Rnordman

When Dusty DiMercurio began his work at Autodesk, he had a bold vision of what was possible for the design-and-engineering software company. To win over allies, however, Dusty started small by launching a blog called Line//Shape//Space. Four years later, he’s grown that small pilot project into a multi-award-winning publication and is influencing the entire organization to think differently about content.

Leading by example, Dusty and his team are changing the culture of Autodesk, teaching how to tell stories that are so good their audience wants to engage with them. For all those qualities, Dusty is one of our 2016 Content Marketer of the Year finalists.

We asked Dusty to highlight how the culture at Autodesk has changed and what lessons he has learned from his years inside the organization.

Learn the ropes by starting small

Line//Shape//Space was among Autodesk’s first concerted efforts to connect with very small businesses (VSB). Autodesk’s business traditionally came from larger companies, so focusing on the small business market was a substantial shift.

The research into VSBs uncovered common needs and pain points among customers regardless of industry. First, Dusty learned many VSB owners had worked for larger companies and were familiar with the types of tools Autodesk offers. Paired with that finding, the research also showed that business owners’ greatest challenges were less about learning Autodesk software, and more about the struggles of running a business — which became the focus of Line//Shape//Space in those early days.

Dusty and his team set off to build a site specifically for this audience. They studied other successful content hubs targeting similar audiences, including American Express Open Forum. He says that understanding what others are doing is incredibly helpful as you build your own hub.

You can read about the ins and outs of how Line//Shape//Space was created in this recent profile from Chief Content Officer.

Help internal teams realize that marketing is fundamentally changing

Dusty’s team models what’s possible using content marketing, and in doing so helps the larger organization recognize the importance of great content as a means of pulling audiences in (while Dusty’s team runs Line//Shape//Space, the organization has industry-based content teams outside of Dusty’s purview). And Line//Shape//Space continues to inspire dispersed content teams to try something new, including new approaches to blogs and content hubs.

In fact, the Autodesk home page now leads with stories of customer success and achievements. Dusty describes this as an important shift of focus for the brand: “Our stories were more focused on customers’ struggles and successes, rather than the usual focus on products and solutions. In that way we were a catalyst to help drive cultural change … It wasn’t a forced change, but people saw the impact Line//Shape//Space was having and wanted to be part of it.”

Leverage formal, internal partnerships

Dusty’s team has a formal partnership with the Autodesk public relations team, which works to get the company earned media.

Line//Shape//Space often publishes bylines from executives at Autodesk that articulate the organization’s vision and point of view. These are written through a collaboration between the editorial team and subject-matter experts inside the company. The Line//Shape//Space editorial team shares these stories with the PR team which pitches them to media partners. The PR partnership results in a much wider reach than Line//Shape//Space could attain alone; the partnership has yielded bylines in Forbes, Huffington Post, and many others. What’s more, the PR team no longer relies on independent freelancers, as it can now leverage the editorial resources of the Line//Shape//Space team to grow earned-media wins.

Have a plan to get people to the next step

Line//Shape//Space has several goals:

• Attract an audience
• Serve up highly relevant, industry-specific content
• Send readers ultimately to industry teams who can nurture the relationship

As with most content marketing efforts, the goal is not simply drawing in the audience but ultimately creating demand for a product or service using content. To that end, it’s critical that the content team work closely with sales and marketing to ensure a tightly aligned strategy.

The Line//Shape//Space team often partners with industry teams at Autodesk to figure out the most promising stories to tell. For instance, the editorial team may tag along as industry marketing creates a video about using an Autodesk product in a manufacturing setting. While the marketing team’s end-game is a product video, Dusty’s team uses the experience to write an article about a manufacturing success story — and includes a related-content link to the marketing video.

Connecting what Dusty’s team works on with industry-specific content and marketing efforts has been a key way to demonstrate the value of the Line//Shape//Space team. Though the industry teams are not reliant on Line//Shape//Space and drive traffic their own way, they gain from the Line//Shape//Space team’s journalistic skill set.

Focus on the right metrics

Choosing the right metrics and extracting meaning from them often separates good content marketers from great ones. Dusty’s efforts show how even the most sophisticated marketers focus on continuous learning and evolution. Among the notable actions Dusty and his team take to ensure that their efforts deliver results:

Focus on unique metrics for stages of the sales cycle: For pre-funnel content, the team wants to ensure that readers are spending more time onsite, soaking in knowledge and value from the resources on Line//Shape//Space. One useful metric is total-time read (TTR), or as Dusty puts it, “How much of people’s attention can I earn?” For readers who are more informed, and perhaps ready to consider an Autodesk product, the team aims to move them along the sales cycle toward more product/solution-centric content.

Analyze micro-movements: The Line//Shape//Space team uses a custom dashboard that examines the minutiae of how readers engage, going into far more depth than what Google can offer. The team looks at micro-mouse movements and scrolling, as well as whether someone opens a new tab while on the page. The dashboard also calculates how much time someone should be spending on the page (based on a simple WordPress plug-in) vs. how long they actually are spending. This is the completion rate.

They also track some of the more traditional metrics such as:

• Number of pieces published — they see a connection between that and site growth
• Page views from organic traffic
• Unique page views
• Social actions — tweets, shares, up-votes
• Sign-ups — number of customers who create an account

Help teams rethink how they engage via email

While marketers still use email marketing, each year it becomes more challenging to do it well. As such, Dusty’s team helped influence an initiative Autodesk marketers have implemented, which they refer to as “Earn the Right.” If an Autodesk marketer wants to email someone, she or he needs to have someone willingly follow the company or person. No longer can staff go to the marketing operations team and request an email list for a certain demographic to blast a promo.

“It’s a really interesting time because this initiative reflects the organization’s recognition that we need to engage differently with our customers; we need to earn the right to engage with them,” Dusty says. “Our email inboxes overflow with ‘offers’ on a daily basis; the only way to cut through that and stand out is to earn your audience’s attention.”

The result? People are thinking more carefully about creating great content that the audience really wants to consume. Through these efforts Autodesk marketing teams are focused on generating content that audiences actually want.

Train HR about the type of talent you need

Publishing so much great content, Autodesk is often looking to expand its marketing footprint with new hires — yet to stay effective, HR needs to understand the type of person who will succeed in the organization. To ensure a good fit, Dusty and his team helped create an outline of what the modern marketer looks like, which is a combination of right- and left-brain skills and competencies. Autodesk created a model called CAA (Content, Analytics, Automation) to coach hiring managers about the kind of people the marketing team seeks. These are the three attributes of CAA:

• Content: First and foremost, the hires need to know how to tell great stories.
• Analytics: New hires need to understand how to measure what they are publishing so they can refine what stories they are telling based on what they’re learning.
• Automation: Marketers often think automation equals marketing automation, but this skill is broader. Dusty looks for people who understand the latest tool sets at marketers’ disposal to engage customers in new ways at scale. This includes tracking customer’s digital body language (explained in the “metrics” section above).

Recognize there is no substitute for quality

The editors and writers for Line//Shape//Space are all journalists — individuals trained in the complexities of telling great stories. Not only is high-quality writing important to attract and retain an audience, it’s also one of the reasons senior executives support the platform. Many of the senior executives with bylines on Line//Shape//Space collaborate because they know the site has high editorial expectations. Explains Dusty, “they wouldn’t want to be featured on it if it didn’t frame their vision in the right light.”

Dusty is also quick to explain that Autodesk has storytelling as part of its DNA because it sells tools that help others tell their own stories. For instance, Autodesk has tools to help architects create a project proposal or a video-game company create its story in a visual way.

As such, senior executives understand the importance of storytelling, which has helped with buy-in.

“At Autodesk, we recognize how important storytelling is. We’re self-reflective and think about the ways we want to be engaged. It’s an important part of the evolving ethos of Autodesk and our communication style. I call it karmic marketing: Engage people in the way you want to be engaged with … kinda like the golden rule of new marketing.”

Karmic marketing: engage people in the way you want to be engaged with says @dustycd #cmworld
Click To Tweet

Looking forward

Dusty’s team recently moved over to digital marketing and e-commerce — meaning that instead of focusing exclusively on Line//Shape//Space, the team is now responsible for all content published on Autodesk.com. With a much larger scope of work, Dusty now needs an integrated content strategy — one that connects the dots across everything Autodesk is doing.

“It’s a continued revolution,” Dusty says.

Autodesk’s Dusty DiMercurio is a finalist for 2016 Content Marketer of the Year, which will be announced live at Content Marketing World Sept. 6-9. Register today to be there in person and to grow your content marketing skills. Use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Editor’s note: A special thanks to Ardath Albee who scoured the planet looking for the best of the best content marketers. She was instrumental in helping us find our 2016 Content Marketer of the Year finalists. 

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Create a Culture Where Content Marketing Thrives appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

At the end of the day, your likability often boils down to your emotional intelligence.

You might be naturally likable, or you might be a work in progress. If you're in the latter group, here are the highlights of one particularly helpful Quora thread: "What are useful social skills that can be picked up quickly?"

Out of the 83 answers submitted by users, we selected 18 simple ways to instantly become more likable:

Kathleen Elkins and Natalie Walters contributed to previous versions of this article.

SEE ALSO: 14 habits of the most likable people

1. Make eye contact

"It is an idiotically simple thing, but it remains one of the most impactful life hacks around," writes Quora user Brad Porter. "The most attractive quality in a person is confidence. But 'be confident' is not very good advice. Instead, find the best proxy for confidence, in terms of interactive behavior. And that's eye contact."

Start this habit immediately, says Porter. It requires no practice or special skill — just the commitment to meet someone's gaze and look them in the eye while conversing.

2. Put your smartphone in your pocket

And keep it there until your conversation or meeting is over. Basil Chiasson puts it simply: "Pay attention. Look at them. Stop what you're doing. No interruptions."

This is another simple yet effective habit that can be executed immediately and does not require any effort or skill.

3. Call people by name

The next time someone greets you by name or uses your name mid-conversation, remember how great that feels.

If you have trouble putting names to faces, try different strategies, such as writing them down or using imagery or rhymes associated with the name. Quora user Howard Lee suggests repeating names verbally when you're first introduced and then twice more in your head.

If you're looking for an alternate pastime to skiing during the bleak months of Wyoming, you can garden. There's a new project blooming in this cold state, and it's called Vertical Harvest.

The post In Wyoming, this vertical farm is growing crops even in the winter appeared first on Digital Trends.

If you want to get a reply to your email, you can start by writing a good one. Boomerang has had some helpful tips to do this in the past , but now the company is taking it a step further. Its new feature Respondable will rate your emails on the fly in a few key categories.

Read more...

VANCOUVER – Canada “has missed the boat” when it comes to developing renewable energy resources that would mitigate the impact of global warming and its impact on human health, a leading medical expert says.

Dr. James Orbinski, a professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, told a meeting of the Canadian Medical Association that Canada still has time to catch up with other countries or it will be left behind.

California has the fastest-growing economy in the United States despite putting a price on carbon emissions, but Canada has failed to recognize that this is not a “false choice” with a negative economic impact, Orbinski said Monday.

“For Canada, we have been stuck in this paradox,” he said. “We are lagging behind economically in terms of the kind of advances that other nations like Germany, Spain, the nations of continental Europe, the U.K., China even, the kind of policies that they’re engaging in terms of dealing with the effects of climate change.”

The development of alternative energy sources, such as solar and wind power, has fuelled a knowledge- and technology-based economy in California, which has experienced a fifth year of drought driven by climate change, Orbinski said Monday.

People in developing regions of the world suffer the most from the effects of climate change, he said.

In 2011, 13 million east Africans were on food assistance because of drought, he said.

“This is the consequence of climate change. It is profound. And it is utterly unacceptable.”

Orbinksi, who co-founded the medical and research organization Dignitas International to provide AIDS treatment in the sub-Saharan African country of Malawi, said 270,000 people are receiving treatment for the disease, but that’s not their worst problem.

“It is drought,” he said, adding 29 million people in southern Africa are on food assistance.

Orbinski, who headed Doctors Without Borders when it won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1999, said wildfires, hurricanes and floods, as a result of rising sea levels, are just some of the effects of climate change.

The rate of temperature increases in Canada is two times higher than the worldwide average, with greater hikes in the northern part of the country, he said.

“What is very clear is that climate change is like no other threat that the human species has ever faced in its history,” he said. “It is the contemporary issue of the 21st century.”

Orbinski urged doctors to get involved locally in climate-change initiatives, adding that could affect policy change.

Dr. Cindy Forbes, outgoing president of the Canadian Medical Association, said discussions will be held by the organization’s board as physicians aim to make a difference in their own communities when it comes to climate change initiatives.

“We’ve identified it as a major issue,” she said in an interview. “We will be looking at what we can do at the federal (government) level but at this point we have not made any decisions or determinations as to what our next steps will be.”

The federal government, along with other provinces, set new goals following the Paris Agreement last December to reduce carbon emissions by 30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030.

Last week, British Columbia decided against increasing its carbon tax. Premier Christy Clark called on other provinces to match B.C.’s carbon tax and said the government would re-evaluate the levy when other jurisdictions have similar taxes in place.

— Follow CamilleBains1 on Twitter.

The post Canada ‘missed the boat’ on economic policies to mitigate climate change: doctor appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

WASHINGTON – For more than a decade, lawmakers have been pointing at their counterparts to take the blame for what just about everyone agrees is a broken immigration system.

Republicans say President Barack Obama’s immigration enforcement policies encourage more people to sneak into the country. Democrats blame Republicans for blocking legislation that would allow people already here to gain legal status and create a path for future, legal immigration.

But whatever specific policies are being fought over now, immigration experts say the problem took root at least 30 years ago, when President Ronald Reagan signed a 1986 immigration law that has become known as the “Reagan Amnesty” and allowed roughly 3 million people in the country illegally to gain legal status.

Immigration laws were overhauled again in 1990 under Republican President George H.W. Bush and again in 1996 under Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Obama has tried in his eight years in office to overhaul them once again, but nothing has passed.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has said he will fix the system, build a wall along the border with Mexico and perhaps deport many of the estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally. But this week he has indicated he may back off from that idea.

“We’re going to build the wall, and we’re going to stop it. It’s going to end,” Trump said earlier this year. “We’re going to have a big, beautiful wall.”

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has pledged to push comprehensive immigration reform and to act on her own, as Obama has, if Congress doesn’t approve such a measure.

Trump and Clinton have laid the blame for the current state of immigration — and the estimated 11 million people living and, in many cases, working illegally in the United States — on the other party.

But experts disagree.

“I think there’s a lot of blame to go around and spread around for decades,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director for the conservative Center For Immigration Studies. “There isn’t one person responsible.”

Instead, he said, the problem lies in how the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986 was implemented. He described the passage of the bill as something of a “con-job” that allowed millions of immigrants in the country illegally to have legal status with a promise of workplace enforcement and other measures to curb future illegal immigration.

But that didn’t happen, he said. And there was little incentive to follow through on promises of strict workplace enforcement, he said, once millions of people were legalized.

“I definitely view this as the 30-year problem,” said Doris Meissner, who headed the now-defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service under Bill Clinton and is now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

The 1986 law was intended to create a new era of enforcement, including strict enforcement of the new law that barred employers from hiring workers who don’t have permission to work in the United States.

Thirty years later that stringent workplace enforcement, and mandated use of the government’s E-Verify system for employers to check the legal work status of prospective hires, is still being debated by lawmakers and the business community. Multiple iterations of federal legislation to require employment verification have been defeated in Congress.

Meissner said the ability of people in the country illegally to continue to find work during the economic boom of the 1990s was a significant incentive for more to come.

And while an average of about 1.3 million people a year were caught crossing the border illegally over the decade of the 1990s, the Border Patrol was relatively small, not growing above a force of 10,000 until 2002.

Meissner says part of the problem was the two immigration laws that followed in 1990 and 1996 that she said did very little to create a legal path to the United States for low-skilled workers. The government does have a pair of visa programs for seasonal agriculture workers and others who are considered seasonal, nonagricultural workers, but Meissner and other critics of the program argue that it is not sufficient.

“There is no line to get into,” Meissner said. “This is why at the end of the day we need updated laws, we need immigration reform.”

Instead, she said, the focus was on enforcement and making it easier to deport immigrants in the country illegally.

As that happened, the estimated population of people living in the country illegally rose from a few million in the late 1980s and early 1990s to today’s estimated 11 million people.

The focus on enforcement may also have created an inadvertent incentive for immigrants in the U.S. illegally to stay in the country for fear that it would be harder if not impossible to get back in if they left, said Stuart Anderson, executive director at the non-partisan National Foundation for American Policy.

So, Anderson said, many people made the decision to stay and try to avoid federal law enforcement as long as they could.

“I don’t think anyone would say that policy was successful,” Anderson said. “No one would have said this is what we want the result to be.”

In recent years the debate over immigration reform has focused on enforcement versus what to do with the millions of people already living in the country illegally.

Krikorian said lessons of the past are driving the latest efforts to put security and enforcement priorities first. And building a path to legal immigration for those considered to be low-skilled workers won’t likely be a consideration going forward.

“The problem is that (in 1986) the legalization happened first,” Krikorian said. “Then the political incentive to roll out the enforcement … effectively evaporates.”

___

What political news is the world searching for on Google and talking about on Twitter? Find out via AP’s Election Buzz interactive. http://elections.ap.org/buzz

___

Follow Alicia A. Caldwell on Twitter at www.twitter.com/acaldwellap

The post Hunting for the root of immigration woes? Look to the past. appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

The other day I said, “I’ll check social media for a few minutes, then get back to work…”

Thirty minutes later, I was reading my seventh article about the top 30 places to go on vacation. Because who doesn’t need a vacation? (I chose Copenhagen, if you’re curious.)

It’s understandable if you get distracted every now and then, but scenarios like these occur dozens of times every day. Gallup research found “the average amount of time that people spent on any single event before being interrupted or before switching was about three minutes.”

That same study found that it takes an average of 23 minutes for us to focus and get back into the groove of our work.

Clearly, the fewer distractions you succumb to, the better, but it’s not always easy to resist temptation.

That’s where Amanda Holmes comes in. Her father, founder of Chet Holmes International, the business coaching company she’s now the CEO of, learned how to be productive from billionaire Berkshire Hathaway chairman Charlie Munger and passed on his wisdom to her. Here are Amanda Holmes’ five practical, easy-to-follow tips to help you manage your time and productivity like a billionaire.

For more practical time management tips, save your free seat for Holmes’ live Q&A session during the free online Inbound Sales Day event September 14th.

1) No more “got a minute” meetings.

How often do you hear, “Hey, got a minute?” It always ends up being more than a minute. This happens multiple times a day -- and I’m guilty of asking others for a minute as well.

Amanda tells us that her father, Chet Holmes, told his employees, “Anything you want to talk about, write it down and we’ll talk about it during our weekly call.”

Manage your time or others will manage it for you.

2) Be deliberate about notifications that require action.

You’ll be asked to provide reactions to other people or things throughout your day. This could include phone calls, text messages, emails, and any mobile notifications you receive. They’re all attention-grabbing tactics whose purpose is to take up as much of your time as possible.

In fact, the apps on your phone were designed to get you addicted.

Instead of responding to these interruptions right away, set aside dedicated time to react to those things. Set up your voicemail. Close your email. Turn off phone notifications.

3) Do less.

The other day, my to-do list started at seven items and by the end of the day, increased to 23 (I counted). My horrible realization was that most of those things wouldn’t have had a big impact on my work.

Cap your to-do list each day at a certain number of items -- anywhere from five to 10 is reasonable. This doesn’t mean only making five prospecting calls a day -- it means you need to be highly deliberate about the types of tasks or number of larger projects you’ll dedicate time to. You can’t say “yes” to everything that crosses your path.

4) Touch it once.

How many times have you looked at an email and thought, “I’ll answer this later”? So you open it again an hour later… and still don’t do anything with it. A few days later, it’s still there, awaiting your response.

Don't open and read an email multiple times if you’re not going to finish it. Touch it once and move on to your next activity.

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Alphabet, calls this the OHIO rule: Only Hold It Once.

5) Plan your days.

Once you have your list of things to do each day, allocate a block of time to each of those things. Make sure to have some time blocked out to check email and respond to anything that needs your time.

This way, you’ll know what you should be doing at any given time.

The overarching idea is to be proactive about your time. Be in control of what you’re doing throughout the day instead of reacting to various things pulling you in multiple directions.

Did these tips help? Get more time management hacks and sales tips on September 14th during Inbound Sales Day.

If you are planning any trips, today is the day to book your flight.

August 23 is called "Cheap Flight Day." It's the day most airlines drop the prices on flights because it marks the start of the fall season where kids have already flown back to school and the rush to book vacations dies off, Brian Ek, a travel analyst at Priceline, told Go BankingRates. 

Several airlines have deals for Cheap Flight Day, they include: American Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Delta Airlines, Emirates International, Fiji Airways, JetBlue, Norwegian Air, Qatar Airways, Vietnam Airlines, and Virgin America.

Deals include the ability to fly from Miami to Turks and Caicos Islands for as low as $68 one way on American Airlines, and the ability to fly from New York to Bangkok, Thailand for as low as $682 for a round-trip ticket on Qatar Airways. 

These deals, though, are only available for a short window of time, which lasts from now to about November when airline travel picks back up for the holiday season. 

To save even more money on "Cheap Flight Day," remember to try other travel hacks as well, like keeping your dates flexible and traveling during off-hours, like early in the morning or late at night. 

SEE ALSO: Airbus is building a high-speed flying taxi fleet so you never have to sit in traffic again

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This is how pilots train to fly America's most expensive fighter jets

The Louder You Yell, the Less Your Customers Listen

By Steve Shaheen

While walking your dog down the street, you come upon a gorgeous patch of grass. Your pup sees it, too, and rushes toward it — and then you see the sign: “Please keep off grass.”

You pause and think. Why can’t dogs enjoy this grass? Who do these people think they are to restrict the pleasures of my best friend?

But what if the sign said, “This area has been treated with pesticide — please keep pets off grass”? Would you feel the same sense of frustration, the same indignant temptation to break the rules? The first sign provokes resentment. The second informs and lets readers decide for themselves how to act.

There’s a saying: “With the best salespeople, you never know they are selling.” Great salespeople deliver their message without making you feel uncomfortable, awkward, or, most importantly, that they’re trying to control you.

In this world, we only have control over ourselves — a reality marketers and salespeople can easily forget. These are a few ways I’ve found to help customers choose you: 

1. Pitch with emotion. Many cigarettes have the words “smoking kills” emblazoned on their package. Think about that: The company with the least incentive to say this must literally tell people that their product causes death.

I don’t deny the powerful properties of addiction, but smokers — at least in the beginning — ignore a life-and-death warning to make an emotion-driven choice. They’re not buying the product itself; they’re buying into the emotional connections associated with cigarettes. Young smokers want to fit in, define themselves, find friends through the habit, or distract themselves from another problem. Big Tobacco has built itself on our emotions’ ability to distract from reason.

Steve Jobs knew the power of emotional messaging, too. In his “Think Different” campaign speech, he told Apple employees, “We are not going to bombard people with the latest features of the Mac,” alluding to improvements in computer memory, onboard storage, and more. He pointed out that Nike rarely mentions the features of its shoes, instead focusing its advertising on “honoring great athletes” — another homage to emotion’s power over reason.

The next time you talk about your product or service, think about what users’ emotional connection to it may be. If you think there isn’t one, remember that there’s nothing intrinsically emotional about computer hardware.

2. Close with respect. Few things are worse than an intrusive salesperson. You’ve tried everything from passive disinterest to overt avoidance — and he or she still won’t leave you alone. Perhaps, at some point, you succumb — or, worse yet, if you don’t buy the product, the salesperson forks over your data to dozens of other vendors. 

Take Target’s eerie pregnancy prediction software that learned a teen girl was expecting before her father did. Perhaps Target thought it was getting ahead in the marketing data game, but does anyone believe it bought the company more new sales than angry customers?

Pushing a customer into a sale generates revenue, but it fails to maximize long-term value. When a customer feels great about choosing you, he or she is more likely to champion your brand (more sales), submit fewer service requests (fewer costs), and keep coming back (greater lifetime value). Not all types of closes are created equal. A marketing and sales culture that respects customers’ personal boundaries is not only the right thing to do; it’s also a formula for long-term success.

3. Sell with subtlety. When was the last time you bought something that declared, “This product is the best — you must have it”? Akin to watering plants with a pressure washer, that messaging doesn’t just turn off customers because it’s boring: It’s failure by firepower. 

What subtle cues convey your message instead? Naming and ad copy are good places to start. Have you ever noticed a traffic accident is called an “accident” (implying no blame) versus a “failure” (blame) or that the term “pro-life” is used by its adherents rather than “anti-abortion”? Those terms are subtle, yet deliberate, ways to mold conversations in ways that advantage their speakers.

From mirror neurons to the law of round numbers to placing higher-priced items on the right, advertisers have a slew of techniques to sell to you with subtlety. 

If you want to stand out to consumers, don’t shout louder. The world is already full of screaming salespeople. Instead, lower your voice, appeal to emotion, and leave the high-pressure tactics at home.

Steve Shaheen is the global head of digital marketing for Restaurant Brands International, the parent company of Burger King and Tim Hortons. He previously held leadership roles with The Walt Disney Company and LivingSocial and founded two successful digital marketing companies in the education and healthcare industries. He has an MBA from Harvard Business School.

A Sales Professionals Four Most Important Words

By Richard F. Libin, President, APB, rlibin@apb.cc, www.apb.cc

In sales, the right words can make or break a deal. Yet the four most important words in the business are never spoken, but govern behavior and determine whether or not your customers have an exceptional experience. Ultimately they can impact your ability to close the sale.

The four words are:

1. Accountability
2. Communication
3. Comprehension
4. Consistency

These four words can literally mean the difference between success and failure in any sales organization. This does not discount the professional skills that are needed by any means; however, these behaviors form the foundation that is needed for sales skills to work.

Accountability is defined as “the quality or state of being accountable; especially an obligation or willingness to accept responsibility or to account for one's actions”*

Think about it. Quality. Obligation. Responsibility. These are powerful and often fearful concepts. Yet, every day we all are held accountable for something. And, generally, accountability is a two-way street — people and organizations are accountable to each other. For example, a mortgage company agrees to accept the obligation of loaning the outstanding value of a property to a buyer, who in turn agrees to be accountable and repay the loan with interest on time each month. Teachers take on the obligation of educating their students according to the required curriculum. Students (and parents) are accountable for attendance, homework, behavior and studying.

Yet, when it comes to our jobs, accountability is what most people fear most. No one wants to be held accountable, least of all salespeople. We can learn more about why this is by looking at communication, comprehension and consistency.

Communication is defined as “a process by which information is exchanged between individuals through a common system of symbols, signs, or behavior”*

An exchange of information. This would seem pretty simple, yet miscommunication is as common as clear communication. Often, it happens even more often, especially in business. As a manager, it’s not enough to think that employees know what is expected. It’s also not enough to simply tell them. People communicate in different ways and require different resources to ensure communication is remembered and learned. Some learn by hearing, others by seeing, and still others by doing. Effective communication requires all three methods. Tell your employees, show them and then have them do it.

Even so, is this enough? Do people remember after a single communication? In our world today, there is so much “noise” that for communication to truly be effective, it needs to be repeated and recorded. Managers must clearly tell employees every day what is expected in their job, for their sales and/or customer service performance, how they are measured, where to go for more information and how to handle challenges or problems.

Employees must have access to materials and resources that can make their jobs easier and to set them up for success. For example, if your business uses the Internet, be sure your employees have full access to internal resources as well as to the customer view of your business as reference tools.

Even the best communication, however, is worthless without comprehension.

Comprehension, our third word, is defined as “the act or action of grasping with the intellect: understanding”*

Do your people understand what they are accountable for? Most people will answer, “Yes,” yet most of the time people make mistakes or fail to meet expectations because of a lack of understanding. Comprehension cannot be assumed. Without a clear understanding, employees either do what they think should be done or what they feel like doing.  Rarely, will they meet expectations.

Comprehension occurs when an individual has a full understanding of what is being done, how it must be done, and why it matters. To fully comprehend, an individual must be involved in the process. And, they must understand the personal benefit — like the great radio station WIIFM (What’s In It For Me), and the benefit for the customer. Let’s simplify this with an example. If you ask people to jump off a bridge, 99% will ask why. They need to understand before they act. The same is true in business. Employees, who understand why processes exist, perform better. Often, simply asking questions will provide a reality check on whether or not an employee understands, and whether or not management is communicating clearly.

Consistency, our final word is defined as “harmony of conduct or practice with profession”*

Another primary cause of misunderstanding is a lack of consistency from one manager to the other, or even by the same manager. If processes and expectations are applied inconsistently, not surprisingly employees get confused. How can any employee be held accountable if the rules change day to day? Managers must be consistent. And, if changes are made, they need to start back at the beginning, communicate what employees are responsible for, ensure comprehension and apply the new standards consistently. Only then can managers hold employees accountable and business achieve sales and service excellence.

Conclusion

Accountability, Communication, Comprehension, and Consistency – when taken to heart and applied by management with their people, are truly the four most important words in achieving sales excellence.

*Source: Merriam-Webster, m-w.com

Richard F. Libin is the author of the book, “Who Stopped the Sale?” (whostoppedthesale.com) and president of APB-Automotive Profit Builders, Inc. His next book, “Who Knew? It’s All About You. Because Everyone Is A Salesperson,” is due out in 2016. His firm has more than 48 years’ experience working with both sales and service on customer satisfaction and maximizing gross profits through personnel development and technology. He can be reached at rlibin@apb.cc or 508-626-9200 or www.apb.cc.

Companies that grow face a predictable problem: over time, the business becomes way too complex for its own good. I see this a lot in companies that have moved heavily into what I call the “exploitation” phase of a competitive advantage, or the phase that comes after the initial launch and successful ramp-up. Chris Zook and James Allen have also recently tackled this issue their recent HBR article “Reigniting Growth.”

With the warm glow of steady and more-or-less predictable profits to depend on, more and more policies are introduced, more new ways of extracting profits are developed, the company loses touch with its customers, fewer activities are directly related to what Geoffrey Moore famously called the “core” and instead have to do with context, and the company seems to lose its agility. The internal world comes to matter more than what is going on outside the boundaries of the company and it just sort of loses its edge. The difficulty here is that this doesn’t happen overnight. Convinced that they have a sustainable competitive advantage (always a risky way to think about your business), executives allow bureaucracy to take over and decision-making to become sclerotic.

To give an example of just how hard it can be to prevent this from happening, let’s consider the case of Nokia. For years, the company was a poster-child of success, earning admiration from business executives and academics alike. The voluminous case studies and articles about the firm would fill entire file cabinets in the typical business school storage area. I myself wrote admiringly about the firm’s practices with respect to venturing in an article that was published in 2006. Nokia’s CEO was featured on the cover of Forbes magazine in 2007, with the headline “Nokia: A billion customer and counting. Can anyone catch the cell phone king?” You could forgive executives in the company for believing that they had it nailed.

And yet…2007 was the year that the iPhone was introduced and Android commercialized. Despite Nokia’s global footprint, it was nowhere in the US and carriers disliked the company’s arrogance, built up during its day as the dominant handset maker. I’m told that at one point the management-through-presentation culture of the company was so extensive that they were actually investigated by 3M for potentially re-selling the huge volumes of acetates used in those days to make slides for overhead projectors!

I started to get communications from the company that felt like really bad news. In one, a star researcher said that he was leaving as there was no space for creativity anymore, as the company squeezed budgets and eliminated roles without a clear ROI. The venturing process that I so admired was essentially dismantled, to be replaced by a numbers-driven group that went hunting for near-term success. And I wasn’t the only one concerned about the company’s direction – in 2008 my colleagues Yves Doz and Mikko Kosonen wrote about the “rollercoaster” that was strategy at Nokia for many years, just before the Apple phenomenon decimated the company’s handset business.

This is a story without suspense – eventually, we know, Kallasvuo was fired and Stephen Elop was brought in as CEO, penning a call to arms for the company, his famous “burning platform” memo. In what was clearly a “Hail Mary” pass, Elop engineered a tie-up with Microsoft that never really worked out, eventually setting the stage for the sale of the company’s entire handset business. And this despite having working prototypes of devices that could have come to market as the iPhone or iPad – years before Apple invented them. The problem, according to people like Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, was sclerotic decision making that caused the company to miss opportunity after opportunity. Sounds like what Zook and Allen are talking about.

This is exactly what I look at when a company has gone far too heavily in the direction of exploiting. You can think of it as the “tangle” of growth. Without the pressure to move quickly and make decisions fast with imperfect information, it is all too easy for the balance between pressing forward into the future and exploiting the current situation to get out of whack. The focus becomes internal, politics take over decision-making, senior leaders are not told the bad news they need to hear, technical experts’ voices are not heard and, for reasons nobody can quite put a finger on, everything seems to be moving at a leaden pace.

What is the remedy that Zook and Allen propose? Clean house by eliminating under-performing units, while reducing complexity and eliminating excess cost. Focus on what they call the “front line”– that part of the company that actually touches the customer. Get senior teams out of the office to encounter one-on-one what is really going on in their markets and with their customers. Eliminate bureaucracy. Rediscover the mission.

Pragmatically, you can begin to do this without a whole lot of drama. I start by making a model of the business. I like to look at variables in 4 columns:

• Outcomes (what you are trying to achieve, as in sales)
• Drivers (what you believe causes the outcome to occur, or not)
• Leading indicators (how do you know how you are doing on the drivers?)
• Work streams (what are you doing to influence the leading indicators)

In a recent retreat with the executive team of a retailer that is facing a genuine tangle and trying to get back on track, we kept it simple. I used a hand-drawn picture of what the model for their business would look like. The handwritten, unsophisticated part is important – remember that a lot of the tangle is characterized by over-engineered PowerPoint presentations and way too many reports. What you want is to get clarity about what really matters to your business and what is just noise. So what we drew as outcomes for this retailer were results such as in-store sales, revenues from secondary products, revenues from on-line sales, and then the various contributors to cost. Next, we looked at what we believe caused those things to happen, for good or for ill (things like traffic from which customer segments, average spending, median spending, nature of what was bought, share of wallet, etc.). Then we looked at what indicators might predict whether our drivers were improving or not (customer complaints, net promoter scores, sign-ups for a loyalty program, and so on).

With this picture firmly in front of the whole team, we next dove into the implications for what the organization should be focusing on – and more importantly what it could safely stop doing. If an activity didn’t have an impact on a leading indicator, we resolved to eliminate it. If a unit couldn’t clearly show the linkages between what they do every day and the outcomes we were trying to drive, it was a candidate for being shut down. If one member of the leadership team owned a key driver, the goal was to let them manage it rather than everybody being in micro-management mode.

Eventually, the changes that were implemented led to a redefinition of the company’s core strategy and a renewal of its relationships with its customers, without a wrenching restructuring or devastation to morale. Perhaps even more impressive than these strategic outcomes were the effects of this “detangling” on the organization. The senior team was able to more effectively prioritize the use of their time. Before the detangling exercise, they had fallen into the classic trap of continuing to “do stuff” when really their very senior roles were to ensure that the right things were being executed down the organization. They were now more able to clearly separate out responsibilities so that less communication and fewer meetings were required as they realized that the responsible person should tackle the action plans. Decisions were made more quickly. A big thrust, ongoing at the moment, is to re-energize their workforce which had been drifting in the direction taken by Circuit City and Home Depot, namely replacing experienced and deeply knowledgeable staff with part-time and less knowledgeable people which eventually damaged the reputation of both firms (and in the case of Circuit City ultimately led to its demise).

Getting tangled up is easy. Getting untangled is hard. Absent the pressure from either a major corporate crisis (such as a burning platform) or a CEO and senior team that insist these things be part of the ongoing work of the organization, the tangle will dominate. The reason this strikes me as a critically important issue today is that in a world of transient competitive advantage, even very good companies, like Nokia, can fall victim to this syndrome. Far better to tame it before it sinks you.

When Business Insider asked experts what they thought would change the financial industry in the next decade, nearly all said automation. But while some saw humans being replaced, others thought that the tech will make humans better.

This is what we learned after surveying chief technology officers, chief innovation officers, startup founders, and venture capitalists.

We are heading toward a world where "ubiquitous mobile computing, an exponential growth in data, and continuous advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence will transform finance into an always-on, algorithmically driven industry," according to Sean Park, the founder, chairman, and CIO at venture-capital firm Anthemis Group.

Adding to this trend, he said, is the coming of age of the "Snapchat generation," the millennials — and the generation ahead, which some call "Generation Z" — that have grown up using technology in an automated world.

It's clear that industry experts, from startup founders to senior executives at incumbent giants, agree. Here's a sampling of their thoughts:

• David Reilly, CTO at Bank of America, believes that automation will "change how we insure property, loan money, invest money, deliver technology, write research reports, and what professionals in financial services do every day." For example, an insurance company can incorporate far more data — from credit scores to behavior — when it decides how risky a customer is. He added: "Every week in the news we read about a new application for artificial intelligence, machine learning, neural networks, or robots — whether it is self-driving cars, AI assistants, predictive models, robots building (or printing) hardware, or how to invest our money ... Put these all in the category of automation — and that is what will impact finance the most in the next decade."
• Diwakar Choubey, CEO of online lender MoneyLion, predicts that "what was once a sit-down conversation between a client and their personal private banker might now be accessible through a mobile app to broad audiences, 24/7."
• Jenny Fielding, managing director at Techstars Accelerator, said that technology "enables basic automation so that making payments, checking balances and customer service can happen in real time via messaging platforms. However, as the underlying technologies mature, deep learning algorithms will minimize the need for human interaction."
• Dean Nicolacakis, PricewaterhouseCoopers' coleader of US fintech, believes that automation will allow financial services to become "embedded directly into the user activity itself as a native, not a separate, function." Think services like Uber, where paying is simple within the app. He imagines that kind of seamlessness will come to other transactions like getting a mortgage.
• Chae H. An, vice president and CTO of the financial-services sector at IBM, sees the growth in artificial intelligence allowing banks to provide services tailored specifically to individual customers.
• Bu Lo, cofounder and CEO of online investment manager FutureAdvisor, said that "technology will also continue freeing up human financial advisors from mundane tasks so that they can focus on providing uniquely human value, like coaching and mentoring." Instead of having to deal with administrative procedures, advisors can spend time offering a personalized service according to client needs.

The days of traveling to your bank, waiting on line, and sitting down with a financial adviser to discuss your financial future are already a thing of the past for many. But experts think that, for most of us, the bank of the future will be entirely virtual.

"The impact on businesses will be profound," said Fielding.

SEE ALSO: We asked some of the smartest minds in finance how Wall Street is going to change — this is what they said

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The biggest security mistakes people make with online banking

If you're one of those people who constantly needs the newest version of everything in your hands then this startup could be one to keep an eye on.

The startup, Upgraded.io, works out how much your current device will be worth at the time you want to upgrade and deducts that figure from the anticipated RRP of the new device. It then charges the difference over a period of several months.

The startup — founded by Jamon Rahn, who was hired by Uber to grow the company's business in Singapore — aims to help customers upgrade their smartphones, tablets, and other devices with less hassle and less cost. 

"In 12 months the devices you have now will still have value but you'll put it into your closet and throw away that value," said Rahn. "We give you that value up front. We say this phone will be worth X and all you do is pay in the difference."

The used phone market is worth $17 billion (£12.9 billion), according to a Deloitte study, while Rahn says he's going after a $37 billion (£28.1 billion) market because he's focusing on other devices beyond smartphones.

Having just completed the Y Combinator accelerator course in Silicon Valley, Upgraded.io is now looking to expand from the US and into Europe and Asia, possibly with the help of funding from investors that attend the Y Combinator Demo Day on Tuesday. It'll no doubt hope to follow in the footsteps of Y Combinator alum such as Airbnb, Dropbox, and Stripe.

"A €900 (£775) smartphone would cost €50 (£43)-€60 (£52) a month and allow the customer to upgrade to a new one every year," explained Rahn, who claims that his data science team can predict the future value of devices with great accuracy by looking at previous device roll outs. 

Based on those numbers, the customer would pay €600 (£517)-€720 (£620) for a €900 (£775) device over a 12-month period. They'll also have to trade in their old handset when they want the new device.

Upgraded.io is already live in the US and it will go live in two Scandinavian countries this autumn, according to Rahn, who said he's on the brink of signing deals with a number of large European retailers. It's unclear at this stage when the UK launch will be. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The iPhone 7 is hitting stores on September 23 — here's what you're getting

Digital communication isn’t always the best form of long distance communication. Sometimes a simple phone call can solve your issue.

Understanding when it’s appropriate to call your points of contact and when it’s more effective to email them can help you build stronger B2B relationships. But how do you know when to do which?

If you’re facing this dilemma, these guidelines can help.

When Should I Email My Contacts?

In this digital age, many businessmen and women prefer to reach out to clients via email. This method is most effective for the following situations:

To Answer a Simple Question

When your contact has a question on behalf of your client that does not require an elaborate response, shooting a quick email to your contact is a much more efficient use of your time.

To Send Meeting Notes

After a conference call, it’s much easier to type up an outline of the meeting minutes and email it to your contact and others who were on the call.

To Confirm Project Status

It’s always helpful to have a written record of progress on any project. Electronic progress reports are much more professional than verbal updates, as many clients prefer to visualize progress especially through the use of charts and graphs. Written progress reports are also ideal for record-keeping purposes.

Sending emails is useful for answering easy questions and delivering documents to your contacts, but sometimes picking up the phone is a more suitable option.

When Should I Call My Contacts?

Telephone calls are often more appropriate for these situations:

When Delivering Bad News

Although it’s not the bearer’s preferred method for delivering bad news, informing your contact of less-than-satisfying results is best done over the phone. Verbally informing your contact of statistics such as a drop in website traffic or a rise in your client’s unsubscribe rate demonstrates your sincere concern for your client’s success.

If an Explanation Requires More Than 56 Sentences

In some cases, a client may ask a question that requires a lengthy response. Instead of wasting your time compiling a longwinded email that your contact may not have time to read, giving him/her a call may resolve the issue in a more timely fashion.

If Your Contact has Not Responded to Your First Two Emails

We often spend approximately 28% of our day responding to emails. If you’ve sent your contact at least two emails on a particular topic and still have not received a response, it may be time for a telephone call. Your contact may not check email as regularly as you, or perhaps your emails are being delivered to your contact’s junk mailbox.

If Your Contacts Prefer Phone Calls

Some people prefer phone calls rather than more modern electronic forms of communication. They feel more comfortable knowing who they are talking to and knowing they are receiving instant responses. It may not be your communication method of choice, but to maintain healthy client-business relationships, you should always initially reach out to them using the method with which they are most comfortable.

At Least Once a Month

Even if it’s not your contact’s preferred method of communication, it’s good practice to make this personal connection with your contact on a monthly basis. Taking the initiative to make a simple phone call can help build rapport with your contact, as the telephone is considered a more personal outlet today.

When Speaking to Your Contact’s Manager

It’s important to reach out to your contact’s supervisor or manager at least once a quarter to ensure all parties are on the same page, to make sure his/her supervisor is receiving the information your client needs in order to maintain a profitable B2B relationship. Confirm that your services are meeting your client’s internal goals and that the decision makers understand the value of those services. Knowing whether more than one layer of the company is pleased with your work will help you mold your performance to better suit your client’s needs.

If Your Contact has Multiple Questions in a Short Period of Time

If your contact is looking for an immediate response to a lengthy list of questions, making a phone call may be the better option. Your contact may have a greater concern that he/she would rather not address via email, and it’s your responsibility to make your contact as comfortable as possible with you and the services your team provides.

In addition, if your contact is sending you multiple emails regularly that each contain one or two questions, it may be more conducive for you to pick up the phone. You may be able to cover all of those questions in one short call.

If You Choose to Retain and Grow an Account

When gaining a new client, it’s important to be cautious with your initial call. Then, giving your contact a call once in a while helps you develop a stronger professional relationship with your contact and client. Addressing their needs over the phone demonstrates your compassion and your desire to see your client succeed.

Recognizing when to email and when to call your contacts is crucial to developing your client relationships. Let go of the urge to constantly send emails and chat via project management platforms and the like—pick up the phone to help improve your client retention and account growth.

(Bayne Stanley/CP)

Iraq, one of the world’s biggest oil producers, will increase its exports of the stuff by about 5% this week, Bloomberg reported over the weekend. State-run Northern Oil Co. worked out its differences with the Kurdistan Regional Government, the semi-autonomous authority that had closed the pipeline Northern Oil was using to get crude from three fields to market.

The bad news keeps piling up for Canada’s economy

As one would expect, global prices slumped on the news. A three-week rally that saw West Texas Intermediate surge to more than $48 from about $40 at the start of the month ended unceremoniously on Aug. 22.

Noteworthy, however, was the reaction of the Canadian dollar: its value barely changed. That’s not what is supposed to happen. Everyone knows the Canadian currency is lashed to oil. When prices fell, the loonie should have descended. The tight link between the Canadian dollar and crude is broken.

The blue line above is the average weekly change in the Canadian Dollar Effective Exchange Rate Index, a weighted average the loonie’s value against the currencies of Canada’s six biggest trading partners. The red line is the Bank of Canada’s index of energy prices. Oil prices sank in July, as the central bank thought they might. Policy makers might have hoped the currency would sink, too. They have been leaning on the benefits of a weaker exchange rate to support their thesis that Canada’s economy is destined to rotate to manufacturing and non-energy exports. But any exporter trying to compete solely on price this summer got no help from the exchange rate. The currency has traded between about 76 U.S. cents and 78 U.S. cents all year.

Many on Bay Street have struggled to explain the currency’s buoyancy. The loonie touched its high for the year earlier this month even as negative economic indicators piled up. The trade deficit widened to a record, suggesting a drop in demand for Canadian goods and the currency needed to buy them. “To all but the loonie, Canada’s economic malaise has become increasingly apparent,” the Globe and Mail wrote on August 8. The article included three economists—from BMO Nesbitt Burns, Gluskin Sheff + Associates, and Bank of Nova Scotia—and all bet the currency was due for a fall because the data didn’t jibe with a stronger exchange rate. The currency was trading around 76 cents when that article was published and climbed above 78 cents on Aug. 18. The exchange rate lately has been hovering around 77 cents. That’s not much of a decline.

GDP is actually a pretty terrible way to measure economic growth

Currency markets are a torrent of conflicting pressures in this post-crisis era, making the old rules of thumb poor guides. It’s true that Canada no longer is a shining star of the global economy. But nor is it any danger of collapse—which makes it look pretty good against post-Brexit Britain and the European Union. The International Monetary Fund predicts Canada’s gross domestic produce will expand almost 2% next year, faster than every other Group of Seven country with the exception of the United States. Currency traders care more about the future than the past.

Dated economic indicators are relevant only because they help predict whether central banks will raise or lower interest rates. The Bank of Canada has made it pretty clear that it sees no reason to cut interest rates. With borrowing costs either near zero or negative in the biggest advanced economies, that makes Canada a relatively attractive place to stash money. The number of countries rated “AAA” by all three of the main credit rating agencies is down to four: Canada, Denmark, Norway and Luxembourg. International purchases of Canadian securities were near record levels in the second quarter, Statistics Canada reported on Aug. 18.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, Canada became a haven for risk-averse international investors. Demand for Canadian bonds and other financial assets drove the currency to par with the U.S. dollar. That won’t be repeated. The U.S. economy is relatively stronger and the Federal Reserve’s next move probably will be to increase interest rates. But Canada still is very attractive for low-risk investors who would like to earn a little money on their investments. That will put upward pressure on the currency, offsetting negative economic news. Non-Canadians added more than $80 billion to their portfolios in the first half of 2016, the most ever over a six-month period, according to National Bank of Canada senior economist Krishen Rangasamy. “Strong portfolio inflows explain in part the resilience of the Canadian dollar amidst persistently weak oil prices,” Rangasamy said in a research note.

The era of the meek, deferential central banker is over

MORE ABOUT THE ECONOMY:

• To grow Canada’s exports, we have to look past the U.S. market
• The bad news keeps piling up for Canada’s economy
• Why we could pay a price for low interest rates
• The Bank of Canada really, really wants you to look at this exports chart
• Hillary Clinton will be the next president. Everything else is a distraction
• Donald Trump’s anti-trade rhetoric exposes deep rifts in the global economy
• How Brexit is further inflating Canada’s overheated housing market
• Brazil’s Rio 2016 fiasco heralds the age of the downsized Olympics
• 77% of Canadians would switch jobs for better retirement benefits
• The business investment mood in Canada is remarkably bad
• Brexit has awakened dangerous forces in the world economy

The post Why the loonie is still flying high despite the economic storm clouds appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

In many ways it seems impossible that Amazon has been in business for more than 20 years. Time does fly! During that time, Amazon has been – and continues to be – the largest and most innovative leader in the e-commerce market. You may be surprised to discover the other markets Amazon has not only entered, but is also in the process of redefining and reinventing.

Amazon Grows While Others Struggle

Amazon recently reported a 28 percent jump in sales with a profit of $513 million in its first quarter. The first three months of the year saw a phenomenal $29.1 billion in sales thanks in part to the success of Amazon’s own Kindle and Fire tablet computers as well as the Amazon Echo. And while Amazon grows and begins to open brick-and-mortar retail stores, large retail competitors like Walmart, Macy’s and Sears announce large layoffs and are closing stores.

After the lackluster earnings from Apple and Microsoft recently, it appears that Amazon is bucking the current trend by surging ahead of the competition and many technology giants. However, many of the media outlets reporting on Amazon’s success across the globe fail to understand exactly how and why the company not only achieves continuous growth but also seems to select the best new areas to jump into.

Leaders within the retail industry desperately want to learn the secret to Amazon’s success, but all too often they repeat the same old mistake of paying more attention to the competition than to the forces that are shaping the future.

When leaders do take the time to think about the future, they quickly discover that there is no shortage of trends to review. Let’s face it, there is a long list of companies as well as individuals who either publish their trend list or write a blog stating their top five – and they just keep piling them on. Trends are like ideas – there has never been a shortage. The problem is figuring out which ones to act on. The risk of being wrong can be enormous. And as we have all seen in recent years, not acting can be even worse!

As you can tell from the title of this article, Amazon’s secret success strategy has been to be anticipatory by identifying the Hard Trends that will happen and using them to innovate with the confidence certainty provides. Before going into this powerful strategy in more detail, let’s look at what Amazon is doing that’s invisible to most. I’ll bet it is far more than you realized.

Redefining E-commerce

There are around 50 million online shoppers who are choosing to pay $99 a year for the Amazon Prime service. In addition to offering free, super-fast delivery of items, Prime also serves as an alternative to Netflix with a growing catalog of movies and TV shows. The service is becoming increasingly attractive to those who want to, or already have, cut the cord to cable TV.

Many fail to realize that 74 percent of Prime members also purchase items on a regular basis from Amazon. When delving deeper into these stats, you are hit with two that are quite staggering:

1) Forty-four percent of all online shopping takes place on Amazon.

2) Over the 2015 holiday season, 51 cents of every dollar spent online went to Amazon.

While many retailers continue chasing customers and bombarding their email inboxes with generic and irrelevant marketing messages, Amazon uses data analytics to provide shoppers with what they are interested in, when they are most likely to want it. And the level of personalization increases for Prime members. That’s one of many reasons why 60 percent of Amazon shoppers are Prime members who love the benefits of membership, making it easy for Amazon to keep its best customers coming back for more.

Capturing customers and bombarding them with value creates an elite club in which friends, neighbors, and families share stories of how Amazon keeps finding new ways to exceed expectations, such as an ever-growing list of items that can be delivered within a few hours. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos famously said, “We want Prime to be such a good value, you’d be irresponsible not to be a member.”

Creating Its Own Private-Label Brands

Amazon’s available inventory contains over 50 million different products, with 75,000 new items added every day. But the big news to many is the introduction of private-label brands such as AmazonBasics (electronics accessories), Pinzon (kitchen gadgets) and Elements (health and beauty products). The list of private-label categories is expanding fast, and by creating its own brands, Amazon is once again growing and strengthening its offering without most people noticing.

A Growing Logistics Company

With 125 fulfillment centers and 23 sortation centers across the globe, nobody can accuse Amazon of not thinking big enough. With over 4,000 branded trailers, and leasing forty 767 jets, the company is indeed on the move in many ways and could easily be labeled as a logistics company.

From the beginning, Amazon has used an anticipatory strategy rather than a reactive or agile strategy, unlike most of its competitors. By learning to separate the Hard Trends that will happen from the Soft Trends that might happen, Amazon arms itself with a powerful choice: to take action and become the disruptor, or wait and become the disrupted.

By using Hard Trends to select the areas it would disrupt, Amazon went beyond focusing on the profitability of the quarter and used the methodology to bring a high level of strategic clarity to its planning. By separating future facts from possibilities and assumptions, Amazon used that knowledge to anticipate disruptions, problems, customer needs and game-changing opportunities.

With an all-consuming focus on its value proposition of selection, price and customer experience, and raising the bar on them continuously, should we be surprised by Amazon’s success? The biggest lesson to learn from the company’s inspirational success story is how it understood the strategic importance of being anticipatory rather than reactionary.

Cloud Services

For example, when it became apparent that cloud computing was becoming a Hard Trend, did Amazon look around to see what everyone else was doing? Of course not. Instead, it focused on the creation of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to obtain a sustainable advantage in the future. It’s this anticipatory mindset that delivers great things. AWS sales have rocketed to $2.57 billion, which is up 64 percent from last year, smashing analyst predictions. Despite Microsoft Azure making a few waves in the industry with $560 million in revenue, this remains considerably behind the $2.46 billion lead AWS has.

Amazon Doesn’t Compete

Amazon does not compete or imitate its competition. Copying Walmart would merely result in becoming Walmart. Companies in every industry should be following their own path by lowering risk and taking action by using Hard Trends to shape the future. The time has come to replace competing with initiating and creating; it is that simple.

Manufacturing as a Service

I believe that Amazon’s next move will be to purchase industrial-grade 3-D printers that smaller companies and individuals won’t be able to afford. This will enable the launch of yet another virtualized service, Manufacturing as a Service (MaaS), that will allow any user to be a manufacturer of custom products to deliver anywhere, anytime and to anyone.

This represents a fantastic opportunity for anyone with an idea for a product to upload a CAD drawing to Amazon, which will make and dispatch items to clients. Even if you don’t know how to turn an idea into a comprehensive design, there will be a wealth of people to help you, from sites such as Upwork as the so-called gig economy gathers steam.

Many in the corporate world spend too much time scratching their heads and wondering what the future holds, clinging to their reactionary past. Amazon, with its anticipatory mindset, can see beyond the fog on the horizon to know that in the very near future, anyone will be able to be a manufacturer or turn an idea into a business using a set of virtual tools.

Failing Fast to Learn Faster

When a new product or service is not working, end the pain, share the lessons learned and move on. Rather than rushing in and protecting and defending the product or service that’s not working, develop a metric to evaluate when it’s time to cut your losses and move on. In a letter to shareholders, Jeff Bezos proudly called Amazon “the best place in the world to fail.” If you’re not making mistakes and experiencing some failures, you’re not innovating. Failing is not the problem – failing slowly is. And when you do fail, instead of hiding it, licking your wounds and moving on, as most do, share the lessons learned.

Growing B2B E-commerce

While some organizations still purchase their equipment from catalogs, most are unaware that the Amazon Business marketplace site hit over $1 billion in sales in less than a year. Quietly modernizing the market by encouraging its users to bring their shopping habits into the workplace will further cement Amazon’s “everything under one roof” ethos.

A Major Grocery

Amazon’s expansion into the grocery sector initially raised a few eyebrows, but it is also experiencing tremendous growth. While traditional big-box grocery stores such as Walmart and Target are seeing their sales decrease by 4 to 5 percent, once again it’s Amazon that is riding the wave, with an increase of 18 percent in the first quarter alone this year.

Whatever your needs or requirements, you can be sure that Amazon will be working on providing a new service that anticipates your future needs, and it does so by identifying the Hard Trends shaping the future.

On the surface, it’s easy to see why people jump to the conclusion that the key to Amazon’s success is being agile, responding to change faster than anyone else. But when you look at the level of Amazon’s ability to place big bets on where the future is heading – and win! – it’s clear that agility would not provide that capability. Amazon’s secret weapon from the beginning has been having an anticipatory mindset and using Hard Trends to shape its future rather than relying on reacting quickly as a way of competing with others.

The time has come to stop looking at the future with yesterday’s eyes. We are doing things today that were impossible just a few years ago. And, in just a few years we will be doing things that are impossible today. Ask yourself if you would rather react faster than your slowest competitors or learn to use the Hard Trends that will happen to anticipate disruption, problems, customer needs and game-changing opportunities. The choice is up to you.

Stop me if you've heard this before: there's a housing bubble in Vancouver. 

The massive rise in Greater Vancouver home prices, which are up 30% year-on-year as of the end of May, has in many corners been attributed to rush of Chinese buyers coming into the market.

Buyers seeking a safe place to park assets outside of China, however, are likely to be far less price sensitive than traditional homebuyers. This is how markets start to look bubbly: uneconomic buyers dominate. 

Another factor potentially driving Vancouver prices higher, though, is that when priced in yuan rather than Canadian dollars, home prices in the region haven't risen nearly as aggressively over the last decade.

Seen this way, then, the rise in Vancouver home prices for the market's most aggressive buyers hasn't been, well, as aggressive. 

And in a note to clients, Matthew Barasch at RBC Capital Markets argues that amid broad warnings on the bubble-like nature of Vancouver's market, this foreign influx of capital pressing prices higher looks a lot like the dynamic we're seeing across other markets as well (think US Treasurys). 

On the one hand, this might indicate that everything is a bubble. Alternatively, higher prices across the board don't necessarily mean there is a bubble. 

Here's Barasch (emphasis added):

Now, we are not going to stick our necks out the window in the spirit of Howard Beale and proclaim "we're mad as hell and there is no bubble!," but we also do not believe that just because prices have risen a lot means that Vancouver home prices automatically meet the definition of a bubble that is set to burst, leaving bits and pieces in its wake. Further, we wonder if Vancouver is indeed a bubble, whether or not we are surrounded by bubbles worldwide as Vancouver is hardly an exception in terms of soaring prices brought about by significant foreign inflows and the lowest bond yields in a millennia. 

The metaphor Barasch extends in his note — because this is a research note and all research notes must have metaphorical hooks — is that just because Vancouver's bubble-looking markets looks like a duck and acts like a duck doesn't mean it's not a platypus. Which, sure. 

But the reality is that consensus thinking right now would say there is a housing bubble in Canada, particularly after the Bank of Canada's commentary earlier this year. 

Some analysts might be more hyperbolic than others — "Overall, we might be close to peak crazy in the housing market" — but any chart that looks like the following from RBC will get people excited.

Or as Fitch Ratings said in a note out Monday, "Fitch currently estimates home prices to be more than 20% overvalued nationally in Canada when compared to growth in long-term economic fundamentals, leaving markets increasingly exposed to downside risk."

SEE ALSO: The next big consensus view in economics has arrived

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: EX-UNDERCOVER DEA AGENT: What I did when drug dealers asked me to try the product

Mitch Joel, (President of Mirum), wrote a compelling piece on the misuse of marketing automation. I could not agree more with his statements made in the article. He described how many organizations use marketing automation in the wrong way to just garner the attention of their buyers. I have written about this topic in the past and was thrilled to see Joel also begin hammering away at marketers who apply bad practices to technology.

Within the article, Joel states the following, “What ever happened to building an ethical list of potential clients, and actually nurturing those relationships?” He goes onto say,“I want all brands to use marketing automation. I believe it will change the dynamics of customer acquisition and retention. I believe it will lower the overall cost of marketing, and increase sales in an attributable manner. I mean it… this isn’t just a bunch of buzzwords. Still, we need to do it right.”

Again, I could not agree any more with his assessment, but the real question that I believe marketers are struggling with is how to do this? How do they nurture relationships with their buyers and use automation the “right” way to enable that? This is where marketers seem to be stuck.

1. Truly Get to Know Your Buyers

Each time I get the opportunity to speak to marketers I ask them how often they speak to their buyers or customers?  On occasion I will get a few raised hands that state they make it a consistent practice to do so. However, when I dig a little deeper, I come to find that the overwhelming majority of these marketers do not speak to their buyers about their buying process or the approach their organization took to make a purchase including:

• Understanding the pain points and challenges they were seeking to solve
• Knowing who was on the buying committee and what roles each played
• Gaining insight into their content and channel consumption preferences
• Identifying the trigger events (what Google calls the “Zero Moment of Truth) that pushed these buyers into the buying process

In addition to speaking to their buyers, it seems even fewer understand the industry conditions in which their buyers live and operate on a daily basis. Rather than understanding certain market conditions that could trigger a buying cycle or impact how buyers buy, organizations appear to be content with simply trying to push their message (as Joel points out in a very intrusive way) on these buyers with no understanding of what is happening in their world.

The issue with marketing automation is not marketers sending out emails. It is using this technology to blast emails that have no relevance and do not resonate with those who are on the receiving end. Additionally, many who take this approach fail in that they do not take a multi-channel approach to demand generation.

If you really want to make the most of marketing automation, get to know your buyers – how they buy, what they want to hear, the channels they use, etc. Understand this before you ever load a list, create an email or hit send.  It is then you will begin to see some of the benefits of this powerful, enabling technology.

2. Embrace Change

The world of our buyer has changed. I will spare the statistics that prove the buying process in B2B has drastically changed and if you are one of those who still refuse to accept and recognize that, I respectfully urge you to find a new profession. Truth is, I rarely find anyone who refutes that the way buyers buy today is fundamentally different than in the past. However, what I do find is the lack of change in response within most B2B organizations. In the face of this change from our buyers, we have by and large failed to adapt organizationally in a way that positions us for success.

Sure, there has been change in terms of adopting new technology (refer back to Joel’s post), creation of more content, additional departments created within the marketing organization and more, but these changes are all surface. As the old saying goes, you can put lipstick on a pig, but at the end of the day it is still a pig.

If we as B2B marketers are going to do right by our profession, more importantly by our customers and buyers, and derive the greatest value from technology, we have to understand that we must transform. This means looking at how we align people, process, content, technology and data to that of our buyers and their buying process. This means forgoing an undying allegiance to our “sales process” and aligning and operationalizing our approach to the buying process. This means sales understanding they no longer control the sale and rather than trying to qualify and sale continually, they would be better served by taking part in the dialogue and becoming subject matter experts so they can help educate their buyers and their market at large.

Is it easy? Hell no, but it is necessary as our buyers are outpacing us and their complexity and sophistication only continues to grow.

3. It is More that Just Content

So much attention is put on content aimed at our buyers and while this is important, it is not the only thing that marketers need to get right in order to ensure success.

Beyond the alignment of content to buyers and their buying process, marketing and sales teams need to align their people, process, technology and data to their buyers and their buying process. In essence, all of the components and interactions need to be operationalized around the buyer. It is in this way that organizations will derive more value from their content and also from their marketing technology. Anything less, leaves a very weak link in the demand generation value chain and will limit the results.

There is no doubt that the improper use of marketing automation can cause consternation and even a “hatred” for those companies who are seemingly all too intrusive. The time to begin using marketing automation the “right” way is now and the only way to do this is to change our approach, focus on our buyer and operationalize our demand generation approach.

Author: Carlos Hidalgo @cahidalgo CEO/Principal of ANNUITAS

The post Use Marketing Automation The Right Way appeared first on Annuitas.

While umbrellas are for rain in NYC, in Saudi Arabia's Mecca they provide respite from the blistering sun. Each year millions of Muslims visit Mecca for their haj pilgrimage, and after years of volunteering there, scientist Kamel Badawi has envisioned an object to serve the needs he's observed.

First and foremost it's an umbrella, providing the basic need for shade. But it goes a step further by providing a breeze, delivered by a fan located in the apex of the underside, powered by solar panels atop the umbrella.

Badawi figures he can wring enough juice out of the solar panels to power more, so he's also outfitting the umbrella with USB ports to charge external devices, a built-in flashlight, and a GPS system that would communicate with the user's smartphone.

The GPS is no extraneous gimmick, by the way; the annual haj is one of the largest regular gatherings in the world, with two to three million folks all in the same place, and having a way to pinpoint one's location would be helpful for family members who have become separated. This year, in fact, Saudi Arabia announced an intention to roll out GPS-enabled bracelets for all Mecca attendees.

As of now the Kafya, as Badawi and business partner Manal Dandis call the umbrella, is only a prototype. The pair are seeking funding, preferably from an international company, for development. They recognize that if successfully executed, the Kafya will have plenty of buyers beyond Mecca. "In order for our product to spread worldwide, we have to avoid marketing it as an exclusive haj product," Badawi told The Express Tribune.

Mark Hunter is one of those guys you never forget once you’ve heard him speak. That’s because he’s got such penetrating insight and such unreserved passion behind his opinions. This episode commemorates the release of Mark’s newest book, “High Ticket Prospecting.” Anthony asks Mark a lot of questions about the content of the book including why he felt the book was needed in the first place. In characteristic style Mark’s going to give it to you straight on this one, so be sure you take the time to listen.

Find your ideal client by starting with the outcomes you can provide.

One of the most important things Mark Hunter teaches is that in order to find the ideal prospect you have to first know who your ideal client is. But you won’t be able to identify them unless you start with the outcomes that you uniquely provide. On this episode, Mark Hunter chats with Anthony about how that process works and gives you some steps to follow to build that ideal client profile and get your prospecting in high gear as a result.

You’ve got to communicate with people using the method they appreciate most.

Prospecting is about communication and Mark Hunter is no stranger to picking up the phone to make that connection. But he’s also aware that not everyone gravitates toward or appreciates the telephone. So as a salesperson you’ve got to pivot in the way you make contact with people, learning how to connect with them using the means they prefer, whether that’s email, phone, or something altogether different.

Why have salespeople shifted to email over the telephone?

Mark Hunter believes that most sales professionals have shifted to email because it makes the sting of rejection easier to handle. It’s also a way that they are able to show their managers that they are making contacts consistently – but just how effective ARE those contacts anyway? On this episode, Mark chats with Anthony about the right and wrong way to do email prospecting. He even gives you a brief example of what his prospecting emails are like and how he uses them.

The greatest lesson Mark Hunter has learned in life is to get back up.

The sales arena is not a place for the faint of heart or timid. Rejection is real. Closed doors happen often. Mark Hunter has learned that one of the most important skills for any human being, but especially a sales professional is the ability to get up when they are knocked down. Discouragement cannot be allowed to win. Pessimism must be crushed. On this episode, Mark shares why he’s come to believe that so strongly and how it has served him in life and sales.

Outline of this great episode

• [0:43] Anthony’s introduction of Mark Hunter.
• [2:00] The elephant in the room about Mark’s new book.
• [3:36] Why Mark decided he needed to write a second book about prospecting.
• [5:04] How Mark plans to target high profit customers.
• [9:19] Why have sales people shifted to email?
• [11:48] What salespeople have to do to maximize their time for prospecting.
• [14:25] The difference between a prospect and a suspect and why it’s important to qualify leads immediately.
• [17:05] Why sales managers are responsible for accuracy in the prospecting pipeline.
• [18:19] Should salespeople still be using the telephone? What about leaving voicemail?
• [24:53] How email can be used effectively to prospect.
• [32:24] The person who’s had the biggest influence on Mark’s thinking.
• [34:18] The biggest lesson Mark has learned in life.
• [38:26] Mark’s new certification from the National Speaker’s Association.
• [39:37] How you can get Mark’s new book.

Resources & Links mentioned in this episode

• www.Preorder.theonlysalesguide.com

High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results

Price: $18.95

(1 customer reviews)

1 used & new available from $18.95

The theme song “Into the Arena” is written and produced by Chris Sernel. You can find it on Soundcloud

Connect with Anthony

Website: www.TheSalesBlog.com

Youtube: www.Youtube.com/Iannarino

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iannarino

Twitter: https://twitter.com/iannarino

Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/+SAnthonyIannarino

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iannarino

Tweets you can use to share this episode

The post Mark Hunter on How to Target and Win High Profit Prospects – Episode #71 appeared first on The Sales Blog.

With the cacophony of an election year ablaze with unparalleled drama being fought on the front lines of Twitter, we find ourselves slowing down and staring at it like a bad accident. The need for escapist relief is perhaps more dire than usual right now. This fall, if it's drama you crave, but the Hillary v. Trump show is driving you to near-suicide, then the AMC series Halt and Catch Fire is your new best friend. Returning for its third season on Tuesday, August 23rd with a two-hour premiere, you'll still get your fix of intriguing plot twists, flawed personalities, and high stakes, but without the partisan tantrums and pre-apocalyptic anxiety.

What the Hell is this Show About?

The show's title refers to the computing term (HCF), "Halt and Catch Fire," an early technical command that sends a computer into race condition, forcing all instructions to compete for superiority at once. Control of the computer could not be regained. The namesake series takes place in the personal computing boom of the 80s, when IBM was dictator, and before "website" was a word. Though HCF is categorized as a "workplace drama," you could say the same thing about Breaking Bad, and you'd be completely missing the point--and the thrill--of both shows.

To "break bad" is a colloquialism used in the American South meaning to challenge authority. Breaking Bad and HCF have three important things in common: obscure, nondescript titles that run the risk of losing potential viewers who need their plot summaries spoon-fed and hashtagged, a committed, forward-thinking home on AMC Networks, and the consistently visionary TV producer Melissa Bernstein.

Bernstein saw the potential in Breaking Bad, arguably the least commercially viable TV pitch in history--a meth-selling teacher with terminal cancer--and saw it through from start to finish, executing a literally dead-end idea into one of the most lauded TV shows of our time. We knew Walter White was going to die, but that doesn't mean it wasn't thrilling to watch him get there. I asked her if that hybrid of inevitability and possibility was in HCF:

Melissa Bernstein: It's all about the writers capturing specific, compelling, flawed characters that you want to know more about. Breaking Bad has wonderful overlap with HCF. If you find a great journey that's worthy of an audience's time, that's what matters, and both those shows have it. I love the characters, they felt like people I hadn't seen a hundred different times. That felt very fresh to me in a universe that is getting more crowded every day.

On a panel at the recent Brainstorm Tech conference in Denver, Bernstein noted: "It provides some insight into where we're headed, and why. I think looking back will help us look forward. We are now, as a people, disconnected in some ways, but connected in a way that nobody ever could have imagined, and I think this story looks at that, too. So much of what these characters are trying to do is use computers to connect people, and honestly, to find it for themselves, to connect as human beings in a meaningful way with their existence...despite some of their self-destructive tendencies."

As for the inevitability aspect of the plot, we already know the personal computer becomes ubiquitous, we already know the social function of the internet is primary, we already know telephones end up in our pockets. But knowing the outcome of the technology in HCF doesn't make the ride to our "now" any less suspenseful, dramatic, and emotionally riveting, because this is a show about the people who got us there. It took freakishly inventive, insecure, visionary, malicious, humble, compassionate, delusional, brilliant, square peg, devoted, miserable, and optimistically malcontented people to do it. They questioned everything at a time when that was not a desirable workplace habit.

For there to be a tipping point in the 80s, you needed people with one foot in the past and the other in the future, to bridge the abyss between old business and new--people like HCF character John Bosworth, brought to life vibrantly and flawlessly by actor Toby Huss, whose Iowan nativism is hidden beneath his Texan character's accent. While speaking with Huss about the new season, I asked how he would describe the show:

Toby Huss: "In the absence of killing and zombies and such, sure, it's a workplace drama, but it's really a textured, nuanced, and measured look at how people interact, and this specific time in really recent American history, where there's a massive amount of change happening. It's also about how people get along with each other when it's time to work, and how they bounce in and out of each other's lives. These people simultaneously discovered this new technology and new things in themselves they didn't know were there. It's about how these emotionally new, nuanced things they found in themselves smash up against each other. I think that's a pretty potent combination--and it's fun to act."

That's where the possibility aspect of the show comes in: the types of people who shake things up inhabit the world of HCF. They're human progress, personified. These are the type of people who today dominate Silicon Valley, where the setting moves to in season three. It is telling that such a socially awkward demographic was responsible for connecting the world. In the 80s they were on the fringes and struggling to be taken seriously, but they were the ancestors of people like the founders of Google, another popular entity with an obscurely-referenced name, who turned that name into a verb. These are complicated and fascinating characters brought to life.

This is Really How It Was

I learned about people like this firsthand when I had the strange luck of being hired at a San Francisco startup in 2006, by Google's first Director of Business Development, Chris Skarakis. He had just left Google, where his parting project was digitizing the libraries of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Oxford. (Thanks, Chris.) I was just coming out of the first three years of motherhood and had missed an entire leap of technology, when I was hired and brought into orbit with this kind of visionary intelligence.

Suddenly I was immersed in a world of punk rock-listening, Stanford-educated programmers like the ones in HCF. They taught me basic computer code and spoke their mind in sky's-the-limit whiteboard brainstorming sessions. It caught me up quick and changed the way I thought about technology and business. I asked my former boss what kind of people it really took to innovate technology. He shared the story of how Google's company motto, "Don't be evil," came to be:

Chris Skarakis: "I was in the room for that one. A group of us were called together with HR people to come up with the company values and philosophies. Your typical stuff was brought up and listed out. Then one of the engineers, Paul B. said "don't be evil." Initially everyone sort of chuckled and brushed it off, but Paul wouldn't let it go until we all saw the wisdom in what he was saying. It was adopted, obviously, and became iconic for Google."

Technology has transformed the way we get the news, socialize, find work, bank, waste time, shop, date (and how the cowardly break up). Turkey's president recently used the iPhone's Facetime feature to quell a military coup by mobilizing its citizens to resist and take to the streets. They did. What makes the device you are reading this on even possible is the result of the work and vision of extraordinary nobodies with wild ideas, and the leverage and funding of ordinary somebodies who took a measured risk. HCF throws them all together in every shape and size, and watches as they all jockey for position, rarely realizing they have to fit together to complete the puzzle.

To some, the incessant refusal of some of the HCF characters to fit in and play nice might seem too convenient or "written," or clash with others seemingly out of reflex. You see it in both Joe MacMillan, the IBM-expatriate turned mercurial entrepreneur, (played as expertly as a chess game by Lee Pace) and upstart programmer Cameron Howe (an unpredictable and edgy role perfectly cast with Mackenzie Davis), So I asked another former Google friend, Eric Fredricksen, a staff engineer from the early days, what he noticed were the real-life personal qualities critical to bringing on real technological breakthroughs:

Eric Fredricksen: "The key to it all I would say is [Google founders] Larry and Serge's unwillingness to take expert opinions as gospel, which I think is rare. They're smart guys not standing on their egos too much, but when some impressive person told them "this is already figured out, it's this way," they'd puzzle it out themselves, sometimes on the spot, before accepting it, if at all. One blunt-ended example: everyone knew search wasn't worth much, but they--and the staff at Google--figured out how and when and why it was."

That's Joe and Cameron to a tee, and the same is seen to varying degrees in engineer Gordon Clark (portrayed with pitch-perfect neurotic nuance by Scoot McNairy, whom you alternately want to hug and punch), and later, in his wife, Donna Clark (whose potent chemistry of undervalued intelligence, insecurity, and an open heart is incarnated flawlessly by Kerry Bishe). There are no cartoon heroes and villains in HCF. Everyone takes turns being the underdog you're rooting for, and the one who's screwing your future up.

Although HCF is fiction, the heavily-researched show is based on fact. Co-creators, writers, and showrunners Chris Rogers and Chris Cantwell (collectively known as "the Chris's") were partly inspired by the Steve Jobs biography, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Soul of a New Machine," by Tracy Kidder. They also did exhaustive anecdotal research, and drew from personal experience. At the Brainstorm Tech conference, they spoke about the show's inception and philosophy (interview by Fortune Magazine's Michael Lev-Ram):

Christopher Cantwell: "The inspiration largely comes from my father. He started working on computers in the mid-1970s, answering an ad off the postboard in his high school, looking for punch card operators. He went to work for a computer company, and kind of graduated from there. By the early 80s things were really taking off in Texas, and he moved my entire family, including me at six weeks old, down to Dallas, and took a job at a firm very similar to [the fictitious] Cardiff Electric. He was a salesman, very much like Joe is, and he worked with sales engineers, very much like Gordon Clark. That dynamic is what informed that relationship early on."

Chris Rogers: "HCF tells you the story you didn't know about the rise of the personal computer--because if you can just google it and get the answer, then that's not a TV show worth watching. We want to bring you new information. That story is usually told through the lens of Silicon Valley, and two companies, Apple and Microsoft. Sure, we knew about the big figures, but there were a lot of people that contributed to the "are you a Mac or a PC" question. As we dug into the research, we looked for stories you couldn't find online, and we got to interview a lot of people who made big contributions to the personal computer, but were forgotten by history. These people were part of something that was not recognized in its time as very important, and now means a great deal, so that's a very fulfilling part of it."

This is not Mad Men with computers and Members Only jackets. The 80s were only thirty years ago, but for people who are never more than a few feet away from their cell phone and spend the bulk of their free time and work time on screens, we are oddly missing much reflection on the history of how we got to the party of now--especially asking who brought the keg and how they paid for it. Turns out it was not your average beer run.

As exciting as the zombies are in AMC Network sibling The Walking Dead, the characters in HCF face the more formidable enemies of real life: ignorance, lack of vision, fear of change, greed, and shortsightedness--including our own. These are more relevant threats to our daily lives than getting our faces eaten off (unless you live in Florida). HCF underscores the reality that it truly was a battle for the future--both internal and external--which is now a present we are experiencing both the fruits and consequences of.

These entrepreneurial renegades--both real and fictional--did not run around free and funded by virtue of their big ideas. It's not just the Teslas and Edison types that deliver the future. There are the nameless and uncredited middlemen, playing by ear, who see potential and connect the Teslas to the J.P. Morgans and the Googles and Facebooks to Sand Hill Road.

I learned about the venture capital beltway of Sand Hill Road in 2006, when my new tech startup boss, Chris, took me for a burger at a place called Buck's in Woodside, CA. It was an odd little place, with old computers and components serving as decor, along with a stuffed alligator, and scribbled-on napkins commemorating famous deals were displayed behind acrylic. Buck's became famous during the dot-com era for deals and ideas (like PayPal) seeded at these tables, between entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.

I felt lucky to know someone who was an integral part of building something--like he did at Google in digitizing those libraries--that had literally transformed and unified the world with information in ways that would have enormous impact. All around me were bits of history that impacted the world so much, things I totally took for granted. HCF is like a TV version of Buck's--you need to sit down, tune in, and take a look around.

Besides venture capital, startups in the 80s needed old school business people, whether they liked it (and each other) or not. People like the unexpectedly unpredictable John Bosworth. From the pilot episode where he is the unquestioned boss who hires Joe MacMillan, to the moment he steps on the plane to Silicon Valley at the end of season two, he arguably changes the most over the seasons. His transformation parallels the tech industry's evolution from a top-down management, widget-selling industry to firebrand entrepreneurship peddling the invisible--speed, access, and community--which became the core components of the internet as we use it today.

Innovation and monetizing the invisible is risky, but, like PayPal and Google, can pay off big and maybe change the world. The Hollywood Hills are dotted with lavish houses built on risky ideas. You have to have the skill, guts, and vision to sell products and ideas that are close to inconceivable to investors and the public. We see ourselves in the familiar parts of people like John Bosworth, but how many of us would put our lives on the line in a gutsy bet like he did in season one? He had a lot to lose. Yet his risk--and its failure--was the tipping point, enabling new companies to emerge from the rubble of Cardiff Electric. Those are the kinds of people--and sacrifices--that enable innovation.

The Writing is Outstanding

Two of my favorite things about HCF are the character's tango with the inevitable and the unpredictable, and the wry but subtle wit peppered perfectly throughout the series. A standout in manifesting this is Toby Huss's Bosworth, whose stern AMC publicity photo doesn't capture the wit and sparks of levity he brings to the role. Part old school Texas businessman out of step with technology, and part prospecting visionary, Huss built a believable and endearing character out of what could have easily become a stereotype--and was almost a short-term role. Huss is that kind of character actor you want to see more of, and the show's producers, writers, and creators thought so, too:

Melissa Bernstein: "We adore his character so much. As written, we did not imagine him this way at all, but when we saw him in Toby's audition, we were all totally taken with it, and it changed everything about that character's trajectory."

Like Bosworth, Huss took a gutsy bet, portraying the no-nonsense boss with wit and charming complexity that may have otherwise been missed. I asked him how it came about:

Toby Huss: "Good old John Bosworth! It's funny, because I had no master plan, but the way the guys wrote it, I think they saw one thing in it, and I saw something totally different. I saw this really textured, sort of nuanced guy, who was really a couple years away from retirement, and then his world exploded. He had to think on his feet like never before. He really had a wonderful arc from the first season to this one. No one saw that arc, I think, until they started mining that territory, but I thought it was a great character that they had. They just needed somebody to come and flesh it out, maybe, and I got lucky enough to do that."

Developing that character differently based on an actor's interpretation also highlights the agility and talent of "the Chris's." They recognize opportunities and take chances--much like the tech industry characters they write about. Sometimes you see it in little ways, like the season three open, where they creatively harvest Toby Huss's experience as an uncanny and satirical Frank Sinatra (from his annual "Rudy Casoni" Christmas Show in L.A.) to perfect effect.

They also take very big chances, which is why HCF is the most feminist primetime drama on TV, without anyone noticing. The very same writing dexterity that brought us Bosworth's unique character is why the series is not a sausage party like HBO's Silicon Valley. That's good news for HFC--it means a longer runway and slower burn rate for the show. Then again, at least people know what Silicon Valley is roughly about.

The Women

Melissa Bernstein: "The first season of HCF centered around the Gordon and Joe partnership, but as the story evolved, Donna and Cameron gravitate towards each other, and form a business relationship based on something completely different. It gave us all these opportunities. There's a lot of mutual respect and trust, and that plays out differently than the Joe and Gordon partnership, which came together with a very different power dynamic. How does that work when it's in the vise of the technology world with all the pressures that come with success or failure?"

It would have been foolish of us not to take the opportunity to pursue Donna and Cameron. The writers didn't do it for the novelty of it or because the male leads weren't working, it's that these characters were so compelling, we wanted to spend as much time with them as we did with Joe and Gordon. I think a lot is made of it, and I think a lot should be. There are things still not right in our world between men and women and the inequality of pay, and there are issues that I think we're struggling with as a society. What we see on television and in movies is an important reflection and exploration of that, and we need to figure out a way to get it right.

Cameron's character drives the story forward in unexpected ways, where, at first, she explores complicated work relationship dynamics as the young female tech genius in a male-dominated workplace in season one. Then, as the boss, with Donna as female co-pilot in a world they create as they go along by season two. The differences are fascinating--and telling.

Season three continues the female-driven story, and the Chris's have enough confidence in their writing, the story, and the cast to not need overly-sexualized female leads as only love interests or crutches to hold the audience's gaze. This leaves the series with tons of uncharted territory so often neglected in American television, and they are stories relevant and interesting to everyone.

We don't say that a show is "male-led," or that an all-male rock band is a "guy band." The reverse is not true. HCF does not have token women, inserted in place of men. They are strong, yes, but also imperfect, nuanced, and fully developed characters. As revealed in the strange uproar over the female leads in the rebooted Ghostbusters, somehow the media and entertainment industry feel the need to apologize for or explain stories with prominently female actors, to those who simply don't get it. Coincidentally, Toby Huss had a small role in Ghostbusters, so I asked him about the film's backlash, and if that related at all to how people might perceive Halt's female-driven story. Here's his colorful response:

Toby Huss: "The backlash was so hilarious and so terrible--it reeked of awful mamby-pamby white privilege, just boys crying about more shit. It's all white boys, I guarantee--just dicky white boys whaling on the women, and then they're whaling on Leslie Jones. My lord, it was just crazy and awful."

But these are two very different things, that movie and this TV show. Halt is relatively new. The women are such richly drawn characters, they're acted so well by Kerry and Mackenzie, and the story is so compelling, so, it's a different thing. We're not raping the halcyon days of white boys or however these guys perceived they were being emasculated by women playing the Ghostbusters guys.

In HCF, Donna and Mackenzie--they're never talking about boobs--well, ok, they are sometimes--but they've got really progressive women characters on this show whose lives are not dependent on men. That's another reason why it's a special little show and not like most shows on TV. They don't go to pool parties and wear bikinis all the time. It's kind of fucking refreshing, don't you think?

Yes. Because the female characters were not written gender blind, either. They're not just "male-ish" female leads. Instead, the Chris's are cognizant of the differences in the way men and women think, live in the world, and are treated, and they brilliantly leveraged it into the story. This is why it's a captivating ride. You don't know where this is going, because no one has done it like this before. There is no obvious end point for any of them by the end of season two.

Melissa Bernstein: "I think there's a ton of misconceptions in the entertainment industry about whether people will show up to see stories that star women as much as they will to see stories that focus on a male actor. To my mind, if you tell a great story, it doesn't matter what the gender of the leads is, but we have to keep proving that, which is unfortunate. I'm very much up for that challenge, because I believe it. I think the proof is in the pudding. Season two of HCF is a great answer to that question. Can it be compelling? Hell, yeah! Watch the show."

In season one, engineer Donna Clark provides a simple but critical space-saving computer design element that her husband had been struggling with--so critical that it later gets stolen. Actress Kerry Bishe discusses her progressive role as Donna in a recent interview in Feminist Frequency:

Kerry Bishe: "I almost forget what a gift it is that these characters are so multifaceted that they can't be described in a single adjective. I'm very picky about the kinds of roles I want to play. Representation matters to me. People love to talk about "strong female characters," but that idea is so limiting. I like to think of female characters as complex, whole, and also fallible people. The things that they do badly, their flaws and deficiencies are as important as their skills and positive qualities. Women characters often operate on this single trajectory, but Donna really has had the room to grow and change and make mistakes. It's one of the biggest, fullest characters I've been able to play."

Finally, The 80s Look Like the 80s

The big favor Halt and Catch Fire does for us is rightly cast the 80s, not with garish cliche, but as the older brother who knew about the Clash way before you did. Whenever I see that period depicted on TV or in film, it's been a caricature--the fashion, the hairstyles, the music. Noticably, HCF's entire art department elicits the feel of the 80s in a way that I haven't seen on TV yet.

Melissa Bernstein: "We didn't want the era to be a sideshow. We wanted it to feel like real life and never take people out of the story. We want you connecting with characters and what's going on in their heads, the internal drama. It's critical. If you get lost in the cliches of the era, then we're really sending our audience down the wrong path. We worked with our really talented department heads (like Chris Brown, production designer) to make sure that it was all well-researched, and that it felt like real life at the time, from color palettes, to the products themselves, from the computers to the more domestic pieces."

Our costume designer (Kimberly Adams) picked fashion designers who lived through that era, and who have an affinity for it, like it meant something to them, and they really remembered the details of it, and wanted to see them come through in subtle ways, and worked with the cast to specifically reflect their characters in those choices. They did a really nice job.

I agree. When we were in Gordon and Donna's house, I felt like I was back in the home I grew up in. From the kitchen products, vintage computer components, macrame on the walls, and watching Gordon stop at a phone booth to make a call, I see so much familiarity, while simultaneously noticing how much has changed. What Gordon and Donna are behind on in domestic home fashions, they make up for in being far ahead of the curve in ideas--they just don't know it yet.

Melissa Bernstein: "The first two years of the show, the feeling was that Donna and Gordon were not people of the eighties. They were still cruising on the seventies--it takes time. Some people adapt immediately and get the newest iPhone when it shows up, have the newest shoes, and stay totally current, but for most of us it takes a while. Hairstyles and the interior design of your home, that's not something people change every year or two. Season three is a totally clean slate for us from a production design standpoint just because of the setting changing to Silicon Valley, with fresh eyes--production designer Chris Stearns, and costume designer Katherine Morrison."

The 80s delivered our future--in a Members Only jacket and a Gremlin at times, sure, but look what it brought to the party. Quite a feat for a show set in the 80s to be one of the most relevant on television. So why aren't more people watching it?

Why Doesn't Anyone Know About the Show?

Ratings-wise, HCF falls under the radar partly because it's not called Computer People, and doesn't feature relationships simplistic enough to be easily portrayed in a still picture on a billboard. But is the new season's promo photo of the cast standing around computers in an office with serious looks on their faces the only alternative? It looks like I'm walking into work late and everyone's mad at me. I don't want to go in there. Who would?

AMC Network's brilliance lies in its committed understanding that characters are the bond that keeps an audience tied to a series. They're not afraid to hang a show on a seemingly commercially unviable premise, like Breaking Bad, because they see great characters. They're adept at recognizing when to give shows more time, as they've done with HCF. But there seems to be a disconnect between the show and its promotion. It's being treated like Gordon was at Cardiff Electric. They didn't realize they had a computer genius in their midst until someone took the time to coax him and give him the attention and resources he needed. Where's Joe MacMillan when you need him?

I live in Los Angeles and pass by all the new show billboards, with dramatic pictures of aliens and international subterfuge. I understand that it's a challenge to promote an oddly-titled show with an internal struggle as dramatic, yet as invisible as the technology it is about. But honestly, is HCF really any different than M.A.S.H.?

It just seems like AMC was stumped by the title, shrugged, and moved on. If the name "Halt and Catch Fire" makes the show the TV equivalent of the impossibly-named band Einsturzende Neubauten, then so be it. They're both still fucking great. The smart ones will find it, but they shouldn't have to look so hard. Yes, it's a challenge to encapsulate HCF in a sentence, tagline or hashtag (or this would be a shorter article), but I think its appeal is more universal and important.

It's ironic, of course, that a show about people trying to innovate in technology would have trouble being innovatively publicized in the world of television, but that's part of what the show is about: sometimes you can be so good, so right, so ahead of the others, but you're still misunderstood, unappreciated, overlooked, your accomplishments ignored, and you're gunning a Mustang in neutral. It's a challenging and frustrating existence, full of drama, conviction and self-doubt. That's why it's so good. Of course, it's even more ironic that it's on the same network that brought everyone's favorite ad man, Don Draper, to life. How would he advertise the show?

Toby Huss: "We all love the show, and we love doing it, and we're all so invested in it, just because it's a great thing. It's one of those rare shows, and we all know that it's a privilege to work with these kinds of people, and the crew is really wonderful. You just want more people to watch it. I think people are starting to online. HCF is like a kid on the autism spectrum. It's a special child, and he needs a little special attention. You can't just put him in gen-pop and hope everything works out."

The members of the online community around HCF found each other organically, so technology's gift of social media is where you find the devotion of HCF's fans is in action. There they are, on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and fan blogs with titles like "Save Halt and Catch Fire" started by fans fearful of the show being canceled. Innovation always comes, it just depends on who gets to it first.

Why Halt and Catch Fire is Important

As kids scurry back to school, and adults list their annual regrets for their never-got-to-it summer plans, we're all wishing to be immersed in other realities, lives, and eras--our news can be too brutal, our politics too loud, our own lives too small. We may wonder how it all got this way. That's why I love HCF. It reverse engineers our everyday lives, spooling back to before computers and the internet went on their first real date. It takes our current technology, parsed into its components, and with impeccable acting, smartly attaches human context and story to each one. Though we know what is at stake, and which technology eventually wins out, the characters don't.

They don't know that in our present, we watch a man die as his girlfriend live streams the incident on Facebook, or that, in the unrest that ensued, more people died. They don't know that the image of a Syrian boy, pulled from the rubble, is instantly transmitted around the world and gets the attention of millions of Americans about a tragically overlooked conflict, and may impact decisions on military actions. I wrote this long-ass article about a television show because I think it's a really important series, raising important questions about our relationship to technology, to each other, the differences between the way men and women run things, and how that could be used for good, instead of, well, evil.

What are you reading this on--a computer or a phone? How do you know how much money you have in the bank? How will you tell your friend you're running late because you spent too much time on Facebook? Text? Email? Where do you spend the bulk of your social life? Online or with your friends and family?

We changed technology and technology changed us. The evolution of both changed our world. It begs the question of whether or not we are really more connected. Can we make the world a better place with technology and connection? These people thought so. That's the heart of this show, and why I think it's the most compelling and relevant show you could watch this year.

The series makes me wonder if we can be better stewards of the possibility they gave us, or do we have to type in (HCF) and start from scratch? The future is eternally determined by what is behind us. The series has an ongoing, permanent cliffhanger: what will we do with technology and what will it do to us?

Toby Huss: "You can't really be a citizen in the world, make plane reservations, go to dinner, do things, hang out, send text messages, and make phone calls without using a massive amount of technology every day. It's a great thing, but I still shut the phone off and go meandering on two lane roads. That's great to me, too. Not having information available is really nice--I like not knowing things, I like not being reachable all the time."

Is there anything else you'd like to say to people about the show?

Toby Huss: "Yeah, why aren't more fuckers watching this?"

Netflix, AMC.com, Amazon, or on DVD and digital download.

People still seem to think that Instagram isn’t worthy of their business’ time and efforts, despite countless facts and statistics telling us otherwise. But even with statistics, it can be tough to get a concrete idea of what, exactly, Instagram can do for a business. Well, look no further!

In this post we’ll talk about:

• How Instagram can directly benefit your business
• Instagram features you can use to generate sales and leads now

Instagram For Your Business

At the risk of sounding repetitive, here are some stats you may have already seen about Instagram that are so important they’re worth mentioning again.

• There are now over 300 million daily active users

• Engagement rates for brands on Instagram are around 8 times higher than other networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest)

What these statistics tell us is that Instagram’s user base is very, very active on the app. They don’t just sign up and forget about it. 300 million people are scrolling through their feeds every single day, and they’re not just looking – they’re engaging with brands in a big way.

TrackMaven Study

If you’re spending most of your social media budget on Facebook, where brand engagement levels are significantly lower, you may be wasting resources that could be spent on a platform where people want to interact with brands. That makes Instagram extremely valuable for any business, no matter how small.

But how and where do you allocate resources to Instagram? Let’s dive deeper into some app features and Instagram for Business tools that will make your life easier.

Features and Tools

There are so many ways your business can use Instagram to help with branding and market awareness, leads, sales, and more.

In-App

Some of the most effective ways are through free, in-app functions that anyone can use. One of the best examples of this is the new Instagram Stories feature that was recently rolled out. Instagram Stories is similar to Snapchat’s Stories feature, with a few important differences.

If your business is on Snapchat, followers can be hard to come by. It’s very difficult for individuals to find users they want to add without knowing the exact username due to the lack of a search function on Snapchat. With Instagram Stories, you get to post informal Snapchat-like content where more of your followers will have a chance to see it. That means more interaction with your audience.

And the older features are just as significant when it comes to audience engagement with brands.

Hashtags (#), for example, are extremely useful for any business looking to expand their audience. When you post a photo, you can pick out a few relevant hashtags that describe your business or the photograph and include them either in the caption or in a comment below. People who don’t follow your business will be able to find your post using these hashtags – thus expanding your reach.

If you use relevant keywords as hashtags, the people finding you are likely to be interested in what you’re posting about. Refine your hashtags by seeing which posts perform best with which tags to attract the most new users.

Geotags are another in-app feature that can expand your audience and allow you reach people who don’t already follow your brand. Whether you’re at the office or putting on an event, geotagging the location of your post can attract the attention of others interested in that venue or area.

You should also regularly check other posts published with relevant geotags (just click on the geotag to do this). There may be some great opportunities among these posts for interaction with customers. For example, if you own a coffee shop, you should check the geotag for your shop at least once a week to see if anyone is posting Instagrams while enjoying a cup of coffee.

You can interact with these people via comments in any way you want. Thank them for stopping by, reward them for their loyalty with a free item during their next visit, etc. Be creative!

But you don’t need a brick-and-mortar location to utilize these functions. For example, Mainstreethost recently participated in a HubSpot User Group meetup. In an Instagram post, we included a geotag for the coffee shop that hosted the event. This targeted people who weren’t at the event but might have a dual interest in the coffee place and business/marketing.

Instagram for Business Advertising

Last but not least, to facilitate a more strategic approach, Instagram created a resource for business accounts called Instagram for Business. One of the most important parts of Instagram for Business is advertising – paid ads are a fantastic option if your budget allows for it. You can create your ad in Facebook’s Ads Manager or Power Editor platforms and choose how much you want to spend, how long you want it to run for, and what you want it to look like. Click here for a comprehensive guide on how to make impactful Instagram ads.

Pick your audience, image, and caption carefully to attract the most engagement possible, and don’t forget to include a relevant CTA based on what type of action you want to encourage. Do you want to link your ad to a product page hoping people will buy? There’s a CTA for “Shop Now.”

What if you just want them to visit a particular web page or blog post? Choose the “Learn More” CTA instead. Instagram allows you to customize these ads pretty much any way you want – and the results are worth it.

But while the ad dollars spent help increase your business’ influence, the results will be nothing without a thought-out strategy by the ad creators to make sure it’s reaching the right people.

You can track your ad’s performance in whichever platform you choose (Ads Manager or Power Editor) to learn how to improve the next time. The result of doing all these steps correctly will be boosted Instagram likes, comments, and (hopefully) account follows.

These in-app features and advertising tools can lead to actual sales and leads for your business if you put in the time and effort to make your Instagram profile stand out. It’s well worth it!

Every salesperson has received at least one piece of advice that’s stuck with them: That nugget of wisdom that’s consistently helped them be more productive, help more prospects, or win more deals.

If you’re curious to learn other reps’ all-time favorite sales advice, good news -- more than 500 members of the Practical Sales Tips LinkedIn group recently shared theirs. We've handpicked 42 of the best soundbites.

1) Ask questions first.

“Prescription before diagnosis is malpractice.” -Sean McPheat

2) Keep your pipeline full.

“Never need the sale.” -Dr. Joy Madden

3) Stay upbeat.

“No matter what kind of day you are having, always act like a ‘10’ with customers or on the sales floor. Remember, it’s about your customer's needs, not yours.” -Linda Nickelsen

4) Be honest about your knowledge gaps.

“If you don't know the answer to a question, don't guess. Agree to come back with a response by a mutually acceptable time -- and remember to do so!” -Graham Bennett

5) Borrow the prospect’s point-of-view.

"It doesn't matter what you think you're selling that counts. It only matters what the client thinks they are buying. In other words, see the whole sales transaction through their eyes and match what you offer to their wants, lifestyle, and their view of the world.” -Sean McPheat

6) Avoid overselling.

“Trust matters. Never promise what you can't deliver.” -Audrey Diffley

7) Define expectations.

"At the start of every appointment, reaffirm why you're there, your agenda, the prospect’s agenda, and likely outcomes. Otherwise, you’re playing by their rules -- and nine times out of 10 they won’t tell you what those rules are.” -Fraser Hay

8) Solve problems first.

“Never sell with the goal of getting the money, sell with the intention of solving the problem or making the prospect's pain go away.” -Zhelinrentice Scott

9) Get multiple data points.

“Don't trust any one piece of information: Triangulate.” -Darren Hitchcock

10) Look for upsell opportunities.

“Always have an eye out for the second sale.” -George McBride

11) Let the prospect come their own conclusions.

“Everything ties into ‘I believe, let’s discuss, you decide.’” -Nick Meikle

12) Set an alarm.

“Be punctual. They will never remember that you were five minutes early. They will never forget that you were five seconds late.” -Joseph "Joey" Himelfarb

13) Attitude is everything.

“Create a good feeling. It's what the prospect will remember.” -Andrew Shykofsky

14) Confidence is key.

“Visualize success before you talk to prospects. Be confident and use your body language to emphasize your words.” -Gary Sahota

15) Have prospects sell themselves.

“Never make statements, always ask questions -- preferably questions you know the answer to. This leads clients to draw their own conclusions and sell themselves, as opposed to being sold. Even when you’re asked a question and you’re unsure why they asked, it’s better to clarify by saying, 'That's an interesting question; why is that important to you?' rather than diving in and flubbing the whole process.” -Steve Farmer

16) Create a connection.

“Feel satisfied that you've built real rapport before any other discussion takes place. And remember, you're not selling -- you're seeing if there's a mutual fit between what you provide and what your prospect wants.” -Sarah Hughes

17) Be resilient.

“Tough times don't last, but tough people do.” -Gary Mills

18) Timing is key.

“A 'No' may not mean 'Never,’ it may only mean 'Not yet.’ Learn as much as you can and revisit the prospect when they are ready.” -Martin Rhodes

19) Objections can be overcome.

“Learn to read between the lines so you know when no is not no.” -Laura Kuehn

20) Stay focused.

“Be really present. Don't pre-empt where the call is going.” -Anthea Vorster

21) Always be helping.

“A sale is not something you do. It is something that happens when immersed in providing great customer service.” -Melody Maki

22) Your competency will improve over time.

“There are four levels of competency in sales. Level one is ‘unconsciously incompetent.’ At first, you don't even know what you don't know. Level two is ‘consciously incompetent.’ You become aware of your shortcomings and address them. Level three is ‘consciously competent.’ With careful consideration and thoughtfulness, you can be confident in your abilities to sell. Level four is ‘unconsciously competent.’ You reach a level where talking about the sale becomes second nature.” -Bonnie Brown

23) Think like your prospect.

“Know your customer. If you are able to see things from their perspective, their needs, objections, etc., then you will gain empathy and stand a fighting chance. If you don't, you'll come across as patronising and naive -- and almost certainly won't succeed.” -Nick Goode

24) Sell benefits, not features.

“The customer never wants your product. What they buy is always a means to another end: profits, prestige, time, and so on.” -Jason Rekker

25) Don’t forget customers after they sign.

“It takes longer to get a new customer to come on board then to keep a old customer. Treat both like they are gold.” -Lori Sayles

26) “New” doesn’t always equal “better.”

“No matter how excited you are about a new product or what you are selling, don't just ‘product dump.’ First, ask questions to see what the client needs. Your new product may not be the best answer, and you may lose a sale by pushing it -- when you could have something else that might work better.” -Leslie Harper

27) Mind your P’s.

“Mine are the three P’s: Be patient, be persistent, and most of all, be pleasant!” -Annette Bonacker-Hess

28) Know the answer to, “Why now?”

“Always sell to a compelling event and make sure that compelling event is a) the buyer's compelling event, b) fits with your timeline; and c) is not within the control of the buyer to ignore or change. Then plan the sale backwards from the compelling event with the help of the buyer.” -Steve Eungblut

29) Don’t try to “win.”

“My mentor once explained that a competitive attitude can be a detriment to top sales performance. If you look at every sale as a win/lose proposition, it is likely that you will have a propensity to oversell, or try to overcome objections. Overcome means ‘fight,’ so win the fight, lose the sale.” -Lee Dubois

30) Build trust.

“People will not believe the message if they don't believe the messenger.” -Phil (PJ) Weber

31) Prepare.

“Ask yourself before every call, ‘How will I bring value to this customer?’ How will you differentiate yourself from all of the other salespeople so that they will want to see you again and tell their friends/colleagues about you? Go in with a plan. It is easier than trying to create one on the fly.” -Daniel Clutter

32) Don’t lie. Period.

“Practice full disclosure. What you think you might lose by disclosing, you’ll gain in trust.” -Albert Mensah

33) Be nice to the “little people.”

“Do not overlook junior staff. Many of them will be decision makers sooner than you’d expect.” -Dzintars Lusis

34) Don’t get complacent.

“Always play as if you are behind, no matter how ahead of target you are.” - Graeme Brown

35) Build a great personal brand.

“Your smile is your logo, your personality is your business card, how you leave others feeling after having an experience with you becomes your trademark.” -Jay Danzie (courtesy of Mike Fischer)

36) Make them think.

“Ask better questions than anyone has ever asked the prospect.” -Lisa Cook

37) Building rapport is always doable.

“Professionals have personal lives too. Break the ice and get them to connect on a human level.” -Stephen B. Savage

38) Be persistent.

“Don't underestimate the power of a proper follow up.” -Adrian Lupau

39) Not everyone is a good fit.

“Telling prospects ‘no’ is okay. Disqualify fast and move on quickly.” -Jesse Pappas

40) Focus on your product’s value.

“Never sell on price alone.” -Bob Earle

41) Lecturing prospects doesn’t work.

“Telling ain't selling! Have a conversation, ask questions, and be an active listener. Don’t interrupt -- whether you’re talking to prospect, your manager, or your reports.” -Dave Ferrante

42) Empathy will set you apart.

“Nobody cares how much you know until they know how much you care.” -Maria May

What's the best piece of sales advice you've ever gotten? Let us know in the comments!

One of the reasons companies settle for low-quality leads is because they don’t think they can affordably improve lead generation.

OK, that sounds a tad unfair. No-one settles for low-quality leads, so let me qualify that. We all work to the best of our abilities with the best of what we have at our disposal.

It’s just that some leads are better than others, right?

What if I told you that there are fairly simple ways for you to source high-quality leads while saving money?

After all, you don’t want your salespeople spending a lot of time on cold calling potential clients. Your sales people are there to make sales. They should be meeting prospects that are interested in your specific products and solutions.

If you can generate high-quality leads for your sales teams, those leads will convert into revenue generating accounts much faster.

The following are the good lead generation approaches to get the leads you want at reasonable costs.

Eliminate Wasteful Methods

Your first priority is to identify the lead generation methods that convert well and those that don’t. Traditional cold calling, for instance, is rarely cost-efficient for a sales organisation.

Sales reps normally don’t enjoy the process, and they don’t execute calls as effectively as they could. [Read “4 Things You Should Never Say When Cold Calling” and “Why You Need To Connect With Top Decision Makers“]

At a minimum, practice methods that allow you to access information that turns a cold call into a warm one.

Content marketing, emails and direct mail are other common approaches to contacting leads. By collecting data on your lead generation system, it is possible to home in on the tactics that efficiently produce results.

Simplify Your Landing Pages

The majority of B2B buyers start with their own online investigation. Therefore, providers are developing content marketing strategies that align with the buyer journey and include external and on-site content placements.

The goal is to educate prospects on the solutions for their problems and then drive them to your website for conversion.

Poorly designed landing pages and complex forms are among common on-site obstacles that negate a higher conversion ratio. Your page should concisely and emphatically outline the benefits your solution provides for a particular problem.

Your call-to-action should drive a response that is simple for the reader to initiate. Avoid multi-step forms. Only ask for the information, such as name and contact details, that you need.

Imagine the impact on your leads if you converted even 1 or 2 percent more of your visitors because of a simpler response process.

Work With A Lead Generation Specialist

It sounds counterintuitive to some, but hiring an outside specialist to conduct lead generation is often the most financially-savvy move. Your reps usually prefer lead nurturing and conversions, so lead generation doesn’t get the time and energy it needs.

If your teams are chasing prospects that are not currently a good fit for your business, it is costing you money.

In contrast, Internal Results is a speciality firm that offers lead generation services. We have a team of experts dedicated to appointment setting. What makes this strategy affordable is that we only charge you for appointments that are arranged and approved by you. You don’t pay for unsuccessful contacts.

Beyond the cost structure, landing the best leads for your team to nurture leads to more efficient sales processes. You avoid the clumsy, unproductive and wasted time spent with low-quality prospects that have little to no natural inclination for your solution.

Conclusion

It doesn’t have to cost a lot of money to land high-quality leads. You not only gain great prospects but you eliminate wasteful activities by applying these lead generation techniques.

And when you apply the maths, it offers an excellent return on your investment.

Talk to us today to get the high-quality appointments you want from your lead generation activities.

Fifteen states have increased their minimum wage this year, with more on the way. In Seattle, for example, large employers will have to pay a $15 minimum wage by January 2017. These increases will seriously affect low-wage employers such as retailers and restaurants, which means investors should be asking some tough questions to see which low-wage employers in their portfolios will benefit from the wage hikes and which will lose:

How are you increasing your labor productivity?

If a company raises wages, it needs to increase labor productivity or either raise prices or lose profits. Simply cutting employee hours is not a viable solution. Companies that rely on understaffing to squeeze more profit out of fewer people will never get to the land of high productivity and great service that creates customer loyalty. The operational problems caused by understaffing will stymie attempts to lower costs and reduce service. So how can a low-wage retailer increase productivity? There are three possible approaches.

Automate. This can make sense in some environments, especially for routine information processing. But it’s a different story for retailers and fast-food companies — the largest low-wage employers. Robots are not yet good at social interactions or tasks that require dexterity, such as unpacking crates, shelving shampoo, making a burrito, or arranging flowers. That’s not to say that automation wouldn’t help in some ways. Wouldn’t it be cool if robots could round up the carts from the parking lot or if everything had an RFID tag and customers didn’t need every item to be scanned at the checkout?

So far, the technology we hear most about in retail is self-checkout. But self-checkout by itself does not automate the checkout process, it just outsources the task to customers. That doesn’t work so well when there are many items to scan or when things suddenly get complicated — say, when the customer realizes she got the wrong item or when she wants to use two coupons for the same product. Self-checkout can also increase customer theft.

Consequently, investors should ask: What technologies are you planning to use to increase labor productivity without undermining service or increasing costs elsewhere?

Simplify processes. There are many ways to simplify processes in low-wage service settings. Perhaps the most significant is to reduce product variety within a category and cut back on promotions. My local, low-cost supermarket has over 250 types of soup, over 50 types of milk, and over 50 types of shredded cheese. As research has shown, customers are less likely to buy anything when there is too much choice and they are less satisfied with what they do choose. Such variety also boosts costs and decreases labor productivity. With so many products in a limited space, shelving takes more time and not all units fit on the selling floor. So employees have to put the extras in the backrooms and bring them out when the units on the selling floor are sold — an error-prone process that often leads to stockouts. And of course, employees spend a lot of time moving products around and changing prices and locations of products due to promotions.

Given this reality, investors should ask: Do you want to pay people $15 per hour for all this non-value-added work? What are you doing to simplify so your people can work more efficiently?

Improve work design. Many low-wage employees could work more productively — if the company would let them. Standardizing routine processes and providing enough equipment, training, and time would help employees do their work properly. Cross-training allows employees to do useful work even when there are no customers. Empowering employees to make simple decisions for customers would reduce the time spent on small issues and deliver faster service.

With this in mind, investors should ask: How are you changing work design to improve productivity?

How are you using your workforce to cut costs and increase sales?

Another way for higher wages to pay off is if the employees themselves help reduce costs. One of the truths that makes the Toyota Production System so successful is that those closest to the work are in the best position to improve it. They have the most detailed knowledge and the strongest motivation. If a company can create an improvement system with mechanisms to hear employees’ ideas (the easy part) and to act on them (the hard part), costs will go down.

Employees can also increase sales. They know things about their local customers that no centralized system can know. They know what the customers are asking for that the store or restaurant doesn’t have.

Of course, all this requires enough time to do the daily work and engage in improvement. Many low-wage employers think that increasing labor productivity means doing as much as possible with as few people as possible all working as quickly as possible. But key aspects of great service can’t be speeded up. An IT system may find an answer quickly, but it can’t listen to the customer’s problem more quickly or with any empathy. Nor can thinking about improvement and experimenting with countermeasures be speeded up.

For these reasons, investors should ask: What are you doing to gather ideas from your people and to act on them? How are you leveraging employee knowledge to improve service and sales? How are you making sure your people have enough time to do their tasks well, give great service, and contribute to continuous improvement — all of which will pay back their wage increases?

What is your plan for transitioning to high performance?

If a company’s answers to any of the questions above is some variation of “we’ll find a way,” it has a problem and investors should worry. None of the changes I have mentioned are that easy. They require a shift from seeing employees primarily as a cost to be minimized to the generator of profits and returns. If a company’s leaders view employees this way, they will realize that it makes sense to invest more in them.

Higher investment, of course, doesn’t just mean higher wages and more training. It also means setting high expectations and doing everything you can to help people meet them. As I learned from my own research, that’s when you find convenience store clerks and grocery store cashiers who love providing great service and love their companies for helping them do it.

Right now, most companies are used to operating in the realm of mediocrity — from recruiting to training to job design to performance management. I have visited many retail chain stores since I started my research in the late 1990s. It is not unusual to find stockouts, messy (or worse) backrooms, new employees who still haven’t been trained, not-so-new employees who can’t answer basic questions, and managers who know about problems that are losing the company money but feel no urgency to solve them. Lack of care and respect for employees means that employees lose concern for their work.

Getting from there to excellence will take years. So these companies better get started. Investors can do them a favor by prodding them for serious answers. What exactly is the plan to move to excellence? What are some useful measures of whether progress is being made?

The minimum-wage hike will deeply affect low-wage employers. The companies that muster the most competence and motivation (that means leadership) in moving towards excellence will win. The others will either have to make less money or else increase their prices and lose out to their competitors.

Editor’s Note: This article was first published on August 23, 2016. 

Segment CEO and Co-founder Peter Reinhardt was recently reflecting on what were his top lessons learned from changing packages and pricing. Without batting an eye, the unicorn founder said, “The first is to raise prices and that we discovered we could raise prices by probably ten thousand times from what we were initially charging and people were happy to pay for that.”

While Segment may be an extreme case, the business is far from unique in learning that it was leaving money on the table due to its pricing. Successful price increases drive a far higher profit improvement than any other initiative. Across a study of Fortune 500 companies, for instance, Andreas Hinterhuber found that a 5% price increase leads to a 22% improvement in operating profits. Compare that to a 5% improvement in SG&A expenses, which only moves the bottom line by 5%.

A successful price increase helps you acquire better customers, who are more serious about using your product and less likely to churn. It dramatically improves the lifetime value of a customer, which in turn boosts the LTV: CAC ratio. Plus, it allows startups to build a more sustainable business model, and hence be more in control of their own destiny.

Take StatusPage, the leading hosted status page provider acquired by Atlassian. As Co-Founder Steve Klein describes in detail, StatusPage started out with two price points – free and $49/month. Over time, they removed the free tier and managed to raise prices by up to 8x with minimal impact to conversion or churn. This was a key lynchpin in their efforts to grow average revenue per user (ARPU) by 2.4x and reach a $2.5M annual revenue run rate over the course of only two years.

Pricing Is Your Best Shot at Growing 25% Faster

Each year, OpenView collects benchmark data from hundreds of companies on important metrics such as growth rates, cash burn and unit economics. The 2018 study also asked questions about pricing. We found that among companies that changed pricing, 98% of the time the pricing change had either a neutral or positive impact on the revenue growth of the business. In two-out-of-five cases, pricing changes led to a 25% or greater improvement in ARR.

The experience of Deputy, a Sydney-based workforce management software company (and an OpenView portfolio company), helps reinforce the insight. Deputy had provided additional value to its customers year after year, which could be seen in their NPS scores, yet had been reluctant to adjust its pricing. The company ran a comprehensive market research study to gauge customers’ perceptions of their affordability and value.

Armed with these insights, Deputy decided to raise the price of their monthly plans by between 25% and 33%. By all accounts, the price increase was an overwhelming success. Deputy didn’t see any dip in trial volume or conversion through the funnel. The higher prices fueled an acceleration in revenue growth, which the company could then use to further invest in the product and customer experience. Not long after, Deputy pulled in an $81M Series B (the largest in Australian history).

BigPanda and Pricing for Fair Value Exchange

I recently had a chance to connect with Dan Turchin, the VP of Growth Strategy at BigPanda, about their recent pricing increase and how he approaches software pricing. BigPanda, which in May 2016 announced a Series B funding round closing at $21M, centralizes and automates IT incident management. Looking at BigPanda’s 2016 pricing page compared to what it looked like a year before, they implemented a significant change to both packaging and pricing.

Turchin has two fundamental philosophies when it comes to pricing: it should be as transparent as possible and it should align with value. He explains, “The goal behind any pricing model is to achieve a fair value exchange…What’s driving our process is not revenue maximization per se, it genuinely is a spirit of partnership and trying to figure out what is the right balance and what features are unlocking the right value.” In other words, when you invest in creating new features and driving more usage of your product, it creates an opportunity to extract some of that added value in the form of higher prices.

What struck me about Turchin’s approach is how rooted it is in truly understanding BigPanda’s customers and what they value. This type of deep voice-of-customer research is regularly talked about, but rarely done at most startups. As Turchin puts it, “We’re trying to have enough conversations with customers to get feedback on how they associate value with BigPanda and how to translate that into the most simple, transparent, logical way to consume the value.”

After the pricing change, Turchin and his team made sure to closely monitor the response and make adjustments as needed. “We measure sentiment on pricing mostly by the adoption cycle – how quickly a customer gets into production and how quickly the deployment grows. We’re definitely seeing onboarding times and time to incremental purchase go down,” he notes. Seeing those metrics trend in the right direction gave the team confidence that their pricing change did not have a negative impact on customer success, and was a smart course of action.

Room to Raise Prices

In my current role and past life consulting companies on their pricing strategies, I’ve picked up on six signs that a SaaS company is due for a price increase. They all hark back to Turchin’s notion of fair value exchange, and being able to extract more money only when you are delivering sufficient value to your customers.

• Sign 1: Prospects don’t push back on pricing. Does your sales team have the authority to discount, but rarely uses it? When you send a proposal to a prospect, do they comment on everything except for the price? For better or worse, software buyers have been conditioned to negotiate, especially when procurement gets involved. If they don’t negotiate with you, you’re probably leaving money on the table.
• Sign 2: Customers tell you how cheap you are. Have customers ever told you that they are surprised you are able to make money with your current pricing? Do they (favorably) compare you to other solutions in their tech stack, mentioning how they prefer you but pay 2x, 5x, 10x the price for another piece of technology? Or, my personal favorite, are customers satisfied even if they only implement a portion of your software because they see the investment as a ‘drop in the bucket’? In general, when customers are consistently happy with your pricing, they will not balk at paying more.
• Sign 3: You create a very high ROI. Does your software demonstrably save time, reduce waste or increase your customers’ revenue? Are you capturing enough of that value creation? As a rule of thumb, software companies can safely capture 10-20% of their economic value.
• Sign 4: You have not touched pricing for years. Did you set prices a while ago and have not given them another look since? Or, worse, have you not changed pricing since you launched? Do you have a strong point person in charge of evaluating and managing your pricing strategy? Many SaaS companies put a 5-7% annual price escalator in their contracts, and so 3 years without raising prices could mean you fell 20% or more behind competition.
• Sign 5: You added new features without monetizing them. Have you invested in extending your product capabilities, but gave those new features away for free to create goodwill with customers? Do you continually do that? Customers are more open to price increases when you can show a track record of using that extra money to invest in improving the product.
• Sign 6: Your customers mostly buy your most expensive package. Even if prospects aren’t raving about your affordability, they may be telling what they think about your pricing based on what they choose to buy. In an ideal world, your most popular package will be your middle one (the ‘Better’ in your ‘Good-Better-Best’ lineup).

Don’t Shortchange Implementation

With pricing, it pays to sweat the details. Too often a pricing strategy gets rigorously analyzed and debated by an executive team, but then nobody pays attention to the nitty-gritty details of successfully implementing it. I don’t need to repeat the cautionary tales of Netflix (2011) and Zendesk (2010).

Nailing implementation and minimizing backlash requires telling a good story about your pricing change, and giving customers a choice about what to do. As Turchin comments, it’s best to err on the side of transparency and view it “as an opportunity to engage with the customer; here’s what we’re doing, here’s why.” Specifically you should:

• Validate your course of action: First, confirm whether an across the board price increase is the best strategy. Could you add a new edition instead, or change the pricing metric to one with more upside?
• Communicate why you’re raising prices: Talk about how you have not raised prices for a while, how since the last price increase you’ve invested in new features and services or what you plan to invest in going forward. If possible, add metrics that point to the impact of what you’ve invested in – for instance, the amount of time spent on the platform, the % uptime you’ve delivered or how quickly you’ve been able to respond to help desk requests.
• Use the pricing change as a marketing tactic: By pre-announcing a price increase, you can create urgency with customers and prospects about why they should lock-in their rates now before their old prices expire.
• Give customers a choice: Nobody wants to feel strong-armed in a negotiation, and too hardline of an approach is likely to upset your customer base. A better approach is to provide a bounded set of options for customers to choose from. For instance, they could stay at their current plan at a higher rate, or choose to downgrade plans and keep the rate they’re paying today, or if they commit within 30 days they could get 10% off a better plan than they have now. This takes some of the sting off and puts the customer in the driver’s seat.
• Have a plan for existing loyal customers: Depending on the size of the price increase, it could be difficult to swallow for long-time customers who signed up at a steep discount to the current rate. The first thing to consider is whether grandfathering makes sense. If you are rapidly scaling and doubling your customer base year-on-year, the revenue opportunity from migrating existing customers may not be worth the effort. If you decide that it is, you should still proactively identify customers who will see especially steep increases and have an account-by-account plan to retain them. Typically if they’ll see a price increase beyond 50%, a best practice is to stair-step them so they gradually move up to the new rates rather than swallowing it all at once.
• Make peace with not convincing 100%: If you’ve done the math on a price increase, you know exactly how many customers you can lose in the process and still break-even. Set a realistic target for how many customers you think will leave as a result, and recognize the team for a job well done if that target is achieved. Keep in mind that some of those ‘lost’ customers will eventually boomerang once they try an alternative and realize the grass wasn’t actually greener.

The post SaaS Pricing Guide: When & How to Raise Prices Without Losing Customers appeared first on OpenView.

For most salespeople, lead generation is a mixture of good intentions and disorganized execution. In fact, the vast majority of salespeople make the same lead generation mistakes again and again. Overwhelmed by the idea of prospecting, many salespeople procrastinate lead generation altogether, putting it off as soon as they get busy.

If this sounds anything like your approach to prospecting, it’s time to shape up. A solid lead generation strategy can help you close more sales, attract more clients, and maximize your profits. So what are you waiting for?

Below are four deadly lead generation mistakes that salespeople make. Correct these mistakes to start turning your good intentions into profitable action. And while you’re at it, watch this video to learn about the most effective lead generation strategy out there:

1) Relying on just one approach. 

In a world where we have dozens of communication methods at our fingertips, it can be easy to feel overwhelmed. Phone calls, emails, social platforms, networking events -- sometimes it’s a relief to focus on just one, and forget the rest. But limiting yourself to just one communication approach is a sure way to kill your lead generation strategy. Instead of relying on just one method of generating leads, you should have at least three lead generation strategies going on at once.

For example, try calling high-level prospects, asking for referrals from your existing network, and inviting your best prospects and customers to semi-annual private events. By combining these three vastly different lead generation approaches, your strategy will yield better, more varied results to fill your pipeline with qualified leads.

2) Setting unrealistic lead generation goals.

Many salespeople set lofty goals for lead generation, only to ditch them when life gets too busy. If your goals are unrealistic, you’re likely to end up in the same boat. While everyone appreciates an ambitious salesperson, it’s better to be laser-focused on specific lead generation goals that you know you can accomplish even on your busiest days.

Instead of overwhelming yourself with a vague, lofty goal, commit to smaller actionable steps you can follow through on. For example, dedicate a specific -- and attainable -- amount of time each day to lead generation, or write small weekly goals in a visible place to keep you on track. Truly great salespeople understand that consistent focus on attainable goals is the key to executing good intentions.

3) Separating delivery from lead generation.

Salespeople often view sales as a separate job from the delivery of their product or service. When these two interconnected processes are thought of as separate, it can lead to a misalignment of priorities and a huge loss of opportunity. 

Instead of separating these tasks, remember that delivery is the perfect opportunity to strengthen your relationship with clients. During the delivery process, you can -- and should -- ask for referrals and introductions to new leads. The most successful salespeople see product delivery as the perfect opportunity to generate valuable leads. 

Ensuring delivery goes smoothly is also the best way to keep your relationship positive and productive. You can’t expect a client whose implementation didn’t match up at all with your promises to refer business to you in the future.

4) Being disorganized. 

Unfortunately, most salespeople are completely haphazard when it comes to prospecting. They bounce from emails to phone calls and back with no consistent process for connecting with their leads. Instead, take the time to establish an organized sales prospecting campaign to consistently reach out to your leads.

First, map out an intentional process for connecting with and getting in front of your prospects. The goal should be to touch each prospect at least seven to 15 times throughout your campaign. Utilize a strategic mix of letters, packages, phone calls, voicemails, emails, and drop-ins if applicable -- and write down an intentional schedule for each step of your plan.

To stay organized, try logging these steps in a CRM to easily track where you are in the process with each and every prospect.

By using multiple approaches, staying focused, capitalizing on delivery, and getting organized, a salesperson can enjoy a steady stream of leads -- and slowly but surely get on the prospect’s radar every time. Check out the video below for more tips on how to improve your lead generation strategy by avoiding common mistakes:

Which of these lead generation mistakes do you find yourself making? And which communication tools have proved most effective for you as a salesperson? Share your experiences in the comments below. For more cutting-edge sales advice, join the free 9-Day Sales Intensive online training course.