content that users want and that provides value to them.

It is essential that you design your website, your ads and your landing pages with mobile users in mind. There are many tools available to help you do so, and CodeFuel offers several articles in our blog with checklists and other helpful information.

Mobile is a valuable tool for marketers. Not only is it the preferred tool for accessing information for many users, but it is often an essential tool, being the only way that some people can get the information they need, such as when they are on the go.

At Engagio, we think about account selection using a four-stage maturity model depending on the methods used to compile target accounts.

No matter where you are on the spectrum, from relying on manual approaches to using the most sophisticated data modeling and analytics, you can still see real and tangible value from Account-Based Everything (ABE). This reliability is one of the reasons that ABM is known to deliver the “highest Return on Investment of any B2B marketing strategy or tactic” (according to the ITSMA.)

Selecting your target accounts (the most important step in the process) is a blend of both manual intuition and data-driven logic. Doing it right combines gut feel, historical performance, and sometimes predictive data science to come up with an “Ideal Customer Profile.”

The ABE Account Selection Maturity Model starts with simple sales rep account selection and progresses through to full predictive analytics.

Consider each of these four levels:

Level 1: Rep Self-Selection

Picking accounts manually is all about gut feeling. Sales teams generally know who their best customers are, and what they look like. This collaborative decision is based on intuition and experience, and won’t be wildly off-base.

Level 2: Basic Data

At this level, marketers add in data such as company size and simple scoring to weigh their best options. By adding a bit of analysis, more opportunities can be uncovered, and the right level of value can be assigned to target accounts.

Level 3: Advanced Data

Every existing database is only as useful as the data within. At this stage of account selection maturity, add advanced data about prospective accounts from third-party vendors, such as technographic insights (which technologies are used at target accounts) and intent data (which identifies who is showing in-market behavior). In addition, to account for this new layer of insights, more advanced scoring or modeling is necessary to weigh accounts and prioritize the list.

Level 4: Predictive Analytics

Taking a more sophisticated approach to building a target account list for Account Based Everything includes the use of predictive scoring and modeling. This approach uses data analysis to choose the companies most likely to buy based on the ones who have already bought or become opportunities. All types of information used in previous levels (plus more) are aggregated and analyzed in a complex model that would be nearly impossible to execute manually.

Though any of these four stages will be an effective start to choosing the right accounts for your Account-Based Everything strategy, the more data you include, and the more sophisticated your modeling, the better your chances of optimizing resources.

Wondering where to begin with Account Based Everything? Start by downloading The Clear and Complete Guide to Account Based Marketing for the six ABM processes, the new ABM metrics, how to manage change, and a whole lot more.

Where are you on the model?

If you’re like many people in the world of talent acquisition, you probably feel like you’re running on a treadmill most of the time. A req comes in, you post/inmail/call to fill it, and move on to the next. Each day you’ve got to put one foot in front of the other in order to keep pace, or risk falling off.

An idea came along a few years ago around building communities of talent so source from. Typically these take the form of a following on Twitter/LinkedIn, or an email list serve.

Why haven’t these worked?

While we’ve all heard about how recruiting is becoming marketing, the reality is that most of us aren’t marketers yet. One implication of this is that we don’t really know how to create content that’s engaging and interesting.

For most companies that have a talent community, the messaging that goes out to their followers is in the form of job alert blasts. “There is a new opening in sales that’s not very relevant for you!” “There’s a customer service job that just opened up which you probably don’t care about.” Ok, so maybe I shouldn’t use quotations here, but you get the idea.

Even more targeted job blasts aren’t effective. Put yourself in the candidate’s shoes. I followed you on LinkedIn, or signed up for your talent community, because I thought your company was interesting. I read some press you had, or my friend told me about you. But, I wasn’t ready to apply. My resume wasn’t up to date. I actually like my job. In the future though, things may be different.

This person who’s thinking about their future, who had an initial attraction to your company, they are an amazing person to keep warm. But, they don’t want to hear about job openings (for the most part). They know where to find those. They want something more interesting.

The more effective way to keep candidates warm

Think about a major purchase you’re thinking of making in the next 6-12 months. Let’s say it’s a new car. You’re interested in five different brands, so you sign up for the local dealerships’ email lists.

Four of those dealers send you emails that include the make of the car, and the price. Ok, we knew that already. But, one of those dealerships sends you an interesting video about how their car performs when off roading. The next month, they have a blog post from a recent customer talking about the amazing customer service they received when one of the tail lights got smashed in an accident. We now have a connection to this dealership. They’ve built trust, and actually increased the attraction we initially felt towards them.

Do you see the parallel? The company who sends out interesting information to their talent communities is going to build mindshare in the people who engage with their content. This mindshare allows you to effectively source from this pool when you get a new req in. It means a higher response rate to emails. It means easier first conversations. And, it means better interviews from people who know your company. The recruiter who is now a marketer wins.

What content do candidates want?

At NextWave Hire we have over 3 million data points that tell us exactly what candidates want. It’s not too dissimilar to what you’d want to know before you applied for your next job: What skills will I get, what’s the day to day like, how’s the culture unique, how should I prep for interviews? Of course, there are many role specific questions too: what’s the tech stack, what was your last sales process like, how do you run customer discovery interviews?

No offense, but candidates want to hear the answers to these questions directly from employees. They speak their language, are more credible than a marketer/recruiter, and employees know all the details from actually doing the job.

Advice on how to get going

If you have a talent community already, then start getting some interesting content from your team to share. You can literally do this with an iPhone for starters. And, don’t stop at email. This information is great for social too!

You should be able to get in depth information about what content candidates are engaging with in order to understand who the warmest leads are in your pipeline. Now, when that new req comes in, you can quickly pull up a list of people who know your company, like your content, and are most likely ready to have that conversation about what’s next in their careers.

Good luck.