Content creation falls squarely in the domain of your marketing team, right? Yes, it’s true that marketers set strategy and create the content that supports that vision. But no team is an island, and in reality, it’s the sales team that is out there interacting with prospects and customers each and every day.
Your sales team should feel empowered to share and create content for your business. Here’s how you get them involved in the process, and the dos and don’ts for making the system work.
Do: Ask for Their Input
Your marketing team might be the wordsmiths of the group, but your sales team are the boots on the ground. They’re out there talking to prospects every day. They hear the same questions, hesitations, and sticking points over and over again.
When creating your content, you want to be sure that you’re proving to prospects that your business is the best one out there to solve their problems. The sales team understands better than anyone what those problems are, and how to communicate your solution.
You should be turning to them for advice and input. They’re the people who can point the marketing team in the right direction and help them create the type of content that will be most meaningful and helpful for your audience.
Do: Create a Process for Gathering Their Ideas
Your sales team have their own impressive skill set, but marketing writing is not necessarily part of it. In order to gather their input, don’t ask them to think like a marketer. Make it easy for them to share what they hear in their role as a salesperson.
Consider putting together a worksheet that asks them some basic questions. What are the top three questions they hear from prospects? Do they hear similar reactions across the board to pricing and specific products? What kind of content do they wish they had available to them as part of their sales arsenal?
Gathering responses to these questions will help your marketing team understand and meet the sales team’s needs.
Do: Provide Them with Content Extras
Salespeople are dealing with prospects and existing customers who are at all different stages of the marketing hourglass. Whether they’re speaking with a prospect who wants more information or a return customer who’s thinking about referring a friend, it’s helpful for them to have unique content to share, that goes above and beyond what’s available on your website.
These prospects and customers are already speaking with your sales team—they’ve proven that they have a high level of interest in what your business is offering. Why not go the extra mile and dazzle them with a content upgrade that the Average Joe scanning your website won’t be able to access?
Providing the sales team with content like ebooks, checklists, or templates that can enhance the customer experience at any stage of their journey will help them to establish a deeper sense of trust with the prospect or customer, which can help them close the sale in the long run.
Don’t: Leave Them to Their Own Devices on Social Media
Social media is a great tool for salespeople to use. It can help them generate conversions, but only if they’re using it properly. Again, the sales team are not marketing experts. It’s up to your marketing people to share best practices and make sure that the sales team is using their social media profiles to greatest effect.
While the marketing team creates the social media persona and posts for the brand, salespeople can cultivate their own followings and voice on social channels. Encouraging them to use hashtags effectively, tag the company in relevant posts, and incorporate video into their posts are great ways to help them drive sales. For more on the specifics of how to use social media as a part of the sales process, check out this webinar.
Do: Establish Brand Guidelines and Provide Templates
The sales team shouldn’t feel afraid to take ownership of sharing company messaging. After all, they’re not going to turn to the marketing team to write every email and script out every phone call they have with a prospect.
However, your marketing team has worked hard to create a brand identity, complete with a set voice and look, and you want to be sure that any content your sales team does create is working in harmony with the marketing team’s strategy.
That’s why it’s helpful for your marketing team to provide salespeople with brand guidelines and templates. What are the approved color palette and fonts for marketing materials? How do you want sales pitch decks to look?
Providing a style guide can help salespeople stay on the right track when communicating with prospects. Your marketing team should also put together a template for the types of communications your sales team will use regularly (and that includes things as complex as pitch decks and as simple as the formatting for their email signature line).
Part of building trust in your brand is establishing consistency in the way you communicate. Prospects and customers might not realize it consciously, but when they’re getting materials from a brand that are all over the map in terms of appearance and tone, some distrust might start to creep in. That’s the last thing you want for your business, so you must provide your sales team with the tools they need to put their best, most consistent foot forward.
Your marketing team might own the content creation process, but your sales team is a valuable asset in establishing and executing their approach. Making sure that their input is collected and considered, and providing them with the guidance to confidently communicate with prospects is the key to creating effective, trustworthy content for your brand.
Sales cycles are getting longer and more complex. Buyers are more informed (and demanding) than in the past, and reps are busier than ever – in fact, on average, only 34% of a rep’s time is being spent on selling each week.
What steps can you take to more effectively manage the EOQ scramble? How can you minimize the risk of slipped deals? And how can you do this without overwhelming your reps? Join our live webinar, “Managing the EOQ Scramble (And Minimizing Deal Slippage)”, on Tuesday, March 26 at 11:00 a.m. PDT/2pm EDT, to hear directly from successful sales leaders on the steps they take to accelerate their sales cycle.
With regularity, most active sales trainers and I get the following question:
“When is the best time to prospect?”
First, wanting to stay real and all, what they are really looking for is either a reason not to prospect or absolution from having not prospected for a while for all the wrong and usual reasons. Either one leads to the same corner of no prospecting and any cross street in sales. There is always something else that seems to them more important matter to deal with than prospecting. As detailed in my recent piece about the must of consistently prospecting, it starts with a commitment to a life-long habit of starting enough deals to drive every stage of the pipeline, including the close.
There is no absolute number, which is another thing many sellers are looking for. Thinking that if everyone is different, then they can’t be wrong. However, there is a uniform approach that can be applied to the vast majority of B2B sellers. It is not in vogue, but it is never out of fashion, your numbers. Four simple numbers (my apologies to those who don’t believe sales is a numbers game):
1. The required number of Closes per month or quarter?
2. Number of Proposals you have to present to get on Close?
3. The number of prospects who begin Discovery with you, take a real Proposal?
4. Of 10 First Meetings, how many make it into viable Discovery?
When you focus on, know and understand the above numbers, you will be in a position to design and implement a structured and continuous incremental improvement program to start improving each element. Moreover, in case you want to believe that it is not a continuous improvement program just consider a fundamental but immutable fact of sales:
Next year quota will rise, but your day will still cap out at 24 hours; meaning you either improve the four numbers above or slowly sink.
The first thing you will have a is a handle on the number of appointments you need to have a shot at getting a sufficient number of prospects in Discovery to generate enough proposals to get the required closes to exceed quota, which by extension will give you the number of hours per week or month, to drive your pipeline.
I find that most sellers who adopt and get to this point, no longer ask when the best time to prospect is? Because once they see how it is aligned with their success, how each prospecting call or e-mail is contributing to that success. Rather than seeing it as a chore, they need to complete so they can get on to doing things they “like.” They see prospecting as a step or an activity that has to happen before they can get to the rest. Sure, there are referrals and bluebirds, and if you can make your quota on those, by all means, skip prospecting or colds calling. However, the stats suggest that half of sellers are missing quota, and I bet we know why.
They also begin to book time in their calendar for the activity of prospecting. Why not, you diarise discovery calls, proposal calls, closing calls, what’s wrong with diarising your most important calls.
So when is the best time to prospect? When you have scheduled it for! Of course, if you didn’t schedule any time, then that will be reflected in your pipeline. As to the best time of day week, month…, as you plan your call blocks, move them around through the day and different days of the week, and you will begin to notice trends, then ride them.
One pointer, you can do call blocks before and after business hours, read 8 By 8:00 and 5 After 5:00. Moreover, finally, no law says you cannot call when you have downtime between call blocks, any time will work if you make it.
What if you didn’t have access to email as a medium available to you as a sales tool? What if you couldn’t send an email as a way to warm yourself up to make an unexpected phone call to your prospect to ask for an appointment? What if you couldn’t email information to your clients, especially the unwanted emails, the ones where you expect your company and product to do all the value-creating you are supposed to be doing?
What if there was no CRM? What if there was no electronic method for storing the information about your dream clients and clients in a way that makes it easy and efficient to communicate with them? Where would you keep your notes? How would you manage your deals (let’s say there is no Excel spreadsheet either)?
If LinkedIn disappeared and you could no longer research the contacts inside your dream clients, how would you go about learning something about them? How would you discover what they believe is important enough to share with the world if there was nowhere to share it?
As cruel as it might seem, pretend that the entire $999 a month per person worth of sales tools that make up your tech stack disintegrated. No more technological tools to manage your sequence, to find your contact information, to dial your phone, to record and transcribe your call, and to track the clicks on your collateral and your slide decks? How well would you sell without the tool?
What if you had no marketing? What if there was no lead generation? What if the word “Inbound” was a way to describe your sales manager tossing a phone book onto your desk? What if those phone numbers were your “leads,” and what if they were as warm as they would ever be without you taking action? How would you create opportunities?
How about eliminating demos? What would you do if there was literally no way to demonstrate your product, service, or solution to your prospective client? What if you had to sell something truly intangible? Could you get ink on paper sight unseen?
What if you had to sell? What if you were the value proposition? What if you were responsible for creating opportunities without any of these things? Could you do it? What if you had to win deals with a pen, a legal pad, a business card, and your wits?
The salesperson who has developed themselves to be able to win without any of these things will be even more effective with the tools. The salesperson who cannot sell with without them will be no better with them.
Put the mindset and skill sets before tool kits.
Essential Reading!
Get my first book: The Only Sale Guide You'll Ever Need
"The USA Today bestseller by the star sales speaker and author of The Sales Blog that reveals how all salespeople can attain huge sales success through strategies backed by extensive research and experience."
Artificial intelligence and machine learning has become essential if you are selling sales, customer service and marketing software, especially in large enterprises. The biggest vendors from Adobe to Salesforce to Microsoft to Oracle are jockeying for position to bring automation and intelligence to these areas.
All of these companies want to help their customers achieve their business goals by using increasing levels of automation and intelligence. Paul Greenberg, managing principal at The 56 Group, who has written multiple books about the CRM industry, including CRM at the Speed of Light, says that while AI has been around for many years, it’s just now reaching a level of maturity to be of value for more businesses.
“The investments in the constant improvement of AI by companies like Oracle, Microsoft and Salesforce are substantial enough to both indicate that AI has become part of what they have to offer — not an optional [feature] — and that the demand is high for AI from companies that are large and complex to help them deal with varying needs at scale, as well as smaller companies who are using it to solve customer service issues or minimize service query responses with chatbots,” Greenberg explained.
This would suggest that injecting intelligence in applications can help even the playing field for companies of all sizes, allowing the smaller ones to behave like they were much larger, and for the larger ones to do more than they could before, all thanks to AI.
The machine learning side of the equation allows these algorithms to see patterns that would be hard for humans to pick out of the mountains of data being generated by companies of all sizes today. In fact, Greenberg says that AI has improved enough in recent years that it has gone from predictive to prescriptive, meaning it can suggest the prospect to call that is most likely to result in a sale, or the best combination of offers to construct a successful marketing campaign.
Brent Leary, principle at CRM Insights, says that AI, especially when voice is involved, can make software tools easier to use and increase engagement. “If sales professionals are able to use natural language to interact with CRM, as opposed to typing and clicking, that’s a huge barrier to adoption that begins to crumble. And making it easier and more efficient to use these apps should mean more data enters the system, which result in quicker, more relevant AI-driven insights,” he said.
All of this shows that AI has become an essential part of these software tools, which is why all of the major players in this space have built AI into their platforms. In an interview last year at the Adobe Summit, Adobe CTO Abhay Parasnis had this to say about AI: “AI will be the single most transformational force in technology,” he told TechCrunch. He appears to be right. It has certainly been transformative in sales, customer service and marketing.
With data breaches impacting organizations on what seems like a daily basis, there’s a very good chance that your personal information has been compromised — and once it is leaked onto the Dark Web, you are vulnerable forever. According to the 2018 End-of-Year Data Breach Report, the total number of data breaches decreased in 2018, however, the number of stolen records climbed more than 126 percent. Not only is that a significant increase in the amount of Personal Identifiable Information (PII) that is now in the hands of cybercriminals, but it is also an indication that breaches have become larger, exposing more pieces of data per incident.
Many of us are experiencing data breach fatigue — the idea that individuals and organizations have become immune to the effects of data breaches and are less motivated to do anything to protect themselves. But while we are mistakenly putting our guard down, hackers continue to use our personal information for their own financial gain.
Credential Stuffing Attacks
One of the main ways that hackers utilize information stolen through data breaches is by credential stuffing, a cyberattack where large numbers of hijacked usernames, email addresses, and related passwords are used to attempt account logins at targeted web applications through an automated process. This is especially dangerous for consumers who use the same username and password combinations for multiple accounts.
In January of 2019, Have I Been Pwned? shared Collection #1, a database of 773 million unique pairs of email addresses and passwords that had been discovered circulating on a criminal forum on the Dark Web. Later that month, Collections #2-5, containing another 2.2 billion credentials, were also discovered. In February of 2019, 617 million stolen credentials from 16 websites were listed for sale on the Dark Web. That’s a lot of personal information up for grabs!
I Changed My Passwords. Am I Safe Now?
The simple answer is “no.” When the stolen data is your personal identity — your name, social security number, or other persistent record tied to who you are — it never expires. And, as long as cybercriminals continue to breach companies who collect such information, it is constantly being packaged, resold, and used for different malicious activities. Even your children are at risk.
A hacker recently contacted The Register to inform them that they were responsible for the leaked 617 million credentials I mentioned above. The cybercriminal stated that their goal is to make money and make hacking easier for others — at the cost of making the lives of their victims difficult. These communications are a clear display that hackers only care about profiting by selling our data, with no regard for the consequences for those affected.
How Can I Protect Myself?
Every organization is vulnerable to hacks, and it is important not to become complacent when it comes to protecting your identity. No matter how long ago you may have been affected, you never know when your personal information or login credentials will be used against you.
Tips to Protect Your Identity on the Dark Web
Don’t use the same password for multiple web sites. Use a password manager to generate unique credentials for every online account.
Use two-factor authentication. Requiring an additional level of security can often thwart hackers from gaining access.
Invest in identity theft protection. Make sure you and your family are protected now and into the future.
It seems the world is migrating to an “As A Service” model. Everyday one hears a new (sometimes not so new) XaaS approach. The model, at least as a subscription payment approach, is not new. We’ve had various subscription, rent, lease capabilities for at least decades, if not centuries. The application of this model to different areas, is interesting.
Then there’s the SaaS selling model–not applied strictly to Software (cloud or otherwise) that seems to be all the rage. This is typically a high volume/high velocity approach to selling, focused primarily on transactionalizing and optimizing our selling approach, despite what might be most helpful to the buyer.
Also, there are more and more organizations offering selling as a service, basically outsourcing the sales execution function to organizations dedicated to selling. But again, there’s not a lot of innovation in this approach, the concept of agents and manufacturer’s reps has been around for at least decades, if not centuries.
But I’d like to leverage the concept in a different way, suggesting that, well executed, Selling IS a service.
That is, done well, selling creates tremendous value for our customers and for our own companies (beside the revenue generation aspect of it).
Let’s focus on the customers. Too often, too many organizations and sales people construct their value propositions in terms of the value realized from the implementation of a certain solution. “Our solution will create this ROI, eliminate these problems, reduce expense, increase revenue……”
This is important, but it is probably not distinguishing or differentiating. Presumably, any number of competitive offerings the customer may consider will produce roughly similar business results.
Increasingly the greatest value created, the greatest differentiation is created long before the solution is purchase and implemented.
We know, through research by groups like Gartner, CSO Insights, Sirius Decisions, and others that sales people create huge value in the buying process.
These customers have identified a problem, established a need to buy and started their buying journey. But the majority of them fail to complete that journey (in complex B2B buying). Their failure has little to do with solution selection, but more to do with managing and driving change within their organizations.
Sales creates tremendous value in helping customers navigate this process, helping them achieve what they set out to do.
Selling practiced this way Is A Service! It’s a service that creates value for the customer and we should be very selective in who we provide that service to. That is, there are customers who don’t want or value this, we are wasting our time with them, they don’t value what we, as sales professionals, can provide.
Think of this from an internal point of view. If sales people work this way, they are getting more people who want to buy, but can’t navigate their buying process, to buy! In some sense, this is incremental to our own internal expectations. So sales represents a huge service internally.
The bigger opportunity, however, is the service we provide to customers that need to change, that are missing opportunities, that can grow and improve, but don’t know! They don’t realize they are missing out. They are consumed by the turbulence around them, just trying to make it through the day. Selling IS A Service of tremendous value to these organizations.
Delivering these services to those who value them helps them and, again, creates tremendous value to our own company.
We need to recognize and be proud of the fact that we offer a tremendous service that creates huge value for our customers and companies. We need to be careful to invest our time on those that value that service.
When PLM meets machine learning, Best-in-Class organizations “swipe right” to convert potential to productivity, resulting in better user experiences and better products. In a nutshell, machine learning definitely spices up the staid and steady PLM value proposition.
With the advent of big data, machine learning is introducing new ways to manage everything in manufacturing, from customer engagement, to design, to supply chain, to product lifecycle management. The combination of big data and advanced, inexpensive computing systems has made machine learning practical in real work applications, and it is driving positive change as part of the product development lifecycle.
Today’s Best-in-Class companies are embracing a new era of digital transformation in product lifecycle management (PLM). Among their quiver of Fourth Industrial Revolution tools is machine learning, which they are almost 2x more likely to implement than All Others (Figure 1).
Figure 1: The Best-in-Class Implement Machine Learning at Higher Levels
PLM systems collect vast amounts of data, with most of the product attributes housed in a PLM system, from user behavior, seasonality, materials, specifications and more. Now and in the future, the power of PLM data will be harnessed through machine learning models to inject additional insight into the product lifecycle. Here are a few possible use cases already available or close to fruition, either through embedded PLM functionality or integration into the PLM solution:
Increasing Design Productivity. Machine learning can be harnessed in PLM to create adaptive interfaces that increase user design productivity. This product feature predicts next steps and updates the user interface accordingly, helping users increase productivity. The ability to automatically adapt the user interface to meet the needs of different types of users across multiple departments can result in a higher-quality design experience.
Reducing Supply Chain Delays. Faster time-to-market is always important, and a PLM solution that uses machine learning can quickly recommend alternative suppliers at competing costs, in a geographical location that won’t increase costs or cause further delays. In addition, these automated recommendations can factor in historical supplier performance and reputation to ensure that quality and compliance standards are met and the best performers’ parts are chosen.
Better Decision Management. Machine learning is increasingly being leveraged in the product design process to provide a competitive advantage. ML can be used to deliver valuable business insights more quickly and efficiently, and it has the power to process, analyze, and learn from large volumes of data. When provided access to historic sales data and unfiltered customer feedback, machine learning insight can enable product designers to utilize insights to improve future product lines. Similar to the benefits of virtual prototyping, machine learning has the potential to determine which of millions of possible combinations of product attributes will results in higher gross margins.
Digitalization of PLM is just beginning, but already the potential machine learning use cases for PLM look very exciting. In PLM, Aberdeen sees the rise of a virtuous circle between manufacturing data and the ability to harness it via machine learning. Simply put:
Machine learning-ingested data enables improved insights.
Improved insights result in better products.
These great products attract even more users.
The Numbers: Manufacturer Buyer Intent in Machine Learning and PLM
Aberdeen tracks buyer behavior and content consumption across millions of websites to connect web-based search activity to discernible purchase intent signals. In addition to those intent signals, this data also reveals macro-level trends in the relative interest level for AI technology. To this end, Aberdeen maintains several industry-focused indices that demonstrate sector-level fluctuation in research activity across hundreds of technology categories. One such index contains thousands of organizations in the manufacturing sector.
If we take a six-month view of aggregate activity for this index, focused on technology categories related to manufacturing analytics and big data, the findings reveal a discernible bias toward more sophisticated and cutting-edge technologies (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Machine Learning and PLM Buyer Intent in Manufacturing
Source: Aberdeen, March 2019
In aggregate, this Manufacturing index shows a sustained buyer intent signal in machine learning and steady interest in PLM: Manufacturing providers are looking to bring new and sophisticated analyses to the abundant data they maintain. A major push in the manufacturing is the strong desire to convert this data into focused predictive insights. The results show that machine learning and PLM are a means to accomplish that goal.
Aberdeen’s intent data provides a macro-level view of how Manufacturing and large groups of companies are consuming content, and where their interests lie. However, this data also provides a more granular, company-level view, down to the device ID. This provides unprecedented clarity into how specific organizations are consuming content, and where they might be making near-term investments.
Do you know which specific companies are currently in-market to buy your product?
Wouldn’t it be easier to sell to them if you already knew who they were, what they thought of you, and what they thought of your competitors?
Good news – It is now possible to know this, with up to 91% accuracy. Check out Aberdeen’s comprehensive report Demystifying B2B Purchase Intent Data to learn more.
Business Insider's Better Capitalism series focuses on why inequality has been hurting economic growth, and why new approaches to business and policy can be a course correction.
Today, Congress is grilling the big tech CEOs about antitrust for the first time.
We've listed books like "Goliath" by Matthew Stoller and "The Meritocracy Trap" by Daniel Markovits that make sense of how we got to this point.
This article is part of Business Insider's ongoing series on Better Capitalism.
There's been a shift in corporate America over the past few years toward equality and accountability.
Leaders are increasingly being held accountable for not only their role in the economy, but in society, as evidenced by Wednesday's Congressional hearing with big tech CEOs like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos. The executives will face questions on whether they're hampering innovation and contributing to a fair society.
The move toward accountability gained speed in August 2019, when nearly 200 CEOs of America's largest companies declared their companies exist for the "benefit of all stakeholders — customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders." This collection of CEOs, the lobbying group the Business Roundtable, rejected the idea that maximizing shareholder value at all costs will take care of everything else.
Their statement was not legally binding, but even if it ends up merely symbolic, it marks a significant shift in the conversation. Since the beginning of last year, Business Insider has been exploring the momentum behind this shift — why we need "Better Capitalism," as we call it, and how we can achieve it.
Our series started with the rejection of the shareholder primacy theory that grew in popularity in the late 1970s and became the norm beginning in the '80s. That theory led to a short-term focus on profits above all else, and we're arguing that this has come at the expense of other stakeholders, and has been a significant factor in the country's out-of-control wage-and-wealth inequality.
We've found that there is an increasingly loud call to tie profits to purpose, and it's not just a moral argument, especially today amid the coronavirus pandemic and nationwide calls for racial justice.
To make sense of where we are today and where we should be headed, we've gathered some of our favorite books on the economy and the role of business in society.
This is an updated version of a story that ran on March 16, 2019.
The shift in the conversation Americans are having about capitalism has direct ties to the financial crisis and the ensuing populist movements, but its roots are in the American economy's rise to dominance following World War II.
Nicholas Lemann, a New Yorker staff writer and professor and dean emeritus at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, takes a look at how the US economy got to where it is right now. [Full disclosure, a contributor to this article, Richard Feloni, attended the school of journalism when Lemann was the dean.]
He explores how the theories of shareholder primacy and trickle-down economics led to, as the subtitle of the book captures, "the rise of the deal and the decline of the American Dream." And it's not simply theoretical. Lemann makes his narrative resonate through the stories of both those who have thrived and those who have suffered through the past several decades in America.
O'Toole, the founding director of the University of Southern California's Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision-Making, chronicles the ways business leaders tried to align their profits with social good, sometimes with poor results.
Using case studies of entrepreneurs behind brands like J.C. Penney and Levi Strauss & Co., O'Toole examines what works and what doesn't when it comes to building sustainable, socially-conscious companies.
The late Cornell Law professor Lynn Stout rose to prominence challenging the ideas that have dominated the past 40 years. In 2012, she took on the theory of shareholder primacy, which is the idea that public companies exist above all else to serve the needs of shareholders, and that if they make decisions with this approach, customers and employees will naturally benefit.
There's an argument to be made that this approach may have made sense in the 1980s, after the stagflation of the '70s, but Stout shows that it was inherently flawed and achieving the opposite result. Shareholder primacy can benefit investors in the short term, but it's an approach considering all stakeholders that creates lasting long-term value for investors, as well.
'Rewriting the Rules of the American Economy' by Joseph Sitglitz
Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize-winning economist based at Columbia University, and his 2015 book looks at how shareholder primacy has been one of many policies that he believes have been hurting the American economy.
Stiglitz dismisses the argument that implementing policies that would decrease inequality would hinder growth. Instead, he explains, the wealthiest Americans have increasingly captured the benefits of the growth seen in the past few decades, which handicaps the economy from performing at its best.
'Conscious Capitalism' by John Mackey and Raj Sisodia
Whole Foods founder John Mackey and Babson College professor Raj Sisodia kicked off a movement with their 2013 book, "Conscious Capitalism."
Stout and Stiglitz used their books to show that prevailing business theories were not only detrimental to workers and communities, but to shareholders and the economy as a whole; Mackey and Sisodia use theirs to show that businesses were already in a position to link their profits to purpose, and that investing in all stakeholders also increased the bottom line.
Anand Giridharadas is a journalist and former McKinsey consultant who was fully enmeshed in the world of the elite. As an Aspen Institute Fellow, he was a true believer in "doing well by doing good." But by 2015, he felt like everything was built on a charade.
In his book, Giridharadas gives a scathing critique of how countries like the United States have essentially handed over societal problems to corporations and billionaires, without addressing the roots of the issues.
We're using our list to highlight ways that those in power can better use that power, but Giridharadas' book is an important wake-up call that will ensure you are always conscious of the bigger picture.
We're in the early stages of another major shift in industry, where advances in technology will be both replacing and creating millions of new jobs. New solutions around job retraining and skills-based education will play a vital role in ensuring the changes benefit as many people as possible, but "Janesville" also shows there are no quick fixes.
Washington Post reporter Amy Goldstein reported extensively in Janesville, Wisconsin, from 2011 to 2017, tracking the struggles of a town after its General Motors plant closed. Her findings included the insight that when we talk about "closing the skills gap," we must be very deliberate about the path from training to job. It will require the cooperation of educators, politicians, corporations, and labor.
We've been focusing on how the neoliberal policies of the past 40 years have negatively impacted people, but reporter and activist Naomi Klein's 2014 book focuses on how those same policies of growth at all costs have also ravaged the planet.
The literature on the harmful effects of climate change is extensive, but "This Changes Everything" specifically focuses on the role business has played, and why citizens must demand that significant moves toward sustainability are enforced.
'Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World' by Adam Tooze
The debate over the role of public companies, the wealthy, and policy in America has been waged for decades, but it's begun a new phase as the generation that entered the workforce during the financial crisis has come of age.
Columbia historian Adam Tooze offers perhaps the most extensive explanation of the crisis itself, its causes, and ramifications, and how what happened in the American financial system was closely linked to the crisis that shook Europe.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren has breaking up big tech in her presidential campaign platform, and it's based on a growing movement of economists and lawyers pushing for enhanced antitrust law.
Columbia law professor and former Federal Trade Commission adviser Tim Wu has provided the most succinct and persuasive case for why we should revitalize antitrust, to weaken the effects increased market concentration is having on workers, politics, and customers.
"Artificial intelligence" is a ubiquitous but often misunderstood buzzword when we discuss the future of business.
New York University professor Amy Webb is here to help. She breaks down how "The Big Nine" developers of AI are shaping our futures, but that nothing they create has inevitable ramifications.
She uses data and history to show what's actually happening in the world of AI, dispelling both excessive fear and optimism, and proposes ways that countries and corporations will have to work together to create regulations and expectations around increasingly powerful technology.
There are different ways of categorizing the industrial shift we're in — there's a debate over whether it qualifies as "the Fourth Industrial Revolution" — but it's undeniable that technological changes are transforming the way we work.
AOL founder and venture capitalist Steve Case sees this period as the beginning of "The Third Wave of the Internet," following the first wave of foundational internet companies like AOL and second wave companies like Facebook.
We're headed into a world where "the internet of things" will become the internet of everything, and Case believes that this is going to more evenly distribute the power concentrated in Silicon Valley and Wall Street. It's why he's investing in rising startup scenes throughout the country, which he thinks will be critical to the future success of the American economy.
A meritocrat turns on his own class in this provocative read. The book argues that the American Dream that was built on a post-aristocracy mindset has actually replicated aristocracy by another name: meritocracy.
Daniel Markovits, a Yale Law School professor, enhances in this book an argument he first gave in a 2015 commencement speech at the same school. In short, he argues that elite American workers, typified by lawyers, have driven increasing inequality by commanding ever higher wages. These "meritocrats" work longer hours than other Americans, for greater outcomes, leading to an unhealthy situation for them, for the increasingly underpaid and underworked majority of workers, and for the economy as a whole.
It's an unprecedented accomplishment in human history that the richest Americans overwhelmingly work for a living, and he argues it requires an unprecedented solution.
Monopoly isn't just a board game, it's the enemy of democracy, as Matthew Stoller puts it in his 2019 book "Goliath," which highlights "concentrated financial power" as the major culprit. Whether a monopoly is US Steel or Amazon or Google, the end result is bad for the democratic political system, he argues.
In the essay and the book it inspired, Stoller brings his own perspective as a former Capitol Hill staffer to the story of how the Democratic Party began to embrace the financial sector in the 1970s, leading to what he argues were disastrous results. The New Deal of the 1930s, he argued, broadly redefined American politics in general, and the Democratic Party in particular, as distrustful of concentrations of power. But the Democrats of today forgot its lessons.
The book ranges much farther afield than the financial sector, exposing what Stoller calls "the 100-year war" between democracy as a political system and its opposite: monopoly power. President Franklin Roosevelt, in his telling, built off the previous era of "trust-busting" to investigate concentrated power in the housing, newsprint, steel, fertilizer, and tobacco, industries, to name just a few.
“My advice would always be to ignore the perceived wisdom and look for the most reliable evidence on the ground” – D.T. Puttnam
Hearing a senior executive announce “We’re committed to becoming agile!” is not the bombshell moment it used to be. It no longer indicates a personal revelation or board-room epiphany. In fact, if you were to read some of the interviews with managers in business magazines, or the guest articles and puff-pieces on agility in their companies, you’d think that their hearts and minds had been won decades ago. You’d have no reason to doubt that executives were anything other than firmly on-side with Scrum Masters, coaches, and change agents. Agile transformation, you would surmise, is a done deal with the higher-ups.
Now according to the 2018 State of Agile report, the top reason survey respondents gave for undergoing agile transformation was to accelerate a production calendar. You can see why people would think that this is important. The imperative everyone faces is to complete projects “faster and cheaper”. Time, after all, is money. Hence there’s no great mystery why executives would appear to be pulling in the direction of agile change.
Moreover, there’s no denying that senior managers are generally right about the need for increased agility. If their organizations fail to improve, then they could well be disrupted out of business. That much is becoming increasingly clear. Yet it’s also the sticking point. You see, agile transformation isn’t about “accelerating a production calendar”, as is often assumed. It’s really about becoming a learning organization…one that’s innovative enough to survive.
People, I suppose, can be right about certain things for the wrong reasons. That’s what management support for “going agile” often boils down to. I remember the gasp of incredulity when I first explained to a senior executive that the agile transformation he talked about wasn’t geared towards completing projects “faster and cheaper”, as he claimed. “In truth,” I said, “agile transformation is about learning to build the right thing at the right time”. The mouth gaping back at me was momentarily staggered into silence. The face that framed it was a picture. It is still in the gallery of my mind’s eye: “Study of a suit in shock”. An unforeseen vista had rent the air and stretched out before him. He now saw a different perspective: value might not be what it appeared to be. These are the new bombshell moments which add pep to an agile coach’s day.
It’s important to give folk an anchor in a major paradigm shift, such as the adoption of agile practice. They need something they can hold on to as a point of reference, a true north. Here’s something to grab: agile transformation is not done for its own sake. Value, however it is measured, ought to be improved as a result of change. If value is measured well, then by means of frequent release, inspection, and adaptation, it can be maximized. If it is measured poorly, then an organization may just become better at doing the wrong thing. Eventually, more switched-on disruptors will move in for the kill.
Some companies misalign their success criteria. For example, they may gauge success in terms of a certain capability delivered by a certain date for a certain cost. Their project controls and measurements are geared towards an objective where evidence of success, or failure, will arrive late. These companies would be far better served by an ability to respond to change in an uncertain world.
Generally speaking, the most common dysfunction is to try and measure value in terms of outputs, rather than outcomes. A classic example, which is often encountered in agile transformation, is known as “point productivity”. If a technical team estimates each piece of work before doing it, and gives it a notional size in points, then team members will roughly know how much they’re taking on when planning to meet a goal. They are within their rights to use this approach. However, the numbers are not then too hard for managers to get hold of, and it is tempting for the higher-ups to conflate the estimated size of the work with its value. On the basis of this extraordinarily circumstantial evidence, the more “points” a team supposedly “delivers”, the more productive it is held to be. Why fake this equivalence? Because the genuine value of product increments to stakeholders, if any are indeed delivered at all, can be a much harder thing to discern. In fact there could be little appreciation of a product in the first place. There might simply be a project with a mandate, a bolus of requirements, and a fixed amount of money in the pot.
The irony of the situation is palpable. We often read about how merciless companies can be in the quest for profit, and of how keen they are to maximize shareholder value. Yet when it actually gets down to counting the beans in a timely way, and figuring out what sort of investment to make in the next Sprint, based on hard empirical evidence, they can’t set themselves to the task. They can’t do it. They fiddle the books with wooden dollars instead, and declare that the balance of story points being “delivered” perhaps ought to rise. Non-profit organizations, such as charities, are not necessarily any cleaner. The performance indicators used to gauge impact on the social good, for example, can be tenuous and trailing. Rather than dealing with this challenge head-on, and identifying the outcomes which they can empirically measure, non-profits might also resort to assessing outputs instead. They too can fall prey to the siren call of measuring “points delivered”, for example. They too might obscure true stakeholder value with circumstantial data that, when taken out of context, becomes fake. The comparative ease with which data like this can be obtained, and used to proxy for value, is often imagined to be a solution and its misappropriation a virtue.
It’s critically important to understand that measurement is strategic in nature. Senior executives are accountable for the value an organization provides and for corporate reputation. If the measurement of value is poor, then the outlook is grim. However, if the understanding of value is challenged and curated in an empirical way, with a timely focus on quality outcomes rather than circumstantial outputs, then it becomes possible to survive and thrive. Continuous improvement is enabled. Management, in other words, has to be evidence-based. This is of essential concern where an agile organization with an innovation capability is to be cultivated.
What actually should executives measure then? Evidence Based Management, or EBM, proposes four key value areas which organizations can focus on, irrespective of business context. These are Current Value, Unrealized Value, Time to Market, and Ability to Innovate. Let’s take a look at each of these areas, and at the nature of the measurements which lie beneath them.
Current Value measures the value delivered to customers or users today. How much is an initiative worth to stakeholders? How satisfied are customers, or employees for that matter? How many people actually use a product or service? From a financial perspective, what is the revenue per employee, or the product-cost ratio?
Unrealized Value measures the value that could be realized by meeting all of the potential needs of customers or users. What does the organization need to do to maximize that value? What is the relative market share of a product or service, and what is the gap between the current experience of customers or users, and an experience that might be said to “delight” them?
Ability to Innovate measures the ability to deliver a new capability or feature which better serves customer or user needs. Do we have data on which functions are used most heavily, and those which are used least often? What is the organization’s innovation rate, which is to say, the relative investment in developing new capabilities versus maintenance of the old? How much technical debt has to be paid off, relative to new functionality? What is the defect rate for the product or service, and how many major incidents occur over a given period? How many different versions are being supported? What percentage of a team’s time is spent on the product, and how focused on that product are they allowed to be? How much time is spent merging code and context-switching?
Time to Market measures the ability to quickly deliver a new capability, service, or product. How frequently do builds happen, how often is work integrated, and what is the frequency of release? Once a release is made, is additional time and effort needed for the product to stabilize, and if so how much? What is the average time it takes to effect a repair? What are the cycle and lead times to production, and how long does it take to close the validated learning loop?
That’s a lot of things to potentially measure, and the elicitation of the associated data is something that has to be sponsored by top management. Nobody, no employee, nor any consultant brought in for the job, can pull these numbers out of a hat. Getting hold of key value measures isn’t the sort of thing that can be delegated away. These are a comprehensive set of data points drawn from a range of functions across the enterprise. No-one below chief officer level is likely to have the organizational reach, or the political sway, to pull in the numbers. Moreover, departmental and mid-tier managers should be keen to engage with this strategic initiative, so that the data obtained will be timely and of good quality. This can require direct and pro-active involvement from the CEO, even if he or she has someone else to collate the measurements and to curate the results. Don’t forget that the first step in organizational transformation is to communicate a sense of urgency for change…for which executives have to constantly stay on the ball.
These key value measures, once elicited, provide a kind of transparency over enterprise agility. The data can be visualized in the form of a spider diagram, for example, and a picture then shaped of how “agile” an organization might be. Of course, this picture will not in itself cause an improvement. No report ever can. Simply being in receipt of numbers and charts does not cause people to inspect and adapt. For any change to happen, empirical process control must be established. A change leadership team will need to consider these measurements, challenge those which appear to be weak, and frame an hypothesis about how the situation might be improved.
We believe that [doing X] for [people Y] will achieve [outcome Z]. We will know that this is true when we see that [measurement M] has changed.
For example, if the innovation rate appears to be poor, they might decide to furnish a product ownership community with a dedicated team for the incubation of new opportunities. Then they can see the effect on the innovation rate, and on the overall picture of enterprise agile health.
We believe that supporting the product ownership community with a dedicated team will achieve an improved innovation rate. We will know that this is true when we see that the number of value propositions being evaluated each month has increased relative to the number of support and maintenance tickets which have been started for existing products.
Well? Did the innovation rate of the company improve? What other measures changed when the data was next collated…and what hypothesis ought to be framed and tested next?
These are the bare bones of EBM, or Evidence Based Management. If it looks like something which is impossibly or impractically hard to do, bear this in mind: in a crisis, executives suddenly become interested in empirical evidence. They ditch the pro-forma reports, filters, and stage-gated practices which normally define the organization’s way-of-working. They get close to the outcomes instead. They try to exert control over them until the situation stabilizes and the immediate danger recedes. Then they go back to their old, non-empirical practices which have just been found wanting. Can you feel the irony yet?
Perhaps executives should adopt Evidence Based Management as a new standard, if they genuinely want to have a more agile organization. The alternative is bleak. If they don’t do so, then the illusion of control — which comes from managing circumstantial outputs — will persist until reality bites them. But will the outcome of such ignorance be survivable at that point? Or will the more agile, and the more innovative, have moved in for the kill?
Mobile commerce (m-commerce) isn’t just the future of online shopping — it’s absorbing more and more e-commerce in the present. Business Insider Intelligence projects m-commerce will account for nearly 40% of US online sales by 2023, totaling $447 billion. And 49% of shopping traffic from November 1 through December 6 in 2018 went through smartphones, according to Adobe.
Despite its popularity, m-commerce faces serious conversion issues that retailers need to improve on. In North America, mobile browsers posted a conversion rate of just 6% in Q2 compared with desktop’s 11%, according to Criteo. But mobile websites still accounted for 43% of all transactions in the region among retailers that actively promoted their shopping apps, showing that they deserve special attention.
So, although consumers spend more time accessing the internet on smartphones than any other device, e-tailers aren’t able to maximize that value. And considering mobile shoppers have a similar engagement rate as desktop shoppers, but the rates at which they select products and transact are lower, according to Qubit, mobile sites clearly need to improve their ability to convert — and top e-tailers have work to do.
In the Mobile Checkout Benchmark Report, Business Insider Intelligence scores the mobile checkout experience of top e-commerce marketplaces — which includes every action from the moment a consumer chooses a product to the final purchase when they add the product to their cart and check out — to determine the current leaders in the space.
It establishes key factors in the checkout process to appropriately score e-tailers and identifies what all retailers and brands can learn from their strengths and shortcomings to improve their own m-commerce conversion capabilities. The report also looks at what developing technologies and initiatives have the potential to bolster conversion in m-commerce.
The companies mentioned in this report are: Affirm, Amazon, BigCommerce, Discover, eBay, Klarna, Mastercard, PayPal, Pier 1, Shopify, Splitit, Target, Visa, Walmart, and Wish.
Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:
Business Insider Intelligence’s Mobile Checkout Benchmark Study ranks top e-commerce marketplaces based on their conversion capabilities on their mobile websites.
Target ranked first, leading in the adding to and reviewing the cart stage and performing well across the board.
eBay led the overall efficiency and checkout and payment phases thanks to its simple process, but poor conversion capabilities on product pages and carts kept it from winning overall.
Amazon underperformed as it focuses on gathering consumer data and adding Prime subscribers rather than one-time conversion.
Speed and simplicity are top features to drive mobile conversion, according to experts interviewed by Business Insider Intelligence, and becoming faster and more efficient in various facets of mobile checkout will pay dividends for e-tailers.
In full, the report:
Examines mobile websites’ struggles with conversion.
Creates a benchmarking to score top e-commerce players’ websites conversion capabilities.
Scores e-tailers’ performances and picks out key learnings from their strengths and shortcomings.
Identifies developing technology that will be able to bolster mobile conversion in the future.
Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:
Subscribe to a Premium pass to Business Insider Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >> Learn More Now
An Agile mindset is crucial in management roles for organizations that are moving towards Agility. I observed this while working in various organizations and currently am a witness of it while assisting my customers.
Decisions, actions, directions and vision often come from the management level, especially in the hybrid world. When an organization thinks about applying Scrum, they shouldn’t expect only changes of how teams work but also, they should start considering how the management team intends to operate.
The substantial concept is to realize that Leaders are crucial and impactful to apply Scrum in teams and organization.
Start with Yourself
If a leader of an organization thinks about applying Scrum as their framework of choice, the change starts with them. Again, from my experience, some companies expect modifications on the team level without considering a requirement of organizational transformation or, even more remarkable, inside the leadership team.
Tips:
• Leaders may apply the Scrum Framework inside their own management team
• Look at the maturity level of the management team, improve this accordingly
• Leaders may initiate organizational changes towards cross-functional Scrum Teams (but let them form Scrum Teams by themselves to increase self-organization)
• Focus on products and delivering value
• Leaders apply Agile Manifesto and Agile principles to their work, encourage teams to follow them
• Lead by example and show teams Agility; Change the culture
I’d met a leadership team who uses the Scrum Framework. They told me “How can we expect our teams to work with Scrum if we don’t practice it on our own?”.
Accept Complexity
Organizations very often deal with complexity. Their products and market belong to the complex domain, where more is unknown than known. Usually, organizations try to solve complexity by predictability or old management habits (from the industrial era) and therefore often fail. The challenge is to realize and accept the fact that the company operates in the complex situation, where long-term predictions may mislead and end up with missed opportunities within the market (or other possible undesirable results).
If the organization works in the complex environment, product delivery is placed in the complex domain. Leaders may deal with complexity by introducing the Scrum Framework or continuously improve existing Scrum (if already applied).
The Scrum Framework is designed for solving these complex problems. Scrum is based on the empirical approach which consists of 3 pillars: transparency, inspection, and adaptation. These are the key ingredients to an Agile mindset and this is essential to Agile leadership.
While serving my customers and helping them adopt Agility and Scrum, I observed that it is more effective when Leaders help their teams and organization to build such this mindset and incorporate it into the culture.
Apply Scrum Values
Agile Leaders tend to respect and live by Scrum Values. Leaders should be a good example and teach the organization how to live by the Scrum Values, make them alive in their work environment and make them important. These values might be “a bridge” between teams and leadership, something they share and respect together. This brings a sense of unity and identification within the organization.
Impediments
Scrum Masters are responsible for removing impediments for the Scrum Team. They are making many attempts and at times they are unsuccessful. More often than not, Scrum Masters are not able to remove specific impediments by themselves. Some decisions regarding impediments have to be made on the management level. A leader can help a Scrum Master to remove impediments and collaborate with the Product Owner and organization to resolve problems within the team.
Conclusion
The importance and “primum mobile” of Agile leaders are invaluable. This role is impactful and tangible both for organizations and teams. Agile Leaders have the potential to change the culture, working environment and have a direct (or indirect) impact on delivering value.
Benjamin Fernandes, the Tanzanian co-founder chief executive of Nala, spent hundreds of hours talking to local Tanzanians about their frustrations with mobile money payment services before he launched his new payment platform.
While at least a hundred million Africans hold mobile money accounts, the process of transacting over the services is difficult, so Nala made an application that acts as an interface on top of the unstructured supplementary service data layer to make money transfers and payments much easier.
Mobile payment services have swept across the African continent in the 12 years since the wireless carrier Safaricom launched M-Pesa in 2007. As of 2017, roughly half of the 282 mobile money services operating worldwide were in Sub-Saharan Africa, according to a McKinsey report. Nala’s founder estimates that there around 420 million Africans holding mobile money accounts, making the continent the leader in mobile money adoption by a wide margin.
In Tanzania, making one send money payment requires a user to enter somewhere between 39-46 digits, a hard enough task for anyone, let alone someone who may be newly adjusting to mobile phone service.
Using Nala, users can make payments to anyone on any device, and it only requires a one-time download to start transacting, according to the company.
Think of Nala has taken all of the short codes from all of the transaction providers and created a router system that users can operate without having to memorize the different underlying coding. Currently live in Tanzania, with over 100,000 users, Fernandes says that his company has plans to expand to at least two other African countries over the course of 2019.
It’s been a long road for Fernandes, a former national television host of youth talk shows and sports shows in Tanzania, to financial services entrepreneur.
Fernandes moved to the U.S. for university, doing his undergrad degree at the evangelical Christian University of Northwestern in St. Paul. At the university, Fernandes developed an interest in economics and excelled. Encouraged by his business professor to apply to Harvard and Stanford for business school, Fernandes briefly returned home and did just that.
He received a full ride to Stanford through the school’s Africa MBA Fellowship in 2014 and moved back to America.
“I took the two years at Stanford to learn everything i can about fintech,” Fernandes recalled. “In the summer i started working at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and that’s where i met Sam Castle. He was a PhD student at Washington doing research in mobile payments in MENA and Sub Saharan Africa.
Castle and Fernandes stayed in touch while the Tanzanian wrapped up his studies at Stanford, and when Fernandes graduated and received the Frances and Arjay Miller Prize for Social Entrepreneurship along with its attendant $20,000 bounty, he returned home and started working on Nala.
“It was such a hard decision to make to go home,” Fernandes recalls. “Most Africans don’t go home. We stay in the States. But I was 24 at the time and thought ‘We’ll figure this out.'”
As he began working on different prototypes and as the work progressed, he was able to convince Castle to come on board.
Now the company is generating some revenue from airtime sales and bill payments, although down the road Fernandes sees value in the data that the company collects across the multiple accounts that Nala services.
Eventually there’s a possibility for the company to get into other financial services like lending and savings.
What’s clear is the massive opportunity that exists in simplifying a transaction mechanism that’s wildly popular across the continent but also massively tricky for consumers to use.
Mobile payments have already revolutionized financial transactions in Africa, by building a simpler interface, Nala could take that revolution one step further.
A Detailed Comparison Between WordPress And October CMS
A Detailed Comparison Between WordPress And October CMS
Leonardo Losoviz
Three months ago, WordPress finally released React-powered Gutenberg to power its default content editing experience, triggering many people who are not happy with this change to look for alternatives. Some folks decided to fork and release pre-Gutenberg WordPress, however, for me this doesn’t make much sense since it still carries 15 years worth of technical debt. If I were to find an alternative to WordPress, I would try to avoid being stuck in the past, and aim for a clean cut through some mature platform built on modern foundations.
This article compares WordPress to the arguably similar yet more modern October CMS on a wide arrange of both technical and non-technical topics. The goal of the article is not to convince people to stick to WordPress or to switch to October CMS, but simply to demonstrate what aspects must be taken into account before concluding the move to a different platform. The same comparison could (and should) also be done with other platforms before making a sensible decision.
Why October CMS
I found out about October CMS when it won an award, after which I went into research mode and spent a good deal of time digging deep into this CMS — from the perspective of both a user and a developer. As I gained knowledge on this CMS, I felt confident that I could provide an objective evaluation of its features as contrasted to WordPress. I chose this CMS for the comparison over alternative options such as Grav, Statamic, ButterCMS, Joomla, Drupal, Jekyll, Hugo, and others, for the following reasons:
I know how this CMS works (unlike Grav);
It is free and open source (unlike Statamic and ButterCMS);
At five years, it is “relatively” new (unlike Joomla and Drupal);
It is a dynamic (not static) content generator and based in PHP (unlike Jekyll and Hugo).
I believe that October CMS is a good candidate because it is based on Laravel which is a framework used for building modern applications. After seven years of existence, it has received positive approval from developers (as evidenced by its sizeable community and ecosystem), and marks a distinct contrast over coding in WordPress, i.e. WordPress is mostly procedural programming while Laravel is decidedly object-oriented programming.
What’s The Difference Between The Two?
Below I will compare WordPress and October CMS on different categories and highlight what, I believe, is good and not so good about them. However, I will not pick a winner, since that’s not the objective of the article and, in any case, there is no “best” or even “better” CMS: each CMS has its own set of strengths and weaknesses that will make it more or less suitable for each task, project, company, team, and anything else. Moreover, a project may benefit from using more than one CMS, such as using some CMS to manage and provide data, and another CMS to render the view. To decide which of the dozens of CMSs out there is most suitable for your own needs is entirely up to you.
In addition, this article could never draw definitive conclusions since it is only concerned with a subset of all possibilities. For instance, we can also find online comparisons such as “WordPress vs Drupal vs Joomla”, “WordPress vs Static Site Generators” and even “WordPress vs Medium”. Because none of these articles sees the full picture, then none of these comparisons can ever be conclusive, and should not be treated as such.
Let’s start with the comparison.
Philosophy And Target Group
It is no coincidence that WordPress powers nearly 1 in 3 websites. Ever since its inception, it has strived to be extremely user-friendly and has done so successfully, removing friction for technical and non-technical users alike as well as for people from all backgrounds — irrespective of their education and economic levels. WordPress’ founder Matt Mullenweg expressed that WordPress’ motto of “Democratize Publishing” for the current era meant the following:
“People of all backgrounds, interests, and abilities should be able to access Free-as-in-speech software that empowers them to express themselves on the open web and to own their content.”
WordPress is easy to use for everyone and its inclusivity is evidenced on the development side too: It’s not uncommon to find people without a programming background (such as marketers, designers, bloggers, sales people, and others) tinkering with their WordPress installations, designing their own themes and successfully launching their own websites. WordPress is user-centric, and the needs of the users trump those of the developers. In WordPress, the user is king (or queen).
“October makes one bold but obvious assumption: clients don’t build websites, developers do. The role of a client is to manage the website and convey their business requirements. The web developer, and the industry itself, revolves around mediating these factors.”
In the words of its founders, the CMS’ mission is to “prove that making websites is not rocket science.” Being based on Laravel, October CMS can claim to have strong foundations of reusable, modular code that can produce properly-architected applications, maintainable in the long term and fully customizable without requiring hacks — the type which attracts serious programmers. October CMS can also provide a great user experience, however, it is not as simple or frictionless as that provided by WordPress. Users may need to be explained how to use certain functionality before being able to use it. For instance, embedding a form from some plugin has a lengthy explanation on how to do it, which is more cumbersome than the self-evident, drag-and-drop functionality provided by several form plugins in WordPress.
Installation
WordPress is famous for its 5-minute installation, even though many people point out that (taking into consideration all the plugins that must be installed) a typical installation requires 15 minutes or more. In addition, WordPress also offers the Multisite feature, which allows us to create a network of multiple virtual sites under a single installation. This feature makes it easy for an agency to administer the sites of multiple clients — among other user cases.
Installing October CMS is also very smooth: The Wizard installation itself takes even less than five minutes, and if you install it through the Console installation, it is even faster. You can do the latter by simply navigating to the target directory and then executing curl -s https://octobercms.com/api/installer | php (after which we need to input the database configuration, otherwise it behaves as a flat-file CMS). Once the installation has been completed, we will have a fully functioning website, but still quite bare (if you add the time needed to install and configure the required plugins, you can expect it to take at least 15 minutes).
Installing October CMS with the Wizard is a breeze. (Large preview)
Security
WordPress has been accused of being insecure due to the high amount of vulnerabilities that are constantly found. This forces users to have the software for the CMS and all installed plugins always up to date to avoid security exploits. Among the main issues is WordPress’ support for older versions of PHP which are not supported by the PHP development community anymore (WordPress currently supports PHP 5.2.4, while the latest fully supported PHP version is 5.6). However, this problem should be resolved in April 2019 when WordPress will officially start supporting PHP versions 5.6 and upwards.
Otherwise, WordPress is not necessarily insecure because of itself, but because of its high popularity, which makes it a primal target for hackers. However, this plays both ways: WordPress ubiquity means that its security team must really take their job seriously by constantly looking for exploits and fixing them as soon as possible, otherwise up to a third of the web is at risk. The stakes are just too high.
October CMS, on the other hand, doesn’t have a reputation of being insecure. However, since there are roughly 27,000 live sites that use October as compared with WordPress’ millions, we can’t judge the two of them on the same terms. Nevertheless, the team behind October CMS does take security seriously, as evidenced by the Wizard installation’s prompt to input the CMS backend URL, set as /backend by default but changeable to anything else, as to make it more difficult for hackers to target the site. In contrast, changing WordPress’ login and backend URLs from /wp-login.php and /wp-admin respectively to something else must be done through a plugin. In addition, October CMS can function as a flat-file CMS (i.e. without a database) and avoid database-related vulnerabilities such as SQL injection.
Technology Stack
Both WordPress and October CMS run on the traditional LAMP stack: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. (However, only PHP is fixed: we can also use Windows, Nginx, MariaDB, and others.) October CMS can also behave as a flat-file CMS, meaning that it can do without a database, however, at the cost of forgoing many functionalities (such as blog posts and users) the only functionality that is guaranteed is pages, which is considered to be the basic unit for the creation and publishing of content and shipped as a core feature.
Concerning the language stack, sites built with both WordPress and October CMS are based on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (note that PHP is used to generate the HTML). October CMS also makes it easy to use LESS and SASS files.
Programming Paradigm
WordPress follows a functional programming paradigm, based on calculating computations by calling functions devoid of application state. Even though WordPress developers do not need to stick to functional programming (for instance, for coding their themes and plugins), the WordPress core code inherits this paradigm from 15 years of preserving backwards compatibility, which has been one of the pillars to WordPress’ success but which has the unintended consequence of accumulating technical debt.
Programming in WordPress could be characterized as HDD which stands for “Hook-Driven Development”. A hook is a mechanism that allows changing a default behavior or value and allowing other code to execute related functionality. Hooks are triggered through “actions” which allow executing extra functionality, and “filters” that allow modifying values.
Hooks, which are widespread across the WordPress codebase, are one of the concepts that I most like from coding in WordPress. They allow plugins to interact with other plugins (or with a core or theme) in a clean way, providing some basic support of Aspect-Oriented Programming.
Good news is that Laravel (and in consequence October CMS) also supports the concept of hooks, which is called “events”. Events provide a simple observer implementation, enabling code to subscribe and listen for events that occur in the application and react as needed. Events make it possible to split a complex functionality into components, which can be installed independently yet collaborate with each other, thus enabling the creation of modular applications.
Dependence on JavaScript Libraries
The latest version of WordPress incorporates React-powered Gutenberg for its default content creation experience. Hence, WordPress development now relies by and large on JavaScript (predominantly through React), even though it is also possible to use other frameworks or libraries (as evidenced by Elementor Blocks for Gutenberg which is based on Marionette). In addition, WordPress still relies on Backbone.js (for the Media Manager) and jQuery (legacy code), however, we can expect the dependence on these libraries to wither away as Gutenberg is consolidated as the new norm.
October CMS depends on jQuery, which it uses to implement its optional AJAX framework to load data from the server without a browser page refresh.
Pages, Themes and Plugins
Both WordPress and October CMS treat a page as the basic unit for creating and publishing content (in WordPress case, in addition to the post), support changing the site’s look and feel through themes, and allow to install and extend the site’s functionalities through plugins. Even though the concepts are the same in both CMSs, there are a few differences in implementation that produce somewhat different behavior.
In WordPress, pages are defined as content and stored in the database. As a result, page content can be created through the CMS only (e.g. in the dashboard area), and switching from one theme to another doesn’t make an existing page become unavailable. This produces an overall frictionless experience.
In October CMS, on the other hand, pages are static files stored under the theme directory. On the positive side from this architectural decision, page content can be created from an external application, such as text editors like Sublime or Visual Studio Code. On the negative side, when switching from one theme to another, it is required to manually recreate or copy the pages from the current to the new theme, or otherwise, they will disappear.
Significantly, October CMS resolves routing through pages, hence pages are used not just as containers for content but also for functionality. For instance, a plugin for blogging depends on a page for displaying the list of blog posts under a chosen URL, another page to display a single blog post under another chosen URL, and so on. If any of these pages disappear, the associated functionality from the plugin becomes unavailable, and that URL will produce a 404. Hence, in October CMS themes and plugins are not thoroughly decoupled, and switching themes must be done carefully.
October CMS enables the creation of content from external applications. (Large preview)
Core vs Plugin Functionality
WordPress attempts to deliver a minimal core functionality which is enhanced through plugins. WordPress relies on the “80⁄20 rule” to decide if to include some functionality in its core experience or not. If it benefits 80% of the users it goes in, otherwise, it belongs to plugin-land. When adding plugins to a site, they can lead to bloat if too many plugins are installed. Plugins may also not work well with one another, or execute similar code or load similar assets, resulting in suboptimal performance. Hence, whereas launching a WordPress site is relatively easy, a bigger challenge is its general maintenance and being able to preserve an optimal and performant state when adding new features.
The WordPress plugin directory claims to have almost 55,000 plugins. (Large preview)
Likewise, October CMS also attempts to deliver a minimal core functionality, but on steroids: the only guaranteed functionality is the creation and publication of pages, and for everything else we will need to install one plugin or another, which is expressed as:
“Everything you need, and nothing you don't.”
The objective is clear: most simple sites are only composed of pages, with possibly no blog posts, users or login area. So why should the application load resources for these when they are not needed? As a consequence, functionalities for blogging, user management, translation and several others are released through the plugin directory.
Searching for 'Rainlab' in October’s plugins directory displays plugins created by October CMS' team. (Large preview)
October CMS also includes certain features in its core which (even though they are not always needed) can enhance the application significantly. For instance, it provides out-of-the-box support to upload media files to Amazon S3 and accesses them through the Rackspace CDN. It also includes a Media Manager which is mostly used through plugins, e.g. for adding images into a blog post. (Pages can also use the Media Manager to embed media files, however, the CMS also ships with an Assets section to upload media files for these which seems more suitable.)
I believe that October’s opinionatedness can perfectly enable us to produce an application that is as lean as possible — mostly concerning simple sites. However, it can also backfire and encourage bloat, because the line of what is needed and what is not is an arbitrary one, and it’s difficult to be set in advance by the CMS. This difficulty can be appreciated when considering the concept of a “user”: In WordPress, website users and website admins belong to the same user entity (and through roles and privileges we can make a user become an admin). In October CMS, these two are implemented separately, shipping in core the implementation for the website administrator which can log in to the backend area and modify the settings, and through a plugin the implementation of the website user. These two types of users have a different login process and a different database table for storing their data, thus arguably breaching the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle.
This problem arises not only concerning the behavior of an entity but also what data fields it must contain. For instance, should the website user data fields be predefined? Is a telephone field required? What about an Instagram URL field, considering that Instagram got kind of cool only recently? But then, when building a professional website shouldn’t we use a LinkedIn URL field instead? These decisions clearly depend on the application and can’t be decided by either CMS or plugin.
The October CMS plugin called User implements users but without any user field, on top of which plugin User Plus adds several arbitrary user fields, which are possibly not enough, so plugin User Plus+ adds yet other user fields. When, where and how do we stop this process?
Another problem is when there is no room to add new capabilities to an entity, which leads to the creation of another, extremely similar entity, just to support those required capabilities. For instance, October CMS ships with pages, and allows to create “static pages” through a plugin. Their nature is the same: both pages and static pages are saved as static files. The only difference between them (as far as I can tell) is that static pages are edited with a visual editor instead of the HTML editor, and can be added to menus. In my opinion, only structural differences, such as having one entity saved as a static file and the other one stored in the database, could justify creating a second entity for a page (there is a pull request to do this), but for simple features, as is the case currently, it constitutes development bloat.
In summary, a well implemented October CMS application can be very lean and efficient (e.g. by removing the database when not needed), but on the contrary it can also become unnecessarily bloated, forcing developers to implement several solutions for similar entities, and which can be very confusing to use (“Should I use a page or a static page?”). Because neither WordPress or October CMS has found a perfect solution for removing bloat, we must design either application architecture with care to avoid down-the-road pain.
Content Creation
Gutenberg makes two important contributions to WordPress: It uses components as the unit for building sites (which offers several advantages over coding blobs of HTML), and it introduces an entity called a “block” which, once Gutenberg Phase 2 is completed (presumably in 2019), will provide a unified way to incorporate content into the site, thus enabling a simpler user experience as opposed to the more chaotic process of adding content through shortcodes, TinyMCE buttons, menus, widgets, and others.
Since WordPress 5.0 Gutenberg is the default content creation experience. (Large preview)
Because Gutenberg blocks can produce and save static HTML as part of the blog post, then installing many Gutenberg blocks doesn’t necessarily translate into bloat on the website on the user side, but can be kept restricted to the admin side. Hence, Gutenberg can arguably be considered a good approach to produce websites in a modular way, with a simple yet powerful user experience for creating content. Possibly the biggest drawback is the (unavoidable, but not easily so) requirement to learn React, whose learning curve is rather steep.
If React components are the basic unit for creating content in WordPress, October CMS is based on the premise that knowing good old HTML is enough for building sites. Indeed, when creating a page, we are simply presented an HTML (Markup) editor:
If the page were solely static HTML, then there would be no need for a CMS. Instead, October CMS pages are written using Twig templates which are compiled to plain optimized PHP code. They can select a layout to include the scaffolding of the page (i.e. repetitive elements, such as the header, footer, and so on), can implement placeholders, which are defined on the layout to allow the page to customize content, and can include partials, which are reusable chunks of code. In addition, pages can include content blocks, which are either text, HTML or Markdown files that can be edited on their own and can attach components which are functionalities implemented through plugins. And finally, for whenever HTML is not enough and we need to produce dynamic code, we can add PHP functions.
The editor is all about HTML. There is no TinyMCE textarea for adding content in a visual manner — at least not through the default experience (this functionality belongs to plugin-land). Hence, having knowledge of HTML could be considered a must for using October CMS. In addition, the several different inputs for creating content (pages, layouts, placeholders, partials, content blocks, components, and PHP functions) may be very effective, however, it is certainly not as simple as through the unified block interface from WordPress. It can even get more complex since other elements can also be added (such as static pages and menus, and snippets), and some of them, such as pages and static pages, seemingly provide the same functionality, making it confusing to decide when to use one or the other.
As a result, I dare say that while pretty much anyone can use a WordPress site from the admin side, October CMS is more developer-friendly than non-technical user-friendly, so programmers may find it a joy to use, but certain other roles (marketers, sales people, and the like) may find it non-intuitive.
Media Manager
Both WordPress and October CMS are shipped with a Media Manager which allows adding media files to the site effortlessly, supporting the addition of multiple files simultaneously through a drag-and-drop interface and displaying the images within the content area. They look and behave similarly; the only notable differences I found are that WordPress’ Media Manager allows to embed image galleries, and October’s Media Manager allows to manually create a folder structure where to place the uploaded files.
October CMS ships with a powerful Media Manager. (Large preview)
Since the introduction of Gutenberg, though, WordPress’ media capabilities have been enhanced greatly, enabling to embed videos, pictures and photo galleries in place as compared to within a TinyMCE textarea (which only provides a non-accurate version of how it will look like in the site), and unlocking powerful, yet easy-to-use features as shown in this video.
Internationalization
WordPress core uses gettext to enable the translation of themes and plugins. Starting from a .pot file containing all strings to translate, we need to create a .po file containing their translation to the corresponding language/locale, and this file is then compiled to a binary .mo file suitable for fast translation extraction. Tools to perform these tasks include GlotPress (online) and Poedit (downloadable application). Conveniently, this mechanism also works for client-side localization for Gutenberg.
Poedit allows to translate strings for themes and plugins for WordPress. (Large preview)
WordPress currently doesn’t ship any solution in core to translate content, and will not do so until Phase 4 of Gutenberg (targeted for year 2020+). Until then, this functionality is provided by plugins which offer different strategies for storing and managing the translated content. For example, while plugins such as Polylang and WPML store each translation on its own row from a custom database table (which is clean since it doesn’t mix content together, but slower since it requires an additional INNER JOIN of two tables when querying the database), plugin qTranslate X stores all translations on the same field from the original database table (faster for querying the data, but content mixed all together can produce wreckage on the site if disabling the plugin). Hence, we can shop around and decide the most suitable strategy for our needs.
October CMS doesn’t ship the multilingual functionality through its core, but as a plugin created by the October CMS team that guarantees a faultless integration into the system. From a functional point of view, this plugin delivers what it promises. From a development point of view, it is not quite ideal how this plugin actually works. In WordPress, a page is simply a post with post type “page” and there is a single translation mechanism for them, but in October CMS, there are entities “page”, “static page” and “blog post” and, even though quite similar, they require three different implementations for their translations! Then, the content from a “page” can include message codes (e.g. codes called nav.content, header.title, and so on), each of which contains its translations for all locales as a serialized JSON object in database table rainlab_translate_messages. The content from a “static page” is created into a new static file per locale, however, all translated URLs for all locales are stored not in their corresponding file but instead on the default language’s file. The content for the “blog post” is stored as a serialized JSON object with one row per locale in database table rainlab_translate_attributes and the translated URL is stored with one row per locale in database table rainlab_translate_indexes. I don’t know if this complexity is due to how the plugin was implemented or whether it is due to October CMS’ architecture. Whichever the case, this is another instance of undesired bloat on the development side.
Plugin Management
Both WordPress and October CMS offer a sophisticated plugin manager which allows to search for plugins, install new plugins, and update currently-installed plugins to their latest version — all from within the backend.
October CMS enables to keep all plugins up-to-date effortlessly. (Large preview)
Dependency Management
October CMS uses Composer as the package manager of choice, enabling plugins to download and install their dependencies when being installed, thus delivering a painless experience.
WordPress, on the opposite side, hasn’t officially adopted Composer (or any PHP dependency manager) because the community can’t agree if WordPress is a site or a site dependency. Hence, if they require Composer for their projects, developers must add it on their own. With the switch to Gutenberg, npm has become the preferred JavaScript dependency manager, with a popular developer toolkit depending on it, and the client-side libraries being steadily released as autonomous packages in the npm registry.
Interaction With The Database
WordPress provides functions to retrieve database data (such as get_posts) and store it (such as wp_insert_post and wp_update_post). When retrieving data, we can pass parameters to filter, limit and order the results, in order to indicate if the result must be passed as an instance of a class or as an array of properties and others. When the function doesn’t fully satisfy our requirements (e.g. when we need to do an INNER JOIN with a custom table) then we can query the database directly through global variable $wpdb. When creating a plugin with a custom post type, the code will most likely be executing custom SQL queries to retrieve and/or save data into custom tables. In summary, WordPress attempts to provide access to the database through generic functions in the first stage, and through low-level access to the database in the second stage.
October CMS employs a different approach: Instead of connecting to the database straight away, the application can use Laravel’s Eloquent ORM to access and manipulate database data through instances of classes called Models, making the interaction with the database also be based on Object-Oriented Programming. It is high-level access; just by following the rules on how to create tables and set-up relationships among entities, a plugin can retrieve and/or save data without writing a line of SQL. For instance, the code below retrieves an object from the database through model Flight, modifies a property, and stores it again:
$flight = Flight::find(1);
$flight->name = 'Darwin to Adelaide';
$flight->save();
Upgrading The Data Model
Another reason for WordPress’ success (in addition to not breaking backward compatibility) has been its database architecture, which was engineered to enable applications to grow over time. This objective is accomplished through “meta” properties, i.e. properties that can be loosely added to a database object at any moment. These properties are not stored in a column from the corresponding entity table (either wp_posts, wp_users, wp_comments or wp_terms), but instead as a row in the corresponding “meta” table (wp_postmeta, wp_usermeta, wp_commentmeta or wp_termmeta) and retrieved doing an INNER JOIN. Hence, even though retrieving these meta values is slower, they provide unlimited flexibility, and the application’s data model rarely needs to be re-architected from scratch in order to implement some new functionality.
WordPress provides unlimited flexibility for upgrading the application’s data model. (Large preview)
October CMS doesn’t use meta properties but instead can store several arbitrary values, which are not directly mapped as columns in the database tables, as a serialized JSON object. Otherwise, when an object needs some new property, we need to add a new column on the corresponding table (which is the reason behind plugins User Plus and User Plus+, mentioned earlier on). To update the application’s database schema, October CMS relies on Laravel’s Migrations, which are sets of instructions to execute against the schema (such as add or drop a column, rename an index, etc) and which are executed when upgrading the software (e.g. when installing a plugin’s new version).
Headless Capabilities
Both WordPress and October CMS can be used as headless, i.e. treating the CMS as a content management system that makes content accessible through APIs, which allows to render the website on the client-side and can power other applications (such as mobile apps). Indeed, WordPress is steadily heading towards headless, since the Gutenberg content editor itself treats WordPress as a headless CMS (and, as a consequence, Gutenberg can also work with any other CMS too, as Drupal Gutenberg demonstrates).
A headless system needs to implement some API to return the data, such as REST and GraphQL. WordPress supports REST through WP REST API (merged in core), exposing endpoints under some predefined route /wp-json/wp/v2/...; October CMS supports REST through plugins RESTful and API Generator, which allow to create custom endpoints and, as a consequence, support versioning as part of the endpoint URL and can offer a better security against bots. Concerning GraphQL, WordPress supports it through WPGraphQL, while October CMS currently has no implementations for it.
Quite importantly, a headless system needs to offer powerful content management capabilities. As mentioned earlier on, WordPress has a very solid database architecture, offering a plethora of data entities (users, posts and custom posts, pages, categories, tags and custom taxonomies, comments) over which the application can be reasonably well modelled, meta properties to extend these data entities (enabling the application to upgrade its data model accordingly and without major changes), and with plugin Advanced Custom Fields filling the gap to construct relationships among the data entities. In addition, plugin VersionPress allows to version control the database content using Git. Hence, WordPress is undoubtedly a good fit for managing content, as demonstrated in severalprojectsinthewild.
On its part, and as mentioned earlier on, October CMS can omit the database and behave as a flat-file system, or it can have a database and behave as a hybrid, storing the content from pages as static files and blog posts (and others) on the database. As a consequence, content is not centralized, and its management involves a different approach. For instance, while we can use Git to version control pages, there is no support to version control the database per se; the solution to this is to populate data into the database through Seeders which, being code, can be put under version control and executed upon deployment. In addition, October CMS doesn’t offer a baked-in database model featuring predefined data entities that can support the needs of most applications. Hence, more likely than not the application will need custom development to implement its data model, which means more work, but also means that it can be more efficient (e.g. accessing a property from a column is faster than from a row in another table through an INNER JOIN, which is the case with WordPress’ meta properties).
CLI Support
Both WordPress and October CMS can be interacted with from the console through a Command Line Interface (CLI): WordPress through WP-CLI and October CMS through Laravel’s Artisan. In addition to Laravel’s commands, October CMS implements several custom commands for updating the system, migrating the database, and others. These tools make it very convenient to access the site from outside a browser, for instance for testing purposes.
Managed Hosting
It is not a problem finding a managed hosting provider for a WordPress site: given WordPress’ market share, there are dozens (if not hundreds) of providers out there vying with each other for the business, constituting a very dynamic market. The only problem is finding the most suitable provider for our specific sites based on all of their offerings, which can vary based on price, quality, type (shared or dedicated services), bandwidth and storage size, customer support, location, frequency of renewal of equipment, and other variables which we can navigate mainly through reviews comparing them (such as this one, this one or this one).
Even though nothing near as many as WordPress, October CMS still enjoys the offering from several hosting providers, which allows for some consideration and selection. Many of them are listed as October Partners, and several others are found DuckDuckGoing, but since I haven’t found any independent review of them or article comparing them, the task of finding out the most suitable one will take some effort.
Marketplace, Ecosystem And Cost
WordPress’ commercial ecosystem is estimated to be USD $10 billion/year, evidencing how many people and companies have managed to make a living by offering WordPress products and services, such as the creation of sites, hosting, theme and plugin development, support, security, and others. Indeed, its size is so big it is even bloated, meaning that it is very common to find different plugins solving the same problem, plugins that underdeliver, underperform or have not been updated for years, and themes which seem to look-alike each other. However, when creating a new site, the size and variety of the ecosystem also means that we will most likely find at least one plugin implementing each of the required functionalities, enabling us to save money by not having to develop the functionality ourselves, and the availability of customizable themes enables to produce a reasonably distinctive-looking site with minimal effort. As a consequence, we can easily create and launch a WordPress site for less than USD $100, making WordPress a sensible option for projects of any budget.
Being relatively new (only five years so far), OctoberCMS certainly doesn’t enjoy anything near WordPress’ marketplace and ecosystem sizes, however, it has been growing steadily so its size is bound to become bigger. Currently, its marketplace boasts 600+ plugins, and only a handful of themes. Concerning plugins, the October CMS team is requesting the community to put their effort into the creation of original plugins, delivering functionality not yet provided by any other plugin.
Hence, even though 600+ plugins doesn’t sound like much, at least these translate into 600+ different functionalities. This way, even though it is not possible to choose among several vendors, at least we can expect to have those basic website features (such as blogging, comments, forum, integration with social media, e-commerce, and others) to be covered. Also, since October’s founders are personally reviewing all submitted plugins and judging them according to quality guidelines, we can expect these plugins to perform as expected. As another plus, October plugins can incorporate elements from Laravel packages (even though not all of them are compatible with October, at least not without some hacks). Concerning themes, the low number of offerings implies we will most likely need to develop our own theme by hiring a developer for the task. In fact, I dare say that the theme in October CMS will most likely be a custom development, since themes and plugins are not thoroughly decoupled (as explained earlier), with the consequence that a market for easily-swappable themes is more difficult to arise. (This is a temporary problem though: once this pull request is resolved, pages will be able to be stored in the database, and swapping themes should not disrupt functionality.)
In my opinion, because of the smaller offerings of themes and plugins, creating a simple site with OctoberCMS will be more expensive than creating a simple WordPress site. For complex sites, however, October’s better architecture (Object-Oriented Programming and Model-View-Controller paradigms) makes the software more maintainable and, as a consequence, potentially cheaper.
Community
Being a part of and having access, WordPress’ community represents one of the most compelling reasons for using WordPress. This is not simply as a matter of size (powering nearly one third of all websites in the world, there are so many stakeholders involved with WordPress, and its community is representatively big) but also as a matter of diversity. The WordPress community involves people from many different professions (developers, marketers, designers, bloggers, sales people, and so on), from all continents and countries, speaking countless languages, from different social, educational and economic backgrounds, with or without disabilities, from corporate, not-for-profit and governmental organizations, and others. Hence, it is quite likely that, for whatever problem we encounter, somebody will be able to help on any of the support forums. And contributing to WordPress is pretty straightforward too: The Make WordPress group congregates stakeholders interested in supporting different projects (accessibility, design, internationalization, and many others) and organizes how and how regularly they communicate — mostly through some dedicated channel on its Slack workspace.
Furthermore, the WordPress community is real and tangible: it doesn’t exist just online, but it gathers offline in WordCamps and meetups all over the world; in 2018, there were a total of 145 WordCamps in 48 countries with over 45,000 tickets sold, and a total of 5,400 meetup events from 687 meetup groups. Hence, it is likely that there is a local chapter nearby which anyone can join to ask for help, learn how to use the platform, keep learning on a regular basis, and teach others as well. In this sense, WordPress is not just a CMS but, more importantly, it’s also people, and considering to leave WordPress should never be done only on its technical merits but on the power of its community, too.
WordCamp Kuala Lumpur 2017 drew more than 200 attendees, coming from several countries. (Large preview)
October CMS’ community is nothing near in size or diversity as WordPress’, even though it has been growing steadily following the increasing popularity of the software. October provides a support forum to ask for help, however, it is not very active. A Slack workspace exists which is pretty active and where, quite importantly, October’s founders participate regularly, helping make sure that all enquiries are properly addressed. This channel is a great source for learning low-level tips and tricks about the software, however, it is geared towards developers mainly: There are no channels concerning accessibility, design, internationalization, and other topics as in the WordPress community, at least not yet. Currently, there are no conferences concerning October CMS, but there is Laracon, the conference for the Laravel community.
Maintainers And Governance
Can we trust that the software will be maintained in the long term, so that if we decide to start a project today, we will not need to migrate to some other platform down the road? How many people are taking care of developing the software? And who is deciding in what direction the software moves towards?
Powering one-third of all sites in the world, WordPress is not short of stakeholders contributing to the software; hence we need not fear that the software will fall into decay. However, WordPress is going through internal deliberations concerning its governance model, with many members of the community expressing that decisions concerning WordPress’s direction are being taken unilaterally by Automattic, the company running WordPress.com. Center stage of this perception was the decision to launch Gutenberg, which many members disagreed with, and which suffered a lack of proper communication by the project leads during its development and release. As a consequence, many community members are questioning the role of “benign dictator”, which has been historically granted to WordPress’ founder and Automattic’s CEO Matt Mullenweg, and researching different governance models to find a more suitable one for the future of WordPress. It is yet to be seen if this quest produces any result, or if the status quo perseveres.
Decisions concerning October CMS’ direction are mainly taken by founders Alexey Bobkov and Samuel Georges and developer and community manager Luke Towers, which keep the project going strong. October CMS doesn’t have the luxury of having a governance problem yet: Its current concern is how to make the project sustainable by generating income for the core software’s maintainers.
Documentation
WordPress documentation in its own site is not extremely comprehensive, but it does the job reasonably well. However, when taking all of the documentation about WordPress into account from all sources, such as general sites (Smashing Magazine, CSS tricks, and many others), specialized sites (WPShout, WPBeginner, and many others), personal blogs, online courses, and so on, there is practically no aspect of dealing with WordPress that hasn’t already been covered.
October CMS doesn’t enjoy anything near the many third-party courses, tutorials or blog posts about it as much as WordPress does, however, the documentation on its site is reasonably comprehensive and certainly enough to start coding. October founders also regularly add new documentation through tutorials. One aspect that I personally enjoyed is the duplication of Laravel’s documentation into October’s documentation for everything of relevance, so the reader must not fill the gaps by him/herself and having to guess what is October’s domain and what is Laravel’s. However, this is not 100% perfect. October’s documentation uses terms originating from Laravel, such as middleware, service containers, facades and contracts, without adequately explaining what these are. Then, reading Laravel’s documentation in advance can be helpful (luckily, Laravel’s documentation is decidedly comprehensive, and Laravel’s screencasts, Laracasts, are another great source of learning, not just concerning Laravel but web development in general).
Conclusion
I set out to discover what features may be enticing for developers looking for alternatives to WordPress by comparing WordPress to a similar CMS, which I defined as being free and open source, based in PHP and producing dynamic content, and enjoying the support from some community. From the CMSs fulfilling these conditions, I chose October CMS for the comparison because of the knowledge I got about it, and because I appreciated its clean and modular coding approach as provided by Laravel, which could offer a fresh and modern perspective for building sites.
This article did not intend to pick a winner, but simply analyze when it makes sense to choose one or the other CMS, highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. There is no “best” CMS: only the most suitable CMS for a specific situation. Furthermore, anyone looking for a CMS to use on a particular project with a specific team and given a certain budget, should do some research and compare all the offerings out there to find out which one is most suitable for the particular context. It’s important not to limit to a few CMSs as I’ve done here in this article, but instead give a chance to all of them.
On a personal note, as a developer, what I found in October CMS is really appealing to me, mostly its ability to build modular applications as provided through Laravel. I would certainly consider this CMS for a new website. However, in the process of writing this article I also “rediscovered” WordPress. Being so popular, WordPress receives more than its fair share of criticisms, mostly concerning its old codebase and, since recently, the introduction of Gutenberg; however, WordPress also has certain excellent features (such as its super-scalable database model) which are seldom praised but should be taken into account too. And most importantly, WordPress should not be considered on its technical aspects alone: in particular, the size of its community and ecosystem places it a level or two above its alternatives. In a nutshell, some projects may benefit from sticking to WordPress, while others may better rely on October CMS or another platform.
As a final note, I would like to remark that exploring how another CMS works is a very rewarding activity on its own, independent of the decision reached concerning whether to use that particular CMS or not. In my case, I had been working for years on WordPress alone, and delving into October CMS was very refreshing since it taught me many things (such as the existence of PHP Standards Recommendations) which I had not been exposed to through WordPress. I may now decide to switch CMSs, or stick to WordPress knowing how to produce better code.
When my team of graduate students and I sent the first message over the internet on a warm Los Angeles evening in October, 1969, little did we suspect that we were at the start of a worldwide revolution. After we typed the first two letters from our computer room at UCLA, namely, “Lo” for “Login,” the network crashed.
Hence, the first internet message was “Lo” as in “Lo and behold” – inadvertently, we had delivered a message that was succinct, powerful, and prophetic.
The ARPANET, as it was called back then, was designed by government, industry and academia so scientists and academics could access each other’s computing resources and trade large research files, saving time, money and travel costs. ARPA, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, (now called “DARPA”) awarded a contract to scientists at the private firm Bolt Beranek and Newman to implement a router, or Interface Message Processor; UCLA was chosen to be the first node in this fledgling network.
By December, 1969, there were only four nodes – UCLA, Stanford Research Institute, the University of California-Santa Barbara and the University of Utah. The network grew exponentially from its earliest days, with the number of connected host computers reaching 100 by 1977, 100,000 by 1989, a million by the early 1990’s, and a billion by 2012; it now serves more than half the planet’s population.
Along the way, we found ourselves constantly surprised by unanticipated applications that suddenly appeared and gained huge adoption across the Internet; this was the case with email, the World Wide Web, peer-to-peer file sharing, user generated content, Napster, YouTube, Instagram, social networking, etc.
It sounds utopian, but in those early days, we enjoyed a wonderful culture of openness, collaboration, sharing, trust and ethics. That’s how the Internet was conceived and nurtured. I knew everyone on the ARPANET in those early days, and we were all well-behaved. In fact, that adherence to “netiquette” persisted for the first two decades of the Internet.
Today, almost no one would say that the internet was unequivocally wonderful, open, collaborative, trustworthy or ethical. How did a medium created for sharing data and information turn into such a mixed blessing of questionable information? How did we go from collaboration to competition, from consensus to dissention, from a reliable digital resource to an amplifier of questionable information?
The decline began in the early 1990s when spam first appeared at the same time there was an intensifying drive to monetize the Internet as it reached deeply into the world of the consumer. This enabled many aspects of the dark side to emerge (fraud, invasion of privacy, fake news, denial of service, etc.).
It also changed the nature of internet technical progress and innovations as risk aversion began to stifle the earlier culture of “moon shots”. We are currently still suffering from those shifts. The internet was designed to promote decentralized information, democracy and consensus based upon shared values and factual information. In this it has disappointed to fully achieve the aspirations of its founding fathers.
As the private sector gained more influence, their policies and goals began to dominate the nature of the Internet. Commercial policies gained influence, companies could charge for domain registration, and credit card encryption opened the door for e-commerce. Private firms like AOL, CompuServe and Earthlink would soon charge monthly fees for access, turning the service from a public good into a private enterprise.
This monetization of the internet has changed it flavor. On the one hand, it has led to valuable services of great value. Here one can list pervasive search engines, access to extensive information repositories, consumer aids, entertainment, education, connectivity among humans, etc. On the other hand, it has led to excess and control in a number of domains.
Among these one can identify restricted access by corporations and governments, limited progress in technology deployment when the economic incentives are not aligned with (possibly short term) corporate interests, excessive use of social media for many forms of influence, etc.
If we ask what we could have done to mitigate some of these problems, one can easily name two. First, we should have provided strong file authentication – the ability to guarantee that the file that I receive is an unaltered copy of the file I requested. Second, we should have provided strong user authentication – the ability for a user to prove that he/she is whom they claim to be.
Had we done so, we should have turned off these capabilities in the early days (when false files were not being dispatched and when users were not falsifying their identities). However, as the dark side began to emerge, we could have then gradually turned on these protections to counteract the abuses at a level to match the extent of the abuse. Since we did not provide an easy way to provide these capabilities from the start, we suffer from the fact that it is problematic to do so for today’s vast legacy system we call the Internet.
Having come these 50 years since its birth, how is the Internet likely to evolve over the next 50? What will it look like?
That’s a foggy crystal ball. But we can foresee that it is fast on its way to becoming “invisible” (as I predicted 50 years ago) in the sense that it will and should disappear into the infrastructure.
It should be as simple and convenient to use as is electricity; electricity is straightforwardly available via a trivially simple interface by plugging it into the wall; you don’t know or care how it gets there or where it comes from, but it delivers its services on demand.
Sadly, the internet is far more complicated to access than that. When I walk into a room, the room should know I’m there and it should provide to me the services and applications that match my profile, privileges and preferences. I should be able to interact with the system using the usual human communication methods of speech, gestures, haptics, etc.
We are rapidly moving into such a future as the Internet of Things pervades our environmental infrastructure with logic, memory, processors, cameras, microphones, speakers, displays, holograms, sensors. Such an invisible infrastructure coupled with intelligent software agents imbedded in the internet will seamlessly deliver such services. In a word, the internet will essentially be a pervasive global nervous system.
That is what I judge will be the likely essence of the future infrastructure. However, as I said above, the applications and services are extremely hard to predict as they come out of the blue as sudden, unanticipated, explosive surprises! Indeed, we have created a global system for frequently shocking us with surprises – what an interesting world that could be!
Ending Sales Team Resistance to Your Pricing Initiatives
Too many B2B companies today fail to activate pricing initiatives because they don’t focus on overcoming resistance from the sales team. The key stakeholder in pricing execution is the sales organization. Without them,
Factory software tools are often out of reach of small manufacturers, forcing them to operate with inefficient manual systems. WorkClout, a member of the Y Combinator Winter 2019 class, wants to change that by offering a more affordable SaaS alternative to traditional manufacturing software solutions.
Company co-founder and CEO Arjun Patel grew up helping out in his Dad’s factory and saw first-hand how difficult it is for small factory owners to automate. He says that traditional floor-management tools are expensive and challenging to implement.
“What motivated me is when my dad was trying to implement a similar system,” Patel said, noting that his father’s system had cost more than $240,000, took over a year to get going and wasn’t really doing what he wanted it to do. That’s when he decided to help.
He teamed up with Bryan Trang, who became the CPO, and Richard Girges, who became the CTO, to build the system that his dad (and others in a similar situation) needed. Specifically, the company developed a cloud software solution that helps manufacturers increase their operational efficiency. “Two things that we do really well is track every action on the factory floor and use that data to make suggestions on how to increase efficiency. We also determine how much work can be done in a given time period, taking finite resources into consideration,” Patel explained.
He said that one of the main problems that small-to-medium sized manufacturers face is a lack of visibility into their businesses. WorkClout looks at orders, activities, labor and resources to determine the best course of action to complete an order in the most cost-effective way.
“WorkClout gives our customers a better way to allocate resources and greater visibility of what’s actually happening on the factory floor. The more data that they have, the more accurate picture they have of what’s going on,” Patel said.
Production Schedule view. Screenshot: WorkClout
The company is still working on the pricing model, but today it charges administrative users like plant management, accounting and sales. Machine operators get access to the data for free. The current rate for paid users starts at $99 per user per month. There is an additional one-time charge for implementation and training.
As for the Y Combinator experience, Patel says that it has helped him focus on what’s important. “It really makes you hone in on building the product and getting customers, then making sure those two things are leading to customer happiness,” he said.
While the company does have to help customers get going today, the goal is to make the product more self-serve over time as they begin to understand the different verticals for which they are developing solutions. The startup launched in December and already has 13 customers, generating $100,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR), according to Patel.
Mark Cuban may be the most famous bootstrapped billionaire in America. According to him, the secret to success is straightforward: sales cures all. It is important to find out why sales come first — and how to make more of them.
Why sales come first.
Startups today are obsessed with metrics — but it seems many startups can’t sell. Many startups and other businesses are preoccupied with user acquisition. Cuban and other experts argue that without sales, none of the other stuff matters. Companies must figure out how to transform influence into profit, or before long, their would-be customers (and investors) will find other brands to replace them.
Why sales matter more than ever.
The most successful startups don’t appeal to everyone at first, nor all at once. Instead, they focus on a hyper-specific niche, redefine that niche and then use their positioning to expand.
For most companies, that means selling a new product or service to a group of people in desperate need of change. Buzz is great, but buzz can only go so far. Startups need to get their products in the hands of people who can use them and leverage successful case studies into further sales.
Sales — how to make more of them.
Sure, some of the early cases will encounter obstacles. That’s the point. By making early sales and getting past the problems that arise, startups can fix the issues and turn around to sell more products with fewer problems. Sales and hands-on user experiences — not marketing and internal testing — are the key ingredients to product optimization and company growth.
Startups don’t just sell to grow, though. They have to sell to survive. Investor money doesn’t last forever, and when it runs out, cash in the bank allows startups to keep going without asking for more. Even if the company needs an influx of cash, sales allow founders to play hardball in negotiations with investors who would otherwise demand bigger chunks of stock.
A sales-driven startup is a startup on the right track. How can founders make the sales they need to survive?
1. Turn thought leadership into a conversion tool.
Blogs, whitepapers and other thought leadership vehicles are great tools to boost your brand. They are tools for turning interested parties into buyers.
Figure out which questions your prospects ask most frequently and build content around those questions. Highlight correct information in your marketing content. Then, A/B test different sales techniques to turn those questions into conversions.
If your customer is better informed — you’ll have found “how to make more of them.
Do your prospects want to know the specifics of one of your core features? Create a post about that feature and send an email to people who would benefit from its use. Make it easy for visitors to either purchase directly from the landing page or view other articles about what your company does. Keep users a click away from a conversion or a conversation with a sales agent no matter where they go on your site.
2. Get personal with sales reps.
Salespeople have a hard job. They must get in front of prospects every day, which means they must always keep their spirits up. That constant pressure to stay chipper can lead to emotional burnout, especially when reps face multiple rejections in a row.
Regularly visit with salespeople to talk about the challenges they face.
Let sales and marketing vent their frustrations. Don’t tell them things like, “I want solutions, not problems.” Treat them with respect and take their concerns seriously. If they’re good at what they do, they can tell you what would help them do their jobs better.
Do salespeople not know enough about the products they sell?
Connect them with developers and designers to help them learn. Take them to the sites of successful clients to show them how those clients get the most value from the products and services. When salespeople start to exhibit signs of burnout, don’t double the pressure — allow them to step back, regroup and get back up when they’re ready.
3. Eliminate administrative work for sales teams.
If salespeople are supposed to make money, why do they spend barely a third of their time selling?
According to one report from InsideSales.com Labs, salespeople spend 37 percent of their time generating revenue, 18 percent of their time in CRMs and 10 percent of their time working on spreadsheets.
You didn’t hire your top sellers to worry about spreadsheets: you hired them to convince people to buy your products.
Invest in tools that do the heavy administrative lifting for your sales and marketing teams. This means even when those tools are more expensive than the other options. Hire a sales enablement assistant or two to take care of the busywork so salespeople can spend more of their time on the phone and at prospect sites.
Startups can’t afford to waste all their time posturing and branding.
Sales beget more sales, and companies that fail to convert leave themselves vulnerable to competitors. All competitors may have been able to turn buzz into dollars and you can too. Rethink your marketing strategy to include more conversion opportunities and give your salespeople the attention and tools they deserve to get your sales numbers higher.
We are celebrating Women’s History Month and we’d be remiss if we didn’t talk about women in sales. It’s no secret that women are drastically under-represented in sales, holding only 4 out of every 10 sales positions. This is increasingly the case as you look up the leadership ladder, with only 1 in 4 executives being female. But just because men outrank women, does that necessarily mean that they are better at selling?
Let’s take a look at just a few of the ways women have the upper-hand in sales and some key takeaways that everybody, regardless of gender, should take into consideration.
1) Natural Social Skills
A study from US psychological testing firm Arch Profile found that female sales reps tend to be more helpful and attentive to detail. These natural social skills mean that they are more likely to identify a solution rather than just push a product in efforts to make the sale. Men’s traditionally transactional attitude doesn’t fly in a complex sale where buyers have more options than ever before, and are looking for a partnership from vendors. An aggressive approach to selling can turn buyers off, and just the tone of a sales rep can be enough to eliminate a company’s product or service from consideration.
Key Takeaway: Sales coaching and training should focus on helping reps learn different ways to approach sales interactions. Further, reps should take the time to build and develop those business relationships that are based on honesty, credibility, and authenticity. At every prospect touch point, look for ways that you can add value, such as with relevant content, cementing your position as the buyer’s trusted advisor.
2) Willingness to Listen
Though a common stereotype, the idea that women are better listeners is one is backed by science. A team from Cambridge University found that the part of the brain linked to the ability to listen was more prominent in women than in men.
A common mistake that sales reps make is talking too much and failing to practice active listening. But a survey from Inc. Magazine found that one of the top reasons buyers moved forward with a specific vendor was because they “felt that the salesperson understood their needs best.”
Key Takeaway: Selling isn’t about talking – it’s more about listening and taking the time to understand your prospects’ needs, challenges, and pain points. Ask open-ended questions to gain insight into these topics and paraphrase what they just said to validate and demonstrate that you understand their problem. Then use those conversations as a launch point to challenge and engage prospects.
3) Strategic Flexibility
Sales has long been a boys’ club, involving activities traditionally viewed as more masculine (think back to sales execs in TV shows like Bewitched or Mad Men). Because of this outdated cultural mindset (thankfully, one that doesn’t exist at every company), there can be a hesitation to deviate from selling the way you have always sold in the past. For example, some companies have golf outings with clients that tend to cater more to men (both reps and clients!) that can deter women from participating. The result? Lower customer engagement and lost sales opportunities. Since women have historically had to work harder just to prove themselves and to work their way up, they are often more willing and open to trying new things, such as the latest technologies, pilot programs, and fresh, creative sales tactics.
Key Takeaway: The status quo isn’t always the way to go! The B2B buying space is in a constant state of change. To continue to see sales success, reps must adapt to evolving buyer expectations, forces in the marketplace, and even goals and processes internally.
4) Informed Decision-Making
In their book Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing, authors Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman conducted research that suggests women don’t take as many risks because they are better at assessing odds and can make more informed decisions. Another study from Duke University echoes this sentiment, finding that when men are under stress (as is common when those monthly and quarterly goals loom ahead), they are more likely to make rash decisions and take more costly risks. The same study found that women under similar pressure exhibited improved decision-making abilities, conducting thorough research and going after more advantageous decisions with surer successes (versus a small chance of a huge achievement). So basically, women aren’t taking fewer risks – they are merely taking better risks.
Key Takeaway: Use data to help make informed decisions, from top of the pipeline through post-sale. Data-driven insights can help reps make decisions about factors that may affect the success of a sale, such as how to prioritize prospects, what content to share to drive engagement, and which messaging to use in certain interactions.
Another reason that gender diversity in sales is so important: a study conducted by Credit Suisse found that sales organizations with at least one female on their board outperformed their peers with all-male boards by 26 percent!
Empowering women in sales isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do. Read this guide to understand further what it means to be a woman in sales and how to take your selling to the next level.
In addition to our Sunday App of the Week feature, we also summarize some of our favorite B2B sales & marketing posts from around the Web each week. We’ll miss a ton of great stuff, so if you found something you think is worth sharing please add it to the comments below.
Unlocking metrics that matter
“Technology that gives consumers a voice to tell brands what they think helps marketers measure the more valuable nuances below the top-line metrics noise.” Great article, Tod Loofbourrow.
There are plenty of mistakes that can happen when you market your software product and to avoid these unnecessary mishaps certain precautions must be taken. From core competencies to poor timing, there are definitely a lot of things to watch out for.
Here are 7 common lead generation mistakes that software companies make in software selling along with some tips on how to avoid them:
1. Not Knowing the Core Competency of your Competitors
It is a natural default for potential buyers to compare and contrast specifications most especially when it entails entrusting their business processes to the effectiveness of the software tool being offered. When marketing your software product, be prepared to counter or give additional details about what you are selling and how it stands out from the competitor mentioned.
Do this professionally. Avoid bad mouthing the features being offered by your competitors. Instead, highlight what makes your product worth investing in and offer to add specific features that will address their needs.
2. Not Working with a Software Marketing Specialist at the Start
If you want to dominate the market, make sure to do things right from the start. This means establishing a team of specialists in your industry who can give you a better understanding of the process from end-to-end and the right guidance at the same time.
Working together with a software marketing specialist/firm allows you to cut your total marketing spend or get better output (e.g.: more qualified leads, higher conversion, and faster sales turnout) with the same budget.
How to identify the right software lead generation partner?
Narrow down your choices to the companies with experience
Review their track record, specifically their software lead generation experience
Asses how well they integrate with your current marketing system
3. Marketing your Product to the Wrong Set of People
Spending so much of your resources marketing to the wrong set of potential buyers is an awful waste of your precious time. Some potential buyers seem promising in the beginning because they will respond to the way you engage them. Unknown to you, they will easily drop your proposal after spending so much time expounding on your product.
Remember that the right people will always translate into actual sales. Finding the right people for your software product is only possible by first identifying businesses who are highly likely going to need your software product. Identify the buyer personas who can be expected to respond well to your marketing initiatives.
A buyer persona, while semi-fictional in essence, represents the kind of buyers you should be targeting. Common data that would be accessible to you include demographics, buying behavior, goals, and motivations.
How can software companies find the right software leads & buyers?
Account-based marketing lets you engage multiple contacts/prospects within a target company using messages tailored to each contact’s role.
By connecting with different company contacts, you can improve your brand’s chances of reaching the right decision maker.
4. Believing that Word of Mouth Marketing Happens Naturally
Sure, word of mouth can work for some products. Unfortunately, not as well as you may hope for a software product such as the one you are trying to sell. A person who says he likes your software better than that of your competitor will not create a snowball effect.
If you want word of mouth to work beautifully for you as a marketing initiative, you have to get the information out to as many people as possible in order to start an effective trend. These people need to be convinced that your software product works and that it addresses a very important need. Positioning your product as a solution will really do wonders for your business.
How can ABM drive brand advocacy?
We now know that through ABM, you can bring your offer to multiple stakeholders. But by pairing ABM with multi-channel marketing, your touchpoints are in context, resulting in a better overall experience which is the foundation of every solid brand advocacy program.
5. Giving Excessive Amount of Information
If you are unable to summarize the best features of your product in 2-3 sentences, you may have to sit down with your team again to come up with this. Avoid giving too much information that has the potential to confuse or over educate your target clients. It tends to complicate their decision making when they have too many information they need to sift through and understand at the same time.
6. Poor Timing
In business, timing is everything. Study what is the best time to launch your marketing campaign, make a sales call or send out sales emails. You wouldn’t want to be caught in the middle of a tight season when your target clients are spending on other important expenses and would most likely reject your sales pitch.
How Marketing Automation fixes ill-timed lead generation touchpoints
With the right marketing automation platform, you can deliver relevant personalized messages across channels.
7. Making a Complicated Buying Process
A lot of potential buyers get turned off by complicated buying processes. The simpler the process, the better for a lot of business owners. For instance, there are vendors whose call-to-action is unclear or too complex to comprehend.
When buyers encounter this kind of complication, they tend to have second thoughts and this may result in a lost sales opportunity. Make sure that your product is easy to purchase.
There are a few things in marketing that tend to remain constant—one of them is the need to measure success and, where possible, find ways to duplicate it.
But with so many marketing automation platforms out there, teams can feel both overwhelmed and under-informed on the possibilities. Which data is the right data, and what standard is best? As marketers we have to be both pragmatic and flexible: expecting immediate pay-back or ROI on all marketing strategies just isn’t realistic, but applying the right kind of measurement can have a huge effect on campaigns across the board. Figuring out how to measure properly is crucial to long-term goals.
First Things First: The Transformational Marketing Journey
Keep in mind a familiar pattern that tends to emerge when digital campaigns or tactics are launched, and know that the ride is almost never perfectly smooth sailing (if it seems like it is, you should start worrying). Usually, it all begins in an “up” mood, with a lot of what’s called “Uninformed Optimism”; but once the campaign is initiated, the effort can fall quickly into the “Valley of Despair.” You might call this, simply, a reality check. As I write in my book, this period of despair is all about the learning curve—you’ll have to ask yourself a lot of questions and reassess your goals. There will be a notable decline in team performance and productivity, but it’s really nothing to worry about too much in the end.
However, do keep in mind that the amount of time you spend in this valley will determine how much success you have with your transformation overall. The longer you suffer with low performance, the less likely it is that you will hit your most ambitious goals.
Once you hit rock bottom, another phenomenon appears—creative tension. Now, tension can often be a bad thing, but in this case it is precisely what pulls you out of the valley. When things start to go bad, and disagreements crop up, there might be some secondary goals that get caught in the crossfire. Stick with it, though, and you’ll see that very often its the crisis itself that helps pull you out of stasis. Once you get over your differences and reevaluate, you’ll find you’re ahead of the game.
Undergoing transformative new projects or campaigns usually follows a familiar pattern.
Here are some additional principles to think about before you initiate your digital transformation at any level of the game, whether it be marketing, sales, logistics, or change management.
1. Strategize
Where do you want you brand to be in 3–5 years? List your goals and reexamine the assumptions the underly your KPIs for the balance sheet. Figure out what your brand’s ultimate destination will be, from top campaign priorities down to the bottom line itself. Clarity in strategy means that measuring and achieving success will be easier and more predictable in the long-term.
2. Develop
Create a roadmap to your overall goals and additional maps to each smaller goal. How will you reach to each of them, and what are your contingency plans? Define your method and approach, sticking closely to it while also being open to on-the-fly adjustments. Continue to grow and expand your strategy and goals based on new input, using the best data and your top team members to develop a strategy that you can use time and time again.
3. Target
To market a brand, you need to know who your audience is. Decide who your customers are and what market they’re in. Are they moms? CMOs? Sports fans? Tweens? The best way to cement this in your vision is to use clear buyer personas. When a new campaign kicks off, we all start with great intentions and a strong focus, but once distractions and trouble spots pop up you can lose sight of your why you’re doing what you’re doing—and who you’re doing it for. Creating a concise, well-researched buyer persona or personas can save you a lot of trouble in this regard.
4. Align
Not only must the CEO and CMO be aligned in strategic goals and objectives, the entire team from your docket of freelancers to your top staff must be in lock-step. Determine short and long-term plans across the board and include as many people possible. The more the better. In addition, include your financial team in investment decisions that can establish contingency plans in the event of needed budget cuts. The financial team must be the group that establishes core financial measures for ROI, so ensure they are a part of planning, development, and execution.
5. Automate
Although it seems that marketing agencies are still slow to adapt to automation, it is undeniable that marketing platforms like HubSpot, Salesforce’s Pardot, and Marketo offer an enormously useful range of tools, from integrating CRMs to tying marketing efforts directly to qualified sales leads. Automation connects web traffic to prospects and prospects to closed sales, and does so efficiently and with a trail of analyzable data. My advice? Take advantage of the data and tools that high-quality automation provides. If needed, hire a short- or long-term specialist to train you in the the platform. You won’t regret it.
6. Measure
It’s critical to establish quantitative key performance indicators (KPIs), such as category management, specific objectives, and sales. But it’s equally important to establish qualitative KPIs such as loyalty, reputation management, and third-party credibility. Success measurement is not black and white—marketers must adopt a clear and relevant indicators in order to measure success in all areas of the game.
7. Analyze
Examine your data closely—but don’t get paralyzed by the numbers. Remain focused on the company strategy. Share results of data analysis and discuss what they mean for future campaigns. Again, data means a lot to your creative team but also to your financial team, so task one or two people with keeping track of the data and providing regular or at least periodic reports.
8. Revisit
It is critical to realign your goals so as to continue to effectively implement strategy, which means you may have to revisit your core goals and principles. It isn’t the end of the world to dramatically alter or throw out major parts of your plan as along as you’re tracking progress and pivoting in the right direction. Realize that in the absence of continuously realigning goals, your ROI will be extremely tough (read: impossible) to measure. It’s been shown that, by doing this, successful marketers can grow market share even during a recession!
9. Repeat
Your digital campaign will not be successful without a proven strategy. After a campaign is over, find out the reasoning behind everything that happened—answer all the “whys.” These answers should align with your overall brand strategy. If you had failures, examine them. If it was a general success, take the best portions of that and reuse them. There’s nothing wrong with plagiarizing yourself—as long as you keep the door open to new ideas! Often continued success will depend on doing both.
Everyone’s talking about how business needs to break down internal departmental silos. Why it’s important for the Sales department and the Marketing department to play nicely with each other. Why other departments such as Customer Services, Support, and even R&D should be in considered in the mix too.
Then there’s the Finance department. And that’s where – more often than not – businesses of all sizes run into a brick wall. How come? Because there seems to be a basic communication disconnect between Finance and Marketing. This is fundamentally based around the different goals each department has, as well as language each discipline uses.
On the one hand, Marketing brings insights based on understanding what customers perceive as the value the business brings to them, and which they’re prepared to pay for. Finance, on the other hand, brings efficiency in the operations of the business with ways to deliver that customer value at the lowest possible cost.
The Problem: Contradictory Approaches To Business
This is where the methodology and processes of Finance and Marketing significantly diverge. Left to its own devices Marketing typically over-promises and under-delivers, pushing-up business costs against a return that doesn’t sufficiently justify its position. Taking to extremes the operational costs end up being too high, so the organization goes out of business.
Finance, in contrast, aims to engineer business cost structure from an assumption that “all costs are bad” and should be avoided, ultimately under-delivering on the customer value component. The result of reducing costs by too much is the value element is eroded. The customer no longer sees the product or service as being worth the purchase price, so the business no longer becomes sustainable.
A different approach, but the same end result.
The language of Finance is the language of the business in general. Based upon the underlying strategic goals and measurements set out by the CEO, part of the job of the CFO is to communicate information in strictly ‘business’ terms. It’s where you hear about things like Balance Sheets, ROI, cashflow, and EBITDA.
Clearly, Marketing’s message to the C-Suite/stakeholders should be seen as equally important. However since Marketing uses a different set of language terms unique to its own environment, much of what is said flies straight over the head of the average CFO. Even worse: CMOs sometimes use Finance-derived terminology in different ways to how CFOs would. The result is confusion, ambiguity, and even outright distrust.
Finance & Marketing: Why Can’t We Live Together?
So is the underlying issue primarily one of language? Partly, yes. The choice of language is certainly one part of the problem. But the bigger issue is for marketers to have a better understanding of the finance world. They need to recognize how Marketing’s thought processes and measurements are different to what Finance people understand. Moreover they need to be aware of the need to reframe information and reporting to be more attuned and receptive to a Finance-centric mindset.
Let me give you an example. Supposing the Marketing department designs and implements a successful content marketing campaign. They put together a range of communications collateral – articles, eBooks, podcasts, videos – supported by a targeted social media and email initiative addressing a handful of carefully-researched audience segments.
The result is what Marketing deems to be a resounding success. Pageview metrics for the articles are through the roof. There are thousands of eBook downloads, millions of video views, and gazillions of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ on social media. These translate into increased site visits, reduced bounce rates, and even a higher SEO ranking. The Marketing department are ecstatic to report how all this activity will result in increased audience mindshare, and ultimately an increased market share for the business. Happy days, right?
Except the CFO hasn’t got a clue what all of this actually means, in real terms.
What Finance is looking for is how all of this translates into what rocks their world: cashflow for the business. Sure, they’re just as happy about all the extra traffic and visibility but, from where they’re sitting, there doesn’t seem to be anything tangible to justify the popping of champagne corks.
Business Departments Separated By A Common Language
What the CMO forgot to factor in to the equation was something every marketer needs to consider above everything else: Know Your Audience. To get the CFO more enthusiastic they need to report the results of their efforts in finance terms. What the CFO wants to hear is something along the lines of “Based on our experience with similar programs in the past, we conclude that if the business spends $X on this marketing initiative we will increase revenue by Y% over the course of Z timeframe.”
Now we’ve changed things around and presented things in a way where Finance can get excited, we’ve got something the CFO can work with.
Of course, Finance is going to want to know the details – process, metrics, implementation, and so on. But Marketing already has all of that. First we show how we decide on customer segmentation from conducting research, interviews, data-mining, and so forth. Then we show how the segmentation work leads us to design a customer value proposition, then we define channels – social, advertising, content marketing, email, pricing, distribution, whatever.
We educate the Finance team on how we see these decisions and actions will influence customer buying decisions, and how using metrics such as brand mindshare and perception, recall, and feedback can be used to measure effectiveness within a specific cohort.
Of course efforts to influence customer thought processes isn’t enough – we need to convert those thoughts into actions. Which is why Marketing measures factors such as site visits, time spent per visit, bounce rates, email clickthroughs, landing pages and 101 other metrics that are overlaid with purchase data to validate what and how Marketing-initiated efforts have had on buying behavior.
Once the purchase changes are measured, we’re a hop and a skip away from calculating the true cost of those purchases and acquiring those customers. Then it’s a simple case of comparing the cost increase to the cost of the marketing programs themselves.
Why Marketing Needs To Learn The Language Of Finance
We’ve almost got the CFO on our side. We’re not quite there yet, but we’re on the home straight.
What’s still missing is pivoting this (currently) marketing-centric data view into something easy to digest for the Finance department. This may look like a simple table showing the number of newly-acquired customers against the cost of acquiring them, versus the status-quo. Or it may be breaking down the Customer Lifetime Value of newly-onboarded customers versus existing ones. It all depends on the particular business concerned, and the stated commercial priorities of the organization as a whole.
By connecting marketing efforts to financial results we’ve not only presented the marketing plan and results as a business use case. We’ve presented our work and the report in ways that Finance can understand. The CFO has a new-found respect and appreciation for the work of the marketing team and is more likely to fight for them when budgets are being set, since they now have a working understanding of what goes on over yonder.
Marketing Is Everyone’s Job
Marketing isn’t just the job of the Marketing department. It’s the job of the entire business. The more that Marketing and Finance can work together, adapting their local datasets and verbiage to each others’ world, the easier it becomes for the organization to make validated business decisions.
The final season of HBO’s smash hit Game of Thrones is now less than a month from its debut. For fans of the show, this evokes a combination of excitement and apprehension. We’re eager to see our favorite characters back on the screen, and dreading the possibility that any of them could be goners in an instant.
One of the few places you’ll find more turnover than the Game of Thrones cast is on modern sales teams. And this reality is giving business leaders far more anxiety than any fantasy story arc. Per Harvard Business Review, “estimates of annual turnover among U.S. salespeople run as high as 27%—twice the rate in the overall labor force. In many industries, the average tenure is less than two years.” This attrition costs firms millions of dollars annually.
To an extent, salesforce churn is normal – even healthy. But I doubt there is a manager or executive reading this who hasn’t had a high-quality employee slip away, and felt the pain. It’s natural to wonder what you can do about it. In many cases, it can be hard to spot the signs of an at-risk sales rep before it’s too late.
So, how to manage a sales team that sticks together? Instead of thinking about those many elements that are out of our control, let’s turn our attention to what we can control.
How to Manage a Sales Team with Reduced Churn in Mind
Compensation usually ranks as the No. 1 factor in employee attrition, but in many cases, sales managers have limited ability to alter pay structures, with budgets being set from above. So rather than focusing on financial incentives, here are some day-to-day operational tips for improving sales staff retention.
Keep the Pipeline Healthy
Salespeople want to sell. They want to stay busy, and challenged. Research by Radford studied the rise in voluntary turnover rate for sales pros, and one finding was that when a company’s pipeline “dries up, becomes stale, or faces increased competition, sales professionals can grow frustrated in their jobs.”
Just last week in our “Big Deal” column, we looked at methods for nurturing sales pipeline growth. It’s also advisable to provide ample guidance and resources for digital selling, so that sales reps are empowered to generate their own leads and opportunities, rather than relying on other sources.
Promote the Right People
Few things send employees running like a bad boss. Few things keep them around like a great one.
“Sales managers make or break their team, and they are often the deciding factor when it comes to employees staying at or leaving their jobs,” writes Kathi Graham-Leviss at Forbes. She points to data from Gallup showing that, in general, managers account for 70% of variance in engagement, and that out of thousands employees surveyed, “one in two had left their job to get away from their manager to improve their overall life at some point in their career.”
The Peter Principle comes into play frequently in the world of sales: reps get promoted to managerial roles because of their outstanding sales performance, even when they don’t necessarily have the requisite makeup for leading, managing, and inspiring others.
When identifying prospective risers on your sales team, place a strong emphasis on people skills, and work to develop these skills with existing managers.
“Even ideal candidates can’t excel as managers unless they are developed,” notes a new piece in HBR, which goes on to lay out numerous recommendations for training sales managers. These include mentoring from supervisors, peer learning, and independent-learning.
Listen and Learn
One of the most essential strengths of almost any great manager is also one of the most basic: listening. Last week, Melanie Curtin of Inc. Magazine highlighted CollegeWise, a company that enjoys a near-100 percent retention rate year-over-year. Key to this stability is the manner in which leaders at CollegeWise conduct one-on-one meetings.
"We make it part of every manager's responsibility to sit down and have one-to-ones with employees where the manager comes only with questions, and it's the manager's job to empathize and to learn," says CEO Kevin McMullin.
Many of us like to think of ourselves as approachable, and open to hearing whatever is on the minds of our team members. But are we going far enough to facilitate these conversations?
“It's not enough to just tell managers they need to listen more, or better, or more often,” writes Curtin. “Having formalized processes like this one codifies it. It embeds listening into the culture.”
Be Attentive to High Performers, Not Just Laggards
As a results-oriented sales manager, it’s natural to spend most of our time coaching and assisting your lower performers. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, after all. However, this mindset can lead to strong sellers feeling isolated, unappreciated, or underutilized.
As renowned business leader Richard Branson has said: “You shouldn’t be looking for people slipping up, you should be looking for all the good things people do and praising those.”
Give Savvy Reps More Influence
Of course, it’s not enough to just praise sellers that are showing real promise. Give them opportunities to broaden their impact by training other reps in their areas of strength, and by expanding their roles in the sales process. For example, you could have your most proficient Sales Navigator user host monthly sessions where they share their top tips and learnings. Or you could have one of your reps with a knack for understanding resonant sales content work with marketing to develop those assets.
Not only does it enable your best employees to provide more benefit for your company, but this approach also benefits them because they can grow their career skills and avoid the stagnation of “same old, same old.”
As we prepare ourselves for the final season of Thrones, it’s worth thinking about this leadership lesson from its protagonist Jon Snow, as shared by Lenovo’s Nick Reynolds: “Snow understands that winning takes strength from everyone on the team and he sees his job as finding others’ strengths and encouraging them.”
Sales leaders can do just that by continually recognizing, activating, and challenging their reps. Do these things, and no one will be able to accuse you of knowing nothing.
The best salespeople have always been knowledgeable, empathic, and helpful. They seek to uncover and capitalize on any edge they can find to help them win more deals. That's just part of the job. Sadly, the "edge" that most sales technology promised to give them is actually hurting their relationships with buyers, and a chance at the elusive sale.
Sales technology was supposed to make sales more efficient and personal — it was supposed to help salespeople. Instead, it contributes more friction to the buying process than you could ever imagine. Let me explain.
To understand just how impactful tech is in the sales process, we need to take a trip back in time ...
Before the internet, it was nearly impossible for prospects to get information about a product without the help of a friendly salesperson. Buyers relied on reps to provide options and explain products — sales reps convinced consumers to buy.
But reps didn't hold all the power — they needed prospects too. With less reach and fewer resources, prospects were uncovered through hard work. Reps spent a considerable amount of time scanning paper directories, journals, and driving around their territories to gather information and learn about businesses. The quality of their conversations mattered — they couldn't afford to tarnish a potential relationship.
In this symbiotic relationship, prospects and salespeople built strong connections based on trust. This was the era of small business owners who knew every single one of their customers and of door-to-door salesmen who were welcomed into homes to present products over a quick cup of coffee.
Today, the buying process couldn't look more different.
Technology has given consumers total control of the sales process. Buyers use search engines, websites, social media, and review sites to conduct research long before they consider purchasing. In fact, 97% of buyers go online to research their purchases, drastically reducing how often consumers look to sales reps for product information.
At the same time, sales teams are using tech to help them reach more prospects with the hope of having more conversations. With auto dialers and email automation, reps can make hundreds of calls and send thousands of emails in no time.
What is Sales Technology?
Sales technology, commonly referred to as a sales stack, encompasses all of the tools and systems used by reps to facilitate the sales process.
These days, sales teams are using tech to help them reach more prospects with the hope of having more conversations. According to LinkedIn, 73% of sales professionals use technology to close deals, and of those who use sales technology tools, 97% say technology is either "important" or "very important" to success in their role. With auto dialers and email automation, reps can make hundreds of calls and send thousands of emails in no time.
That might seem like the pinnacle of efficiency — but consumers prefer a more personalized approach. The increase in quantity of sales messaging has led to a total lack of quality and trust in the profession. More calls go unanswered, more emails go unopened, and that gap between prospects and salespeople grows wider. But it doesn't have to be this way.
It's up to sales leaders to harness the power of sales technology and enable their teams to use it for good. When used correctly, it allows reps to sell with context, work efficiently, and build long-lasting relationships.
Types of Sales Technologies
With sales reps relying on technology now more than ever, the following platforms are being used most often by sales professionals to get the job done.
1. CRM
A client relationship manager tool or CRM should be an integral part of any sales stack. A CRM is a central tool where your team can keep all of your customer information in one place, helping your team maximize sales growth and streamline customer communications.
2. Productivity tools
Sales teams are always looking for ways to maximize productivity, which is why the use of sales enablement tools is on the rise. Productivity tools often integrate with other sales platforms to facilitate automated workflows and reduce the amount of time reps spend performing manual tasks. Check out this post for recommendations on the best sales enablement tools for your business.
3. Social networking platforms
Social selling — researching and interacting with potential customers on social media platforms — is common practice for sales professionals. Over 59% of sales reps use Facebook and LinkedIn to connect with prospects, making social media sites a valuable tool for closing deals.
4. Enterprise sales software
An integrated sales stack that houses all of the key software sales teams need to succeed in one place is a valued asset. Enterprise sales software can connect CRM and productivity tools helping teams track their entire pipeline in one place, and automate their communications while still providing the personalized experience prospects are looking for.
How to Use Sales Tech to Save Prospects
Let’s discuss ways sales teams can use sales tech to further prospect relationships.
Get rid of friction
I know what you're thinking. With over 500 solutions available, how is it possible that sales tech isn't working? It's a thriving industry. Consider this; 40% of sales reps report that getting a response from prospects is more difficult than it was 2-3 years ago. We've got work to do. Buyers expect to connect with sales how, when, and where they want. They expects reps to know about their business and issues before they even get on the phone.
When you use sales tech correctly, you can create a frictionless selling experience for your prospects and your team. Let's take a closer look at the tools that can help.
Perfect the sales process
When it comes to perfecting your sales process, your success depends on the quality of your CRM, or customer relationship management software. Your CRM is your source of truth. It holds every piece of critical information — from contact data to deals. It dictates the health of your sales pipeline and the future success of your business.
If you're using a homegrown CRM or one that's overly complex, you're going to be at the mercy of a specialist to make updates and maintain quality. It can be just as bad as not using a CRM at all, adding unnecessary hurdles and friction to your sales team's day.
Instead, a CRM should give reps the edge they need to outperform their goals month after month.Chris Kissner, Director of Business Development atBron Tapes, believes a CRM is essential for his team’s success. "Our CRM allows us to better examine our customers and gather insights about customer usage, lifetime value, industry usage, and more. Before HubSpot, too much of our data was stored in Outlook and spreadsheets," Chris says.
When evaluating CRMs, look for a platform that's intuitive to use and flexible to administer. It should integrate seamlessly with the rest of your tech stack and give you the flexibility to be in control of your data without the help of a developer or coding genius.
More specifically, here are some things to look out for:
Does it integrate with your marketing software? CRMs aren't just for sales — they're an essential tool for anyone involved in creating a remarkable customer experience. Integrate your CRM with your marketing software, and you'll know which content your leads have consumed so you can personalize your sales approach. CRMs give sales, marketing, and customer service teams one place to view, manage, and reply to all conversations, so nothing falls through the cracks.
Does it integrate with your email service provider? A CRM is meant to keep track of prospect and customer relationships over time, and today, relationships are created over email. CRMs that log email activity or offer a bi-directional sync with your inbox can help you collect valuable context that your team can use to have more impactful conversations.
Does it integrate with your VoIP or teleconferencing provider? Email is great, but your most important sales conversations are going to happen during a call or teleconference. Having a CRM that integrates with your VoIP or teleconferencing provider lets you link that context back to a deal. For managers, this is essential. Being able to easily reference a sales call for a deal that was lost or won gives managers the insight they need to coach their team, pivot their strategy, and understand what's working and what's not.
Does it automate your work? Getting reps to update a CRM as a deal progresses can be a challenge. Look for a CRM that offers sales automation and removes some of the more manual, administrative tasks from your team's day-to-day.
Does it make reporting easy? At the end of the day, your CRM dictates the health of your sales pipeline and the future success of your business. Make sure to choose a CRM that lets you report on your sales performance with confidence.
Align with your buyer
With the free time tech awards, some reps choose to focus on the number of prospects they can reach instead of the quality of their customer relationships.
"Ultimately, reps need to get an outcome in the form of a response," says Andrew Quinn, HubSpot's VP of Sales Enablement and Productivity. "Some salespeople are just throwing spaghetti against the wall and hoping some of it sticks, while others take a more methodical approach. If reps use tech correctly, they'll do the latter."
According to LinkedIn's State of Sales report, 96% of decision-makers say they're more likely to consider a brand's products or services if a sales professional has a clear understanding of their business needs, while 93% of decision-makers value personalized communications.
Streamlining your outreach isn't about increasing volume — it's about increasing the quality of your efforts in the most efficient way possible. Prospects expect personalized outreach, but they can see right through attempts at personalizing widespread, automated communication. Take the time sales tech saves you to spend more time with prospects and personalize your communication in a way that's true to the buyer. When evaluating sales tech, look for solutions that meet the following criteria:
Does it help reps perfect their timing? Reaching prospects at right time is critical. In fact, there's a 10x decrease in the odds of making contact with a lead after the first 5 minutes of when they first reach out. Look for sales tech that lets you know when prospects are most engaged. Tools like HubSpot can allow you to track email opens, clicks, and site visits with notifications that help reps reach out at the opportune time. Other tools, like Seventh Sense, use big data to surface a prospect's optimal engagement time and automatically delivers emails at the perfect moment.
Does it help reps provide a more personal message? Timing can only get you so far — it's essential for reps to personalize their outreach, too. Fill in the gaps of your CRM by supplementing your data with additional context from ZoomInfo, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, or Crystal. Use that context to connect with prospects in a fun and unique way.
Does it allow your team to connect with prospects on their terms? Adding videos to sales emails is a great way to catch your prospects' attention. Buyers love it — seven in ten B2B buyers watch video at one point during the buying process. Plus, video tools like Vidyard, Loom, and Soapbox make it easy for reps to record and share personalized videos right from their browser. It's also important to look out for inbound sales requests. Implement live chat on your website or invest in a meeting scheduling tool to allow prospects to raise a hand when they need help.
Enable your team
Once set up, how do you know if reps are using sales tech correctly? Some sales leaders can get hung up on activity over outcome metrics, both of which are important indicators of success, but most often, the outcome is relative to effort. It's not just about what reps did, but how they did it — the "how" is the substance behind the decision to make that first call to which the prospect positively responds.
Take outreach-to-outcome conversion rate, for example. Let's say that salesperson Alex has 100 prospects, while salesperson Jamie has 20. Based on Alex's higher activity, sales leaders may consider them more successful.
But look more closely at their response rates. Alex and Jamie both receive five responses — who's really doing a better job? With only a 5% response rate, Alex's spam may be irritating potential customers, while Jamie is building long-lasting relationships with a 25% response rate. Jamie ensured the reasons behind their calls were worthwhile, and this tailored outreach exponentially raised their odds of entering into a meaningful conversation with prospects.
Sales reps can hit their goals by increasing volume, but it's not the most efficient or constructive approach. What they're doing to meet their quotas may be eroding trust and damaging the brand your marketing and service teams have curated. Make sure you're honing in on the right metrics and setting your team goals accordingly.
Tools like pipeline reporting, leaderboards, and activity and outcome tracking help managers monitor overall performance — but these tools do little to influence and improve individual rep performance. To train your reps, check out Gong— a tool that uses artificial intelligence to monitor the talk tracks of top performers. You can then use that information to empower the rest of the team to adapt strategies that are proven to work.
Implementing new sales tech
Ready to put some of this sales tech to work? Let's talk implementation strategy.
Some reps are risk averse — they may be hesitant to incorporate new technologies when they're not convinced that it's better than their tried and true methods. In fact, six in ten sales reps report that when they find something that works for them, they stick to it.
Quinn believes testing out tech on a small group of open-minded and receptive reps is the best way to begin incorporating tech into your team.
"The sales change philosophy is like Huck Finn and painting the fence," Quinn says. "You need a small group of people willing to take the risk, and then others will see their success and follow without force."
Listen for more strategies on how you can incorporate new sales tech onto your team.
Are you using sales tech the right way?
If misused, sales tech can damage the brand you worked so hard to create — leading to a lack of trust between you and your prospects.
But when used appropriately, the time you save using sales tech can be put towards building deeper, long-lasting relationships, initiating meaningful and personalized conversations, and devoting energy towards promising prospects — creating a frictionless buying experience.
When leads come to the phone knowing as much as you do about your product, solely selling to your leads no longer works. Sales tech allows reps to craft personalized outreach with their customers with context and trust and spend time focusing on what really matters: deepening their relationships with prospects.
There seems to be a tendency with many companies these days to settle on one email design and use it for every email that they send out.
The reasoning makes sense. If you find a template that works for you, why not use it as much as possible? It’s easier for your design team to only do the job once. It’s easier for your email team not to seek design and coding resources every time you want to send out a new email.
But marketers must weigh the convenience that this approach offers with the very real impact it can have on your goals and objectives.
Every email that we send out has a purpose. If it didn’t, we should not send it. The purpose of your monthly newsletter might be to keep people engaged, and add value for your customers. The purpose of your prospecting emails might be to generate quality leads for your sales team to follow up with. The purpose of your promotional emails is likely to generate direct sales.
Because the purpose of each of these emails is different, it stands to reason that the design you use should be different.
Here is a link to a nice promotional email from The Athletic. In it, they are offering a 50% discount on their basic subscription plan. The email works because it is simple, calling attention to the offer with bold text and a button that stands out. They don’t need to clutter it up with a bunch of content or imagery. It gets straight to the point.
Now compare that with this email from Apple News. This is a more traditional newsletter, offering a curated list of articles that a subscriber might find interesting. This email is laid out nicely, offering readers the chance to scroll through and click on any of the articles they want to read more of.
When designing your emails, don’t reach for the same template you have been using forever. Instead, start by identifying the purpose of the email. What is your goal?
Then take that to the design team and have them help you create something that achieves that goal for you.
I just picked up a truly badass book by Warren Berger. It is absolutely straight fire. A More Beautiful Question.
If you’ve read Gap Selling, you know the key to executing is rooted in questions. The better you are at questions, the better you can execute the Gap Selling methodology.
Since its launch and in almost all of my training sessions, I’ve been asked for more info on how to ask really good questions.
Although I address in the book, I have struggled to articulate, at the granular level, how to ask the really dope, sophisticated level questions required to be an amazing Gap Seller. Making a list or scripting questions IS not an effective way to Gap Sell. It’s been frustrating for me, not being able to provide the level of guidance on something that comes so natural to me, yet others are desperate for more direction. However, A More Beautiful Question gets us a heck of a lot closer.
A More Beautiful Question is a book I wish I had found while I was writing Gap Selling. It’s a literary work of art for those who want to understand the power of questions and learn how to question better.
It’s not structured for selling, but rather for innovation or learning, but it’s close enough that those who are committed will be able to translate what they learn into sick discovery questions.
Over the next week or so, I’m going to be dropping my favorite and the most impactful quotes from the book. It’s that good.
I think you’re going to enjoy.
This first quote I’m sharing couldn’t be more accurate and one of the reasons I left corporate America. It’s bullshit, but all too real.
“THE BUSINESS WORLD has a kind of a love/hate with questioning. The business-innovation guru Clayton Christian – himself a master questioner – observes that questioning is seen as “inefficient” by many business leaders, who are so anxious to act, to do, that they often feel they don’t have time to question just what it is they are doing.
And those not in leadership roles frequently perceive (often correctly) that questioning can be hazardous to one’s career: that to raise a hand and ask “Why?” is to risk being seen as uninformed or possible insubordinate or maybe both.”
As sales professionals we face an intriguing paradox. We know, for complex B2B buying, the buyer’s journey can best be described as chaotic. What we have always believed is a linear process–identify a challenge, commit to change, define the problem/needs, evaluate alternatives, select a solution, turns out to be chaotic, as illustrated by the picture below
At the same time, we have a relatively linear sales process: prospect, qualify, discover, propose, close. A sales process is critical for our success. It enables us to focus on the right opportunities. It provides a framework for the things we must do, with the customer, that are likely to result in an order.
But how do we marry the two? We know we have to align our selling process with the customer buying process. But how do we align a chaotic buying journey with the relatively linear selling process? How do we manage this paradox?
Some would advocate, “we have to meet the customer where they are at” In that sense, we must be able to understand where the customer is at a certain point in their buying journey, responding in a way that is helpful to them–wherever they are at.
But then, what we do becomes unpredictable. We have little idea of what to do next, how to be most helpful to the customer, and how do know that we are on target to achieving our goals?
Some, too many, ignore the customer buying process, focusing only on our selling process: qualify, demo, propose, close….
We know neither alternative is very workable, what are we do do?
Further, we have to consider the customer doesn’t have a chaotic buying process by design, it’s just what happens to any complex project in any organization (regardless of whether buying is part of that project). As Mort Hansen indicates in Collaboration, a high percentage of internal projects end in failure.
We are not being the most helpful by just responding to the customer buying journey, we must help the customer simplify and navigate that buying journey. Ideally, helping them reach a linear buying journey, to which we align our sales process.
The paradox of the chaotic buying process and the linear sales process becomes very helpful. Since our selling process is oriented around our best experience of helping customers navigate their buying process in the simplest, most disciplined way, we can help the customer more effectively manage the process and achieve success.
We will never succeed in making the process completely linear, at least in complex B2B buying, but we create great value by helping the customer simplify it, making it much less complex/chaotic, and helping them successfully navigate it to achieve their goals.
PLM systems collect vast amounts of data, with most of the product attributes housed in a PLM system, from user behavior, seasonality, materials, specifications and more. Now and in the future, the power of PLM data will be harnessed through machine learning models to inject additional insight into the product lifecycle. Here are a few possible use cases already available or close to fruition, either through embedded PLM functionality or integration into the PLM solution:
Source: Aberdeen, March 2019
This is a preview of a research report from 
(rb, ra, yk, il)
Source: 
Source: 
But look more closely at their response rates. Alex and Jamie both receive five responses — who's really doing a better job? With only a 5% response rate, Alex's spam may be irritating potential customers, while Jamie is building long-lasting relationships with a 25% response rate. Jamie ensured the reasons behind their calls were worthwhile, and this tailored outreach exponentially raised their odds of entering into a meaningful conversation with prospects.
