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Whether you’re a prolific blogger or aspiring online marketer, you’ve probably heard of Neil Patel. Starting out as a frustrated online entrepreneur, he developed a brand that is built on honesty and the desire to over-deliver. Today, he is an accomplished blogger, entrepreneur, and marketer.

After working for big brands such as eBay, General Motors, Viacom, and Google, there’s no reason to doubt his experience in the field of marketing. He knows all the steps you need to take, the resources you need to have, and the pitfalls you need to avoid in building your online brand successfully.

To learn from Neil Patel’s wisdom, you can go ahead and visit his blog. If there’s one thing he is famous for, then it’s the amount of actionable information he can provide with his in-depth blog posts. Alternatively, you can get nuggets of advice through some of his most helpful quotes:

1. “Don’t optimize for conversions – optimize for revenue.”

Source: What Spending $252,000 on Conversion Rate Optimization Taught Me (link)

Simply put, marketing and optimization efforts are useless if they don’t eventually lead to profits. For example, you may have a plan that can surely convert more visitors into subscribers. But until you figure out how to convert them into paying customers, then you need to dig a little deeper.

2. “Some content will go viral, generating tons of hot traffic to your blog, while other content will be lost in the archives. If you want more of the first kind, you’ve got to put your readers first.”

Source: Creating Content That Converts: The Step-by-Step Guide (link)

Content is the lifeblood of any online marketing strategy. Regardless if you’re trying to build links, sending out newsletters, or publishing a new blog post, content without value is just trash. If you want to generate traffic with your content, it must be packed with useful and relevant information that can help users solve their problems.

3. “Growth is the sun that a growth hacker revolves around.”

Source: The Definitive Guide to Growth Hacking (link)

In one of his most visually-appealing blog series ever, Neil Patel talks about the importance of an achiever’s mentality in online success. You should always seek improvements and never be complacent with mediocrity. Remember that success is an endless pursuit that requires constant effort, even when you thought you reached the very top. Whenever you feel satisfied with your accomplishments, stop and start looking for new opportunities to grow. That’s what being a “growth hacker” is all about.

4. “You have to separate yourself from the competition. You have to be more appealing to your target audience, and you can achieve it by creating a recognizable, personal brand.”

Source: The Complete Guide to Building Your Personal Brand (link)

In a world full of choices, how can you make your brand appear to be the best one? According to Neil Patel, it’s about developing a personal brand that your audience can be familiar and confident with. But to establish your brand, you must first get to know yourself better. Identify your vision and determine your impact to the target audience. You’ll know your personal branding is successful once people start to recognize you from anything – be it a logo, your portrait, or color scheme.

5. “The key with blogging is to lay it all out there because sooner or later, people are going to know what you know – so might as well be the first one to share the information and get credit for it.”

Source: Blogger Profile: How Neil Patel Makes Millions with Quick Sprout (link)

One of Neil Patel’s core philosophies is to over-deliver; and he stays true to this by providing comprehensive, well-structured blog posts every single time. Don’t worry about spilling too much information to the point that they’ll no longer need your services in the end. To Neil, it’s all about winning the audience’s trust and building your authority.

6. “Do something you are passionate about because it won’t feel like work. This way, you will work harder and longer.”

Source: Interview with Neil Patel – Blogadda (link)

When asked about the best tips he can give to aspiring entrepreneurs, Neil Patel made it short and simple – don’t be afraid to take the risk and do something you are passionate about. Keep in mind that nothing in business is supposed to be easy. But if you focus on one of your passions or fields of interests, then you will be more motivated to learn, improve, and succeed over the years.

How to Make Money with Digital Info Products

He was the saddest Santa Claus I’ve ever seen.

It was December. The stores were in full holiday mode, including my local retail superstore.

I was shopping, walking along the back wall when I saw them—two employees. One held a point-and-shoot camera and wore a Santa hat. The other wore a loose-fitting Santa suit, hat, and fake beard.

“Santa” was sitting, slouched on an undecorated bench in a dimly-lit area outside the bathrooms. The other employee stood a few feet away, waiting for customers to request a picture with Santa.

Neither smiled. Both looked bored.

Incongruity: Telling the Wrong Story

Those two retail employees are a perfect example of incongruity in a marketing effort.

Whatever manager decided the store should have a Santa hoped to engage shoppers with a fun, festive experience.

What the employee in the Santa suit actually communicated was:

• “This is miserable.”
• “Being here is miserable.”
• “Is it time to go home yet?”

The idea of “Santa” primes me for fun, joy, and excitement. For smiles, and laughter, and holiday cheer. That’s what I expect to feel when I see a Santa in a retail store. The store’s message was incongruent.

What I got from these two employees was quite different.

Digital marketers make the same mistake all the time.

We set out to excite prospects about our product or service. But we unwittingly set up our funnel in a way that kills the very excitement we were hoping to generate.

Whenever incongruity happens, your target audience will see two things at the same time:

1. The story I’m trying to tell (e.g. holiday cheer)
2. The story I’m actually telling (e.g. employee misery)

Incongruity will kill your conversions in a sales funnel.

Let me use an example to illustrate how congruity works for digital marketers.

Let’s pretend I have an info-product called “Nathan’s Awesome Consulting Method” I’d like to sell to consultants who need more clients. Let’s also say it sells for $297.

I’ll use a pretty standard IM funnel:

1. Blog posts with Facebook ads to drive traffic
2. Retargeting ads to a lead magnet
3. Tripwire offer on the lead magnet download page
4. Upsell to the $297 on the tripwire thank you page
5. Email follow-up for those who didn’t purchase the tripwire or the full package

Straightforward stuff for anyone who’s done a funnel before.

Specifically, I’ll use these items:

1. High-value blog posts about consulting.
2. A PDF lead magnet called 5 Simple Methods to Land 2 New Consulting Clients in the Next 30 Days
3. A tripwire: a 60-minute video training as a tripwire, cost $7. Let’s call it: Land as Many Clients As You Want, Whenever You Want (Nathan’s Proven System)
4. The main $297 product: Nathan’s Awesome Consulting Program

Congruity: One Audience, One Problem, One Promise

Behind the scenes, my little made-up funnel hits the three key criteria for congruity in a sales funnel:

1. It’s aimed at one well-defined audience: consultants
2. It’s aimed at one problem: landing new clients to grow a consulting practice
3. It promises one thing: grow your consulting business

The audience and the problem never change. And neither does my promise to the audience.

What changes is the magnitude of my promise.

At the top of the funnel I promise to solve your problem in a small way: land two clients in 30 days.

By the end, I offer a full system anyone can use to find as many clients as they want, whenever they want.

I’m solving the same problem but in different ways.

Where Marketers Go Wrong

I regularly meet marketers who get bogged down in the mechanics of their sales funnel, obsessing about technical details like:

• The color of the CTA button
• A/B testing of one specific landing page within the funnel
• How many days is “ideal” between messages in the follow-up email sequence
• Conversion rates of different lead magnet offers
• Pricing packages

And a thousand other things.

None of these things are bad, of course. But the mechanics of a sales funnel won’t help you if you forget to step back and examine the message customers receive as they move through the steps of your funnel.

As a marketer, you have to go back and forth with this. You have to constantly zoom in to fix the small stuff, then zoom back out to make sure the story you’re telling still makes sense all the way through your funnel.

How to Wreck a Well-Designed Sales Funnel

Let’s say my opt-in lead magnet is only converting at 30% and I’m not happy about it.

So, I decide to dump my lead magnet: 5 Simple Methods to Land 2 New Consulting Clients in the Next 10 Days.

I swap it out with a new lead magnet called 7 IRS Loopholes for Self-Employed Consultants.

Now my funnel materials look like this:

1. High-value blog posts about consulting.
2. PDF lead magnet: 7 Little-Known IRS Rules for Self-Employed Consultants
3. A tripwire: a 60-minute video training as a tripwire, cost $7. Let’s call it: Land as Many Clients As You Want, Whenever You Want (Nathan’s Proven System)
4. The main $997 product: Nathan’s Awesome Consulting Program

Having done this for a while, I can tell you what will happen.

Opt-ins might go up for the “IRS Loopholes” lead magnet.

But whether they do or not, I predict the overall sales numbers for the funnel will almost certainly drop.

Why?

Because now I’m making two promises in my sales funnel, instead of just one.

“IRS Loopholes” makes a different promise than every other step of the sales funnel. And thus it attracts a different crowd of people to click on the initial Facebook ads at the top of the funnel.

Before, I was attracting consultants who had the pain of not having enough clients. It’s why they clicked to enter the funnel.

Now I’m attracting consultants who want to find IRS loopholes. That crowd might also have the problem of not having enough clients. But they might not. I’ll never know, because that’s not why they clicked to enter the funnel.

Congruity: Priming the Prospects Mind for the Sale

In sales funnels, “priming” is the art of preparing someone to see an offer.

What they see before the offer primes them for what they’ll see on the sales page.

People who download a PDF book about IRS loopholes? They have not been primed to think about the problem of finding more clients as a consultant.

When “IRS loopholes” people hit my tripwire page, I’m asking their brains to process a shift—from the pain of paying taxes to the pain of not having enough clients.

That shift? It will be jarring to the brains of my readers.

Because incongruity kills conversions, every time.

3 Elements of a Congruent Funnel

If you are designing a funnel, here are three elements you must have to make it successful:

Element #1: A Well-Defined Audience Segment

When you set up a funnel, start with your audience and work backward. Funnels work because they promise to solve a problem for a group of people. To do that, you have to clearly define who you’re trying to attract with your top-of-the-funnel content.

Element #2: A Problem

I like to literally write out the problem statement I’m going to solve for my audience. For example:

• “I don’t make enough money to pay the bills”
• “I can’t find clients”
• “I hate my job. I want to quit and work for myself, but I don’t know how”
• “I’ve tried to lose weight but nothing works”
• “My marriage is in trouble”

Element #3: One Central Promise

Every step of your sales funnel should solve the same problem in bigger and better ways. That’s how you attract the right people into the funnel. And that’s how you convert them as they move through the different steps.

3 Dead Giveaways of an Incongruent Funnel

Funnel not working as well as it should? Here are three giveaways that will tell you if you have a congruity problem:

Giveaway #1: No Well-Defined Audience

Don’t expect good results if you don’t know who you’re trying to reach with your funnel.

Giveaway #2: Not Solving a Problem

Newsjacking content might get a lot of clicks at the top of your funnel, but it’s not how you get the right people into your sales funnel. Same with ads about your product’s features. Focus on a problem that’s common in your target audience.

Giveaway #3. Multiple Promises in the Funnel

As we described earlier, switching promises mid-funnel is jarring to your prospects. A different promise might boost your results in one part of the funnel, but it might also torpedo your overall sales results.

Performance Marketer A Real-Live Example

At Performance Marketer, the team obviously spends a lot of time working on our own sales funnels.

As a company, we have 10 – 15 products in total, which we’ve separated based on target audiences. From there, we focus on making a funnel for each audience, attracting them with a specific promise, then leading them to the appropriate product.

For example, our site Membership Site Masters is a course on how to build a successful membership site.

The audience:

• Internet marketers who want to make recurring revenue online with membership sites.

The problem statement:

• “I want to make monthly revenue from a membership site. But I don’t know how to make it work.”

The promise:

• We’ll teach you a proven system for how to set up, fill, and profit from a membership site of your own, including the technical stuff

The content assets we use in the funnel are:

• Lead Magnet #1 : 114 Membership Site Niche Ideas
• Lead Magnet #2 : 4 Video Mini-Course on why it’s a great idea to create a membership site)

The main product:

• A step by step course on how to create a membership site (including technical aspects)

We also add a downsell option:

• The first module (a 7-course video) on the different types of videos you can use in a membership site

See how every piece of the funnel—including the products themselves—are congruent?

We attract people with content and lead magnets that talk about membership sites. This attracts people we know are interested in the topic. Then we follow through with products that solve the same problem in a bigger, easier way.

The key to our success?

The audience drives the rest of the funnel design.

That’s why we keep all those materials on their own domain at Membership Site Masters. We use the same method with all our products and properties, including Performance Marketer itself.

I know “congruity” sounds like a big fancy academic word. But I hope the examples above help you see why it’s such an important element to your success in online marketing.

Don’t be like superstore Santa—sending mixed signals to the people you’re trying to reach.

If you take nothing else away from this article, remember this:

• Choose an audience.
• Find a problem they have that you can solve
• Make everything in your funnel about that one promise, including the products themselves

Do those three things, every time, with every funnel.

If you do, I predict you’ll see an immediate improvement in the effectiveness of your efforts online—and the money you make as a result.

Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations by Dan Ariely, TED Books, 128 pages, $16.99, Hardcover, November 2016, ISBN 9781501120046

Dan Ariely’s new book, Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations, begins on a painful note, with him relating the story of receiving a phone call from a stranger asking him to help a young man that was in the hospital, having been badly burned in a fire. The reason he received this call is that, through a mutual acquaintance, the mother on the other end of the phone knew that, as a young man, Ariely had spent three agonizing years in the hospital himself after sustaining burns over seventy percent of his body.  

It was a painful experience for Ariely that recalled the excruciating pain he had endured during that treatment. And, yet, instead of turning away from that pain, it motivated him to help, it gave him a sense of meaning and purpose and connection. In a book about the complexities of human motivation, it is a great opening reminder that “the things that give us a sense of meaning don’t necessarily make us happy.”

Ariely is still physically affected by the burns he sustained when he was seventeen. His range of motion is sometimes limited, and he can’t use his hands very well at times. It’s one of the reasons he chose the path of the professor and author—work that’s been made easier by digital recorders and voice recognition technology. It is work that has resulted in three New York Times bestsellers,  Predictably Irrational, The Upside of Irrationality, and The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. It is work that’s taken him out on the lecture circuit and into organizations to study human behavior and motivation, work that has led to his new book, Payoff.

He begins the first chapter telling us of a team of engineers at a large software company he was hired to speak to about decision making. They had recently arrived at the end of a two-year project they had worked hard on, and were enthusiastic about, only to have the project scrapped. Not only was the initiative scrapped, there was no inquiry into whether the work they’d done had other applications or implications or merit for the organization, no follow up to keep them engaged with that work in any way. They were all being assigned to other teams and projects, and there was no effort put together a diagnosis of the work they’d done or the journey they’d been on together. The sense of disengagement and demotivation in the room was palpable. Ariely told the group:

 

“The problem is that [any follow up initiative] could require more expenditure of time, money, and effort, and it seems like your CEO doesn’t see the value in investing more in this project simply because he doesn’t understand the value of investing in your motivation.”

 

Even a simple acknowledgment of the work, the extraordinary time and effort they’d put in, could have acted as a balm to their disappointment on the project.

 

Acknowledgement is a kind of human magic—a small human connection, a gift from one person to another that translates into a much larger, more meaningful outcome. … we can increase motivation simply by acknowledging the efforts of those working with us.

 

People view this as the “soft” side of management, but it is not really soft. It is hard, human work, and the advantages and productivity gains of engaged, motivated employees are backed by hard data. Your intuition may tell you that it’s not really that important, that it may help a bit, but not as much as investing in technology or other operational infrastructure. Your intuition would be wrong.

Ariely tells us that bosses that neglect to put in this human effort are “systematically underestimating the importance of meaning at work,” and that, in general, “People dramatically underappreciate the extent and depth to which a feeling of accomplishment influences people.” They also overestimate the extent that pay acts as motivation. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take care of your people by paying them well; but that you should take care in how you pay them. For instance, in an experiment he conducted with Uri Gneezy, George Lowenstein, and Nina Mazar, he tells us that:

 

One of our main findings was that when bonus size became very large, performance decreased dramatically. This counterintuitive effect stemmed from the stress and fear of possibly not getting the bonus.

 

Because most companies have some sort of bonus structure, studying their effect became their “white whale,” and Intel allowed them to take their experiment into the real world. They did a study that offered workers in a semiconductor factory either a cash bonus, pizza voucher, or a simple compliment for meeting a productivity target. They found the cash bonus was actually the least effective in boosting performance. And not only that, performance actually dropped overall in the following days when the bonus was removed. When they weren’t offered the same cash reward on the second day, the workers felt disincentivized because they were no longer being offered anything. A single compliment on their work wasn’t enough to sustain performance over the long term, either, but the productivity dropped back toward the mean of the control group that received no incentive more slowly, and at least a compliment couldn’t be taken away.  

People also want to feel as if they’re contributing to the process, that they’re actively involved in making something. To illustrate the point, Ariely tells the story of a cakemix developed by P. Duff and Sons in the 1940s. The mix was basically ready-made: all you had to do was mix it with water, pour the batter in a pan, and plop it in the oven. The company was baffled when the mixes didn’t sell. It was only when they removed the egg and milk powder and made it slightly harder to use—now requiring those using the mix to add fresh eggs, oil, and milk—that the mixes began to sell. Ariely draws this conclusion:  

 

The Duff cake mix story offers a simple and clear example of the power of effort and ownership and how it relates to motivation. It shows that when we work harder and spend a bit more time and effort, we feel a greater sense of ownership and thus enjoy more the fruits of our efforts.

 

Think about that as you consider what work you can automate in your business, and what the effect will be. People don’t want their work to be just adding water or baby sitting machines.

It seems the more we understand about human motivation, the more complex it becomes. The industrial-era understanding of labor for capital still holds sway in business, but it is losing some of its luster, and Gallup surveys show employees are becoming increasingly disengaged from their work. What you must understand to reverse that trend in your own organization is how to motivate people, and how to make investments in that motivation.

There are plenty of books about how to motivate people in the workplace. Ariely certainly has a lot to say on that topic, and he doles out those lessons quickly and with clarity. But he actually goes much deeper than that. Payoff is about what intrinsically motivates us as people, not just employees. It is about the nature of work and human nature, and how those can exist symbiotically in a modern organization. It’s about how to connect to our work, and each other, more deeply and meaningfully.

Ariely says “this book is about what we really want out of life before we die.” I would say that it is about how we can all take care of one another.

Houston, we have a problem: only 31% of businesses consider their sales forecasting to be effective in terms of accuracy and helping guide pipeline management.

If this number doesn’t surprise you, your business may very well be in the midst of experiencing the repercussions of generating inaccurate sales forecasting, which can be as serious as over-hiring or product shortage. On the flip side, the Sales Management Association found a correlation between businesses’ forecasting effectiveness and the achievement of their annual revenue objectives.

As a Sales Operations leader, you’ve probably read a million articles and guides offering advice around how to improve forecast accuracy. We’ve all heard these tips before — forecast more often, ditch your Excel spreadsheets, etc. But none of these strategies address the issue at the core of most forecasting fallacies: data. Let’s take a fresh, data-driven look at how you can more effectively predict and drive toward your sales forecasting.

Capture More Data

To effectively predict what will happen in the future, you need to understand what has happened in the past. This requires data – and lots of it. Of course, the only thing worse than having no data is having bad data. In fact, the second most important factor in developing an accurate forecast (after manager training only) is data accuracy, which results in a 34% increase in forecast effectiveness.

Therefore, the first step to eliminating forecasting fallacies is to improve the quantity and quality of your sales data. Here are a few ways to make it happen:

• Enterprise software should be as seamless as Viber, Google or Yelp. Ensure that your sales management software is intuitive and easy to use, particularly on mobile devices. This will inherently drive rep adoption and result in increased data capture.
• The ability to pass lead and contact information into your sales platform directly from other business systems like HubSpot or Zendesk helps eliminate data entry errors, as well as keeps all relevant contact information in one place.
• Think about it: just one transposed number or rogue keystroke and you have inaccurate data. Besides, your reps shouldn’t have to waste time logging every call or conversation they have in your CRM. Choose a tool that automates as much data collection as possible to maximize capture and minimize human error.
• Leveraging a sales platform that doesn’t force sales reps to bounce back and forth between systems to send emails, make calls or run reports is key to driving adoption. It also prevents data from becoming siloed in various systems across your organization.

Measure across Conversion Points

More often than not, very few metrics other than sales revenue are actually factored into sales forecasting, with less than 35% of organizations taking critical measures including new accounts or deal volume into consideration. What’s more, even when these factors are considered, they are often measured in an isolated fashion. What good does it do your business to know how many marketing leads are accepted by sales if you can’t measure the impact this ultimately has on your bottom line?

Think of it this way: sales revenue is the cumulative result of each of the key conversion points within your sales pipeline. To accurately predict this number, your forecasting needs to consistently measure performance across these key conversion points over time, such as leads worked, opportunities qualified, etc. This can be done using two new sets of sales metrics: yield measures and process measures.

Yield measures are used to understand how much value you are getting in return for your investments, enabling you to quantify the true ROI of your time, money and effort.

Process measures are used to understand how leads and opportunities flow through your sales process and pipeline, allowing you to pinpoint bottlenecks and inefficiencies that reveal ways to increase revenue.

This free white paper breaks these measures down into a series of formulas that together allow you to precisely quantify the impact of each stage of your pipeline on your overall performance. With the ability to calculate each of these conversion points and see exactly how it affects sales revenue, businesses can create much more accurate sales forecasting.

Determine Your Sales DNA

Once you are collecting data and measuring it consistently across key conversion points, you will begin to uncover key factors, or dimensions, impacting your sales performance. These include industry vertical, sales team, lead source, stage duration and much, much more. Identifying and isolating these dimensions uncovers underlying trends, patterns or variables that are not obvious when viewing sales revenue as a whole.

Of course, the combination of dimensions impacting performance is different for every business. As such, it can be thought of as your sales DNA. The ability to measure your sales DNA using a consistent set of process and yield measures will reveal the factors that are most significant and predictive in your sales outcomes. In turn, this uncovers quantifiable, actionable insights as to the individual levers that your team can pull to achieve a particular result.

For example, by consistently measuring its sales performance across key conversion points, a business may discover that leads coming from Channel A close at a faster rate than leads from Channel B. However, Channel B leads yield higher revenue when they do close. First, this type of granular insight enables the business to forecast more accurately based on the volume of projected leads from each channel. Second, if there is a sudden unexpected drop in leads from Channel A, the business has the visibility to either adjust its forecast accordingly, or to take the actions necessary to generate enough Channel A leads to reach its projected forecast.

The Science of Sales

Cutting to the core of forecasting fallacies requires taking a scientific approach to measuring and understanding sales performance. While this level of insight has previously been limited to the fastest growing companies with greater budgets and resources, technology is evolving and giving every company the opportunity to become a data-driven organization. For more tips to improve your sales operations, check out this eBook: 3 Keys to Unlocking a Scientific Sales Pipeline.

This post was contributed by Rachel Serpa of Base CRM, and is adapted from the eBook How to Eliminate Sales Forecasting Fallacies with a Data-Driven Approach.

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Download your copy of our “Sales Problems” eBook today to launch into greater detail on how to overcome issues that deeply impact a sales organization, and what using the right sales tools can do to solve them.

The post Cutting to the Core of Sales Forecasting Fallacies appeared first on SalesLoft.

We’ve all read articles about networking best practices. The internet is overwrought with networking angles and strategies advocating for the best ways to stay in front of your contacts and prospects amidst the noise of a digitally connected world.

So Then…Why Is This Business Networking Article Valuable?

I don’t propose that you reinvent the wheel, or require massive amounts of habit changing behavior. This article simply requires a small (but powerful) shift in thinking in order for you to nurture business relationships in the most optimal manner possible.

Shift Happens

Replace the word networking with the word engagement.

Now, take a moment to read that last sentence again. This time, focus on the difference in mindset that this shift is asking you to make.

Why This Mindset Shift is Crucial to Your Business Success

By thinking of networking in terms of engagement, the focal point shift from compiling contacts to maximizing outreach. When we put our attention on making specific connections that support our business success, we naturally steer away from compiling contacts (connections, followers, friends) for the sole purpose of obtaining a large number of contacts.

To put it another way, our targeted messaging will reach more referral-centric ears when we prioritize quality over quantity in our greater professional network.

These days, everyone has a huge network of connections. We meet people at personal and professional events like conferences, meetups, weddings, school functions, and so on. Many of us are such great networkers that we can even meet people while waiting in line for coffee, lunch, or the commuter train. Yes, people are everywhere. Not surprisingly, this plethora of people has led to the (unfortunate) grab-and-go networking mindset wherein we try to include every single person we meet into our network-at-large.

But does this practice truly add value to our networks?

I’d argue that by casting such a wide net, we miss out on nurturing our most valuable connections: those that will generate leads via referrals. But I’ll conquer that issue in an upcoming post (so subscribe to this blog and stay tuned!).

The point is: whether your network is huge or filtered down to include only the most referral-centric contacts, you must stay top-of-mind in order to be remembered for who you are and what you have to offer.

Active Versus Passive Engagement

Our networks can help us achieve our various goals. We should be building relationships to that end. But with so many varying opinions about how to do that effectively, we must first choose what our goals then engage our networks accordingly. That’s why the importance of being specific can’t be overstated when talking about network engagement. When we get specific with our goals, we actually make a direct impact on our own ability to be successful.

6 Ways to Stay Active

1. Help: When we give, we become a valuable asset to our network. Our connections will form a powerful sense of our lasting commitment to them when we do things like share inspiring stories, help someone find a job, fundraise for a charitable cause, or connect people with each other.
2. Video: Videos get the most shares online. So use video to build online awareness of your personality whether you’re using Skype to live chat with current customers and potential leads, or YouTube to offer targeted and proprietary content.
3. Face-to-Face: It’s powerful to meet in person. Coffee, lunch, and happy hour are the easiest ways to accomplish this, since everyone does at least one of these activities every day! But think beyond the basics here. For instance, if you play tennis, find out who else plays tennis in your network and invite them to play if they live nearby. Get a weekly or monthly match on your calendars. Same goes for live sporting events, industry meetups, and other opportunities to sit down with your connections. Get creative!
4. Message: Do you know someone who plays tennis (or another sport), but they live far away? Write them an email, an actual letter that goes in the mail (remember those?!), or communicate with them on social media. Stay authentic by leveraging your favorite sports, news, interests, and so on with connections that share the same tastes.
5. Comment: We are always skimming our social media feeds to stay current, so it’s an easy next step to comment on posts and shares that you feel passionate about. Just remember not to ostracize anyone by being overly opinionated or one-sided. The world is a tiny fishbowl when it comes right down to it. Don’t risk losing an opportunity because you felt the need to rant endlessly (Election 2016, anyone?).
6. Post: Publish original content and relevant industry content on a regular basis. It’s up to you to decide what constitutes “regular,” but it’s good to keep in mind that posting several times a day is the best frequency for success. Remember to always publish helpful, informative content that raises awareness about your brand’s value and industry positioning. Create impact. Be a thought leader. Influence decisionmakers. You can do all of this with the right content.

4 Ways to Be Passive

1. Share: Just like with posting, it’s important to share other people’s content in addition to your own content a few times a day. Again, keep your shares relevant and helpful to your network so that the content will resonate specifically with your connections. In between the bigger content shares (articles, white papers, eBooks, etc), make sure to share your business plans, ideals, and enthusiasm. That way, when the ask eventually happens, it won’t be a surprise to anyone.
2. Like: This is by far the easiest way to show your connections some online love and attention. Check the social feeds of your alumni group(s), sales prospects, industry associations, vendors, and social interest groups on a daily basis. When you find a comment, share, or post that moves you, click the proverbial “like” button.
3. View: Your time is valuable. So when you take the time to view someone’s website, social media feeds, webinar, blog, video of their keynote speech and the like, you’re increasing their online footprint while staying up-to-date about their corner of the fishbowl. From here, make sure you share, like, comment and so on.
4. Tag: When you come across a piece of content in any of your social media feeds that you’d like to share with a specific connection, tag them! Here’s a “How To” article and infographic for every social media platform worth mentioning. Enjoy!

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper announced Thursday morning that he will not be finishing out the remaining 64 days in his term.

Clapper announced his resignation before the House Intelligence Committee during a hearing.

"I submitted my letter of resignation last night, which felt pretty good," he told the committee. "I have 64 days left and I would have a hard time with my wife for anything past that."

Clapper was expected to leave his post after President Barack Obama finished his term, but his resignation came earlier than anticipated.

His resignation comes in the wake of president-elect Donald Trump winning the White House in last week's election.

During his final months in office, Clapper contended with Russia attempting to interfere with the US election by hacking the Democratic National Convention as well as charges that bosses at US Central Command pressured analysts to alter their intelligence reports about ISIS.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Clinton and Trump's final ads perfectly explain how different they are

When you are in the sales process and the sale suddenly halts because the client has an objection, there are two ways to view it: as an obstacle or as an opportunity. Objections are a natural part of the sales process — you should expect and be prepared to handle them. However, occasionally some of the objections are a bit outlandish. We’ve all had our share of doozies. I reached out to some of my sales expert friends to find out the most memorable objections they have ever heard and how they handled them.

In each of these instances, these women looked at the client’s objection as a launching point for a further conversation. And in the end, they made the sale.

Barbara Giamanco: Isn’t Bill Gates rich enough?

I met with this client a few times in the months leading up to an annual license renewal.

A new vice president at the bank was involved in the renegotiation.

During our negotiation, this executive told me, “We think you can give us a better price because Bill Gates is already rich enough.”

I smiled, and responded with the following:

“That is true, Bill is rich,” I said. “I’m curious, do you discount or give away all your bank services for free? After all, your executives are pretty well off too.”

The vice president chuckled, and the conversation continued. The bank agreed to the pricing I initially proposed.

Shawn Karol Sandy: Why would I choose you over a brand-name service?

I met with a growing technology firm that reached out after someone in their Vistage group recommended me. I could tell the CEO really wanted to grill me and was skeptical.

“So, why would I choose you over Sandler Training to enhance our sale strategy?” he asked me. “They’ve been around longer, are a recognized name, and I know several colleagues and competitors that have used them.”

I smiled, leaned in, and responded.

“First of all, do you actually HAVE a sales strategy?” I asked.

He looked shocked for a second, then chuckled and relaxed.

“Your point?” he asked.

Then, I followed up.

“Do you think that your non-existent strategy would be well served by preaching the same techniques your competitors are using?” I asked.

He’s been a client for more than a year now, and we still laugh about that moment when he realized he had to pivot his thinking.

Elinor Stutz: “Not over my dead body!”

During my second year in sales, I was a newly hired rep, and my job was to hunt for business. I always enjoyed the challenge and saw it as a treasure hunt.

But I had an experience my second week that almost killed the joy of the hunt.

I made a visit to a woman who I thought was a new client. Before I could even begin to have a conversation, she told me “Not over my dead body! Leave now and don’t ever come back.”

Stunned, I stopped in my tracks.

I quickly learned that this “new” client was actually a former client of my new employer. I immediately asked myself three questions:

• Is my employer so awful that I need to interview for another job, again?
• What were the wrongs done to this poor woman to make her so furious?
• Is there any salvation from this entire mess?

I didn’t leave. Instead, I smiled and said, “You apparently experienced a horrific scenario before I came on board. I was just hired last week and need to know what happened. Are you willing to discuss it?”

She was stunned. No one before me ever cared whether she was satisfied or not. She was willing to set a date for me to return and learn more.

At that meeting, my strategy was to sit, listen, and let the woman relieve herself of all the steam bottled up inside of her.

The strategy worked. Near the end of her story, she stopped being angry. She became more relaxed and even smiled.

I thanked her for revealing everything and assured her I did not work the same way as my predecessor. She believed me.

I then went on to ask if we could meet again so I could learn what she needed and make a case for her to reconsider working with us. We set a date.

On our third meeting, the woman appeared somewhat doubtful. I asked her to explain her list of needs. She provided a very long list of “must-have’s.” Then, to my shock, she said she had already spoken to a competitor and decided to go with them.

Curious, I asked who that might be. Upon hearing the name, I smiled. I told her the competitor did not offer the services she outlined at the beginning of the meeting.

Going for the buy-in, I asked her whether working with another company was more important or if the specific technology was of more importance. She sighed, having to say the technology.

The sale moved forward!

These are some great stories, and the thing they have in common is these saleswomen were bold. They didn’t give up easily. They helped their client get what was needed.

My clients often call me with difficult objections, and I teach them a process for handling those. Learn more about my six steps for handling objections here.

Need help handling objections?  Schedule an appointment.

The post Objection Confessions: How Three Experts Made The Sale appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

IKEA is the most influential retailer of the last 25 years.

One of seven major parts of IKEA success is they have pricing that is inexpensive but not cheap.

There are stores that sell products for less than Ikea, like dollar stores and deep discounters like Aldi. But you don’t get the feeling of overly cheap when you buy Ikea products. They are insanely inexpensive when compared to similar products at other stores.

Sweden has used the same model to become a major world supplier of weapons on a per capita basis.

Arms exports top per capita in 2014
1. Israel, $97.7 per capita ($773 million, 8.3 million)
2. Russia, $57.7 per capita ($8.3 billion, 143 million)
3. Sweden, $53.0 per capita (total $505 million, 9.8 million people)

Sweden has weapon systems that are inexpensive but not cheap. AIP diesel submarines and an affordable fighter that can defeat the best Russian planes are systems that the US should adopt to lower the cost of defense while increasing security. The US could buy twice as many submarines while saving half of the cost. The US could buy twice as many fighters while saving five times the cost.

AIP Diesel submarines can be ten times cheaper than nuclear but new AIP versions can match capabilities [inexpensive but not cheap]

Advances in modern, ultra-quiet conventional diesel-electric submarines are a serious challenge to US nuclear submarines and aircraft carrier groups

The threat of super-stealthy diesel submarines being deployed around the world has been present for decades. Still, newer boats are coming armed with advanced anti-ship weapons and are being combined with new air-independent propulsion systems (AIP) making them near impossible to find in the ocean's depths.

In 2005, The HMS Gotland, a modern AIP submarine serving in the Swedish Navy created havok in war games exercise. The Gotland virtually ‘sunk’ many U.S. nuclear fast attack subs, destroyers, frigates, cruisers and even made it into the 'red zone' beyond the last ring of anti-submarine defenses within a carrier strike group. Although it was rumored she got many simulated shots off on various U.S. super-carriers, one large-scale training exercise in particular with the then brand new USS Ronald Reagan ended with the little sub making multiple attack runs on the super-carrier, before slithering away without ever being detected.

The 1600 ton displacement Gotland Class was the first operational Air Independent Propulsion (AIP) submarines in the world. Typical cost for a Gotland class sub is $100 to 365 million. The US is paying $3 to 6 billion for the latest nuclear submarines. A large diesel AIP submarine that matched the most of the capabilities of the big US submarines could cost $500 million to 1 billion.


AIP system can utilize advanced batteries that are charged by 75kw generators. The Gotland has generators run by a pair of diesel and liquid oxygen fueled Stirling Engines. The result of this unique, yet remarkably simple system is two weeks of submerged air independent propulsion while traveling at about 6mph. Kockums' AIP system is virtually silent, even in comparison to multi-billion dollar nuclear powered boats that still have to pump high-volumes coolant to their reactors.

The small and quiet sub is even more deadly with a state of the art combat management system. It features an incredible user friendly interface. During a single attack, the system can guide multiple torpedoes at once, which can result in more than a mission kill for even very large naval combatants like aircraft carriers, with each torpedo striking in a different section of the hull if ordered to do so.

Maneuverability was a key factor in the Gotland Class design and this manifests itself in the boat's "X" shaped tailplane structure. This unique design provides four independent maneuvering surfaces at its stern and is tied to another two planes mounted on the boat's sail. These control surfaces, combined with the sub's advanced and highly automated control system, allows for incredibly tight turns, dives and ascensions even in very close quarters, such as in shallow littoral environments. Due to the boat's size, automation and maneuverability, the Gotland Class has been described as the F-16 Viper of the undersea combat world

Read more »

SAN FRANCISCO — For a company like BP, which has been in the oil and gas business for over a century, adopting new technologies could be a difficult task.

It not only takes years to fully deploy new products, but there are also safety and reliability issues that need to be addressed before making the final call.

Even so, Ahmed Hashmi, BP's global head of upstream technology, says that shouldn't stop a company from continuously seeking new investment opportunities.

"If you don’t know what to do next, do something. That first step, it opens up the next three steps for you, and then it opens up the next few...it's like an exponential effect," Hashmi said on stage at GE's Minds + Machines conference on Tuesday.

BP's latest initiative is in the area of digital transformation. The company wants to turn its aging facilities into a more technologically advanced platforms using cloud and analytics software.

For example, BP announced a new pilot program that would put GE's Plant Operations Advisor (POA) software in one of its largest offshore oil production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. The new software will enable the offshore production platforms to gather tons of real-time data to prevent the facility unexpectedly shutting down. It's also expected to improve operating efficiency by up to 4%, which could potentially lead to hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings if rolled out globally.

"It’s about improving and understanding how the equipment operates. Before something happens, you can intervene and fix it," Hashmi told Business Insider.

GE Oil & Gas' Chief Digital Officer Matthias Heilmann likened the POA software to a more professional Fitbit, given how it monitors your performance with real-time data and prevents bad things from happening.

"One of the key objectives is to reduce, if not eliminate, unplanned downtime, which continues to be a major challenge in the oil and gas industry," Heilmann told us.

Digital investments

Hashmi said BP has gone from investing in big data for seismic technology to 2D and 3D modelling over the past three decades, he said. Now, it's all about digital.

"We had to get comfortable embarking on digital investments," Hashmi said on stage.

In fact, BP tells us that the company's R&D spend on digital initiatives increased last year, despite its overall R&D investments shrinking due to lower oil prices. For example, the company now has the largest super computer in the world for commercial research, and has also developed a Well Advisor tool that helps monitor what is happening in the wells being drilled and prepared for production subsurface and subsea.

All this could theoretically help the company prevent any unforeseen disasters, like the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion, from happening again. It will also help the company operate more efficiently and effectively by 2050, as seen in the chart below from BP:

Different mindset

Hashmi also said it was important for him to instill a different mindset at BP to keep up its culture of innovation. He pointed to three things to remember for any organization looking to drive change internally:

1. "You know your business better than anyone else": Focus on where there's value and go after something that's big. Something that changes your business.
2. "You know yourself best": Partner with people with complementary skills.
3. "Put your best people on the job": By best, he doesn't mean just capable people, but those with outstanding behavior who can hold themselves accountable, and allow others to hold themselves accountable.

SEE ALSO: GE signs software deal with electricity giant Exelon

Join the conversation about this story »

“Your great content is not a tasty snack, it’s a full-on feast — if you know how to ‘COPE.’ From articles to videos to photo galleries, it’s easier than you think to increase the impact of your work via social media, email, and syndication to a content-hungry world.” – Stephanie Reid-Simmons, director of content marketing at Zillow

COPE stands for “create once, publish everywhere,” and represents a highly sustainable technique of building strong, foundational assets that can be expressed in different forms and easily adapted for use on multiple content channels — as part of a single, unified process.

Though likely coined by National Public Radio in reference to specific content management tools the broadcast service was building, the phrase has come to represent an important strategic shift in how content can — and, arguably, should — be developed. When planned and managed thoughtfully, COPE content enables marketers to satisfy their audience’s increasingly voracious appetite for quality content — without overstraining their team’s resources to the point of a breakdown (nervous, operational, or otherwise).

Why companies should COPE

Why is it so critical that content creators find ways to increase production efficiency? Consider this: According to our 2017 B2B Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends research, of the 62% of marketers who feel they became more successful at content marketing over the past year, 85% credit more efficient creation of high-quality content as a key contributor.

What’s even more interesting is that, of those who report that their content marketing programs had stagnated (28%) or even declined (3%) over the last year, almost half cite content creation challenges, and slightly over half cite an insufficient time commitment as reasons for their program’s failure to thrive.

Need more evidence that businesses can no longer afford to ride things out without addressing their content productivity problems head-on? Consider some tough love recently delivered by Joe Pulizzi, which boils down to this: Companies that aren’t able (or willing) to fully commit to delivering high-quality content on a consistent basis might be better off ceasing their content operations altogether.

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If you’re not “all in” with your #contentmarketing program, you should stop says @joepulizzi.
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COPE helps address gaps in content capabilities by enabling marketers to squeeze greater value from their efforts. To COPE, as Stephanie uses the term, is to envision from the get-go how you might refashion an especially promising content idea over and over to serve multiple purposes on multiple channels. Rather than build every asset from scratch, you plan to repurpose, reconstruct, and reposition your best content ideas in various ways to get the most out of them.

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Repurpose your best #content ideas in various ways to get the most out of them says @betterlater via @joderama.
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What it takes to COPE

In her top-rated session at Content Marketing World 2016, Stephanie described the technique in detail and illustrated how brands can leverage it —­ not only to amp production and increase efficiency but to maximize the impact of every asset produced.

According to Stephanie, three features are essential to making COPE work:

1. A rich narrative: If you have a strong, resonant story to tell, you can extend its life by telling it across multiple formats and platforms.

2. A powerful concept: When you come up with a unique idea or even just something fun that people will talk about, it’s worth doubling down.

3. A plan: You need a thoughtful framework that governs what, when, where, and how you will atomize your best content.

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You need a framework that governs what, when, where, & how to atomize your best #content says @betterlater.
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Learning how to COPE

As Stephanie mentions, not everything COPEs universally: There will always be ideas that kill it in a specific channel, but get killed in others. However, just because an idea might not translate to every possible publishing platform doesn’t mean you have to abandon it altogether. You just need to prioritize the ones that offer the strongest potential to suit your primary marketing purpose.

Here are a few tips for choosing your COPE ideas wisely:

• Make sure they are substantive: COPE only works if your foundational assets provide a strong enough value on their own to sustain that engagement. Ask yourself if there’s enough substance to the original story before you decide to extend it to other formats and platforms.

• Make sure they appeal to your publishing (amplification) partners: To be accepted on professional media, other brand, and influencer platforms, your efforts must conform to the quality, topic, and stylistic standards their audiences have come to expect.

• Take cues from your data for COPE ideas: Tracking and measuring the performance of all your content may reveal topics and trends that have a high potential to engage your audience — making them more suitable for COPE.

Keep in mind that when companies COPE, a lot of moving parts often are involved. And, depending on the specific characteristics of your target formats or channels, asset production may even require multiple workflows and sets of editorial criteria. For example, turning a blog post into an infographic can require translating complex explanations into simple visual illustrations; turning an e-book into a quiz may involve revising the discussion into a series of questions and answers as well as the use of specific technologies to deliver the content to users.

To maintain high-quality standards no matter how you might need to reconstitute your content, Stephanie shares three key recommendations:

• Maintain an editorial calendar: It should be easily accessible and up to date so your team can be confident that they are making smart editorial decisions, are delivering assets on schedule, and are working toward the same business goals.

• Meet regularly: Communication between editors and internal channel owners is essential to COPE success. Even a five-minute kick-off meeting at the start of the day can go a long way toward ensuring that your teams remain focused and functional.

• Engage amplification partners frequently: COPE success hinges on establishing relationships with influencers and publishers who need the great content you create. You need to find the right outlets, personally engage their interest, and check in with them regularly so they can consider you a reliable, trustworthy content partner in their syndication efforts.

By the way, as you’ve probably noticed if you’ve followed the usage of the term COPE over the years, Stephanie’s take on the term is unusual. As it’s widely used, COPE implies content that has been prepared for reuse exactly as it is in various places without any tweaks or modifications. That’s what “create once” means in the original COPE concept as laid out by NPR and others. The thing that Stephanie talks about “creating once” isn’t a reusable piece of content but a content idea with a lot of potential. When she talks about “publishing everywhere,” she doesn’t mean publishing the same exact thing everywhere. In fact, she means the opposite: refashioning that content idea so that it’s different each time to suit the channel and audience.

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Refashion that #content idea so it’s different each time to suit the channel & audience says @betterlater.
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A COPE success story

Years before joining Zillow to lead its content team, Stephanie (a former journalist) worked for Amazon. There, COPE emerged as an organic by-product of her role as a busy one-person content engine: Because she had time to create only so many pieces, whenever she came across an exciting content idea, she mined every ounce of value it offered. For example, following a rare opportunity to interview the cast of The Big Bang Theory, Stephanie leveraged the output into a range of assets, including a blog post, an email, a video, and several days of Twitter posts.

Bringing her COPE approach to her role at Zillow, Stephanie discovered that not only can “optimizing for awesomeness” save her team time and money, but it exponentially increases the impact of their content — sometimes as much as 100-fold.

For example, a hot trend in real estate is the tiny house movement, which advocates living simply and sustainably by maximizing the space of a small yet affordable home (typically under 500 square feet). While exploring this trend for Zillow — a real-estate and rental-property marketplace — Stephanie’s team discovered the fascinating story of a young couple that traded in the creature comforts of big-city living in Seattle for a more personally fulfilling lifestyle in their 98-square foot home on San Juan Island.

Starting with a post for the Zillow Porchlight blog and an email campaign, the Zillow team soon found ways to extend Leah Wymer and Brady Ryan’s story across platforms. Here are a few examples.

• A video on Zillow’s YouTube channel:

• Syndicated articles published on amplification partner sites like Forbes, MSN, and AOL Real Estate:

Image source: AOL Finance

• Fuel for Zillow’s social media presence:

Image source: Twitter

Through its COPE strategy, Zillow was able to exponentially increase views of the original blog post and the YouTube video over the course of several weeks as people were seeing the same basic story on higher-profile media sites.

Not only did syndicating the story strengthen overall interest, but the story remains one of the most popular — well over a year after its initial publication.

Conclusion

COPE can provide significant strategic advantages that can amplify the power of every asset you create. But it needs to be done in a smart, systematic, and sustainable way, so that your extended reach doesn’t just impact your brand, it also brings greater benefit to the audience you serve.

Want more on content strategy for marketers? Sign up for our Content Strategy for Marketers weekly email newsletter, which features exclusive insights from CMI Chief Content Adviser Robert Rose. If you’re like many other marketers we meet, you’ll come to look forward to his thoughts every Saturday.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Feed Your Hungry Content Channels With a Powerful COPE-ing Strategy  appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Talking about money with friends, colleagues, family, or any other relationship that exists is usually topic that is avoided. When running a business, this trend also seems to remain true. Businesses are often reserved when it comes to sharing the company financials with its employees for a variety of fear-based reasons. While every business has the choice of who they share what numbers with, the businesses that choose to share with employees can navigate this hard-to-discuss topic with clear direction. In this post we will review the 5 correct ways your business can maintain financial transparency with your employees. Let’s take a look!

Share the Information on a Consistent Basis: Good and Bad

While good news is much easier to share, if you are committing to sharing the financial status of your company’s transactions with your employees, you should embrace sharing the information on a consistent basis, whether the numbers are good or bad. Sharing on a set schedule demonstrates that the company will remain transparent, regardless of the color the company is heading into. Good, bad, or indifferent, remaining on a set quarterly, monthly, or even weekly sharing basis will help with the commitment to being transparent with your employees.

Explain the Numbers: Help Employees Understand the Breakdown

Graphs, projections, charts, oh my. Sharing the financial status with employees is more than just arrows up or down. Sharing takes explaining what it all means. When reviewing financials, help employees understand the numbers they are seeing. Are the projections on track for making the growth expected? Does the company see their value in those numbers? Do you even know what the numbers mean? Sharing and explaining what each dollar in and dollar out means for the company can demonstrate the value of your employees in every transaction.

Review Tough Questions Ahead of Time

Make sure you’re ready to answer the tough questions that your employees may ask. Consider what the employee may see when the numbers come through and be prepared to explain what the company is doing, thinking, or considering when they see the same numbers. Reviewing some potential questions in advance of the numbers will help navigate a potential onslaught of “what does this mean?” question session.

Share in Person

Timing is everything. Companies usually have the time they share news to the team down to a day and time of the week. That usually is paired with a nicely worded email, newsletter, or some form of typed-out document. When it comes to sharing the fiscal information, companies should consider doing this in person when possible. Sharing in person can help reduce office chatter about what the numbers “really mean”, or reduce the misunderstanding of one “0” in the fancy pie chart. Sharing in person allows allows real questions in real time. If a company can find a way to share and provide a follow-up meeting or offer in person reviews, it will ensure staff morale stays high around the company’s financial transparency and communication with its employees.

Demonstrate the Employee Connection in Financial Goals and Reviews

People work harder when they see their value in the end product. Highlight the employee’s contribution to the numbers they see. By demonstrating the connection each employee has to every dollar, they will be encouraged to take ownership of that dollar. By highlighting where an employee fits in the grand scheme, it will help define purpose, passion, and projections to shoot for. The employee paycheck should not be the only financial connection they see to a company.

By sharing and remaining transparent with your company’s financial statements, employees can find increased value and connection to the company that they work hard for. By following these five ways to maintain your business’s financial transparency, employers can reduce the fear that goes into sharing their finances with others. While these methods may not make dinner party discussion about how much or how little one makes easier, it can help the employee, company, and its operating managers feel better prepared to use the company numbers to their advantage.

Investors know the value of being anticipatory. In a world characterized by exponential change, the accounting industry has an opportunity to incorporate that same mindset into everyday practices and procedures—in more ways than one.

The Netflix Paradox

The field of accounting has traditionally labored under a challenging paradox when it comes to reporting organizations’ financial activity—using past performance as one gauge of future prospects. An incident involving Netflix this past summer illustrates that—and a broader issue—perfectly.

On the one hand, the entertainment giant turned in a relatively poor quarterly earnings report. Nonetheless, Netflix stock jumped a remarkable 18 percent.

Those steeped in traditional thinking were baffled. How could investors be so optimistic in the face of bad news?

The answer lay not in the past but in the future. For one thing, the company announced it had added 50 percent more subscribers than initially expected. Analysts projected that Netflix was on course for more than 60 million subscribers in the United States and about 100 million internationally by 2020. Further, the company also announced its intent to spend $6 billion on content next year, up $1 billion from 2016.

Therein lies the paradox of accounting practices—a focus on the financials of the past in a world that’s already moved on.

But that also encapsulates an even greater opportunity—in effect, to reinvent accounting by learning how to add strategic foresight to the numbers, become more anticipatory, and accurately leverage the dynamic of change.

New Thinking, Greater Anticipation

In one respect, the opportunity to reinvent accounting could focus on procedures. As puzzling as it may appear—particularly with an anticipatory mindset—accounting methodology traditionally identifies value-creating investments as expenses. Granted, investment does mean expenditure of capital, but one issue with this methodology is that it often completely bypasses the future benefits of these investments.

That begs one obvious question: How can value be accurately measured when it’s not apparent in financial statements? Years of bad quarterly financials have not stopped investors from buying Amazon stock, and they have been well rewarded for ignoring those reports and looking instead at how Amazon was anticipating technological change and taking advantage of it.

But the opportunity to revamp processes and procedures isn’t limited to numbers on a spreadsheet. Like most every other profession, accounting is faced with being forced to do more with less and challenged by information overload and the necessity to do things faster. And in a world characterized by exponential change, those and other realties are only going to come faster and faster—a powerful form of outside disruption. And because technology is giving all of us the capability of doing more in less time every year, the majority of accountants who bill for time will find themselves making less every year unless they find new ways to add new value.

What’s the most effective strategy? Like the Netflix “paradox,” the best path ahead lies with being anticipatory rather than focusing on the past and reacting to change.

Research shows that accounting is ripe for this sort of shift. According to research by CPA.com, 92 percent of CPAs are not “future ready”—in other words, they don’t believe themselves to be well positioned to anticipate emerging trends in business, demographics and broad social developments.

Other studies further underscore the need for future-focused strategies. In another survey, 76 percent of small business owners said their CPAs are not proactive. It should be no surprise that 75 percent have changed firms because their CPAs are providing reactive services rather than proactive advice.

On one level, a greater capacity for anticipation involves using Hard Trends—those future events we know for certain will occur—and Soft Trends—those that may occur but are also open to influence. By learning how to separate these two types of trends, accountants have the opportunity to better serve their clients by helping them anticipate disruptions and predictable problems, including the future impact of regulatory change, to help guide companies and organizations in better planning and a greater overall emphasis on proactivity rather than simple reaction.

Further, new technology and tools will allow for greater productivity, collaboration and, ultimately, the game-changing opportunity to be a disruptor instead of settling for being disrupted and reacting to change time and time again.

Become Anticipatory

To that end, I have developed The Anticipatory Organization Learning System Accounting and Finance Edition in conjunction with the Business Learning Institute. This award-winning online learning program—specifically geared to finance and accounting professionals—is designed to help you develop anticipatory skills with which you can craft a professional mindset that balances traditional skills and values with the greater confidence that an anticipatory mindset can afford.

The year 1995 was heralded as the beginning of the “New Economy.” Digital communication was set to upend markets and change everything. But economists by and large didn’t buy into the hype. It wasn’t that we didn’t recognize that something changed. It was that we recognized that the old economics lens remained useful for looking at the changes taking place. The economics of the “New Economy” could be described at a high level: Digital technology would cause a reduction in the cost of search and communication. This would lead to more search, more communication, and more activities that go together with search and communication. That’s essentially what happened.

Today we are seeing similar hype about machine intelligence. But once again, as economists, we believe some simple rules apply. Technological revolutions tend to involve some important activity becoming cheap, like the cost of communication or finding information. Machine intelligence is, in its essence, a prediction technology, so the economic shift will center around a drop in the cost of prediction.

The first effect of machine intelligence will be to lower the cost of goods and services that rely on prediction. This matters because prediction is an input to a host of activities including transportation, agriculture, healthcare, energy manufacturing, and retail.

When the cost of any input falls so precipitously, there are two other well-established economic implications. First, we will start using prediction to perform tasks where we previously didn’t. Second, the value of other things that complement prediction will rise.

Lots of tasks will be reframed as prediction problems

As machine intelligence lowers the cost of prediction, we will begin to use it as an input for things for which we never previously did. As a historical example, consider semiconductors, an area of technological advance that caused a significant drop in the cost of a different input: arithmetic. With semiconductors we could calculate cheaply, so activities for which arithmetic was a key input, such as data analysis and accounting, became much cheaper. However, we also started using the newly cheap arithmetic to solve problems that were not historically arithmetic problems. An example is photography. We shifted from a film-oriented, chemistry-based approach to a digital-oriented, arithmetic-based approach. Other new applications for cheap arithmetic include communications, music, and drug discovery.

Insight Center

The same goes for machine intelligence and prediction. As the cost of prediction falls, not only will activities that were historically prediction-oriented become cheaper — like inventory management and demand forecasting — but we will also use prediction to tackle other problems for which prediction was not historically an input.

Consider navigation. Until recently, autonomous driving was limited to highly controlled environments such as warehouses and factories where programmers could anticipate the range of scenarios a vehicle may encounter, and could program if-then-else-type decision algorithms accordingly (e.g., “If an object approaches the vehicle, then slowdown”). It was inconceivable to put an autonomous vehicle on a city street because the number of possible scenarios in such an uncontrolled environment would require programming an almost infinite number of if-then-else statements.

Inconceivable, that is, until recently. Once prediction became cheap, innovators reframed driving as a prediction problem. Rather than programing endless if-then-else statements, they instead simply asked the AI to predict: “What would a human driver do?” They outfitted vehicles with a variety of sensors – cameras, lidar, radar, etc. – and then collected millions of miles of human driving data. By linking the incoming environmental data from sensors on the outside of the car to the driving decisions made by the human inside the car (steering, braking, accelerating), the AI learned to predict how humans would react to each second of incoming data about their environment. Thus, prediction is now a major component of the solution to a problem that was previously not considered a prediction problem.

Judgment will become more valuable

When the cost of a foundational input plummets, it often affects the value of other inputs. The value goes up for complements and down for substitutes. In the case of photography, the value of the hardware and software components associated with digital cameras went up as the cost of arithmetic dropped because demand increased – we wanted more of them. These components were complements to arithmetic; they were used together.  In contrast, the value of film-related chemicals fell – we wanted less of them.

All human activities can be described by five high-level components: data, prediction, judgment, action, and outcomes. For example, a visit to the doctor in response to pain leads to: 1) x-rays, blood tests, monitoring (data), 2) diagnosis of the problem, such as “if we administer treatment A, then we predict outcome X, but if we administer treatment B, then we predict outcome Y” (prediction), 3) weighing options: “given your age, lifestyle, and family status, I think you might be best with treatment A; let’s discuss how you feel about the risks and side effects” (judgment); 4) administering treatment A (action), and 5) full recovery with minor side effects (outcome).

As machine intelligence improves, the value of human prediction skills will decrease because machine prediction will provide a cheaper and better substitute for human prediction, just as machines did for arithmetic. However, this does not spell doom for human jobs, as many experts suggest. That’s because the value of human judgment skills will increase. Using the language of economics, judgment is a complement to prediction and therefore when the cost of prediction falls demand for judgment rises. We’ll want more human judgment.

For example, when prediction is cheap, diagnosis will be more frequent and convenient, and thus we’ll detect many more early-stage, treatable conditions. This will mean more decisions will be made about medical treatment, which means greater demand for the application of ethics, and for emotional support, which are provided by humans. The line between judgment and prediction isn’t clear cut – some judgment tasks will even be reframed as a series of predictions. Yet, overall the value of prediction-related human skills will fall, and the value of judgment-related skills will rise.

Interpreting the rise of machine intelligence as a drop in the cost of prediction doesn’t offer an answer to every specific question of how the technology will play out. But it yields two key implications: 1) an expanded role of prediction as an input to more goods and services, and 2) a change in the value of other inputs, driven by the extent to which they are complements to or substitutes for prediction. These changes are coming. The speed and extent to which managers should invest in judgment-related capabilities will depend on the how fast the changes arrive.

There is no better time of year to tighten up on those mobile loyalty programs than right before the holiday season. As people prepare for the inevitable Christmas shopping spree, they start looking for best deals and biggest discounts, giving businesses ample opportunities to reward app users for their loyalty.

Most businesses are aware of the potential of loyalty programs, as rewarding customers for coming back is a practice that’s been around since the earliest days of trade. But what’s important to remember here is that we’re not in the ‘early days of trade’ – we’re way ahead. Digital transformation (the use of new digital channels, including social media, chatbots, Big Data analytics, cloud services) and the penetration of mobile in every aspect of a consumers’ life has changed their habits and their expectations, leaving businesses unsure how to maximize loyalty.

You already know the essentials of a solid loyalty program, like making sure it’s on mobile (or any other platform that’s mainstream at a certain point in time), or having a program that’s easy to learn.

Read on to see what you should do, and what you should definitely not do, as you push for perfection in loyalty programs on the mobile platform.

The Don’ts

Forgetting onboarding for the loyalty program

Your customers need to stay hooked to the loyalty program, otherwise it’s not going to work. It needs to be simple and effective. Consumers need to understand the benefits they’re getting from the program, and you need to make sure those benefits are worth their precious time and “effort”. All those things need to be communicated clearly. And finally, you need to gather data on your newly acquired loyalty program members, and analyze your onboarding strategy. Without these (most basic) elements, you can expect your engagement curve to start plummeting very fast. Onboarding is a science in its own right, and it is very easy to get it wrong. Things like rushing into app permissions, or being prone to hyperbole, are common mistakes product developers make, destroying their onboarding process without even knowing it.

Ignoring Centennials

Loyalty is not something you get over night, it’s a long-term investment that needs a lot of time and effort to build. Despite this reality, brands often ignore Centennials (Generation Z), and cater mostly to Millennials, because they see the latter as the ideal demographic – they’re young, they use new technology to its maximum potential, and they have solid purchasing power. Centennials might not have that purchasing power (yet), but it’s just a matter of time before they get there. And if loyalty is something you build over time, now is the best time to start thinking of the new generations.

Centennials are an important group – they are the first generation to not know life without internet. Some of them don’t remember what it’s like to have a corded phone. This is the generation that will look to its smartphone for essentially everything, and if you want a solid loyalty program on mobile, not just today but in the future, don’t ignore them. You can use these seven strategies to successfully engage with Generation Z.

Disregarding analytics

Here’s a little mantra for you: Whatever can be measured, should be measured. Also, almost everything can be measured. Therefore, everything should be measured, especially loyalty programs. Analytics will help you determine not only if a certain program works or not, but can also give you great ideas for the future. It can also help you determine if your onboarding process is poor, and can help you pinpoint exactly where you lost customers during the process. For example, Appsee’s qualitative analytics tools can help you tweak the loyalty program by tracking if, where, and why people abandon the program. The tools can also give you insights into where people tap, and if your user interface needs improvement.

Remember – the better the measurement, and the more you distill and react on the data, the better the loyalty program.

The Do’s

Create rewards for more than just spending

Don’t limit your loyalty programs to purchases. Why? If you force people to buy something in order to participate in the loyalty program, it might come off as if you don’t really care about the user’s needs, but instead are just trying to motivate them to spend more. Loyalty programs revolve around showing your customers you care, which is why it is extremely important to have other means of participation, besides purchases. That can be anything from writing reviews online, to participating in different surveys, to pretty much anything else you can come up with. People love being part of successful projects. They love their voices heard and their opinions valued. By offering consumers a chance to participate in your brand, without them actually needing to spend a dime, you’re basically telling them you value them as a person, and then as a customer, as well. What better way to build loyalty, right?

For example, you can use in-app engagement SDKs like Apptentive to directly communicate with your customers. By rewarding those customers that choose to talk to you directly and tell you what they would like to see improved, you’re setting yourself up for a win-win situation.

Personalization, Personalization, Personalization

Imagine rewarding a diabetes patient with a coupon for Dunkin’ Donuts. Or giving a New York Knicks fan tickets to a Boston Celtics game. Or, in our case – giving a mobile-first user a discount for buying on desktop. Not only will they quickly decline the offer, but this might completely ruin the relationship you have with your customers. Never let your customers ask themselves ‘why am I getting this?’ – which is why you absolutely must make sure all your offers are strategically personalized. Carpet offers are a thing of the past. Thankfully, digital platforms can help you gather lots of valuable information about your customers, allowing you to personalize and tailor different offers to specific groups of people. Use the tools at your disposal to craft personalized offers and analyze their efficiency to maximize their potential. In-app personalization is an art in its own right, something we’ve written about in the past.

Implement a relatively short journey to benefits

There was this café we encountered during a recent conference, which had a loyalty program within its mobile app – by ordering a cup of coffee, any coffee, through the app, you get a point. By collecting 100 points, you get a small gift – a cup with a special message. The thing is – customers were limited to one point a day. Completely disregarding the fact that you’d get a present worth less than one percent of the amount you’d spend – it would take you at least three and a half months to get it. That journey is way too long, and completely disproportionate to how much time, effort and money is needed from the customer. By having too long of a journey, especially if the reward is not that worth it, people will be quick to abandon your loyalty program. Whether or not it will hurt the brand is open for discussion, but it certainly won’t help with your goal – to keep your customers coming back for more, satisfied.

You need to pay attention to this journey and measure how quickly customers can earn equity, to gain benefits from loyalty programs. Obviously it shouldn’t be too fast, but if it takes too long, it’s not going to work.

Be unique

Nowadays, everyone knows two things – 1) the majority of a company’s sales come from a minority of their customers; and 2) those customers need to be retained, which can be done (among other things) through loyalty programs. But what many brands neglect is the fact that technology is changing both commerce, and consumer habits. These two things have a profound effect on loyalty programs, and if brands are to succeed they need to be unique in their approach, offer personalized, relevant and exclusive content, and make sure it’s easy to consume and participate.

At the same time, they must be careful that their onboarding strategies for loyalty programs are rock solid, that they’re catering to all the right demographic groups. And finally, they must not forget to use the data obtained to analyze and tweak their loyalty programs. Just because it worked yesterday, it doesn’t mean it will work tomorrow!

Influencer marketing has become a mainstream PR and marketing tactic. Brands understand that they can dramatically increase their reach and create more authentic messages by partnering with social personalities who have large and loyal followings.

“Influencer marketing is incredibly powerful because it empowers brands to go directly to those authentic, trusted voices that buyers have already been turning to,” points out Eric Lam, CEO of Revfluence, in the Marketo blog. “Better yet, influencers can help boost the ROI across your entire marketing organization, if used the right way!”

Some statistics:

• 70% of people 18-34 years old said that they prefer recommendation from an influencer, according to MediaPost.
• 85% of B2B decision-makers rely on trusted online communities when buying, according to Forrester Research.
• 20-50% of all buying decisions are directed by word of mouth recommendations, according to McKinsey & Company.

Following these steps will help you develop an effective influencer marketing program.

Research. Build a list of influencers through a social media monitoring and measurement service. Be careful to seek influencers in your niche with loyal fans and high engagement levels, rather than focusing solely on the number of their followers.

Interact with influencers on social media. Twitter is a superb venue for interacting with influencers as it allows you to communicate directly with influencers and also to boost their visibility by retweeting and sharing their content. Creating a Twitter list of your target influencers can help interact, says Benjamin Brandall on Social PR Chat. Beware of excessive sharing which may come across as shallow marketing. They may be put off or feel you’re stalking them. Interact with a new contact roughly once per week.

Comment on the influencer’s content at its source, such as a blog post or Instagram post. That helps you get notice. Comment when you have something genuine to say, perhaps about three comments a month.

Guest post. Guest posting can establish your name in the niche and help develop relationships. First build a backlog of worthwhile content. Generally speaking, the bigger the influencer you’re trying to connect with, the more impressive your portfolio should be. Start off with smaller blogs and build up your guest posting portfolio with good quality posts before going for the bigger fish, Brandall says.

Consider micro-influencers. Influencers with a larger number of followers, but far less than the millions that famous celebrities have, are more likely to consider review products or to share a brand mention without large fees. Research shows that engagement declines after the number of followers increases, says Megan Dado, regional senior director of Rakuten Affiliate Europe, in the Drum. Influencers with fewer followers tend to have more fans who know them personally and trust their recommendations. Influencers with huge numbers of fans are more likely to attract more fake and bot accounts.

Build relationships by offering to be helpful before you ask for a favor. Consider endorsing them, publicizing their latest project, offering them content or co-creating content. “As with life, if you’re focused on what others can do for you rather than what you can offer them, you’re not likely to get any takers,” advises Penny C. Sansevieri, adjunct instructor at New York University and CEO of Author Marketing Experts Inc., in Bulldog Reporter.

Employ social media measurement to determine the value of your influencer marketing and demonstrate its value to management. “Influencer marketing measurement must show the additional value influencers brought above and beyond what the campaign would have brought without them,” comments digital marketer Ben Brausen.

Some metrics to track include:

• activity (volume of outreach to influencers),
• engagement (two-way interactions from target influencers),
• awareness (volume of brand mentions or other relevant topics from your influencer community),
• perception (quality of brand coverage from your influencer community) and
• Action (site traffic generated by your influencer community).

Bottom Line: Influencer marketing can supercharge your PR and marketing campaigns. However, successful influencer marketing means more than simply spotting people with large social media followings. For a successful influencer marketing, you must find the influencers whose opinions are respected by their followers, work hard to develop relationships with them, and measure your campaigns with social media measurement.

This post was originally published on the CyberAlert blog.

Is your company setting up its sales personnel for success? Is it targeting sales competencies that reflect the 21^st century business landscape? Our sales training research reveals some answers that might surprise you.

In Q4 of 2016, Richardson and Training Industry, Inc. partnered to perform new sales training research, surveying 288 companies across more than 14 industries that ranged in size from less than 100 to over 50,000 employees to examine organizations’ approaches to identifying and developing sales competencies.

Download the full report here.

The goal of this sales research project is to provide sales organizations and L&D professionals with insight to help them develop sales training programs that better align with the goal of helping sales professionals master the competencies that are most important for business success.

Sales Training Research Results

The study found that there are significant gaps between the sales competencies reported to be most important for business success and the competencies that are effectively developed through training. Specifically, the research suggests a widespread gap in the effectiveness of training for the following competencies:

• Targeting buyers
• Prospecting opportunities
• Knowing the market
• Understanding customer needs
• Effective presentation skills
• Expanding current accounts

Potential causes of this gap are a mismatch between training goals and business goals and lack of consistency in training across departments.

Additional Research Findings

This research also offers insight into other trends in sales training related to the modalities in which training is delivered, key influencers in the development of a sales competency strategy, and sales professionals’ interactions with customers across the sales cycle.

For more information about how you can narrow the gap between your organization’s critical sales competencies and the training programs designed to support the development of these competencies, contact us at info@richardson.com, or download the free research report by clicking below.

The post New Sales Training Research: Aligning Sales Competencies in Learning and Development appeared first on Richardson Sales Training and Enablement Blog.

Sydney is an account executive for a paper supply company. David, the owner of three restaurant chains, is looking for a menu-printing vendor.

“Most of the restaurant owners I work with say they struggle to sell the high-margin, ‘splurge’ items on their menus,” Sydney says. “Is that something you’re experiencing as well?”

David says yes.

“I’ve seen a few strategies,” Sydney replies. “Some of my clients use their servers to promote certain dishes or do nightly specials. Typically, this results in 5% higher sales.”

Sydney pauses.

“But the truly effective technique is redesigning your menu. We’ve found simply moving your ‘star’ dishes to the top left corner of your menu increases order frequency by 25%. Using high-quality paper increases sales by another 15%.”

David is intrigued and impressed. He chooses Sydney’s company over two other suppliers who offer similar products at lower prices.

According to The Challenger Sale, 40% of high-performing salespeople use Sydney’s approach: The Challenger style. These reps set themselves apart by educating their prospects and disrupting how they think about their business.

Want to apply this style to your sales strategy? Here’s a three-step guide to becoming a Challenger salesperson.

How to Become a Challenger Salesperson

Step One: Identify Your Opportunity

The Challenger approach requires uncovering a surprising insight that helps your prospect improve their business -- and ultimately points them toward your product.

Sydney could have given David advice on improving customer experience. Yet unless she tied it to increased profits or decreased costs, he probably wouldn’t have felt a greater urgency to buy paper. Your teachable moment should ultimately make the buyer think, “I really need [your product].” If you’re not sure whether it does, ask yourself, “What’s the business value of following my advice? Have I made those benefits clear to my prospect?”

To find your opportunity to advise prospects, review the last 10 or so deals you worked. How are prospects routinely mismanaging their relevant business processes? What opportunities are they missing?

Here are some possibilities to get you thinking:

• Inefficient process
• Misallocated funding/budget
• Lack of investment in one area
• Product/pricing mistakes
• Risky initiative
• Wrong priorities
• Poor staffing choices
• Suboptimal team structure

Stumped? Try brainstorming with the other reps on your team. Spotting common themes is easier when you’ve got multiple people in a room.

You can also ask your manager for insights. Since she has access to several or all salespeople’s pipelines, she’s well-versed in recurring prospect challenges.

Note whether prospects are usually aware of this problem. If they’ve identified it but haven’t found a good solution -- or have underestimated the issue’s significance -- they’ve probably done some research. To help them, you’ll need to fill in their missing knowledge gaps and reshape their existing perspective.

But if most prospects have never thought about this specific challenge or opportunity before, bring it to their attention.

Step Two: Identify the Strongest Solutions

Pointing out an issue or opportunity won’t move the deal forward unless you also help the buyer address it. The next step is preparing a few strategies or recommendations.

Ask yourself how previous customers have reacted to this challenge. What has worked? What hasn’t?

If you’re having a hard time coming up with ideas, do research online. Imagine you want to help prospects raise their customer engagement rates. You might search “raise customer engagement rates strategy,” “customer engagement case study,” “techniques improve customer engagement,” and so on. Looking through your CRM and reviewing closed-won deals can also be helpful. Pay attention to common challenges and the ways prospects reacted. Were any of those strategies successful for multiple buyers? If so, it’s probably a technique worth recommending -- and as a bonus, you have evidence of its efficacy ready to share with the buyer.

Finally, you can reach out to current customers. Call five prospects you worked with in the past year and ask, “When we spoke in [month], you were focused on [solving challenge]. Which techniques did you try?”

Follow up with: “Which strategy was most successful? Which was least successful?”

Although gathering these responses takes time, citing real examples will earn you instant credibility with future prospects.

Step Three: Incorporate Your “Lesson” Into Your Messaging

Now it’s time to update your messaging.

At this point, you should have:

• A surprising, valuable insight for your prospects
• Two or three ways they can capitalize on that insight

Mentioning this insight in prospecting emails is a great way to grab your prospects’ attention and lay the foundation for a productive conversation. But make sure you don’t give everything away in your first message: You want to give prospects an incentive to talk to you. Try describing the impact of your suggestion rather than the suggestion itself.

Here’s an email Sydney might have sent David:

Once you’re actually speaking with the buyer, follow this template for introducing your insight:

Rep: “I’ve seen [challenge] come up again and again with my customers. Is that something you’re struggling with as well?”

Prospect: “Yes.”

Rep: “Have you thought about [X strategy]?”

Alternatively, you can:

• Offer an unexpected fact: “Did you know [surprising thing]?”
• Point to an issue they’re not addressing: “I’m curious, is there a reason you haven’t [solved X problem]?”
• Identify a missed opportunity: “Given [benefits A, B, and C], have you considered [investing in initiative]?”

These statements help you challenge your prospect’s perspective without implying they’re unintelligent or inexperienced. After you’ve made them curious to hear more, offer your tips.

For instance, you might say, “My team has found doing X leads to [results], while doing Y leads to [results]. We believe the most effective approach is Z. Customers who try Z see [results].”

Once you’ve added significant value to the buyer’s life and helped them see their world in a new light, you’ll have earned their trust and loyalty. Many prospects struggle to tell the difference between products -- using the Challenger approach can be your competitive advantage.

Author: Zak Pines

We’re at an exciting point in the evolution of marketing automation.

There is a growing range of specialized approaches and technologies available to help marketing and sales teams drive real results–starting with the core of lead lifecycle management, lead nurturing, and lead scoring, and expanding out to cross-channel nurturing, website personalization, account-based marketing, and predictive lead scoring, to name a few.

Perhaps more importantly, as the industry matures, leading-edge marketing automation practitioners now have many years, or even a full decade, of experience under their belt. The insights from these power users can help any marketing automation user, beginner or novice, see rapid returns on their efforts.

At Bedrock Data, we recently launched a Marketo Power User Series featuring 20+ Marketo Power Users and their backstories about how they got started in marketing automation and their best practices, tips, and tricks for getting the most out of a marketing automation platform. This group has collectively earned over 20 Marketo Champion awards, which honor the most advanced and active Marketo advocates, with over a century of Marketo day-to-day operational experience amongst them.

In this blog, I’ll share 20 insights from power users that you can apply to your own marketing automation practices. Let’s get started:

Marketing Strategy

The first marketing automation win is to save your marketing team time. Gregoire Michel, Founder and Managing Partner at Inficiences Partners, explains that implementing a marketing automation system should first and foremost pay itself back by taking time out of your marketing program implementation. It’s also something that your marketing team can, by in large, do on its own without cross-departmental dependencies. By focusing on that first, you can establish a quick win and gain organizational momentum, after which you can focus on other wins such as driving revenue growth and aligning sales and marketing.

 

Without strategy, people, and process, Marketo is just another email tool. Jason Long, Senior Solution Engineer at The Pedowitz Group, speaks about the importance of using an overall programmatic approach to drive improvements in your revenue engine. His quote is meant to be provocative–of course, Marketo offers many more features than an email tool, but Jason’s point is that if you don’t have a plan with a defined process that’s backed by the right resources, you will not be set up to get the most out of your marketing automation system.

 

Avoid the shiny object syndrome. Jeff Canada, Manager of Global Marketing Operations at Quantcast, cautions about focusing on the tool du jour and losing focus on the things that matter. The core fundamentals are lead stages, lead scoring, and lead nurturing–and ensuring you have basic versions of these three program types in place for you to benchmark, learn from, and iterate. Make sure you get this done first to set yourself up for success.

 

 

Program Optimization

Leverage tags to structure your programs to enable the reporting you’ll want. Dan Radu, Principal MarTech Consultant at Macromator, describes the importance of setting up a range of tags to allow you to categorize your programs. Dan recommends a tagging system that includes geography, product/solution area, offer type (blog, case study, data sheet, etc.), and objective (acquisition, awareness, cross-sell, etc.).

 

 

Try a webinar series to get more impact from your webinars. Many B2B marketers are trying to break through the webinar clutter. Bethany Tomich, Demand Generation and Marketing Operations Manager at Rapid7, suggests packaging up a series of webinars on common themes and leveraging Marketo programs to set up a scalable, repeatable webinar process and make it easy for your audience to subscribe to the series or a single event.

 

 

Tokens are powerful for scalable, data-driven marketing program setup. Mike White, Marketing Automation Specialist at Ipswitch, advises that you should leverage tokens when setting up your program structure to make your marketing operations process much more scalable and reduce errors. Tokens allow you to setup programs with many different elements that are data-driven and quick and easy to update.

 

 

Test, test, test your automated flows. Flora Felisberto, Senior Manager of Global Marketing Programs and Operations at Perfecto Mobile, speaks about the importance of testing your automated flows and not discounting the likelihood for human error. You need to be very robust with testing your automated programs, particularly around list logic, and always go back and check the actual results after putting a new automation live to see how it performs in the ‘real world.’

 

 

Lead Scoring and Nurturing

Score your customers for better upsell and service performance. Paul Wilson, Solution Architect at Perkuto, describes the opportunity around leveraging your marketing automation system to collect and share customer data across marketing, sales, and support by using one or more dedicated customer lead scores. Paul recommends using customer data to identify better upsell candidates for sales and feeding valuable information about customer engagement to support teams to improve customer success and support. Customer lead scores should be tailored to specific cross-sell/upsell offerings and should score customer demographics and engagement–including content consumption or specific sales and support activities–to rank customer fit.

 

Connect your lead nurturing into your SaaS Product. Ed Masson, Head of Sales and Marketing Operations at Searchmetrics, reveals that there’s an opportunity to tie in intelligence from how a prospect interacts with your free trial (for SaaS businesses) into your lead nurturing programs. Tailoring your communications based on what users have done in the product, and how far they have advanced in their trial, will help you improve your conversion rates to the next phase of trial consumption or sales qualification.

 

 

Tailor your lead nurturing by persona. Sushee Perumal, CEO at MaxSold, reveals that this is their approach to tailoring their lead nurturing. They use different message streams based on their core audience segmentations and the information they gather about their prospects.

 

 

 

Data Quality

Use a three-tier framework to manage your lead sources. Edward Unthank, Founder at Etumos, believes that figuring out the right approach to lead sources is a key underlying element to marketing automation tracking. Edward recommends using a thorough approach in which you should track three levels of information: lead source category (e.g. inbound vs. outbound), lead source (e.g. direct, referral, social media), and lead source details for the specific source (e.g. Facebook). For the depth of reporting you’ll need to optimize your programs and prove ROI, do it for both first-touch and last-touch conversions as well as the touchpoints in between.

 

Unify your data around the customer. Paul Green, Director of Global Demand Center at Extreme Networks, works in an environment with dozens of MarTech tools powering his team and encourages a customer-centric view to data management. Paul emphasizes the value you’ll get from ensuring a common customer view across marketing, sales, and support and how that will lead to higher quality customer interactions across all departments and, as the ultimate outcome, greater customer satisfaction and revenue growth. This customer-centric data approach requires having a strategy whereby all of your systems that manage customer data are aligned with a unique identifier, usually email addresses for individuals and account identifiers for accounts.

 

Identify the data points that matter to you, and be diligent about managing data quality. Elizabeth Downing, Manager of Marketing Operations at Pantheon Platform, speaks about the importance of identifying key data points that matter to you, which could include demographic data such as geography and intelligence data such as lead source–and being diligent in ensuring you are effectively capturing that data throughout your lead process. By focusing on the fields that matter to you and applying full attention to that process, you will ensure you have the right quality of data to drive your reporting. 

 

Data hygiene is key. Bobby Burns, Marketing Automation Consultant at Marvel Marketers, stresses the importance of data hygiene and using automated trigger campaigns to help keep your data clean–which includes handling unsubscribes and invalid, blacklisted, or inactive emails. If you don’t have a process for handling these leads, you could overestimate your addressable marketing database, which will lead to significant inaccuracies in your analytics. Data normalization is also part of this–keep your data field values consistent to ensure your targeting is precise.

 

 

Marketo is a very effective data management tool. Jeff Coveney, President at RevEngine Marketing, reveals that smart campaigns can be used to normalize data across different fields, such as ensuring a country’s values like US, USA, and United States are unified to a single value. Clean marketing automation data means clean CRM data downstream and greatly increases the effectiveness of your targeting and the accuracy of your reports.

 

 

Be selective around syncing data to your CRM. Jame Ervin, Marketing Operations Manager at Optimizely, works in a cross-functional operations team and encourages taking a close look at the rules for data synchronization between your marketing automation and CRM systems. This will allow for a more effective and efficient synchronization process–impacting delivery times on leads to sales.

 

 

 

Revenue Funnel & Reporting

Define your revenue stages so you can improve your performance. Justin Norris, Solution Architect at Perkuto, articulates the massive value of defining and tracking your revenue stages. Setting up these metrics allows marketing to frame their objectives as pipeline improvements (e.g. “We are looking to improve the conversion rate between two lead stages by X%, and based on our baseline metrics, this will have a forecasted pipeline impact of Y.”) and describe all the programs and activities that are being put in place to meet those objectives. It provides the bedrock for marketing to have a leadership seat at the revenue table.

 

Simplify your processes around your lead marketing funnel. Following the Datto-Backupify acquisition, Chris Rudnick, Senior Marketing Manager at Datto, had a real driving force for simplifying their lead stages, which meant consolidating their two Marketo and two Salesforce instances into one of each. Chris believes it’s important to simply the process, especially since the sales team can benefit as well from a simpler, clearer process that’s not over-engineered.

 

 

 

Make sure you have the right setup for full funnel reporting and focus on what delivers the most value. Eddie Morales, Director of Demand Generation at Revel Systems, reinforces Justin Norris’ recommendation to ensure that you define your revenue stages. He advises that it’s also critical to have the right methodology in place to measure it across your marketing automation and CRM systems. Then, as you make decisions on where to spend your time, choose areas that are going to make improvements along the funnel.

 

 

Take a phased approach to closed-loop reporting. Pierce Ujjainwalla, Founder at Revenue Pulse, recommends starting with program structure and tags, and then using a three-phased approach to get the insights you need. The first phase is making sure you have good data. The second phase is to track metrics from your marketing automation platform and/or CRM. The third phase is to leverage a data visualization tool for deeper drill-downs and a dashboard tool to get more real-time visibility.

 

 

There you have it–20 tips from 20 power users. Do you have any of your own? I’d love to hear them in the comments below.

 

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20 Ideas from Power Users to Power Up Your B2B Marketing Automation was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Finger-pointing between sales and marketing has been one of the oldest business blame games for years. Sales complains that marketing doesn’t do anything to help generate leads and marketing complains that sales doesn’t follow up on leads or that they can’t close the leads they get. It’s the Hatfield’s and McCoy’s. Those days are behind us and the modern sales professional can not afford to head off hunting for new deals without joining forces with marketing — and vice versa. Marketing needs sales to help make their work actually work, and content marketing may be their best lead gen tool.

“The lines between sales and marketing are blurring, the roles are blending, and the customer doesn’t care if you’re in sales or marketing,” according to Social Selling Consultant, Jill Rowley (@jill_rowley). “They care about the value you can deliver”.

Rowley, a seasoned and proven sales professional whose resume includes stops at Eloqua, Salesforce, and Oracle, today consults with businesses to improve sales results. She says one of the biggest challenges her clients face is figuring out how to unify sales and marketing efforts.

“It’s the age-old problem,” she echoed during her presentation at HubSpot’s annual Inbound Conference in Boston this week. She added, “The modern buyer is digitally-driven and they are socially connected.”

From the Sales Funnel to Sales Enablement

This fundamental shift in sales behavior has sunk the old sales funnel and turned it into spaghetti junction because the buyer is now in control. Their journey is not linear and they don’t really want to talk to a sales representative while researching products and services. Instead, they are digging around online, learning about products and services, typically reading reviews, checking with references or leveraging other crowdsourcing tools.

“No one wants to be sold, everybody wants to be helped,” Rowley asserts, which is why social selling and content marketing has become such a critical dimension of marketing and sales.

“Finger-pointing needs to end and both the sales and marketing teams need to move towards sales enablement models”

When sales and marketing is aligned, companies are up to 67% better at closing deals, according to Marketo as stated in this Wheelhouse Report. Which means the finger-pointing needs to end and both the sales and marketing teams need to move towards sales enablement models. SiriusDecisions predicts a 70% increase in sales enablement budgets over the next 2 years. Without question, the idea of sales enablement is growing in its importance and function. So, how can you begin to move in that direction?

Generate Leads with Content Marketing

Rowley points to the following action items sales and marketing leaders can work towards to move towards a more unified sales and marketing organization:

• Work towards collaboration on new digital content between marketing and sales. This is not only blog content, but also video and social content. Help your sales team understand how to best leverage that content.
• Make it easy and fast for your sales team to find and access the content through the creation of a content library. When a sales person has a productive sales call and needs to send a prospect a blog or video, you don’t want that person to have to hunt to find those documents. Speed and ease of use is of the essence.
• Identify external sources for content and uncover ways to curate that content. Not all helpful and informative content has to come from you. Act as a resource for your prospects.
• Train sales people. First and foremost, invest in training your sales people. Sure, you may have a natural “salesman” in your business, but not all people are actually born this way. So train your sales people.
• Train sales people how to socially share content because this is not just a marketing responsibility. A sales person who can develop relationships in social media has the opportunity to help his network of friends and followers with valuable content.

The old sales model is dead and gone. Cold calling doesn’t work and your sales team can no longer sit in a silo waiting for marketing to deliver leads while your marketing team drowns in a sea of digital and traditional marketing tactics. The landscape has changed and proactive businesses are changing as well.

“We have to evolve the model,” Rowley laments. “If you need to grow revenue, you can hire more sales people to make more cold calls and sales will make quota about 50% of the time. Or you can take the sales person you have and make them more efficient and productive through sales enablement.”

“Disagree and commit” is a principle I originally came across while learning about the leadership philosophy at Intel.

The principle essentially mandates that leaders driving decisions show up prepared to speak their mind freely, even if it means heated discussion. Your obligation is to agree or disagree and to speak openly about your position. The conflict, tension and debate is healthy as long as people focus on attacking the ideas and issues, and not one another.

At the end of the meeting, however, everyone commits to the decisions made, regardless of whether they agree or disagree.

It’s no secret that teams, organizations, institutions and nations exist with deep division and dissenting opinion on how to move forward. In order to get things done leadership must work tirelessly to fuel collaboration, partnership and put personal and professional differences aside. Leaders must align around the pursuit of meaningful progress toward shared outcomes.

Personally, this was a very hard for me to accept early in my professional career. As a new leader, I had bold ideas and massive internal initiative to create change. I wanted to build a better business for our employees and customers. I was passionate, emotional and often found myself at odds with other executives on our team as we were making decisions to shape our strategy.

However, I learned over time that it was my responsibility to accept things I could not change and support the decisions and leadership agenda we put forward. Dissention, secret agendas, politicking and complaining behind closed doors would only serve to undermine our ability to come together as a team and get things done.

As Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos perfectly puts it, “complaining is not a strategy.” The thirteenth leadership principle of The Amazon Way is:

Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit.
“Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.”

Commit wholly.

Leadership also means making a commitment. The best place to start is on the inside — with “yourself first.” When we are courageous and committed to showing up for others as our most genuine, vulnerable and compassionate selves, and in spite of our many differences, a beautiful thing happens. We start connecting and experiencing the world in a different way.

Change is a Process, Not an Event

Growth usually requires change. Real change often requires consistent effort. It’s a process. That’s why meaningful change can be so hard. Setbacks are part of the journey. We won’t always get it right. It is exactly in moments of challenge, adversity and uncertainty when leaders need to step up. Fear and division hold us back.

Leadership isn’t a job — it’s a responsibility. And those who take that responsibility seriously have the opportunity to have a major impact on the lives of others. We all share opportunity to lead, contribute and make a meaningful impact.

VIDEO: Lead a Legacy

My life is my responsibility. That lesson has been reinforced to me in so many powerful ways this year. So I am taking a little extra time this week to consider those two questions I shared in the video:

1. Who can I impact today?
2. How do I want to be remembered?

I understand this is a very emotional, uncertain time. Sitting in a hotel room yesterday, I was personally moved by the leadership I witnessed in some powerful speechmaking in spite of the disagreement and clear disappointment in the outcome of the election.

It reminded me that it’s time to get things done.

With love, light and gratitude.

The post Brian Clark on The 7-Figure CEO Podcast appeared first on Copyblogger.

Google is drastically revamping its cloud-powered machine learning services. It's introducing a slew of new APIs, reducing prices on others, and launching a showcase of the best apps and utilities created with them.

The post Google unveils a slew of new and improved machine learning APIs appeared first on Digital Trends.

The Zera Food Recycler, from Whirlpool Corporation's innovation incubator, WLabs, is a residential "composting" appliance for kitchen scraps.

The social media world is a fascinating one.

Every so often, a new social media platform emerges to capture our attention (Peach) or become part of our daily lives (Snapchat).

The social media tools landscape can be just as fascinating — and robust!

Every week, people build and launch new social media tools, empowering us marketers in our day-to-day work. To give you a sense of how amazing the landscape is, here’s a graphic of some of the social media tools available: social media management, listening, analyzing, content creation and more. And here’s the even crazier part: The graphic (from Buddy Media) is four years old. Imagine how jam-packed it’d be today!

With all these tools to choose from, how can you stay on top of the latest and greatest?

As part of our State of Social Media 2016 campaign, we’ve scoured Product Hunt for the latest trending social media tools and created a list of 21 products for marketers and teams to try in 2017.

Keep reading to see the full list, or click over to the Product Hunt collection with all of 2017’s best social media tools.

20 Best New Social Media Tools to Try in 2017

To make it easier to find the tools that are most helpful to you, here’s a look at all we’ll cover in this post. Feel free to jump to any that catch your eye!

1. Quuu
2. Panda 5
3. Zest
4. Yotpo
5. Refind
6. Adobe Spark
7. Rocketium
8. Pixabay 2.0
9. gifs
10. Calendar X
11. Rebrandly
12. Yala
13. PostReach
14. Reveal
15. Ghost Browser
16. Engage by Twitter
17. Snaplytics
18. Intellifluence
19. Waaffle
20. Falcon.io
21. Bonus: Respond 2.0

We’ve also added these tools to a Product Hunt collection for easy browsing and bookmarking. Feel free to check it out there to see the conversation about each of these great tools.

1. Quuu

Hand-curated content suggestions for social media sharing

Price: Free or $10/month

Best used for: Content curation

Description: Quuu and its amazing community (of real people, not computers) hand-curate content for you and fill your Buffer queue, making content curation super easy.

How to use it:

All you have to do is connect Quuu to your Buffer account and select any interest categories that are relevant to you and your audience.

Quuu will send hand-curated content right into your Buffer queue, at whatever frequency you choose. You can then go into Buffer to manually edit the suggestions if you prefer.

At the moment, they curate content in more than 300 different topics. To give you a small taste, here are all the categories they curate that start with the letter “B”:

• Ballet
• Baseball
• Basketball
• Bass Fishing
• Beach Lifestyle
• Beer
• Big Data
• Bitcoin and the Blockchain
• Blogging Tips
• Board Games
• Boating/Yachting
• Brain Health
• Branding
• Business Analytics
• Business Management
• Business Networking
• Business Strategy

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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2. Panda 5

A smart news reader, powered by integrations

Price: Free or $4.99/month

(If you subscribe now, there’s a 40% discount until their beta ends.)

Best used for: Content curation

Description: Panda 5 (the fifth iteration of the popular news-reading app) helps you speed up your content curation process by allowing you to browse multiple websites at once, integrate with other websites, and pull in RSS feeds of your favorite content.

How to use it:

Once you authorize Panda with your Twitter account, it will recommend you a list of feeds to follow based on who you follow on Twitter. You can also search for more feeds and add them to your reader.

To save you more time, you can even read articles in the app itself.

One cool feature of Panda is that it comes pre-built with integrated feeds for a number of popular sites, both blogs and media collections. Here’s a quick look at a few:

• Product Hunt
• Dribbble
• Brain Pickings
• Inbound.org
• Medium
• The Verge

Bonus: If you are using its Chrome extension, you can personalize your new tab with nine different options such as a to-do list or a notepad (with more coming soon).

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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3. Zest

Fresh marketing inspiration with every new tab

Price: Free

Best used for: Content curation

Description: Zest is a new tab extension that helps you discover great marketing articles. All the articles are curated by its community of marketers and manually approved.

How to use it:

Simply add the Chrome extension, and whenever you open a new tab, Zest will serve you the latest curated marketing articles.

You can customize your feed by selecting the tags that are most relevant to you. There are currently 29 different tags (or topics) you can choose from. Here are the top 10 tags with the most number of approved articles:

1. Social
2. Content
3. Strategy
4. SEO
5. Inspiration
6. Paid
7. CRO
8. Tools
9. Metrics
10. Email

Bonus: Apart from receiving this content suggestions, you can also suggest your content or great content you have found. The team at Zest is working on a Zest profile, which will allow people to follow your Twitter, LinkedIn, and Zest posts. Soon, you will be able to build up your online marketing identity with Zest, based on your social media posts and Zest contributions.

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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4. Yotpo – Curation

Collect Instagram photos from customers and influencers

Price: $299 onwards (for the entire user-generated content marketing platform)

Best used for: Content curation for Instagram

Description: Yotpo makes collecting the best user-generated content and making full use of them for your business really easy. Curation is their latest feature to help you collect and use user-generated Instagram photos (with proper permissions).

How to use it:

There are several ways you can use Yotpo’s curation feature.

1. With their advanced search functions, you can create a feed of Instagram photos from your customers, influencers and yourself.
2. Using their automated workflow, you can easily get the permission to use those photos and thank the creators. Getting permission is an important step for staying in compliance with Instagram’s terms and also doing right by the original creators.
3. After collecting the user-generated photos, you can create a shoppable Instagram feed and photo galleries where your customers can go directly from Instagram or your homepage to the product page to complete the purchase.
4. You can also promote your curated photos on your website, social media, or Yotpo Ads to show how real customers are using your product.

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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5. Refind

The home for the best links on the web

Price: Free

Best used for: Content curation

Description: Refind helps you re-discover the links you have previously saved when you actually need them. Refind can also show you what your friends have saved if you prefer.

How to use it:

With Refind’s extension, you can save any links by simply clicking the extension button. Then, you can add a tag or choose from the recommendations. It also shows you how many people had saved the link to give you a sense of the popularity and quality of the link.

Apart from searching for the article in your Refind feed, Refind helps you rediscover them. For example, when you are searching on a particular topic on Google, Refind will highlight the relevant links you have previously saved in the search results.

With Refind, there are three ways to discover or re-discover content:

1. Links you previously saved
2. Links saved by your friends
3. Recommendations based on your saved links

If you tend to find and read articles on the go, Refind also has iOS and Android apps too!

Bonus: For the articles that you intend to read soon but not right now, you can use Refind’s “Read Soon” feature. When you are saving a link with the browser extension, simply hit the “Read Soon” option as well. Refind’s recommendation is to save articles you would actually want to read within the next two weeks. The idea is that this adds intention and immediacy so we will actually read these articles.

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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From our recent State of Social Media survey, we found that 83% of marketers would like to create more video content if there were no obstacles like time, resources, and budget. The following are a few video creation tools to help you with that — some of them are free!

6. Adobe Spark

Videos, images and stories made in minutes

Price: Free

Best used for: Content creation

Description: With Adobe Spark, you can create beautiful graphics, web stories, and animated videos in minutes.

How to use it:

Through Adobe Spark’s browser editor, you can create and edit social graphics, web stories, and videos.

• For graphics, you can resize the graphic for different social media platform and change the theme, color palette, background, and text. (Quick tip: Share the graphic on Facebook or Twitter once and the watermark will be removed.)
• A web story is essentially a web page with photos, videos, and text that tells a story. Here’s a really cool example. When creating a web story, you can include photos, text, button, videos and more.
• For videos, you can pick from a story template or start from scratch. You can then insert icons, texts, and photos, add music and change the layout of each slide.

Templates are provided so that you don’t always have to start from scratch. For example, if you are making a video, here are the story templates you can choose from:

• Promote an idea
• Tell what happened
• A hero’s journey
• Show and tell
• Personal growth
• Teach a lesson
• An invitation

Bonus: Adobe has created iOS apps (Adobe Spark Post, Page, and Video) so that you can create these content on the go!

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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7. Rocketium

Transform text & media into stunning videos

Price: Free, $10, and $25

Best used for: Short video creation

Description: Rocketium focuses on creating short videos with overlaid text (think Buzzfeed’s Tasty videos!).

How to use it:

Using Rocketium’s browser editor, you can create short videos in three simple steps.

1. Add content and captions to the editor. You can upload images and videos or select copyright-free images and videos from their gallery.
2. Choose a theme for your video. You can pick from their pre-made themes or build your own.
3. Customize your video with filters, animations, fonts and more.

Here’s what makes Rocketium so wonderful: You can choose to publish in different aspect ratios (portrait, landscape, and square) and Rocketium will automatically resize your captions for you! There’s no need to go through the usual process of re-making the entire video into a square or a vertical version.

Check out a cool example from the Rocketium team here.

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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8. Pixabay 2.0

Over 780,000 free high-quality photos and videos

Price: Free

Best used for: Finding photos and videos for your content

Description: Pixabay has more than 790,000 free photos, illustrations, vectors, and videos for your use. The Pixabay community contributes more than 1000 new original high-resolution images and videos every day!

How to use it:

With Pixabay, you can find images, graphics, videos and more for your social media or blog posts. All the resources are released free of copyrights under Creative Commons CC0, which means you can freely use them for any purpose (with a few exceptions).

If you are like me — often not sure what term to search for, you can browse the resources by category. Here’s a list of the categories on Pixabay:

• Animals
• Architecture/Buildings
• Backgrounds/Textures
• Beauty/Fashion
• Business/Finance
• Computer/Communication
• Education
• Emotions
• Food/Drink
• Health/Medical
• Industry/Craft
• Music
• Nature/Landscapes
• People
• Places/Monuments
• Religion
• Science/Technology
• Sports
• Transportation/Traffic
• Travel/Vacation

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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9. gifs

Create personalized GIFs in your browser

Price: Free

Best used for: Creating custom GIFs or turning your videos into GIFS

Description: gifs allows you to take any video (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) and live video (Facebook Live, YouTube Live, Periscope, Twitch, etc.) and quickly turn it into a GIF using its web application.

How to use it:

To start creating a GIF, you can copy and paste the URL, upload it as a file or even search for one on gifs.com. The browser editor gives you the options of cropping the video or GIF, adding caption and stickers, and applying effects. You can even do frame-by-frame edits to create more detailed GIFs!

With its one-click meme feature, you can turn a video or a gif into your favorite meme in a blink of an eye. Simply select the meme and gifs.com will add the captions and effects for you. At the moment, only the “Deal With It” meme is available.

Here’s one that I created:

(GIF Source: wifflegif.com)

Bonus: You can set where the GIF links back to. When your GIF takes off on the internet, you could gain traffic to your site or followers for your social media profiles.

Here’s what a Product Hunter (PH founder Ryan Hoover in fact) has to say:

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10. CalendarX

Get a calendar your audience can follow

Price: $7/month, $29/month or $72/month (with a 30-day trial)

Best used for: Live events promotion

Description: CalendarX is a calendar your followers can follow – how meta! Once they follow your calendar, you can push important events to their personal calendar.

How to use it:

In terms of creating events, CalendarX works quite similarly to most calendars. Events you created can be pushed to your followers’ personal calendar so that they will always be up to date about your events. This can be handy for live events such as Twitter chats or Facebook Live events.

CalendarX provides statistics such as the number of followers, the number of calendar page views and more.

To help you gain followers, there are many ways you can share your CalendarX calendar:

• Share a link to the calendar page or the follow page
• Add a follow button on your website or emails
• Embed it on your website

Furthermore, CalendarX allows you collect information from your followers when they subscribe to your calendar, just like a mailing list signup form.

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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11. Rebrandly

Create and share links with your custom domain name

Price: Free or $99/month with advanced analytics

Best used for: Social media branding

Description: Rebrandly is a custom URL shortener for sharing branded links. You can turn long, complex URL into branded and memorable ones.

How to use it: After you create your account, you would want to set up a custom domain for your branding. You can either register for a new custom domain through Rebrandly or use a spare domain if you have one. For example, I could go with links.alfredlua.com.

Download the browser extension to quickly rebrand any links. When you are at a page you would like to share, hit the browser extension button and you will be able to rebrand the link. For instance, I could rebrand my LinkedIn profile as links.alfredlua.com/cv.

If you prefer to organize your Rebrandly shortened links in the existing apps you are using already, Rebrandly integrates with several other link-shortening apps such as:

• Goo.gl
• Clickmeter
• Bitly

Bonus: Derric from Rebrandly was very kind to offer coupons for a free domain. If you use the coupon “buffer”, you can get your first domain with .link, .click, .xyz, .press, .site, .space, or .tech for free.

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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12. Yala

A bot that knows the best time to share your content

Price: Free

Best used for: Social media scheduling

Description: Yala is a Slack bot that uses machine learning to determine the best time to post to Twitter and Facebook.

How to use it:

Start by adding Yala to your Slack team (or reach out to your team admin about adding her to your Slack team). Once Yala is added, she will reach out to you via a direct message in Slack or you could say hi to her (@yala) to begin scheduling.

After you authorize Yala to post on your Twitter and/or Facebook profile, there are several things you can do:

• Change the publishing frequency (Yala will inform you your optimal posting times)
• Schedule a text post or an image with text
• Check your scheduled posts by sending “series” to Yala (Series is your queue of scheduled posts)

Yala uses machine learning to update your optimal posting times automatically so you don’t have to think about the posting times at all!

Bonus: The team is exploring the idea of bringing Yala to Facebook Messenger so you will be able to use it even if you are not using Slack.

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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13. PostReach

The easiest way to measure content performance

Price: $10/month or $29/month (with 21-day free trial)

Best used for: Content marketing analysis

Description: PostReach automates content reporting for you. It tells you your key traffic stats, the number of shares and the influencers who shared your content. With 84% of social media marketers also working on content marketing, PostReach can help you with your social media and content marketing reports.

(PostReach is a project from Buffer’s Ash Read and friends.)

How to use it: With just one click, you can setup Postreach for your blog and it will automatically create reports for every post you publish.

With PostReach, you get the following information:

• Traffic breakdown: Views and unique views
• Reader engagement: Bounce rate and average time on page
• Reader acquisition: Channels and sources which brought readers to your content
• Shares breakdown: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest
• Twitter breakdown: Total shares, tweets, retweets, and total potential reach
• Influencers: Influencers who shared your content and their social stats

Here’s an example report.

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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14. Reveal

Manage your Facebook & Instagram ad campaigns from Slack

Price: Free (at the moment for its beta)

Best used for: Paid social media management

Description: Reveal is a Slack bot that brings you your Facebook and Instagram metrics and allows you to manage your ad campaigns from within Slack. It also alerts you when there are significant changes to your ads’ Click-Through Rate (CTR) and Cost-Per-Click (CPC) so that you can react to them immediately. With 91% of marketers in our recent survey saying that they are investing in Facebook ads, Reveal could be a great tool to stay on top of all the ad campaigns.

How to use it:

To use Reveal, add the slack bot to your Slack team (or reach out to your team admin about adding this to your Slack team). Once you have done that, the Reveal Slack bot will reach out to you in Slack to help you with the setup. You can see the results of your ad campaigns and manage them from Slack.

You can also set up alerts via the website to notify you of any significant changes to your ad campaigns’ metrics.

With Reveal, you get all these right within Slack:

• Full overview of your Facebook ads account
• Details of each campaign, ad set, and ad (including impressions, reach, amount spent, purchase value and CTR)
• Daily, weekly, and monthly report of your ad performance
• Money-saving alerts when your CPC or conversion rate changes significantly

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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15. Ghost Browser

The Productivity Browser for Technology Professionals

Price: Free

Best used for: Social media management of multiple accounts

Description: Ghost Browser allows you to log into any website with multiple accounts from one window. This can be very handy when you manage multiple social media profiles for each of the social media platforms.

How to use it:

After you request for a beta invite, the team at Ghost Browser will send you a link to download the browser. Download, log in and you are ready to roll!

It looks almost like Google Chrome so if you are familiar with Google Chrome, it will be easy to get the hang of it.

Here’s how you can use Ghost Browser to manage multiple profiles of the same social media platform (such as your personal and business profiles) using just one window:

• Right click on a tab and select “New Group”. A new tab with a different color will be opened. Each group acts like a new window, which means you can log in to a different profile of the same social media platform for every group you open.
• Clicking on the Ghost Browser icon beside the address bar allows you to quickly switch between different groups and tabs.

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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16. Engage by Twitter

Grow and understand your Twitter audiences on-the-go

Price: Free

Best used for: Social media listening and engagement

Description: Engage is a standalone app by Twitter to help you manage your Twitter profiles. It allows you to connect with influencers by highlighting important mentions and provides you with more data about your profile and tweets.

How to use it:

In the app, there are three main tabs in the navigation – Engage, Understand, and Posts.

• Under “Engage”, you can check out top notifications, mentions, and interactions with verified Twitter profiles.
• Under “Understand”, you can see metrics for your profile such as the number of likes, retweets and follows.
• Under “Posts”, you can dig into the performance of individual tweets.

Here’s what Engage looks like from the Product Hunt’s Twitter profile:

Learn how to use Engage from Twitter here.

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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17. Snaplytics

Analytics platform for Snapchat

Price: $179 or $299 for the brand’s analytics and $10/day for each active influencer for the influencers’ analytics

Best use for: Influencer marketing

Description: Analytics for Snapchat is very much needed by marketers and influencers since Snapchat does not provide it natively. Snaplytics provides you with all the metrics so that you do not have to collect them manually again. Apart from that, if your brand works with influencers, the platform allows you to track how well the influencers’ snaps are performing.

How to use it:

After connecting your account with Snaplytics, it displays all your metrics in a neat dashboard. You can check out how well each snap is performing, your follower growth, and overall metrics.

Through Snaplytics, you can find out:

• The number of opens, screenshots, completion rate, and open rate for each story
• Estimated total followers and follower growth
• Your average stats such as the average number of opens and the average number of screenshots per story

Here’s a demo if you wish to check out the platform.

Bonus: Snaplytics provides a TalentScout service to help you find the right Snapchat influencers for your brand.

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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18. Intellifluence

Intelligent Influencer Marketing

Price: $9/month (with a 14-day free trial) or Entreprise plan

Best used for: Influencer marketing

Description: Intellifluence helps you discover and collaborate with the right influencers for your brand. What makes Intellifluence stand out from other influencer marketing platforms and agencies is that it focuses on key peer level influencers instead of the big names. This makes influencer marketing more viable for small-medium businesses.

How to use it:

With Intellifluence, you can search for influencers by country, social network, and keywords. Through the system, you can send a pitch for collaboration to your selected influencers and manage your communications with them.

The influencers signed up to be in the system themselves which meant that they are likely to be looking for collaborations. They are also verified by the Intellifluence team. Apart from social media, Intellifluence’s system also includes influencers on other platforms. Here’s the full list:

• Amazon
• Blog
• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• Twitter
• YouTube

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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19. Waaffle

Aggregate, analyze, and publish content from social media

Price: $9/month per campaign

Best used for: Social media monitoring, curation, and analysis

Description: Waaffle is the tool for making the most of your social media content. With Waaffle, you can aggregate and monitor social media posts from Twitter and Instagram, analyze them and publish the aggregated content.

How to use it:

After connecting your Twitter and/or Instagram account, you can create feeds for specific hashtags or accounts. From there, there are three different ways you can use the feeds:

1. Monitor and respond to the relevant posts to engage with your audience
2. Analyze the number of posts using the hashtags or from the accounts and view the top five posts in the past 30 days
3. Display your selected social media posts on a public Waaffle board, a website widget, or a full customizable feed using its API

The curated public feed of social media posts is great for many purposes. Here are some recommendations from the team:

• Aggregated social campaigns
• Competitions
• Live events
• Website social feeds
• Custom social presence
• Shoppable social content

Feel free to check out my test Waaffle board here or a much better actual example here!

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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20. Falcon.io

The social media and customer experience management platform

Price: Pro and Premium plans (pricing not available)

Best used for: Full marketing and customer experience management

Description: Falcon.io is the one tool that helps you with almost all of your marketing efforts. The platform allows you to listen on social, engage with your customers, manage and publish your content, build responsive pages, measure your performance across channels and more! On top of all that, it is also a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool.

How to use it:

Falcon.io simplifies customer experience management into six key areas, and you can manage all that with its platform:

1. Listen: Monitor social media channels and online media to collect insights
2. Publish: Plan and publish with a social media content calendar
3. Measure: Make informed decisions with social media analytics
4. Engage: Manage all your customer engagement needs with your social inbox
5. Build: Create beautiful and responsive campaign pages
6. Audience: Connect all your customer data in enriched profiles

Since it’s such a powerful tool with numerous great features, it might be great to request a demo from the team to better understand the product. You can request a demo here.

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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Bonus: Respond 2

Social customer service software for support teams

From our State of Social Media survey, we found that only 1 in 5 uses social media for customer support. With more customers turning to social media channels for support issues, there’s a great opportunity here to stand out from other businesses. We thought it might be helpful to share the tool which we use at Buffer for social media customer support. It’s none other than… Respond!

We launched Respond earlier this year and the team has been working hard to improve the product. I’m excited to share that Respond 2, a completely redesigned version of the tool, is slowly being rolled out to customers at the moment.

Price: Starting at $49/month for small teams and basic features (Custom pricing is available for larger teams and advanced features.)

Best used for: Social media customer support

Description: Respond 2 is a team inbox for your social customer conversations. It puts all your Twitter and Facebook mentions, direct messages and searches into one simple inbox so that you and your team can quickly respond to your customers and resolve their issues.

How to use it:

Once you connect your account and set up your searches, you are ready to support your customers on Twitter and Facebook.

While most social media tools are built for marketing and engagement, Respond 2 is built mainly for customer support. With your customers and your support team in mind, here are some of the cool benefits of Respond 2:

• You can use filters to bypass the chatter of social media and surface support-related conversations to help your customers quickly.
• You get the things you need to know about your customers to help them, including their profile and your past conversations with them.
• You can work effectively as a team by assigning conversations to the right person and leaving internal notes.
• You can make the best decision for your team through the powerful analytics and reporting.

Here’s a great blog post on some of the awesome stuff in Respond 2.

Here’s what a Product Hunter has to say:

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Your turn: What are your favorite new tools?

Thanks for making all the way to the end of the post! I hope you have found one or two (or twenty) new tools to add to your daily workflow.

Are there any new social media tools I might have missed out? (I probably have missed quite a few.) I’m curious to hear about your shiny new tools too! Feel free to comment below and I’ll be excited to check them out. Thank you!

Globalization, disintermediation, commoditization, among other forces of The Disruptive Age, have all combined to change how we sell. One of the things that has changed is our approach to discovery.

Traditional: What’s Keeping You Up at Night?

I know that this approach is supposed to have fallen out of favor. In sales, however, there are no rules and you have to know them all. There are only possibilities and choices, and there isn’t a single way to obtain any outcome.

You still have prospects that want to share their concerns with you, their problems, and their challenges. Asking them to share these things with you isn’t a bad place to start a conversation, it just assumes they already have a compelling reason to change, and that they are aware of it. That’s often enough to create an opportunity.

If what you know enough about your prospective client to know they are already motivated to change, there is nothing wrong with starting by asking about what your dream client wants or needs to change.

Now: This Is Keeping You Up at Night

Another way to start a conversation is to begin by sharing your view of what your dream client should be concerned about, or the problems they may not be aware they have—or soon will have.

This approach works well right now for a couple of reasons. First, sharing ideas around the biggest and most important trends impacting your dream client’s business is a heck of a good value proposition for a first meeting. You get to explain the dissonance that they’re experiencing. Your prospect gets value from the meeting without having to buy anything from you. Second, and equally as important, it says you have a strong opinion, the business acumen, and the situational knowledge to potentially provide good counsel.

This approach is especially effective now, because it helps you to help your client discover things about their company, their challenges, and their problems, and potentially, their opportunities.

Choose the right approach for your discovery meeting, and remember  that you and your prospective client are both doing discovery work together.

The post The New Discovery appeared first on The Sales Blog.

“When cold calling, how can our sales team make strong appointments that stick?”

Setting appointments have two common problems:

Initial interest (“No, thanks, we already have someone that takes care of that” etc)

Cancellations / No-Shows.

These two common sales challenges aren’t a byproduct of sales. They are a result of using improper sales techniques, methods and strategies.

In short, the sales person set the wrong goal for the sales call prior to picking up the phone, and, therefore, has guaranteed themselves a high failure rate.

When we set a goal or a “purpose” for a sales call (in this case, to set an appointment) we tend to go directly to that point to try and achieve it.

A BAD BUT COMMON example of a sales call for setting an appointment might go something like this:

SALESPERSON: Hi, this is (your name) with (your company). We provide (blah blah blah) and I’d like to see if I could get on your calendar sometime this week. Is Tuesday or Thursday better for you?

PROSPECT: Uh, I don’t think we would be interested. We already have a company that does that.

One of the biggest mistakes appointment setters, or sales people that need to set their own appointments, make is they have the wrong purpose / goal or objective of the call to begin with.

The only way to increase the odds of a prospect wanting to meet with you, and to keep the appointment once they set it, is for the prospect to want to meet with you, more than you want to meet with them. And for that to happen, they will need to have a big WHAT’S IN IT FOR THEM understanding.

Baby Steps

Instead of going for the “close” of setting the appointment in your opening sales call, focus on piquing interest in order to be able to ask them a few questions to see if meeting would even be beneficial for them.

To set more appointments that stick, use an opening value statement that piques your prospect’s interest and then ask a few of the right sales questions that focuses your prospect attention on an area that will uncover a problem. Do it correctly and your appointment quota will be met, if not exceeded, and your prospects will be happy you called.

– Michael Pedone

To millennials, sometimes even a social interaction as simple as a phone call can seem frightening or intrusive. After all, Why didn’t they just text?

Add real-time conversations and career goals into the mix, and the prospect of creating a “network” can feel overwhelming, if not impossible.

But maybe that’s because you have an outdated mental image of networking. For example, when you think networking, do you imagine a stiff happy hour mixer in uncomfortable shoes, sweating through your newest blouse or suit while mingling aimlessly with strangers?

If this is what you envision, it’s time to rethink your mindset. That’s because networking is so much more than employing your Psych 101 social skills to romance a potential employer over Moscow Mules. In fact, networking really includes a variety of means by which you can distinguish yourself in your chosen industry, moving beyond being just another name on a resume cover letter. And likely there won’t be awkward social events involved at all.

Over time, strategically increasing your business connections can lead to significant entrepreneurial growth, unexpected opportunities, and ultimately, more fulfilling work. However, never lose sight of the fact that your connections want to be known as individuals, not faceless rungs in your ascent up the corporate ladder. But if you are genuine in your interactions, and work to maintain the relationships you have developed, you’re setting yourself up for financial stability and surprising possibilities.

Still, if you’re one of the 83.1 million millennials looking for career growth opportunities, your lack of work experience may have you feeling cynical about the value of networking. After all, who would consider someone with so little experience to be a useful prospect?

You’re partially right. However, although millennials are often tagged as inexperienced, the good news is that there is a recent trend in the job force toward a revaluation of personality and innovation, sometimes even over job experience. Use this to your advantage; there are ways of proving yourself an asset to other professionals, but it’s up to you to get creative.

Think smarter, not bigger. Sure, you could reach out to the CEO of that Fortune 500 company making headlines on the NASDAQ, praying to the gods of business that your plebeian e-mail will get a reading. But in the pursuit of this pipe dream, why neglect networking with the people who—like you—are young and hungry and desperate for success?

With this in mind, take time to reach out to like-minded millennials looking to collaborate on projects. Add side jobs to your repertoire to build your “muscle to hustle” and to keep you motivated to grow as a professional. If millennials have anything, it’s a reputation for ingenuity and unconventional qualifications; look at side projects as mini opportunities to polish or discover otherwise seldom-used skills.

Embracing networking as a means to help meet talented, ready-to-work professionals could help awaken an untapped or even undiscovered entrepreneurial side in you. Remember that meeting the right person at the right time could be the missing link that launches you from idea to fully-functioning business, and you don’t know when that will happen. What we do know is that who you know can usually take you further than what you know, so be ready to connect whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Next, don’t scrap an idea just because you don’t yet have the resources or skills to bring it to life. Instead, leverage networking to find someone in your age range who does have the necessary knowledge, and you’ll quickly find that collaboration could be the key to your success.

The best way to make up for your lack of experience is to demonstrate the quality of the experience you do have. Side jobs or projects with other millennials can act as relevant case studies that prove your effectiveness.

No time to head to that mixer across town during peak traffic hours? That’s okay! Connections are literally everywhere. You do have the time to chitchat with your hairdresser about your new business idea. You can make a little more effort to be friendly with the people at your assigned table during a friend’s wedding. It’s the little connections that often strike gold.

As a culture, we love the inexperienced underdog; consider many of our admired business or entrepreneurial heroes. Steve Jobs was reportedly a hyperactive menace, a creative savant with unpredictable behavior and unconventional, initially unpopular ideas. Kim Kardashian and her brood supposedly have no talent, yet she commands the interest of millions.

So make your millennial status work for you and make sure what you do serves a purpose to your end goal. Remember, everyone you meet could well be a potential collaborator, so let’s get to work networking!

You’ve qualified a prospect and know they’re a good fit. It would be in their own interest to buy from you, because no other product or service will provide as much value to them as yours.

Yet, this prospect isn’t buying. The sales conversation moves along sluggishly, and the prospect isn’t willing to commit. You’ve done everything in your power to make it happen, but you can feel the deal slipping away.

And that might just be the core of the problem: YOU have done everything in your power to make it happen. Maybe all this prospect needs now is a little nudge from someone else.

In this post, I’m going to share with you how you can salvage this deal (and get slow-moving deals over the finish line faster).

Looking through the eyes of the prospect

See things from your prospect’s perspective. He’s been interacting with you for a while, and according to you, the sales rep, this is a perfect match! Basically, you’ve led the prospect to conclude that he absolutely should buy, because what you’re selling can help him achieve his goals faster than anything else.

So why doesn’t he buy?

Because you’re a salesperson! And the prospect expects you to try to sell to him on your offer and “do what salespeople do.” Because “all salespeople are conmen and bullshit artists and you can’t trust them, because all they care about is their commission.”

It doesn’t matter how much you care, how honest you are, how skillful you sell. There’s a little voice in the back of your prospect’s head that tells him: don’t be taken for a sucker. So don’t try to talk your way through this. Try something much simpler.

Get someone else involved!

The CEO. An engineer. Someone from support. The VP of Sales. Someone from your Customer Success team. A happy customer. One of your company’s investors.

The higher up you go, the better this will work. But I’ll show you how getting anyone involved, no matter what their place in the hierarchy is, can help move a deal forward.

Let me share three examples with you.

3 ways to use backchannel sales

You can use this tactic in many sales situations, but here are three of the most common scenarios.

Following up when a prospect goes silent

You’ve followed up multiple times, but your prospect won’t respond. Now’s the time to escalate the deal to someone of higher status, like the CEO and ask him to send an email like this:

When the prospect sees that the CEO took time to send over a personal email, he will often respond. He might even apologize that he hasn’t been more responsive. The deal will come back into play because he’ll feel valued and respected.

Handling a missing feature objection

Let’s say the prospect has emphasized the need for a certain feature that you can’t currently offer, and which is not on your immediate product road map. But the underlying problem is one your product will be able to address well soon. You’ve explained this and asked all the right questions, but the prospect isn’t satisfied.

You could loop in someone from Customer Success to let them address the prospect’s concern.

You could also address your prospect’s concerns about the shortcomings of your product by looping in an engineer that’s eager to work on this. Or a VP of Sales that is lobbying for this feature.

Resolving conflicts when there was a misunderstanding

Sales at it’s core is about communication, and whenever two or more people communicate, misunderstandings can arise. Maybe you’ve made a mistake, maybe your prospect is unreasonable, maybe it was just an unfortunate misunderstanding.

But once the prospect feels antagonistic towards you, it’s pretty tough to bring the sale back on track.

However, it’s much easier to resolve this if you loop in someone else. Imagine you’re a prospect, you’ve had a run-in with a rep and feel poorly advised, and you get this email:

Do you see the impact this could have on a prospect?

Propelling sales conversations forward

At Close.io, for example, our sales reps often loop me into a sales conversation that’s already going great.

Many of our customers know me from my keynote talks, my blog, and my podcast, and they’ve gotten value from the advice I’ve shared. I email these prospects that I’m really looking forward to having them as a customer. I tell them I’ll be available to help if they need advice at some point.

This often helps to move an already hot prospect to buy our inside sales software even quicker.

Gathering intel from non-buyers

I also occasionally look into deals that went cold and send these prospects an email. I want to understand why they didn’t buy. I want to know how we can improve. How we can train our reps better? What needs to be prioritized on the product roadmap? How can we tweak our sales process?

There are many more ways to use backchannel sales than I’ve listed here, and I’d strongly encourage you to take 2 minutes and jot down a couple of scenario where you’ll make use of this method.

Let’s talk about one thing that might prevent you from actually using this technique.

“But I don’t want to call in favors from team members all the time”

You might think, “Oh, there’s no way I’m going to ask the CEO to take time out of his busy day to send an email to this prospect that might never end up buying. Especially not for this prospect that I’ve had an argument with, I don’t want to draw the CEO’s attention to my screwups.”

Two things about this:

1. It’s great that you’re respectful of other people’s time. (It’s also smart if they have the power to fire or promote you.) But there’s a very simple way to avoid this becoming a burden for someone else (I’ll show you how).
2. It’s scary to ask a higher-up for help in a case where you’ve failed. But it’s also an opportunity to prove your commitment to the company. Most executives always get a beautified version of reality from the people they manage. But they want to know what’s really going on. If they see that you put your own ego and your personal career concerns aside for the good of the company, they won’t see that as a flaw. They’ll recognize this as a strength.

Here’s how you can do this without turning it into a big request: Just pre-write the email for them, send it to them and ask them, “This deal needs a little nudge. Can you help me? Please send this prospect an email, you can just copy and paste the following.”

In one email, provide the person with the context, the contact details, and the message ready to be copy/pasted so all they need to do is hit send.

That takes 20 seconds. And many times, it can make a real difference.

Now when you ask someone for this favor, and the person later ends up buying—share that with the person who helped you. Send a quick email: “Hey, Thanks again for your help on this deal! They just became a customer, so glad we could team up on this win.”

Boom. Everyone loves to be on the winning team.

Tap into your team intelligence

The important lesson you can take away from this is that sales isn’t a solo sport. It’s a team sport. It’s not about the points you score, but how you win the game. Network performance now has a much bigger impact on sales results than ever before.

Demonstrate to your prospect that the entire company is accessible and cares about them, not just the sales rep trying to close the deal. Have someone else give gently nudge the prospect towards the close. Gain credibility by association. That’s how you get those slow-moving deals over the finish line faster, and win deals you’d otherwise have lost.

Recommended reading:

Sales objection overkill? How to handle prospects who keep requesting more and more
Ever been in a sales situation like this? For every answer you give, you just get another objection, and it goes on like this forever? Here's how to resolve it.

End of sales cycle and a hot prospect turns cold?
The prospect seemed like a perfect fit and ready to buy after several sales conversations. Just when you're going for the close, they pull out. What to do?

Trust trumps transactions
Nobody will ever buy your product if they don't trust you. Everybody gets that in theory—but few people know how to use that in the B2B sales process.

As you see in the cartoon above, translating analytics to action is fraught with problems. Not the least of which is the political nature of organizational decision-making.

When it comes to ROI, we see lots of organizations jumping on the analytics bandwagon — happy to have more insight into which pages, which messages, which segments are driving returns. A whole host of digital tools can transform your data into pretty dashboards to help improve ROI.

In fact, I have a list of great article to help you measure, understand, and improve ROI from your digital marketing efforts–simply scroll through the 14 great articles to optimize ROI.

Overall, businesses do a great job of monitoring, understanding, and using ROI information–translating it into effective actions. These relatively simple metrics guide managers on which messages, segments, products, and channels are working best, allowing them to tweak strategy to improve market performance. Still, you sometimes run into issues of data quality and politics that impede implementation of the right actions based on available data.

Advanced analytics and big data

The problem arises when it comes to using more advanced analytics and big data to improve ROI indirectly. Let’s take a look at the conversion funnel to see exactly what I mean:

Notice, that conversion is only one step (in the middle) of the process. Advanced analytics consider the entire funnel (as well as external factors that impact funnel conversions) to improve market performance.

For instance, consider this distinction between simple and advanced analytics:

Simple: We’re getting a higher conversion rate from traffic coming through Twitter. So, we put more money into our Twitter advertising strategy.

Advanced: Twitter is just the “last touch” in a multichannel conversion process that started with an Adwords campaign and included multiple visits to our website through remarketing. Multichannel attribution models are an example of advanced analytics.

Increasingly, C-suite managers realize the value of advanced analytics and big data, they’re just unsure how to proceed. Consider this from Harvard Business Review:

Even so, our experience reveals that most companies are unsure how to proceed. Leaders are understandably leery of making substantial investments in big data and advanced analytics. They’re convinced that their organizations simply aren’t ready. After all, companies may not fully understand the data they already have, or perhaps they’ve lost piles of money on data-warehousing programs that never meshed with business processes, or maybe their current analytics programs are too complicated or don’t yield insights that can be put to use. Or all of the above. No wonder skepticism abounds. (Source)

Using advanced analytics

This cartoon, from Avinash Kaushik of Occam’s Razor and data guru at Google, shows how even really smart people don’t fully appreciate the role of predictive analytics in translating analytics into action.

By their very nature, predictive analytics are probabilities. That means that they’re right more often than they’re wrong, but they’re not ALWAYS right.

Again, here’s from Harvard Business Review:

Data are essential, but performance improvements and competitive advantage arise from analytics models that allow managers to predict and optimize outcomes. More important, the most effective approach to building a model rarely starts with the data; instead it originates with identifying the business opportunity and determining how the model can improve performance.

Many of the worst predictive models follow a data-first approach. This includes data mining, which is still fashionable in many analytics circles and a feature of many analytic tools. Data mining looks at existing data and seeks correlations (relationships) among the fields within the data. Thus, it’s a rather mindless approach that totally discounts any understanding of marketing concepts or consumer behavior. Not surprisingly, the resulting algorithms are often totally useless. The bigger the dataset, the bigger the risk you’ll produce a useless algorithm.

Combining conceptual knowledge in determining which data to include in your model building results in much greater utility.

For instance, I once created an algorithm using readership among subscribers to predict who would be a sales lead for the organization. I used conceptual understanding building on the conversion funnel shown above to score articles based on content– content further along the conversion funnel got a higher score than general interest content. Using this method, we assigned a score to each subscriber and, once the subscriber passed a threshold it generated a lead for a sales person. This resulted in better quality and higher quantity of leads to the sales force.

Translating analytics to action with data

Translating analytics to action, especially when you’re talking about advanced analytics involves developing understanding and trust among users — often something in very short supply.

First, there’s a serious shortage of managers who understand analytics and big data. Notice in the graphic below, finding folks with skills in data analytics and insights is the biggest challenge faced when building a team, despite the relative importance of these skills.

It’s especially challenging to find team members who possess both marketing skills (in terms of concepts and application) as well as analytic skills. See my earlier post that explains why there’s such a gap.

Translating analytics to action faces many challenges. It:

• requires managers first understand the data you’re seeing. At a deep level.
• next, managers must trust the data they’re getting
• managers need to detect anomalies that require better understanding or further investigation
• finally, managers must understand how to translate analytics to action by understanding what the models are telling them they should change.

Translating analytics to action: understand data

I was working with a team of students on an analysis project using Google Analytics data. I quickly saw they had misunderstood what one of the dimensions meant and were using it incorrectly in their analysis.

Obviously, any effort at translating analytics to action requires you create a codebook containing the meaning behind the measures you’re using. Managers need training so they completely understand what each measure captures, where it comes from, and what it means in terms of consumer behavior.

In developing algorithms (predictive models) managers need input into the factors they consider important in building better predictions. This improves both the accuracy of the model and the manager’s understanding of the data.

Translating analytics to action: trust

Make data as clean as possible to ensure managers trust the data. Also, predictive models need sufficient testing, and those test results shared with managers, so they trust the algorithms.

Translating analytics to action: detect anomalies

Sometimes factors go a little wonky, sending your algorithms off and increasing distrust in your models. Managers need sufficient analytic skills to detect such anomalies. I recently worked with a client and we discovered a conversion rate that just didn’t make sense. He was initially upset that conversion was much lower than industry standards, so, needless to say, I was very motivated to understand why the anomaly arose.

Spending some time pouring through the data, we detected a change in the data coming into our database which pushed subsequent data into later (inappropriate) columns. Hence, we were combining factors in a manner that didn’t make sense. We simply corrected the problem by changing the factors in our algorithm and things went back to normal.

Had we not detected the anomaly early, we might have gone off making bad decisions or spending unnecessary efforts to build a new algorithm.

Translating analytics to action

Sometimes an analysis shows you exactly which actions to take: poor performance of a piece of content, write content similar to those that performed better.

In other cases, it’s not clear how you should go about translating analytics to action.

In that case, you often resort to A/B testing to determine which actions improve market performance based on insights from the analytics. Or, you have to dig beneath the algorithm, into the data itself, to determine what actions are appropriate.

Final thoughts on translating analytics to action

Translating analytics to action isn’t easy and will take time to implement even if you already have the right people, right skills, and right culture to make it happen. But, the benefits far outweigh the costs.