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The success or failure of your content marketing efforts rests on your ability to build a team of dedicated, talented people to power your strategy, and that’s no quick or easy responsibility.

Yet, there aren’t hacks for hiring people like there are for, say, creating content. You’re probably not going to find an article that promises to tell you “how to hire 10 people in 10 minutes” the same way you may find one that says you will learn “how to come up with 30 content ideas in 30 minutes” — and there’s a reason for that.

Finding and hiring good content marketers takes significant time, resources, and skill. Our content marketing agency has hired 30 people in the last 12 months. Our secret weapon? You guessed it: content.

People want to work for the best in the industry

Too often, teams think of content marketing solely as a tool for sales growth and forget another critical group of people reading content in your industry — potential employees.

Just like your prospective customers want to hire the best of the best, prospective employees want to work with industry leaders, too. Those future employees want to know that the team they’re about to sign on with is credible, innovative, and ultimately worth committing their talents to — and when it’s done right, your content can show them that.

Start with strategy

As with every content marketing initiative, a documented strategy is absolutely essential; using content as a recruitment tool is no different. To be successful in using content for hiring, you need to include it as an element of your content marketing strategy. Here are some tips to get started:

When using content for hiring, you need to include it in your #contentmarketing strategy says @Kelsey_M_Meyer
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• Develop a persona for your ideal candidate. The first step in any strategy is knowing your audience. Who is your ideal employee? What kind of background or skills and interests does he or she have? What niche publications does your ideal audience read? What kind of content does the audience engage with?

Understanding who your audience is (and creating content specifically for that audience) is central to your strategy — whether that audience includes future customers or, as in this case, potential candidates.

• Involve human resources in your content planning and creation processes. By including someone from your HR team in your planning session, you’re making sure both departments understand expectations.

Involve HR in your #content planning and creation processes says @Kelsey_M_Meyer
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During one of our most recent rounds of hiring, our director of recruitment joined forces with our marketing team to develop an article for our blog about what it’s like to work here. As our director of recruitment, she had a ton of unique insights to offer potential candidates, and with the help of our content team, she was able to write and publish those insights to educate our audience of potential candidates.

• Indicate recruitment as a goal of your content, and outline the metrics you’ll use to measure it. Aligning your goals and metrics during this process will help your team know if you’re actually reaching the most qualified candidates — and it’ll help you readjust your efforts, if need be.

Indicate recruitment as a #content goal, & outline the metrics you’ll use to measure says @Kelsey_M_Meyer
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For example, the blog post written by our director of recruitment included a call to action that directed readers to check out our “Careers” page and apply. This article generated the highest click-through rate of any blog CTA published that month, and we received a lot of great applicants who told us they’d read her article before applying.

Use content to shine a light on your culture

Once you have a strategy, it’s time to execute. Beginning with the description of our persona, we work backward to create content that the candidate might enjoy.

For us, our ideal employees are intellectually curious, entrepreneurial-minded, and well-versed in industry trends to stay ahead of the curve — which means they’re reading online publications to learn about content marketing and how they can improve. Knowing this, we can prioritize content for publications like MarketingProfs with the understanding that our next great hire could be reading what we publish there.

Depending on your ideal candidate, you may want to do the same. While traditional career sites and job boards are great for casting a wide net, they may not yield as highly targeted results as an article in a publication read religiously by your ideal hire.

Beyond industry-specific articles on niche sites, we also write for broader publications like Entrepreneur about the benefits of a company retreat and what makes a good company culture. Articles like these show potential candidates what we’re all about in a way they can relate to — through written content in online publications they’re regularly reading.

We’ve found that it works to share information about your company and culture this way instead of simply incorporating it in the job description, because it more clearly shows potential candidates the value of working with you (and it’s easily shareable). What do you see more on social: people sharing job descriptions or people sharing articles? If you want the highest number of content marketers to hear about your company, publishing to online publications is a great way to broaden your network of targeted candidates.

Make content part of the application process

When you’re hiring content marketers, you have to make sure that writing, editing, or analyzing content is part of the application process. Too many companies make the mistake of simply asking for an existing writing sample and judging candidates’ ability based only on that.

Often, what you really want is someone who can write about your specific industry. Be mindful of the topic and overall assignment during the interview process, and make sure the candidate’s final product gives you a thorough understanding of the future work.

The difficult part is making sure that reviewing all of these content tests doesn’t take over your hiring manager’s life. Here’s a bit of insight into how the process has worked for us:

• Hiring writers and editors: When we hire a writer or editor, we give each candidate the same test article. This way, we can compare apples to apples and review more easily. We also have our team of 15 full-time editors take turns reviewing to get a diverse set of opinions and to keep all the work from falling onto one person’s plate.

• Hiring account strategists and content strategists: For interviews with our client service team, we give second-round candidates an assignment to complete at home and present to us during their final interviews. The assignment — developing article topics and demonstrating how they fit within a client’s strategy — is given once we’ve determined that an individual has the basic experience, skill set, and personality that make him or her a good fit for the position.

It is not an opportunity to get free work out of a skilled marketer. The assignment should never take longer than two hours, and the work they produce should never be used for a client.

• On-boarding new employees: Now that you’ve attracted the best talent through your content and vetted them through an exercise where they worked on a piece of content, it’s time to welcome them to the team and prepare them for their first day. For many people, starting a new job can be intimidating. Using content can help quiet those fears and make them feel more confident walking into their first day.

We send new employees a “before-day-one” document that tells them everything from when to arrive and what to wear (spoiler: it’s whatever they feel comfortable in), to what to expect in their first days. It also includes about a dozen links to articles we’ve written that we suggest they read to be sure they’re as prepared as possible to jump into the business of content marketing.

Although the process isn’t as quick and easy as coming up with 30 ideas for your next blog post in 30 minutes, it focuses your recruiting and attracts qualified candidates who are familiar with and excited by your company — and that makes recruiting much easier. By using content at different points in your recruiting and hiring process, you can attract truly great content marketers and build a better agency.

Ensure that you are ahead of the curve in content marketing and subscribe to CMI’s daily or weekly newsletter with expert insight and practical tips to take your program to the next level.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How We Used Content to Hire 30 People in One Year appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

If you’re a budget brand, there’s nothing wrong with a website that looks kinda cheap.

But if you’re selling expensive watches or clothes? Well, that’s not the message you want to be sending.

Of course, it’s all about context. Aligning design elements to your brand and business goals is important, and there are certain elements that make a site look more expensive/luxurious or cheap.

What Makes a Website Look Expensive?

A beautiful website tends to look more expensive. Just like with attractive people, an attractive website seems to create a Halo Effect, where people will judge the product quality, customer service, and other things higher.

But what does it really mean to have an attractive website? That’s pretty subjective, isn’t it?

Well, yes and no. There are certain qualities that luxurious brands tend to use, and there are certain design elements that people perceive as more luxurious.

The resounding design element that leads people to believe a site is more prestigious is simplicity.

Simplicity and a Luxurious Experience

We recently published an academic insight that explored which design elements lead people to believe a website is more luxurious.

This study analyzed user reactions to 78 watch websites and 81 car websites, and it looked purely at design elements as differentiators. Things like:

• Mean RGB (Red, Green, Blue)
• Mean HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness)
• Number of colors
• Dominant color
• Amount of white space
• Number of products

While the study only looked at two product types (watches and cars), it found that a few traits were consistent in creating the perception of prestige.

If you’re looking to create the perception of luxury on your site, use lots of white space, keep a low number of products on display, and use fewer colors…

And using colors that weren’t too bright correlated with a higher perceived price. There’s something about clutter and bright colors that screams “I’m cheap” (as RyanAir knows):

Image Source

Don’t Forget Mobile

Intuitively, mobile seems like a casual browsing medium, so you wouldn’t think that those browsing on mobile would purchase, say, a luxury watch or car.

True or not, it’s silly to ignore the mobile experience if you’re a luxury brand. Check out these data points:

• According to Think With Google, Luxury car price searches grew nearly 90% on mobile.
• They also found that 79% of luxury auto buyers indicated they used a smartphone during their research process.

So no matter where customers eventually buy a Rolex or a Porsche, they probably did some preliminary research on their phone. Since our academic insight (above) didn’t explicitly research mobile, we can’t fully extrapolate the findings, but we can assume some of the basic design principles still apply (minimal color, etc.)

For example, A. Lange & Söhne’s mobile site keeps the simple elegance that its desktop site has. Only one product displayed, few colors, lots of white space…

Other than that, it’s most important to make sure your mobile site is usable and that you invest in a great mobile experience. Many think they’re doing this, but research shows otherwise (about a third of luxury brands are said not to be optimized for mobile).

While these design elements are good heuristics if you want to look expensive, it’s also helpful to avoid elements that explicitly make your site look cheap.

What Makes a Website Look Cheap?

While creating a perception of luxury seems largely to be a brand decision, avoiding the perception that you’re cheap has much more to do with usability and, in general, the user experience. Anyone can optimize their site to avoid looking cheap and benefit from it.

Note also that most of what constitutes “cheap” design is pretty similar to what constitutes untrustworthiness (the most important factor in affecting distrust, after all, is visual design). We’ve written a lot on conversion credibility killers, so think about “cheap” design elements with the same heuristics.

Typography

If someone says that typography is a top 5 most impactful A/B test to run, you probably shouldn’t listen. However, typography clearly (and empirically) has an effect on brand perception as well as recall.

Studies have also shown different fonts have strong effects on trustworthiness (comic sans caused users to disregard a NYT article, and in some users, it even caused contempt). One expert even said, “Web design is ninety-five percent typography.”

The difficulty in discussing typography, however, is that there isn’t a single right answer. Of course, it first needs to be readable, but then it also needs to accurately reflect your brand. Here’s how Tommy Walker put it in a previous ConversionXL article:

Tommy Walker:

“The reality of the situation is, asking about ‘the best typeface’ is going to be about as fruitful as asking ‘what color converts the best?‘

It’s all subjective, depends on your target market, the story you’re telling & the emotions you’re trying to evoke. Looking at the big 50 research from Smashing shows us ‘other’ fonts are being used more and more, because they’re a better reflection of the brand’s characteristics and personality.

The question you have to ask is if the typeface you’re using accurately reflects you?

It’s a difficult question to answer, but could make all the difference in the world to your customers.”

Make sure your typography is working with your ideal branding, not against it. (Image Source)

Stock Photos and Other Inauthenticity

Stock photos tend to be a credibility killer, and when done really poorly, they make your site look cheap.

Stock photos, in general, aren’t a problem. You can certainly find good quality stock photos and fit them to your purpose. But the problem is, if you’re trying to look like a luxury brand, you can’t use photos that are common, prevalent, or overused. It makes your brand look like those three adjectives – the opposite of your goal.

Remember the Everywhere Girl? In 1996, Jennifer Anderson posed for a stock photo shoot shortly after graduating college. At the time, companies would subscribe to a service & receive their stock photos on a CD-ROM.

Trouble was, the companies receiving the CD’s didn’t have an easy way to verify who else was using the photo, and the license for the images was not exclusive – meaning anyone could use them.

Within a few years, Jennifer became the face of college girls in what seemed to be every marketing campaign. The most notorious faux pas was in 2004, when PC competitors Dell & Gateway used photos from the same photo shoot in their “Back to School” promotional material.

As MassImpressions put it, “Try to avoid stock photos wherever possible…There are countless professional photographers out there, many of whom are absolutely crying out for somewhere to showcase their work in exchange for a credit on the website or a link back to their portfolio. And they deserve your support – the way things are going online, we need to use ’em or we’ll lose ’em.”

Usability

Many luxury sites make the mistake of throwing usability best practices out the window because they are “stifling their creativity.” That’s not a good idea.

According to Information-foraging theory, people “behave on the web like animals in the wild: they assess the perceived value of a new foraging patch against the perceived cost (effort) of obtaining that food.”

In other words, it’s motivation vs. friction. Any additional friction lowers the chance that users will take the action; beyond that, friction actually produces a negative reaction to the brand (a reverse-Halo-effect).

Here’s how Aurora Bedford from NN/g explained it…

Aurora Bedford:

“By improving a site’s usability, we reduce the interaction cost, and thus increase the expected utility.

But remember that the perception of the interaction cost (that is, users’ assessment of how hard it will be to use the site) is almost as important as the actual interaction cost (i.e., the real effort required to use the site): the perceived cost drives the initial assessment of the site’s expected utility.

Thus, to convince people to stick around and explore deeper into the website, it is important to accurately reflect the quality of the organization and convey ease of use. If, at a glance, users do not believe that the site is worth their time and effort, then they have little reason to stay.”

Tons of Popups and Distractions

While data may, in aggregate, tell you that popups work well, if you run a luxury brand, nothing says cheap like 13 popups in your face before you can even read the value proposition.

I landed on The Luxe Nomad, a site supposedly for luxury travel accommodations, and within seconds was bombarded with like 5 popups (one large overlay and a few more in the background). They were also bright orange, not doing any favors to the attempted ‘luxury brand’:

But when I went on A. Lange & Söhne’s site to buy a watch (I wish), all I got was a nice, minimalist design with no distractions.

It’s not enough to say that “pop-ups are bad.” I’m sure there are ways to make them fit with a luxury brand (seems Bounce X does this well). It’s more about avoiding a cluttered and sleazy looking user experience.

When a website is too cluttered, it conveys a certain cheapness. Here’s how Aurora Bedford from NN/g put it:

Aurora Bedford:

“In the physical world, we often assess the value of a shop based on the storefront: displaying many items in the front window may signal cheaper prices and lower quality, while a few products in a large window may convey exclusivity and higher value. (This assessment is related to people’s scarcity bias: many items crammed into a display appear easy to obtain, while a single object seems more elusive.)…

…Just as with the physical storefront, a cluttered webpage lowers the perceived value of the organization. Clutter and disorganized content suggest a lack of attention to detail, or an inability to distill information into a meaningful summary that, due to the halo effect, people assume reflects the overall character of the business.”

Image Source

Abundance

Scarcity works (and not just for narcissists). Part of prestige is the idea that you’re one of the few invited to the club. If everyone has a Rolex, then it becomes mundane.

I mentioned a study above that said smaller product offerings correlated with higher perceived price, but when something is limited, either in quantity or simply because of its “prestige pricing,” it becomes perceived as more valuable.

I think Sid Bharath put it really well in a Crazy Egg article from 2014:

Sid Bharath:

”In 1962, Ferrari manufactured a series of sports cars called the Ferrari 250 GTO and sold them for $18,000 each. Only 39 were manufactured in total.

In 2004, a young man put the finishing touches on a website he was working on from his dorm room at Harvard. It was a site where people could connect with each other online, but only Harvard students could access it.

Today, one of those cars is worth over $50 million, making it the most expensive car in the world. And that website is worth more than $150 billion, making it one of the most valuable companies in the world.

When access to something is restricted, by being scarce or exclusive, the perceived value and demand for it increases. We always crave what we can’t have. We want to be the only one to own that rare item, or get admitted to that private club. And we’re willing to pay big.”

By capping their production output, Ferrari makes it more valuable to own one of the limited vehicles it makes. And you know that luxury fashion retailers have mastered this “limited edition” scarcity tactic.

Let Design Match Your Objectives

So to get people to buy, do you need to raise prices, offer fewer products, limit your colors, etc.? No. Let your objectives lead your design.

There was a good discussion in the comments section of a previous article, Beauty Pays: Beautiful Websites (and People) Get Better Results, about whether or not beautiful design actually works better.

The answer? It depends.

As a commenter put it, “Imho design should support your objectives and help converting your audience. However this does NOT mean that your design has to be beautiful (whatever that may be).”

He went on to mention RyanAir, eBay, and Amazon as examples of non-beautiful design.

Peep agreed with this:

Peep Laja:

“…’Design should support your objectives and help converting your audience’ – I agree 100%! And great design enables you to do it.

I see that in my line of work day in and day out. You change nothing but design, and conversions go up. Of course, the design has to be conversion optimized.

Ryanair’s brand is ‘cheap’ and they do an excellent job of communicating with their website. It’s a brand thing.”

Aurora Bedford from NN/g also emphasized the focus on brand and objectives to guide your design…

Aurora Bedford:

“The most important thing to remember is that the initial perception of the site must actually match the business — not every website needs to strive to create a perception of luxury and sophistication, as what is valuable to one user may be at complete odds with another.

The ‘budget’ impression communicated by Tigerair’s bright colors and dense presentation of deals works well because the company’s value proposition is low price, not exceptional service.

If a flight with Tigerair was more expensive than a seemingly higher-end Singapore Airlines’ flight, for example, the user would likely not purchase because such a disparity does not match the expectation set up by the website design.

On the other hand, users who care about hospitality and service will prefer the sophisticated design of Singapore Airlines to the cute graphics of Tigerair.”

Conclusion

If you want to look like an expensive luxury brand, here are some best practices that correlate (not cause, by the way) with a higher perceived price point/value:

• Use fewer colors
• Use fewer bright colors
• Use more white space
• Display a smaller product offering
• Clean up the clutter and cheap tactics

If you don’t want to look like an expensive luxury brand, well, then don’t feel like you need to march in lock-step behind these heuristics. Instead, align your objectives and strategy with your design, and find what works best for your own business case.

Feature image source

Customers have never had so much power. The rapid adoption of technologies, such as search engines, social media and smart mobile devices, has moved us from an information-poor world to one that is information rich in less than two decades.

Access to immense amounts of information is having a dramatic impact on the way business is done. It is enabling customers to redesign traditional value chains, putting themselves at the center. They are no longer passive consumers- they are active and vocal.

For enterprises, this presents much more of an opportunity than a threat and has given rise to a service industry focusing on customer experience design. Becoming “customer-centric” is now the catch cry of leading brands. But how do brands move beyond the talk and undergo the transformation?

There needs to be a new wave of technology and digital experiences to take advantage of these emerging market forces. Businesses need to move beyond the usual “surveillance marketing” suspects consisting of CRM, Big-Data analytics and marketing automation tools. These will continue to play a part but a new generation of software designed for the benefit of the consumer and focused on developing mutually beneficial relationships is needed.

Businesses are undergoing a “big shift”. On the one hand, social media and mobile technologies have ushered in a new and exciting era where consumers are looking for meaningful digital experiences and are flocking to innovations that give them control. On the other hand, businesses are reeling from the effects of “digital Darwinism” and the aftermath of the global financial crisis. They are having to alter the way they engage with the markets they play in.

Businesses are investing in advertising software, big data, and digital marketing techniques in an effort to better understand their customers and generate demand. But customers are becoming increasing fatigued by marketing and wary of companies using their data. The result is that the gap between enterprises and their customers is widening – not closing.

Almost every day an article about consumer data appears in the mainstream press. Whether it’s the NSA looking at the personal communications of millions of people or businesses using big data analytics to design more effective marketing it seems that everyone is under surveillance.

Businesses need to find a new way to develop trust with their customers. Data analytics and “AdTech”, in their current form at least, will only erode trust as consumers feel increasingly spied upon.

Consumers want to see value from the relationships they have with brands. While there needs to be a wave of innovation to fully capitalize on this shift in consumer demand and behavior you don’t need to wait for it to arrive. If your brand has a Facebook page, CRM or a loyalty system you have data that you can unlock.

Hands up! Step away from the keyboard. Before you hit that send key on your next genius email marketing campaign, I want you to ask yourself something: Who are you trying to reach and why?

Have you ever sent out an email only to get no response? What about deleted or totally ignored an email that wasn’t even opened? Whether you’re a boots-on-the-ground marketer or a business owner, we’ve all been there.

With the ever-increasing importance of email marketing in today’s modern society, it’s imperative to spam-proof the content you push out – and email is content. If you want to grab your readers’ attention (and retain it), it makes a whole lot of sense to compile effective and professional marketing emails to your intended audience only.

Email Marketing is Not Dead

I hear this all the time: “But Lauren, isn’t email marketing dead?”

No. No, it’s not. In fact, it’s alive and kicking! Why? Because email marketing has an ROI of 3800 percent. Yes, you read that correctly. Over 100 billion emails are sent and received per day, helping email marketing prove itself as the most powerfully effective way to generate new business year after year. More than that, it continues to shine as the most compelling form of marketing, constantly evolving as companies edit, test, monitor and measure emails to drive engagement even further.

But let’s be honest. All that power slips away pretty quickly if you are relentlessly spamming your subscribers. Emails should provide value and act as a channel that both strengthens your relationship with your current clients and also keeps you top of mind with your prospects. No matter how pretty your email looks or how darn captivating your message is, if it doesn’t make it to the reader, it just doesn’t matter.

Pitfalls of Spam

There are a lot of ways your email campaign can swerve off-course, but here are the five most common pitfalls you can easily avoid or correct right now:

Unclean Lists

It can be time-consuming, but you’re much off building a list of real customers and prospects who have actually agreed to receive emails from you. Unclean lists not only diminish the effectiveness of your email marketing, but also damage your reputation all the same.

Wrong Send Times

This is an important metric that should never be underestimated. Increase your email open rates and click-throughs by sending at the appropriate times during the most productive days of the week. And on that note, make sure you send the right amount of emails. There is such a thing as both too many and not enough emails.

No Clear Value

Whatever you do, do NOT send an email just to send an email! Act as a thought leader in your industry. Make sure your message is always offering your readers something of value as well as something interesting and engaging. It must be relevant to their specific wants and needs.

No Call to Action

In addition to value, it’s just as important to include a call-to-action. This creates a sense of urgency and allows your readers to take the next step to learn more about you and your services offered.

No Unsubscribe Link

Not having an unsubscribe option may seem like a great way to retain a “captive audience,” but unfortunately, that’s illegal. As per the CAN SPAM Act of 2003, you must include an unsubscribe link in your bulk emails. But don’t worry, there is a benefit – an unsubscribe link increases your credibility and shows that you are definitely not a spammer.

Don’t be that person who ignores relationship building, trust, establishing connections and everything great in this industry. To increase deliverability and engagement with your email marketing, here’s a few best practices to follow.

Tips and Best Practices

• Create a content plan
• Personalize your message
• Optimize for mobile
• Educate your readers
• Track and measure your results

Final Thoughts

Have you had your own personal experience with email spam as a consumer? What are the hallmarks of email messages you can’t miss? What are the red flags that send an email right to your online trash? If you’re a marketer, what was your most successful campaign, and why? Comment below and let us know – we’d love to hear from you!

As I’m sure you’ve heard before, buyer personas play a key role in the development of successful inbound marketing and inbound sales programs. Truly understanding who your target buyer is, both at a personal and professional level, is a foundation of aligning sales and marketing efforts. Specifically, for SaaS companies, there are many similarities in how these personas are developed and used within the organization. There are, however, some additional benefits that marketers at SaaS companies can take advantage of. Here, we will discuss best practices for developing personas for your SaaS company and how to use them successfully.

First, let’s briefly define personas and how we use them within our organization. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer or potential buyer. By outlining certain characteristics, we are able to differentiate between different personas and how they interact with your company. For many SaaS sales processes, there are multiple prospects involved. This often breaks down to influencers, internal advocates, and decision-makers. Personas allow you to clearly define the roles and responsibilities for each, and help to tailor your content and conversations appropriately.

Once personas are built, the applications are limitless. Not only are they used within the marketing efforts, but they also are extremely helpful in driving sales, customer service, and product development. Understanding the ins and outs of your target audience will allow you to align all of the departments within your SaaS company together.

Developing Buyer Personas

The first step in developing personas within your SaaS company is to involve the right team members. Often, personas are defined by the marketing team and then shared with the rest of the organization. The fact is, the most useful personas are the ones built with involvement from multiple departments. SaaS companies have the advantage of many touchpoints throughout the customer lifecycle. From marketing to sales to account management, customers are interacted with from a variety of angles. Each department can share a valuable perspective, helping to make these personas as accurate as possible.

Now that we’ve identified the required team to build personas, let’s get discuss which criteria to include. These are the main sections of a persona document that will need to be completed for each character.

1. Demographics: Understanding your buyer’s demographics is extremely important. This information helps to guide many aspects of marketing and sales. Questions around demographics can include topics such as where the person lives (urban/rural areas), their education, age, experience, and so on. This data will allow you to really step into the shoes of your target audience and get to know them.

2. Industry: For SaaS companies, identifying the industry of each persona is extremely important. In some cases, your solution is built to accommodate the needs and fill gaps within one particular vertical, such as healthcare or finance. If this is true for your business, any prospects outside of these are unqualified and would not be worth your sales and marketing efforts. However, for some businesses, SaaS products can be adopted across a variety of industries; this is common with ERP and CRM software. In this case, identifying the industry of each persona will help to craft a unique message used in sales and marketing content. How one industry speaks to your value proposition may differ from another, even though the underlying message is the same.

3. Role within the company: Another important factor to include is the persona’s role within the company. As mentioned earlier, with some long sales cycles seen with SaaS products, there can be multiple points of contact. Some of these are influencers, who tend to be the first line of defense when vetting a solution, whereas the decision-maker gets involved more toward the end. Additionally, members of different departments within the organization (IT, Sales, Marketing) may have different needs. By adding this information to your persona documents, you can further tailor your messaging and lead nurturing to be as compelling as possible.

4. Pain points and challenges: One of the most important things to understand when developing personas is the individual pain points and challenges that your audience faces. For SaaS companies, your products solve a problem, whether it’s increasing efficiency, providing better analytics, and so on. Identifying for each persona what they deal with on a day-to-day basis and why they are beginning to look for a solution will give great insight and direction. Answers to this question will guide content marketing efforts and help to streamline emails and nurturing workflows. Additionally, knowing this information can help drive better sales conversations. When a sales qualified lead is identified as a particular persona, that gives the sales rep ample information to prepare for their initial outreach and demonstration. This can result in a higher closing percentage as well as a shorter sales cycle.

5. Goals: Much like pain points, uncovering goals for each persona is critical. Depending on the individual’s role, goals can range from hard metrics to abstract improvements. For example, when building a persona for a CEO or sales executive, often a goal will be to hit a specific revenue target or lead metric. On the contrary, in some cases with mid-level employees or influencers, the goals are to streamline administrative tasks or improving communication within a team. Although these vary significantly, aligning goals with each persona will help to further understand how your unique solution fits for them.

6. How and where they consume information: As stated earlier, personas will help to drive marketing and content efforts for nurturing and lead generation. Learning where and how your audience consumes information will tell you where to promote content and in what form to produce it. For example, if your personas subscribe to blogs and spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, that guides the content and social promotion strategy clearly. Furthermore, it can help to identify new decision-stage opportunities for offers. For those personas who like to interact and share ideas, a consultation or project assessment could be a great way for them to connect with your sales team. On the other hand, if your audience likes to consume content on their own, a downloadable demo or guide might convert even better. Knowing where and how your personas gather information is extremely important in this development process.

Gathering This Information

Sourcing all of this information is no easy feat. It often takes revisions and iterations to get them as close to perfect as possible. To do so, consider interviewing many of your current clients. In our experience, happy customers are always open to discussion and sharing why and how they got into their initial discovery process. Also, be sure to connect with a variety of these customers, from decision-makers to influencers, and across industries. This will help to get a broader sense of your target audience as a whole.

Additionally, to gather demographic and background information, look at job descriptions posted online for your particular persona. Often, these will include day-to-day responsibilities, education requirements, experience, and more. It can be difficult to ask these questions when interviewing existing customers, so this step can help fill in the blanks.

As we outlined in this article, there are many steps necessary to developing personas for your SaaS company. Understanding who your audience is, what their challenges are, and how your solution helps them meet their goals, will undoubtedly improve your marketing and sales efforts. Being able to align content, nurturing, and sales conversations with individual personas will also align these departments within your organization, increasing collaboration and driving new business.

Are there any worthwhile Pokémon GO marketing applications for brands? Hell, Yes.

Like millions throughout the world I have been sucked into the hype surrounding what I now know as 'Puke-a-Mon Go'.  The web has been ‘paraflinched’ with articles lauding how the game targets ‘millennial’ aged zombies who can play Puke-a-Mon Go whilst walking recklessly across lanes of traffic or over cliffs.

In addition to brand sponsorship opportunities as described below, Puke-a-Mon Go boosts profitable in-game purchases. Not insignificant since Euromonitor International projects the 2016 global mobile in-game purchase market to grow some twenty per cent, reaching $29.8bn /£22.5bn..

Planet Earth – 7bn people – gotta catch ’em all

Puke-a-Mon Go quickly clocked up in excess of 30 million downloads.  At its peak, Candy Crush drew an audience of 20 million users. It even rivalled social network downloads.

Inevitably servers crashed as it launched in 26 countries and unleashed Pukemon Zombies onto the streets.

There's more. Daily active Android users overtook Tinder.  Two weeks after launch Twitter reported 30.7 million 'P-a-M Go' mentions from over seven million unique users.  (Source: Spredfast Intelligence).

Even accounting for Donald Trump officially accepting the nomination as Republican candidate for the presidency of the USA Google Trends reported the term Pokemon ‘out-trumped’ Trump and even the perennially favourite search term: ‘porn’.

It is now undoubtedly a cross-generational brand as this New Yorker cartoon shows.

In its favour, assuming one is not run over by a car, killed falling through a manhole, injured walking into a post /through a window or smashed in the face for inadvertently stepping into a heated argument between a couple of EU referendum Remainers and Brexiters, playing the game every day for one week could have health benefits as doing so would burn 1,500 calories for women or 1,800 calories for men.

Using Marketing of Pokémon GO for brands

In between surreptitiously checking Facebook updates,  brand marketers are expected to hurl virtual bowling bowls at each other as they battle to adopt so-called, ‘Pukestop’ locations.  Niantic (the company behind the game) is already selling ‘sponsored locations’ with options including in-game points exchangeable for real-world rewards.

Media buyers are celebrating how through removing challenges faced by the average person’s growing incapacity to tackle reading, Puke-a-Mon Go even addresses traditional display advertising pain-points.

Puke-a-Mon Go also encourages brand engagement; driving people into store or owned locations for ‘interactions’ in return for £5 ($6.55) off future purchases (time limitations apply) on goods valued over £50 ($65.50).

Thanks to Geo-location tagging, brands can increase customer virtual experiences at special events whilst at the same time, decreasing redundant human sensory involvement such as 'taking in' ambient sounds, sights and smells.

With Puke-a-Mon Go, fast-food chains can feature special catch and eat a Charizard burger meal for kids.

In Japan, the famed ‘Yellow Slipped Arches’ burger chain claims approximately 400 of its 2,900 restaurants are (ironically) designated "gyms" where players can battle on smart devices.   Two thousand five hundred restaurants have so far been designated as ‘Pukestops’. Here players collect ‘Puke Balls’ and other vital items to enable continuous play before having to recharge smart phones.

Soft drinks brands are said to be looking at encouraging consumers to run in circuits catching creatures, so counteracting any sugar intake.

I choose you!

Future brand historians may well recognise Puke-a-Mon Go as the first of a new breed of virtual gaming/branding platforms. Perhaps where Second Life failed, perhaps Pokémon Go will succeed. 

Rumoured new iterations are already in the pipeline for regeneration of classics such as Grand Theft Auto.  It is thought the improved version virtual game could lower both theft and insurance premiums as felons run around the Hood stealing virtual, rather than physical vehicles.

Even more exciting is the prospect of multi-cultural high street shopping.  Friends across the world (for example London and Madrid) are expected to strap on VR eyemasks whilst shopping ‘together’ in real virtual time, comparing items at regionally distinctive local stores such as Zara or H&M. Equally, economically squeezed middle classes may strap on VR masks whilst sharing shopping experiences with friends across the world at local delicacy specialists like Lidl or Aldi.

Disclosure: Jonathan Gabay is not responsible for personal injuries resulting from any engagement taken by the above brand uses of Puke-a-Mon or other virtual gaming provider.

Wading through the abundance of reading material about sales strategies and discerning between real experts and “experts” is time-consuming and fruitless if you pick the wrong book to share with your team. Our growing community of over 7,500 sales professionals suggested a number of quality reads for sales teams to help you pick the right one for your organization.

Teams are unique and are going to use different strategies to sell different products and services. We’ve compiled this list of great reads for Business Development Representatives. These authors showcase different tactics and offer quality reads for your reps. Applying some of the strategies can help you align your team for greater success.

Recommended by Derek Draper: ProActive Selling by Skip Miller

Miller’s book offers actionable advice for sales reps that can be integrated into sales strategies and practices immediately. It’s accessible, clear, and effective. This book helps your reps understand sales from the buyer’s perspective and allows them to remain customer-centered throughout the sales process.

Recommended by Tom Blue: The Sales Development Playbook by Trish Bertuzzi

Bertuzzi’s book is a great read for those looking to adapt their sales strategies to the latest tactics. Managers and executives keep it on their shelves as a reference for strategy and practice. Sales reps get a detailed look into high-level strategy and how they fit into their company’s successful conversion of sales leads.

5 great reads for sales reps — From the @saleshacker Forum
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Recommended by Jack Flynn: Cracking the Sales Management Code by Jason Jordan and Michelle Vazzana

Jordan and Vazzana offer one of the best books about sales performance improvement. It’s ideal for teams full of veteran sales reps.  It offers them a refresher on best practices or a kick-start toward their next position.

For managers, it’s a great read to complete with your reps. It provides context for strategy beyond the sales call and toward scalability and sustainability. Read as a group to connect practice to outcome and keep focus on the end goals of growth and profitability.

Recommended by Kenny Madden and Gerard Pinto: Mastering the Complex Sale by Jeff Thull

Closing the deal is more difficult when your customers operate under different business, lingual, or cultural norms. Bringing in all of the pieces to evaluate a strategy and ultimately close the deal takes a nuanced approach due to so many moving parts. Thull breaks down tactics about how to address each of these challenges. He explains how to close the sale when stakes and, at times, tensions are high.

Recommended by Brandon Redlinger: Fanatical Prospecting by Jeb Blount

While empty pipelines can cripple businesses and challenge the most experienced salespeople, Blount provides clear and actionable advice on how to contact leads, fill pipelines, and cultivate sales. The advice is actionable, and the narrative style is crisp. This book rises above the trends and fads to deliver solid, reliable insight on different ways to improve your pipelines and conversions.

Getting these books in the hands of your SDRs is only useful if you’re willing to put in the time to evaluating their utility and putting actionable tips into practice. Of course, these books are not for every team. Nonetheless, they can keep you and your reps thinking about the essentials of practice and growth.

Join the Sales Hacker Community on LinkedIn to participate in the conversation and connect with other sales professionals. Comment below to offer reviews of any of these books or suggest other great reads!

The post 5 Great Reads for Your Sales Team — From the Forum appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Cold calling for sales leads? Blech.

The mere mention of using the phone to “surprise people” brings me back to my early 20s when I was tasked with cold calling local businesses to find buyers or renters. I worked in a luxury high rise building where tenants could buy and/or rent our lavish units.

Something about it felt like an oxymoron; when you’re charging New York prices in Dallas ($6,000 a month for rent!), you don’t go begging any unvetted Joe Schmoe to come see “exclusive residences.”

And years later when I started my own business, I resolved to throw cold calling for sales (and emailing, for that matter) out the window.

Here’s why following that mantra has been a boon for B Squared …

Cold Calling For Sales = Spam

The call, or email rather, that took me back to my cold-calling twenties was this message I got today from a real estate sales person.

They sent me the below email about their new co-working space:

Here’s why I view this email (and any non-solicited phone call) as spam:

1. I didn’t give this company my email or permission to email me (key word:Non–Solicited)
2. I’m not interested in boutique workspace in Manhattan, as I live in NJ and our team is made up of remote workers
3. The sender CLEARLY didn’t do his homework and research my location or needs
4. There was no personalization or customization — just this blob of a picture telling me workspaces are coming this summer to Madison Ave

The Can-Spam Act, which many people actually think protects them (it doesn’t) from this type of email states the following:

“The backronym CAN-SPAM derives from the bill’s full name: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003. It plays on the word “canning” (putting an end to) spam, as in the usual term for unsolicited email of this type; as well as a pun in reference to the canned SPAM food product. The bill was sponsored in Congress by Senators Conrad Burns and Ron Wyden.”

But a closer look reveals:

“The CAN-SPAM Act is occasionally referred to by critics as the “You-Can-Spam” Act because the bill fails to prohibit many types of e-mail spam and preempts some state laws that would otherwise have provided victims with practical means of redress. In particular, it does not require e-mailers to get permission before they send marketing messages.“

And how do we define spam in the digital age?

“Spam or SPAM commonly refers to: Spamming, unsolicited or undesired electronic messages

• Email spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal email messages
• Messaging spam, unsolicited, undesired, or illegal messages in general (private messages on websites, sms, messenger etc…)”

Much like SPAM, cold calling for sales is the unsolicited act of calling someone to sell them goods or services.

When something is unexpected, uninvited, or unsolicited the chances of a conversion are slim to none. And, less than 2 percent of cold calls actually result in a meeting being scheduled.

I don’t know about you, but when I have my sales hat on, I like to focus on high-yielding activities rather than pursuits that will cause my potential customer pain, panic, or annoyance.

Rather than marketing to everyone through cold calling or sending cold emails, I like to put an emphasis on what’s warm.

I’ve Never Had To Make A Cold Call — Here’s Why

From the start, I focused on warm leads and introductions.

My first client was my dad’s company. My second client was my then boyfriend’s (now husband’s) company. And my third client was the friend of a friend.

As I focused on more sales-related tasks, I took a page from my non-profit days and used a worksheet called “Sphere of Influence” to map out more warm leads.

Essentially, the worksheet has you look at every part of your life to identify where warm leads may reside. Look at spheres like:

• Family
• Current friends
• High school & college friends
• Community clubs
• Social clubs
• Competitive leagues
• Co-workers
• Neighbors
• Vendors
• Networking groups

There are four other ways I’ve managed to keep my business growing year after year without cold calling for sales:

1. Nurturing online relationships to IRL (in real life) relationships. Not only have I met a ton of digital friends IRL (SO COOL), I’ve managed to obtain work from other marketers who have overspill or don’t specialize in “done-for-you” social media management. Nearly 30% of our current business consists of referrals from other marketers (who I first met through social media). Not a bad return on investment if you ask me!
2. Growing my list, yes. But more importantly, audience development and segmenting my lists so I can send better/more relevant content to certain groups.
3. Join powerful networking groups. This year alone I’ve managed to obtain more than $100,000 in new business from my networking groups. I currently belong to two; one in NJ and one in NYC.
4. Our friends and cohorts feel comfortable recommending B Squared not only because they know and trust us, but also because we offer referrals for closed leads. Referral Programs can be huge for your business!

Cold Calling: Don’t Do It!

Perhaps I’m not being open enough by embracing this “I’d-rather-die-than-call-someone-out-of-the-blue” attitude. But I have to go with my gut here and I know how irritated I get when these solicitors call or email me out of nowhere.

Do you agree? Is cold calling for sales leads old-school thinking? Or am I too modern for my own good?

What are some of the ways you avoid cold calling for sales? Let us know about them in the comments below!

Now that the hype has died down, the benefits of big data are no longer in question. Mounting research shows that organizations that have embraced big data and analytics are reaping real returns. In fact, McKinsey & Company tells us that companies that have adopted data-driven strategies enjoy 5 percent higher productivity and 6 percent higher profits than their competitors. And, a recent McKinsey analysis of more than 250 engagements over a five year period revealed companies that rely heavily on data for making marketing and sales decisions can boost their ROI by 15–20 percent.

These statistics aren’t surprising. The insights gained by an organization through analyzing large volumes of internal and external data can be game changing—especially when those insights are applied to the strategic planning process. Surveys show that only 45 percent of businesses are satisfied with their current strategic planning process. If your organization fails to find itself in that 45 percent, then allow us to give you a look into some of the ways forward-thinking businesses can leverage the power of big data in strategic planning:

Gaining Insights from Multiple Types of Data

We live in a digital era, so our world is built on information. Data of all kinds is pouring in from everywhere these days, just waiting for someone to collect and analyze it. But while data was at one time structured and fairly easy to process, the sheer volume of information now available has resulted in data that is raw, unstructured, and complex. It flows constantly from social media interactions, smart technologies, sensors, gauges, mobile devices, videos, texts, and countless other sources. Since much of this data is generated through personal habits, behaviors, and activities, it contains valuable and actionable insights that can inform decisions and help companies formulate more targeted and personalized business strategies. Fortunately for businesses, collecting, managing, and analyzing massive amounts of unstructured data are what big data analytics platforms do best.

Breaking Down Silos

Before big data came into existence, corporate data pertaining to various departments was traditionally stored in those departments, creating data “silos” that severely hampered internal communication. Put simply, the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing. Now, thanks to big data analytics platforms, all corporate data can be shared across every channel within an organization. This means that, for example, the marketing department has access to data from the sales department, and vice versa. As a result, each department can work collaboratively, sharing data and insights that can be used to formulate strategies that are more unified and better focused on achieving corporate goals.

In addition, once silos are broken down, big data analytics can bring different data sets together in new ways. This results in the creation of deeper insights that serve the needs of the organization and its customers in ways not possible with traditional analytics tools.

Optimizing the Sales Funnel

Sales organizations can use big data analytics to gain a more accurate picture of each step in the sales funnel. Using key metrics, sales managers are able to keep track of the number of opportunities or leads in the funnel, and also determine the arrival or acquisition rate of these opportunities. They can also determine the total possible value of every deal in the funnel at any given time, and how long prospects are in the funnel before they are acquired, along with the average percentage of closes—or “win rate”—that the sales team moves through the funnel.

Metrics aside, the real benefit of big data with respect to the sales funnel is that data insights can be used to drive decisions regarding which prospects to contact, when and how to do it, and which channels work best for prospect outreach, forecasting revenue, and accurately measuring sales rep success. In addition, machine learning can be applied to the data to predict which leads have a high probability of converting, qualifying, and ultimately closing. The end result is that organizations that take advantage of big data insights are able to more efficiently invest their time and effort in those leads most likely to become profitable customers.

Big data helps organizations to better qualify leads, ensuring a better customer experience and higher customer retention after the close. And while big data analytics is most often associated with B2C organizations, it’s also an effective tool for B2B lead generation and qualification.

Predicting and Optimizing Business Outcomes

Big data tools allow businesses to collect massive amounts of raw, real-time customer data. But the major strategic benefit lies in the ability to analyze that data, using predictive models and machine learning to gain insights into future customer buying behaviors—insights that can be used to inform business strategies and optimize business outcomes. Predictive modeling is a common practice among businesses that use loyalty programs, analyzing past behaviors to tailor coupons and other promotions and offers in order to maximize the odds of a future sale.

One example of using predictive analytics to optimize business outcomes can be found in the e-commerce juggernaut we know as Amazon.com. Amazon uses predictive analytics to suggest other items for purchase, with their, “Those who bought (blank) also bought (blank)” strategy. In fact, Amazon is so confident in the power of predictive analytics that it recently patented a predictive algorithm it hopes will soon make it possible to actually ship products to customers before they buy them.

Transforming the Organization

As with any new business tool, adopting big data necessitates change throughout an organization. After all, with so many new processes, and so much more information to take into account, employees and leaders have to revamp their current strategies to take advantage of the benefits that big data has to offer. Those businesses that have been the most successful with their big data deployments are those that have embraced these changes, transforming their organizations so that the insights gained through big data analysis can actually make a difference by becoming actionable. However, such a transformation can only take place when all stakeholders in the company are committed to data-driven decision-making. For that to happen, leaders must be willing to invest significant amounts of time and energy to make sure that all managers across the organization are aligned with the company’s big data mission 100 percent.

Additionally, leaders bear the responsibility of ensuring that those who work underneath them are aware of the roles that they play in the larger company strategy. A 2012 survey suggests that as many as 86% of employees have no clear understanding of overall company strategy. At the same time, approximately half of employee time is spent on work that is not aligned with company strategy. In adopting big data as a strategic tool, be sure to include your work force in any strategic planning, so that they can not only realign their own efforts to better implement new policy, but also so that they can offer their own unique insights during strategy development phases.

Big data has emerged as a powerful tool that organizations can use to leverage data-driven decision-making for better strategic planning. Those organizations that fully commit to big data, investing in the necessary IT architecture, infrastructure, support, and literacy needed to collect and analyze massively large data sets will gain competitive advantage in their various strategies, and enjoy sustainability and profitability for years to come.

Reasons to think beyond Excel? We can name four. Download the free e-book to learn more.

An example of separating the Wheat from the Chaff and Why BANT isn't dead

Lead qualification criteria are characteristics that help to classify a lead by the degree of its willingness and readiness to buy. As a result of this qualification, one can distinguish, in terms of making a purchase, the leads with the most and least potential: hot, warm, and cold.

In lead generation there are usually two stages of qualification: marketing and sales qualification. The first one is done by a team responsible for a marketing activity. The sales qualification is done to confirm the information from a sales perspective.

Ideally, a number of marketing and sales qualified leads must coincide. If a sales department rejects lots of leads, you most likely need to correct your marketing qualification criteria or to add a new criterion. Of course, sometimes it happens that the criteria are correct, but a sales department determines, through reasons of its own, why a client has no potential.

A question about lead qualification is a matter of leads’ quality. According to Global Benchmark Report on Lead Generation Strategy and Tactics for 2015-16[1], 48% of the respondents have indicated that only half of the leads were of good quality and are taken into sales or lead nurturing. 25% of the respondents said that 3/4 of the leads were of a good quality, which for the most part is taken into sales or lead nurturing. There is so much to improve here to save your sales team time and let them concentrate on qualified leads.

While determining the criteria for your target audience, please be aware of one important thing: there is always a balance between the desired quantity and quality of contacts you want to get. You can use more strict criteria for leads and have fewer of them, which enables you to focus on highly prospective customers. Or you can take broader criteria and thus increase their number, as well as sales work. But perhaps, as a result of your efforts, cold opportunities will warm up faster. Finding a balance between the desired number of leads and their appropriate quality is a matter of testing, correction, and testing again.

Long live the BANT

In lead generation, these following five key criteria that enable an evaluation of a lead’s potential are the most common:

• need;
• interest;
• budget;
• timing;
• decision maker’s role.

The last two criteria are mainly relevant for corporate sales and products with high value. For consumer good sales, it is sufficient to identify a need, interest, and money. This model of five criteria is similar to the famous BANT approach invented by IBM. The BANT B2B Sales persons acronym stands for

• Budget (do they have enough money to buy the product?
• Authority (can they make a purchase decision?
• Need (do they have a need that the product or service in question can fulfill?)
• Timescale (do they have a specific time when they wish to make their purchase?)

Lately, there have been lots of critics of the BANT criteria, as the critics see the criteria as too rigid when they are taken literally. “BANT is dead!” they cry. I do not think so. BANT should be adapted to today’s reality, when almost every customer can find information before speaking to a salesperson.

Another feature that should prevent you from taking BANT literally is that today there are so many innovative products that buyers do not always understand what they need best of all. However, many companies still use BANT as the most simple and common way to rate a lead as cold, warm or hot.

The need for a certain product or service is the main criterion of qualification. Roughly speaking, either there is a need for a product or not. In one case, a person knows exactly what he or she wants, how many and its specifications. In another case, a need exists but is rather vague. It is interesting that clients may not be aware they have a need. For example, a girl comes to buy her first car and she does not know which additional options she needs.

The interest of a buyer is another important criterion for determining purchase potential. For consumer sales, this factor may play a crucial role, especially when the sum of a purchase is not too large. However, when it comes to corporate sales, hardly is the interest ever the main and sufficient factor.

When I started my career, it had seemed to me that having an interest is a great reason to buy. Alas! These dreams lie in ruins of reality. Some customers are very interested and some of them are just great enthusiasts when it comes to something new. But this does not mean that a purchase will be made immediately or even made at all.

A budget for purchase is the best criterion for products with flexible pricing. If a salesperson understands how much money a person is willing to spend, that’s a great step toward making a decision. For example, buyers of travelling services do not hide their budget. This helps a seller to suggest the best offer for them.

However, for the corporate sector, the budget cannot always be disclosed. Sometimes, this is due to the fact that if a budget is mentioned, the position of a customer in the bargaining process becomes weaker. Sometimes, financial planning may be flexible.

Purchase timeframe is another important criterion for lead qualification. It is particularly important for pricey products. If customers are planning an expensive purchase, they are likely to understand when they can buy it. (Exceptions include luxury goods that are sometimes bought spontaneously.)

Here, we come to the last criterion: a person’s authority role within the decision-making process. This option is especially important for corporate lead generation and sales. There are usually several persons involved in a decision-making process.

At the same time, there are consumer sales where a decision is also influenced by several persons. Examples are large family purchases like immovable properties, cars, and education. Every member of a family has his or her own reasons and motivation.

Qualifying questions

To qualify a lead, you need to prepare a list of qualifying questions. These questions should help to identify necessary information before transferring a lead to the next stage of sales. Responses are usually scored from 0 to 5. This scoring system may at first seem too complicated. However, it is necessary when several people are involved in interactions with a customer during a sales cycle. This scoring system will help to identify the hottest leads for active sales and those who should be for now just nurtured.

I see that you have some concerns already, haven’t you? A lead may not want to share information. Yes, this may happen. A lead generation manager should not insist that a lead reveal information. These questions should be asked very carefully so as to not scare off potential buyers. So choose the politest words or ask indirect questions. After all, the lead has not confirmed a willingness to buy yet and has only expressed a preliminary interest in some category of goods.

For example, do not ask “How much money do you want to spend?” but, rather ask: “What budget do you think will suit you for this type of product?” These questions should leave a customer the option to either answer you about the facts or not – a person has every right to remain silent. Yes, everything one says will be used to speed up the purchase.

You can achieve a buyer’s frankness if you honestly say that you need this information to make the best offer. Having understood someone’s position and background, you can make a proposal that best fits that person’s needs, interests, and budget. You are playing on their side. And even if a person refuses to give answers to some questions, this is still valuable for future sales. No information is also informative.

An example of qualifying questions

Let’s illustrate the aforementioned information with an example: a lead qualification scoring system for a company that provides information security software and consulting. The following table shows some variations of questions asked and an interpretation of results:

Then, we calculate the scores for each lead. This allows us to quickly determine lead quality and categorize it as:

- 20-25 points – a hot lead;

- 13-19 points – a warm lead;

- 7-12 points – a cold lead;

- 5-6 – a prospect or a disqualified lead.

While a lead may achieve a high score by qualification criteria, this does not guarantee that a sale will happen. Lead generation will allow you to find prospective customers, to evaluate their willingness to buy, and to create a pool of hot and warm leads. The rest depends on your sales force and product features.

The marketing, lead generation, and sales departments must agree on qualification criteria before the start of any activity. It should not scare you that sometimes after the launching of an activity, it becomes evident that it is necessary to adjust the criteria: to add or to clarify one of answers, for example. This is absolutely fine; conducting lead generation means always working in a test mode.

Thanks to Ksenia Andreeva for sharing advice and opinions in this post. Ksenia Andreeva is the founder of NWComm lead generation agency and the author of the book Lead-Generation: Theory and Practice. This book has a purely practical purpose, serving as an introductory resource to principles and methods that will enable marketing professionals to raise the number of potential customers and multiply the number of sales typically received. It contains many real-life case studies from B2B and B2C. The book is available at Amazon. You can connect Ksenia on LinkedIn.

You work hard. You probably spend too much of your valuable time writing emails, awaiting a response, then following up when you don't hear back, over, and over again. It's soul destroying, not to mention costly. After all, whether or not your emails are effective directly impact how much money you take home at the end of the month!

So how do you write an email that captures their attention? Convinces them you're worthy of their time? Gets them to take action and schedule that meeting with you? 

HubSpot invited copywriting expert Joanna Wiebe to create a free five-day email course just for salespeople packed full of techniques that help to convince, convert, and close more deals. Joanna is the creator of Copyhackers, a world-renowned copywriting company. The course covers:

• The Open Loop Technique, which boasts a 52% open rate
• The PAS Framework, the most reliable sales formula in history
• Using hooks to engage and convert your leads
• The two words that overcome all objections

Sign up today and start improving the performance and response rate from your emails instantly. Each lesson comes with a challenge that you can try out to improve your results.

Transistors can only be so small, and we're reaching the limit on gains that can be made by shrinking them. That will make progress in processor technology difficult, but there are still ways to rapidly increase transistor counts.

The post Transistors may stop getting smaller, but Moore’s Law isn’t dead yet appeared first on Digital Trends.

Game theory is the place where politics, economics, psychology and math meet, and it offers the seductive promise of being able to quantify empirically optimal outcomes from thorny problems ranging from whether to go to war to how to split the tab at a restaurant.

The published, peer-reviewed world of game theory has reached many "counterintuitive" conclusions, many of which were cataloged by Stanford Postdoctoral Fellow William Spaniel in 2014. You could spend all day getting lost in these.

* There’s a reason why gas stations are on the same corner and politicians adopt very similar platforms. And it’s the same reason. Source.

* If you pay the value you think something is worth, you are going to end up with a negative net profit. Source.

* Knowing just slightly more about the value of your car than a potential buyer can make it impossible to sell it. Source.

* A biased media may be better than an unbiased media. Source.

* You might want to shoot to miss in war. Source.

Game Theory Is Really Counterintuitive [William Spaniel]

(via Four Short Links)

(Image: Go Board, Fcb981, CC-BY-SA)

You could not ask for a clearer, easier-to-read, more informative guide to facial recognition and machine learning thank Adam Geitgey's article, which is the latest in a series of equally clear explainers on machine learning, aimed at non-technical people -- and if you are a programmer, he's got links to Python sample source and projects you can use to develop your own versions. (more…)

Setting revenue goals is one thing. Defining the sales strategies that will enable performance (and ideally over-performance) on those goals is quite another. As with most things in life, the "how" is where things get tricky.

The year is more than half over. Sales leaders all over the world are pivoting on the plans they laid out at the beginning of 2016 -- or even starting to build out the targets for 2017.

There's no need to go into sales planning blind. Recent research conducted by McKinsey & Company revealed five sales strategies that have propelled market leaders to their lofty positions. Check out the data and "copy off the smart kids" -- we won't tell.

The average sales rep makes 46 calls every day.

So when your sales reps pick up the phone, make sure they’re ready to go for the close.

The best way to prepare them? The mock call.

The mock call is one of the greatest tools to train your sales reps. It’s been a staple in coaching and sales training for many decades.

Unfortunately, salespeople often do a poor job at it or hold badly designed mock call sessions.

Let’s end that trend today.

Below, we’ve explained everything you need to know in order to design and conduct an effective mock calling session with your salespeople.

Let’s get started.

1. No shortcuts: Play it out in full

When you do a mock call, the details matter. Play out the call as realistically as possible. By doing this, you’ll also get the best insights out of the call.

Start from the very beginning, ringtones and all.

*Ring, ring, ring*

“Hello, this is John.”

Go into the mock call as if it was real. This means:

• Include the ringing
• Include the greeting
• Include the introduction

Remember: The beginning of the call is crucial. This is when the person on the other end will decide whether you’re a friend or an enemy.

When someone answers that phone, the energy has to be right. Because you’ve only got a few seconds to get on friendly terms with them.

2. Remove visual cues: Face away from each other

When you’re on a call, you can’t see the person you’re talking to. There are no visual cues to help you interpret what your prospect is thinking or feeling.

These cues will alter the way you talk and the way you respond to what the other person is saying. Watching you as they talk might change the conversation dramatically.

All these visual cues and influences won’t be there when your reps are on an actual call. So when you conduct a mock call session: face away from each other. Better yet, be in separate rooms.

If possible, hold the coaching sessions at the salesperson’s desk. This will be the most effective as he or she will be in the right environment.

3. Keep it real: Get into character

When you’re making a mock call, you need to get into character. Create a scenario for yourself where you know exactly who you’re portraying during the call.

This means asking yourself:

• Who am I?
• Where do I work?
• What’s my position?
• What does my day look like?
• What do I care about?
• What are my problems?

When you get asked questions, it’ll be much easier to answer them and also pose challenges for your sales rep.

Don’t focus on the sales rep that’s calling you. Instead, focus on getting into and staying in character during the call even when the person makes mistakes.

Take it a step further by choosing your mood. Are you happy? Tired? Annoyed? Stressed? Don’t act like a sales coach, act like a human being.

Be the person your salespeople are most likely to encounter when they pick up the phone and dial.

4. Get the details: Record everything

Recording your calls will help take the training to the next level.

The more you can record, the better. That's because these recordings will show the journey and progress the sales rep is making after every mock call.

Recording audio is great but if you can record video, that’s even better. This allows you to see how the body language of the sales rep changes when the conversation becomes more challenging.

When a person is on a mock call, they’re going to feel self-conscious. They’re going to be aware of other salespeople around them, observing and judging. They’re going to be in a different mental state than when they make an actual sales call.

This means they’re not going to be as aware of their actions as they would be in an environment where they feel comfortable.

When the sales rep listen to these mock calls, they need to be given the time and space to focus and really listen to themselves during a call.

On a day by day basis, improvements can be hard to spot. But when they compare the first mock call to their 10th mock call, they’ll notice the improvement.

Listening to and watching these recordings will lead to faster growth. So record everything and make sure that your sales rep listen to it and analyze it afterwards.

5. Increase self awareness: Self-critique comes first

This is a common mistake that happens in sales training. You do a mock call with somebody and then you critique them immediately afterwards.

Wrong.

Once the call is over, take a second and ask them to analyze the call first. Ask them:

• How do you think this call went?
• What did you like?
• What did you not like?
• What was good?
• What was bad?
• When did you have me?
• When did you lose me?
• Why did the call go the way it went?

This will help to raise their self-awareness. Can this person spot their own mistakes? Can they analyze themselves? Can they analyze a sales situation? How well can they interpret the emotions, frustrations and pain points of the buyer? Was their interpretation of what happened completely different to yours?

Get your sales reps into the habit of analyzing conversations. Ask them to come up with conclusions and action items on their own and take away learnings from every call. Even when you as a sales manager are not around.

Coach your sales team at getting better at analyzing sales calls on a daily basis. They should reach conclusions on their own, without relying on you to give them all the answers.

Train your salespeople to train themselves and remove the need for a manager to step in and tell them what went wrong and what they need to do differently.

6. No rushing: Start easy

The first few mock calls should always be easy. In the beginning, especially if someone’s new or inexperienced, doing a mock call can be nerve-racking.

That’s why it’s important to make the sales rep comfortable with the situation before presenting them with challenging scenarios. Don’t make a mock call difficult until the person is a bit more senior, comfortable and ready to be challenged on their skillset.

Start off easy and increase the level of difficulty over time as your sales rep become more seasoned in their role.

7. Do the work: Call, analyze, repeat

If you want to become really good at something, you have to put in the work. That’s why repetition is important.

Schedule mock call sessions to take place frequently and consistently. They should be part of onboarding, training and continuous development.

8. Don’t overdo it: One thing at a time

Focus on one area of improvement at a time. Don’t give someone too much feedback or pick out every single detail or thing they did wrong and tell them all at once.

Too much critique will overwhelm your sales rep and they won’t know what to focus on. Instead, they’ll be left with a feeling of failure.

That’s not how you want to leave someone feeling after a mock call. You want to leave them feeling prepared and improved and ready to go at it again—better than before.

Pick one thing you want to work on with your sales rep and stick to that one thing and empower them to get better at it.

Do a few more mock calls and tell them what they didn’t do well but also how they’re improving in that area. Build their confidence, their knowledge and their skill level little by little around that one topic.

During a week of mock calls, focus just on that area. Once you’ve really improved, you can move on to the next.

9. Preparation is everything: Hard training, easy fight

Once your sale reps are more senior, it’s time to up the ante. This is when you make the mock calls so difficult that not a single call after that will match it.

The formula is simple: Be the worst person in the world.

If your sales rep can handle that type of worst case scenario, then doing real calls with real people is going to be easy for your reps to deal with.

When challenges arise, they’ll know how to handle it because they’ve been prepared for the worst. Go easy on the more junior sales reps and ramp up the challenges as they grow. But give your senior salespeople a tough time. Make these calls challenging as hell.

This will make the rest of the day seem like a walk in the park.

10. Study yourself: Transcribe the calls

If you really want your salespeople to get to the next level, ask them to transcribe their own calls.

When a call was really great or really challenging or there was just a lot to learn from it, give them the time and the task to transcribe it.

Outsource the transcription, but have the rep work through it, analyze it and format it. This is a healthy exercise to do once a month or once a quarter. Seeing the words on paper will add that extra dimension to understanding what’s happening in a conversation.

While this is something most people never do, it’s an incredibly valuable exercise. If you empower your salespeople to do this, you’re going to see results, growth and ultimately have a sales team that’s happy, healthy and hungry for more.

Now, go make your sales mock call sessions productive and constructive following these 10 steps.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and tips on mock calls, so go ahead and share them in the comments below.

Recommended reading:

 The #1 avoidable mistake 99% of sales managers make
It's a small mistake but too many sales managers are making this mistake—and it's HURTING their sales reps' performances. Fortunately, it's easy to fix.

Training a new sales team? 5 ways to set them up for success
Your new sales hires will set the tone for the next stage of your company's growth. Here are 5 tips on training a new sales team to be their best.

Want to kill it in sales? Take our 30-day self-study challenge
There's a lot that you can learn from others about sales. But if you want to get on the fast-track to top-sales rep, use this self-study framework.

When Evan Marwell decided to start EducationSuperHighway (ESH), a nonprofit organization dedicated to bringing broadband internet access to every U.S. public school classroom, he approached the task with the mentality of a successful serial entrepreneur.

That entrepreneurial mentality is stitched into the fabric of 21st-century America. Thanks to the pace of change in information technology over the last quarter century, we have been conditioned to believe that a single innovative company driven by a visionary entrepreneur can change the world. To many, this notion rings true when you look at companies like Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Uber, among others.

But rather than approach his project solely from the lens of a tech entrepreneur, Marwell realized that bridging the digital divide between those with and without adequate connection to the internet was more than a technology issue. It would require new data, new cross-sector partnerships, changes to federal policy, and teams to help states implement. Marwell needed to be a systems entrepreneur to change the entire system that constrained internet access. (For the record, one of us, Jim, is a backer of ESH and sits on its board.)

Over almost two decades, the social enterprise space has been learning how direct impact and systems change work together. The work our entrepreneurs face today is more complex than ever and requires a set of tools and a framework designed to address the complexity inherent when innovations are integrated into existing systems like school districts, welfare agencies, health departments, and corporate structures.

These insights, and the fact that so many of our systemic social challenges remain intractable, has led us to try to better understand what critical levers need to be “pulled” when entrepreneurs are trying to change systems.

The trail to this new approach has been blazed by many extraordinary leaders, some of whom we have funded. These leaders evidence five key characteristics to their approach:

Systems thinking. An individual or organization must first be able to put forward a new solution or set of solutions to a pressing social challenge. This sounds obvious, but we’re suggesting that organizational theories of change, business plans, and other foundational materials need to reflect systems thinking. The most important tool in the new systems entrepreneur’s suite is the ability to embed the solution into the larger system being targeted.

Marwell had a unique ability to see the full scope of the system he was trying to change, and to identify its pressure points. He had two key epiphanies about integrating ESH’s work into the larger education system: First, Governors and state governments held the most important keys to change, and they had to be engaged early and often. And second, with such a big system of 14,000 school districts, expanding fiber networks to reach more people was essential to scaling the solution. This integrated approach to finding a solution for internet connectivity informed the rest of ESH’s strategy.

Research and analysis. Beyond technical understanding of solution X and its application to problem Y, systems entrepreneurs must have a deep understanding of the system or systems they are trying to change and all the factors that shape it. Marwell developed an early “influencer map” that gave him a clear understanding of the players, from the federal government to industry and communities, he would need to engage as partners. He also developed a national diagnostic website called SchoolSpeedTest to create a bigger body of data about the problem of limited internet access, with the support of the Federal Communications Commission and 100 other organizations from across sectors.

Communications. Maintaining transparent and compelling communications both internally among collaborative stakeholders and externally with key audiences is crucial to the success of a systems change effort. Marwell knew that he would need to raise awareness of the problem in order to drive through his solution, so he launched a public awareness campaign around broadband access. So Marwell gathered a list of 50 CEOs – Republicans and Democrats alike – to write the FCC, and organized letters from governors, mayors, and education-technology leaders.

Policy. As difficult as it may be to achieve in the politically polarized time we live in, changing policy is often absolutely critical to changing the underlying system that constrains the social change required. Marwell saw this opportunity early on, and he set his sights on updating the Telecommunications Act of 1996’s “E-Rate” discounted pricing provision, which had been wildly successful bringing internet access to 99% of public schools and libraries, but hadn’t kept pace with internet advances. He leveraged his network and was able to start building his case for change in meetings with FCC and White House officials.

Measurement and evaluation. Distinct from the place-setting research and analysis mentioned above, measurement and evaluation is about creating consistent and ongoing data to guide strategy and increase accountability. ESH constantly worked with partners on measurement–the best example of which is its report on each state’s school-connectivity status. Marwell and his team also pressed the FCC to be more transparent with data about connectivity and pricing.

Marwell and the ESH team have driven extraordinary progress using this approach. They raised tens of millions of dollars from partners including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Startup:Education. They helped drive reforms in the FCC’s “E-Rate” policy. And since 2013, the share of U.S. school districts with access to 100 kbps connectivity has more than doubled from 30% to 77%.

This progress was possible because Marwell thought about the system he was trying to change as a whole, not about a narrower entrepreneurial opportunity or technical challenge. If more social entrepreneurs hope to effect change, they will need to think the same way.

Acquiring customers is good, but it’s just the beginning. You only win big if you can nurture them into loyal customers.

According to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, it costs six to seven times more to acquire new customers than it does to retain current ones. Or consider this: According to Harvard Business Review, increasing customer retention by five percent can increase profits by 25 percent to 95 percent.

When merchants engage users at every touch point of their journey on their website, merchants deliver users a satisfying emotional experience, thus creating loyalty. However, building loyalty needs to go beyond mere customer satisfaction. Here are six ways ecommerce merchants can engage users at every touch point and create loyal customers through 360 degree engagement.

1. Enroll Customers in a Points-Based Loyalty Program

Given that a well-designed customer loyalty program is the most effective retention strategy, it is imperative for businesses today to implement a loyalty program to sustain growth. (highlight to tweet)

Research from Gartner shows that attracting new customers will cost your company five times more than keeping an existing customer. A points-based loyalty program can boost in-store purchases and online conversions. It can be integrated with your website, social media channels, and email marketing to offer holistic engagement with the customer.

Predator Nutrition, one of the leading sports nutrition companies, has integrated a loyalty program within its core marketing strategy and amplified its average order value by 33 percent. The brand has implemented a 360-degree engagement model where customers are rewarded points not only for purchases, but also for referrals, subscribing to newsletters, writing reviews, and following the brand on social media networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

2. Engage With Customers via Social Channels

The popularity of social media has presented a huge opportunity for brands to connect and win over customers. 72 percent of consumers say social media helps them stay more engaged with brands. Popular social platforms like Facebook and Twitter offer engaging ways to respond to customer complaint requests on the go and ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty. Incentivizing various social actions like sharing, tweeting, liking, and commenting also helps in inculcating customer loyalty with brands. Awarding points for social activities is a great way to engage users on a frequent basis.

Starbucks has been especially successful in brewing customer experience through social media. The brand continues to engage its customers via social channels and is focused on cultivating relationships. Starbucks encourages users to share good experiences and leverages social listening to provide unmatched customer experience, thus inculcating brand loyalty among its customers.

Starbucks’ Tweet a Coffee campaign

3. Encourage Customers to Become Brand Ambassadors via Referrals

Nielsen reports that advice from family and friends is the most persuasive influence on respondents’ buying decisions. Get to know those customers who already promote you. Use social listening tools to find them. Recruit them through interactions on various channels. It is also a good idea to include points for referrals as one of the key incentives in your loyalty program.

The Color Run, a 5k event series and the largest one of its kind in the world, harnessed the power of word-of-mouth recommendations to transform its happy runners into brand ambassadors. The brand encouraged its website visitors to share the event with their family and friends via social channels, offering incentives and thus creating loyal brand advocates.

4. Leverage Email Marketing to Update Customers

Despite consumers’ rants about the volume of email messages they receive, email is still a remarkably effective channel. Email marketing drives more conversions than any other marketing channel, including search and social, according to Monetate. Email marketing can be utilized to amplify the number of both repeat purchases and continued subscriptions. Newsletters, thank you emails, surprise emails, redemption reminders, and exclusive deals are just a few of the types of emails that can be used to engage a customer on an ongoing basis. Include occasional point awards in your email campaigns to increase email engagement rates.

Amazon is one ecommerce brand that takes email personalization to a whole different level to build customer loyalty among its shoppers. Every email sent by Amazon is personalized based on  past shopping experiences, purchasing behavior, location, age, gender, and more. From newsletters to post-purchase thank-you emails, Amazon does it all and engages with the customer at every touch point.

5. Delight the Customer on Special Occasions

Don’t believe that remembering customers’ special days matters? A study by analytics and technology provider Fulcrum reported that 75 percent of customers who received a birthday message from a company with which they did business thought more highly of that company, and that 88 percent of those with positive responses showed increased brand loyalty.

Incentivize customers to provide their special dates when they opt in to your newsletter. Include such dates in the information they provide you when they sign up for your loyalty program. Reward them with bonus loyalty points for their birthday.

Birthday emails are a great way to delight your customers without turning them off. Macy’s leverages this as an opportunity to engage with their customers and encourage sales. Macy’s sends a well-designed email to the subscriber along with an offer like “Free Shipping” to persuade them to take action. Delighting the customers on their special occasions also helps Macy’s build a reputation for itself in the minds of the customer, which in turn leads to brand loyalty.

6. Support Seamless, Omni-channel Customer Experiences

Omni-channel customer experience is not just an option—it’s a necessity. An overwhelming 89 percent of respondents to an Exolevel Seamless Retail Study expected retailers to allow them to shop for products through a channel they found convenient. Engaging consumers with the precise message at the right time on the right channel is a key driver of customer loyalty today.

Best Buy is one of the classic examples of successful omni-channel retailing. The brand embraced a customer-centric approach to compete with the might of ecommerce merchants by differentiating itself with better customer experience. The brand merged its in-store and digital operations to offer customers a seamless omni-channel experience. One of their successful initiatives allows customers to “click and collect” by requesting in-store pickup, cutting drastically the number of clicks required to purchase online, turning stores into distribution warehouses for online purchases and aligned pricing on all channels.

Nurturing consumers into loyal customers is growing more complicated as customer touch points proliferate. However, a 360-degree engagement with them at those touch points is essential. Identify those touch points, integrate them into overall customer journey, and watch your conversions grow.

Check out ShopSocially’s customer loyalty best practices guide for more information.

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is growing like wildfire. Consumer education around this new basket of technologies is critical, since it basically describes a product category that can — and often does — include virtually every “thing” we interact with in our lives.

Your car, refrigerator, door locks, and even your toilet seat are capable of becoming part of the Internet of Things. All they need is a sensor and a network connection. From home automation to large industrial applications, this new generation of network-enabled devices are changing the way we live, work, and play.

So, what are some practical examples of the IoT and its influence in our lives? Here are just a few that could apply to the average consumer.

The dawn of self-driving cars

In a handful of years, your car may be able to drive itself without any need of human intervention. Brands like Tesla, Mercedes, and Google are already in the process of developing a new generation of vehicles that can navigate the roadways while you kick back and enjoy the ride.

Google, which started its self-driving car project several years ago, has well over 1.5 million miles of autonomous travel clocked on United States roadways — and every mile is an education for the technology.

Major auto manufacturers like Toyota, Mercedes-Benz, and Honda are also making huge strides towards freeing driver’s hands. Tesla, a relatively new name in the auto industry, scored over 375,000 reservations of its upcoming Model 3 within days of accepting them.

These cars are equipped with a host of different IoT components. They are littered with sensors that detect hazards, track the roadway, and more. They also rely on both on-vehicle and remote processing to determine the quickest and safest route to the destination. Many of these vehicles are expected to connect directly to the driver or passenger’s smartphone to give them useful information about the ride.

The IoT around you: home automation

A growing number of homes include connected devices. Home thermostats, security systems, appliances, and even smaller bits and pieces like window blinds and light bulbs are finding a new life in the Internet of Things.

Thermostats are possibly the most obvious and common example of the Internet of Things in the home. Twenty years ago, if you wanted to change the temperature in your home, your best bet was to walk over to the thermostat and adjust it. Ten years ago, you could program your thermostat to make your home more comfortable around the time you would be getting home from work.

Today, you can hop on your phone and control your home security system, temperature, and more from anywhere in the world in real time.

Your oven can even become a full-fledged member of the Internet of Things., enabling you to set food-specific temperatures and timers from your smartphone and even take a look at your food as it is being prepared from anywhere in the world.

Connecting future cities

Smart cities is a much larger and more involved area of application for the Internet of Things than the home, but the concept remains very much the same. Sensors, including video surveillance, traffic, and more placed throughout a city enable that city to be managed more efficiently and for its city government to respond to situations as they happen rather than having to depend on the citizenry to alert them to problems.

For example, traffic jams are a common problem in large and growing cities. Management of that traffic is done via traffic lights, but these are often set on timers and/or controlled via sensors embedded into the roadway that indicate cross-traffic is waiting for a green light.

If, however, there was a more big-picture view of how busy specific streets are, where accidents and other delay-causing events are taking place, traffic controls could be more readily adjusted to compensate for them.

A new industrial revolution

Another big area of development for the Internet of Things is in industry. Businesses small and large benefit from the type of data gathered by IoT devices in the workplace.

An IoT device that senses activity on an industrial machine could eliminate the need for a worker to physically monitor it on the warehouse floor. Multiple heavy machines could be controlled and monitored from a single control panel by a skeleton crew – saving the business money on staffing.

This rise in industrial automation paves the way for businesses to invest their staffing dollars on other skilled employment opportunities including research, development, systems management, and data science.

Speaking of data science, consumer IoT products relay a lot of valuable information to a business. This information enables the company to examine ways to improve on their products or services, lets them know how their products are being used so they can invest in expanding on those high-demand features, and more.

This also opens the door to a whole new area of value for the consumer. Apple releasing the Apple Watch enabled the company to add new incentive for customers to stick with the Apple-branded family of products. Additionally, it gave its customers a whole new fitness-tracking device, payment method, and a way to check and respond to messages without having to pick up their phone.

The examples of IoT technologies in the world are virtually endless. The Internet of Things is a large and ever-expanding category of products that reach into every aspect of our lives. Because, after all, the Internet of Things is… everything.

The post IoT and applications: Truly the “internet of everything” appeared first on ReadWrite.

Every day I realize more how stupid I am. It’s OK to be stupid. But when I was 18 I thought I was a genius. Now I realize I’m an idiot.

Here are the other 50 or so things I realize as I get older. I list this just for me. Because my memory is getting worse every day so I might have to refer back to this list.

1) You only retain 1–2% of anything people teach you in a class or in books.

2) Experiences are more valuable than goods.

3) Who your spouse will be is the most important career decision you will ever make.

4) Three skills to money: Making it, Keeping it, Growing it. They are very different skills.

5) Having kids is horrible. But having kids is wonderful.

6) Sleeping eight hours a day is really important. Regardless of the scientific reason.

7) Eat smaller portions. Every year you live, reduce portion size. Else you get fat no matter how much you exercise.

8) Try really hard to not care what people think. This is too hard for me but I’m learning.

9) Business is about creating value. No value = no profits = no business. Don’t believe your own hype.

10) Google people before you meet them.

11) Ask questions at a rate of 10:1 of giving answers.

12) Pretend everyone is your child and he/she is about to die tomorrow. Then you will listen and be nice.

13) Anger is not a real emotion. It is fear clothed. Figure out what you are afraid of before you get angry.

14) Reinvent every five years or you’ll get bored.

15) Try to be creative once a day. Creativity is a muscle. There’s no such thing as inspiration.

16) Gratitude and complaining/blaming can’t exist in the same brain at the same time.

17) All diets are BS. Avoid processed sugars. Eat less.

18) When you read, you can absorb the entire life of another person in a few days. Might as well read a lot.

19) Happiness = Reality / Expectations

20) The 5/25 rule. List the 25 things you want to do in life. Separate out the 5 most important from the other 20. NEVER look at the other 20 again. They are only distractions.

21) Napping is fun.

22) Sex is a painkiller.

23) War is never justified.

24) Ability is 99 parts skill, one part talent. Talent is the ignition and skill is the oil.

25) The only math you need is: add/divide/multiply in your head. And basic probability and statistics and percentages.

26) Watch a lot of comedy. Try to watch comedy every day. Laughter cures diseases.

27) If someone’s feet are angled away from you while they talking to you then they don’t want to talk to you.

28) Alexander the Great doesn’t care (right now) that Alexandria was named after him.

29) The Bible, The Bhavagad Gita, Buddha, The Koran, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, are all the same book.

30) If you are OK at one thing and OK at another thing then you can be the best in the world at the intersection.

31) When you write, pretend you are talking to someone bored and you are trying to keep them interested sentence by sentence.

32) When bored…do what you are most scared of or embarrassed by…in bed.

33) Insecurity is good. Confidence is porn.

34) This is a job: You create X in value: Your boss takes 10% of that. The company takes 10% of that. Taxes take 40% of what’s left. Housing takes 1/3 of what’s left. Eating, commuting, one vacation a year, clothes, takes almost all of what’s left. Which is why we most people have no savings.

35) Thomas Jefferson raped slaves but “Trump is Hitler” and “Hillary kills people.”

36) We don’t have any clue who the richest man in the world is right now.

37) Isaac Newton created Calculus. But also believed in Alchemy. You can’t be smart if you don’t do a lot of stupid things.

38) Richard Branson started Virgin Air by putting up a sign when his plane was cancelled, selling tickets. He used the money raised from the tickets to rent an airplane. You can start an airline like that also.

39) NYC had a huge environmental problem in the 1890s. The city was going to be buried by manure. No technology that existed could solve the problem. 20 years later cars solve the problem. Don’t try to solve every problem today.

40) Quantity is more important than quality. Quality is a byproduct of quantity. Picasso created 50,000 words of art.

41) The fewer things you own, the fewer things own you.

42) The more good things you do, the more people will hate you (but reverse not always true).

43) If you meet someone who you know hates you, shake their hand, smile, and pretend you don’t remember their name.

44) The prequels were not as bad as you think. Don’t be a generational elitist.

45) Nobody knows how World War I was started. Nobody remembers when Charlemagne was born. History books are just one slice of facts and we can only eat so much.

46) Opiniontainment.

47) Paleo people didn’t eat meat. They ate bone marrow, and only rarely.

48) Physics and most of biology are just opinions that will change every few years.

49) To make someone happy: tell them they can have what they want, tell them it’s not their fault they don’t have it, blame someone else, then you can persuade them of what you want (e.g. see “Trump”)

50) There is always the good reason and then there is the real reason (e.g. excuses a teenager will give you. excuses an employee will give you).

51) If someone can’t answer a question then they are lying (e.g, “where were you last night?” “I was out with friends” did not answer the question.)

52) 1% compounded every day is 3700% in a year. Figure out the 1% you want to improve on every day.

53) 42

Please add to the list…

Related post: The Ultimate Guide To Your 20s, 30s, 40s, And 50s

The post 50 Things I Pretend To Know Now That I Am Nearing 50 appeared first on Altucher Confidential.

As a kid, drinking milk was simple.

We'd enjoy a splash in our cereal, or a glass with dinner, and we'd make our moms happy, as these were convinced that milk was the magical elixir that would keep us strong, growing, and healthy.

But nowadays, grocery aisles present dozens of different milk options, and suddenly everyone is saying that dairy may not be as healthy as we thought.

Choosing the right milk can seem daunting, which is why we spoke to Lara Felton, a registered nutritionist and head of the dietary team at nutrition app ShopWell to better understand cow's milk, three of its non-dairy alternatives, and who should be drinking what.

Cow's Milk

Felton refers to cow's milk as the "gold standard" of milk. One glass will give you eight grams of protein, as well as plenty of naturally occurring calcium and vitamin D. Thanks to the lactose in it, cow's milk also contains carbohydrates. If you're healthy, and don't have any dietary restrictions, like allergies, Felton recommends drinking cow's milk.

If you're wondering what kind of cow's milk to drink — skim or whole — Felton suggests going by personal health needs and taste. For those with medical issues such as heart disease or type two diabetes, skim is the better choice because the fat that occurs in dairy is higher in saturated fat, which can lead to cardiovascular disease. But if you're healthy, and enjoy the taste and feeling of satiety that comes from drinking whole milk, Felton says go for it.

Soy Milk

In terms of nutrition, Felton says that soy milk is the closest equivalent to cow's milk of any of the non-dairy alternatives. Soy milk generally has seven to eight grams of protein per glass (cow's milk has eight). The soy beans used to make this kind of milk provide it with multiple healthy fats, and most of the soy milk you'll find in the grocery store is fortified with calcium.

Felton recommends soy milk for vegetarians, vegans, and those who are lactose intolerant. She cautions against drinking flavored soy milk though, since flavored milks usually have lots of added sugars.

Almond Milk

Almond milk has become more popular in recent years due to paleo and Whole 30 diets, which forbid dairy. While it's a source of polyunsaturated fats (healthy fats), Felton warns that almond milk is very low in protein. So if you're looking for a non-dairy milk substitute that provides just as much nutritional value as cow's milk, almond milk might not be the best choice.

However, if you're only concerned with calcium, most almond milk sold at the grocery store is fortified with this nutrient. Felton suggests almond milk as an ideal choice for those who can't have dairy and are allergic to soy. But just as with soy milk, Felton advises choosing almond milk that's unflavored. 

Rice Milk

According to Felton, rice milk ranks lowest among the non-dairy alternatives mainly because it has virtually no protein. Otherwise it's fairly similar to soy and almond milk in that it contains healthy fats and is usually fortified with 30-40% of one's daily value of calcium.

Unless you're someone with serious food allergies — you can't eat dairy, soy, or nuts — Felton generally doesn't suggest drinking rice milk. "If somebody who has a food allergy is just looking for something to put on their cereal besides [regular] milk, rice milk is a perfect alternative for that," Felton explains. In other words, if you can drink another kind of milk, you should.

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Before we start this ultimate guide on how to attract more customers, I’m going to caveat that statement. By saying we’re going to look at getting more customers of the kind you want and not the type that you don’t. Often when we speak to prospects we’re pitching too they talk to us about getting the “right kind of enquiries”. Well, that’s what we’re going to look at here, “how to generate the right kind of enquiries”.

Often when we start up our own business we go after every potential customer that we can, in an attempt to keep our heads above water. Once you have got yourself more established, however, you begin to see patterns forming, and you can start to think about what customers you want to attract. Almost every business has clients who they are keen to avoid – for a whole number of different reasons, so how can you go about getting more of the customers that you want?

The truth of it is, that often problem clients are the ones who take up the most of your time, and earn you the least money, so unless you want to spend your life frustrated, annoyed and unable to grow your business, you are better off trying not to attract these less desirable clients in the first place.

When You first Start Your Business

To work out how to get more of the customers that you want, the first and most important thing to do is actually know who your ideal customer is – and who it isn’t! One of the best ways to work this out is by writing down five of your best customers and five of your worst. You can then analyse these customers to give you a better idea of the kind of customer that you want.

Write down as many details as you can about your best and worst clients – information such as:

• The type of business that they have
• What kind of work they ask you to do, or what kind of products they buy
• Where you got the client from

From this information, you can now look for patterns to see the characteristics of the customers that you should and shouldn’t be trying to attract.

Defining Your Ideal Customer

Client and Marketing Personas

The next step is to build some perfect client or marketing personas. This means you will create a fictional, ‘perfect’ customer, using the information that you have already found out, as well as adding some other information like the demographics of your customer.

By creating ideal customer personas you will be able to better understand the people you will be targeting your marketing efforts towards. It will help you to understand better factors such as your client’s:

• Buying habits
• Dreams and desires
• Wants and needs
• Important things in life
• Problems

From this understanding, you will find it easier and more effective to:

• Create content that is interesting and useful to your clients, engaging with them better.
• Be in the right place at the right time – knowing when and where your clients will show up, and being there to meet and engage with them (both on and off line).
• Understand your customer’s wants and needs and therefore being able to design, create and develop new products and services.
• Boost referrals as you can point people in the right direction of who their referral targets are.

According to James Heaton, writing for the Tronvig Group, creating these marketing personas is useful because:

“First, they help force the creators to get into character. Specificity is a good way to push the process deep enough to facilitate genuine understanding of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviours of your customers. We are not all naturally good at this, and it’s important for a persona’s effectiveness.
Second, it can help you find previously undetected tactical opportunities for your product, service, or institution. These can make what you do more useful and relevant in your customer’s lives. Where does your product or service constructively intersect with what Sally does or what Sally cares about? Once uncovered, these are very valuable insights.”

It is generally recommended that you create between 3 and 5 different personas as this will be big enough to cover all or at least most of the different aspects, but small enough to be relevant and concise. A typical template would look like this:

• Name – Make sure that you give them a real name, so that they seem like a real person- this is vital to create a believable persona.
• Work details – Write about the company that he/she works for – size, industry and about their job role within the industry.
• Demographics – Use your website analytics to get information about your typical customers and then use that information to make it the customers that you want.

• Goals and Challenges –Talk to your actual customers about what goals and challenges they face in your field. Try to find out about what challenges they have, what impedes them and what slows down the process of overcoming them. Find out about their goals and the issues that they face in achieving them, who do they turn to for help and advice, will they need to sell a change to somebody and if so, to who?
• Marketing Message and Elevator Pitch – This is where you decide how and why you are going to market what product or service. This is an area that will be developed over time, so you can start off just by writing down your ideas.

These are just the basics. You will probably want (and need) to add in some categories which are more specific your field – for example, a medical company will need to know different information to a travel booking company, for example. Some extra information might include what social media channels they use, hobbies, computer literacy, medical history, what blogs they read, where they get their news and getting real quotes from customer interviews.

Whilst you may want to just concentrate on the kind of customers that you want, it is also important to create personas for the customers that you don’t want. This is because it gives you the chance to avoid certain things that might attract them – e.g. advertising in a certain place, or in a certain way.

Where To Get Your Client Information

You can use the information that you have found from your initial ‘ideal customer’ analysis. There are also some other sources of information that is specific to your existing customers. Remember though, this information will also include your ‘less desirable’ customers so you need to think carefully about what information you will use. These sources include:

• Analytical data from your website – customer demographics as well as keywords that they used to find you (Google Analytics and Google Search Console).
• Talk to your team – anyone who deals with customers on a personal level.
• Speak to your customers yourself to find out any extra information.

Interviewing Your Existing Customers

Interviewing is a good way to do research for information about your marketing personas. The prospect can be a little daunting, so here are some tips for interviewing to gain information for creating a marketing persona:

• Go to your actual customers – there’s no better way of finding out about a typical customer than by speaking to them themselves. Make sure that you go to both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ customers to be able to understand both types. It might also be a good way to engage with ‘bad’ customers to see if there is a way that you can move forward.
• Talk to your ex-customers too. By engaging with them you also have the opportunity to try to get them to come back, offer them a voucher, and get feedback on your product or service.

• Talk to people who haven’t (yet) bought anything from you. You can use information from those who have shown an interest, for example. This not only gives you some balance, it also gives you an opportunity to get in touch and give them the chance to get to know you.
• It can be difficult sometimes to get people to agree to being interviewed, so some ideas to get people to say “yes” include – offering incentives (vouchers or a gift card), making it clear that you aren’t making a sales call, making it easy for them – let them choose a time that is convenient to them and send them a calendar reminder closer to the time.
• Start off by working on the basis of interviewing 3-5 people for each type of persona that you are creating, but as a rule of thumb, keep interviewing until you can begin to start to predict the answers.
• Ask ‘why’ as much as you can.

What Are Your Customers Problems And How Do You solve Them?

Now that you have created your marketing personas you need to think about how you are going to target your marketing. By targeting your marketing towards the customers that you ‘want’, you cut the risk of attracting customers that you don’t want. One of the best ways to market to a specific group is to understand what their problems are and then use your product or service to show how your business can solve these problems – even if they didn’t know that they had a problem in the first place!

If you don’t know what the problem is, how can you sell someone the solution? If you don’t understand the problem you are trying to solve, not only will you not make the sale, but you also waste your time and lose your credibility.

The most successful salespeople:

• Find customer problems and then find convenient, quick or cost-effective means to solve them…
• Understand that if you find a solution to a big or pressing problem, people are prepared to pay a higher price…
• Understand how to spot someone who has a problem that they are ready and wanting to be solved and those that aren’t…
• Are systematic problem solvers – using a process such as the following, to solve problems –
  1. Identify the problem – Identify which problems are a priority for customers – ask questions and observe, don’t just try to sell products.
  2. Analyse the problem – How often does the problem occur and how serious is it? When does it occur? What causes it? How long has it been going on? Who does it affect? Is it getting worse?
  3. Decision criteria – How will both you and the customer make decisions when it is time to decide whether they buy? How will you weigh the criteria?
  4. Come up with multiple solutions – Don’t just stop at one, come up with several solutions and assess the strengths and weaknesses of each solution.
  5. Choose the best solution – Now pick the best solution according to the criteria identified in no. 3.

Once that you have a good understanding of the typical problems of your ideal customers, you can set out the information to make it clearer;

PROBLEM We are not getting seen enough in our marketplace Too expensive to reach my audience RESULT 1 Lack of sales Damaged profit margin RESULT 2 Competitors getting more custom Spending money that should be going to other areas of the business RESULT 3 Loss of brand reputation Difficult to keep up with competitors

Setting out information in this way makes understanding your customer’s problems a lot clearer and therefore much easier to help them out with solutions through your product or service. As well as giving you clarity in the sales department, the fact that you have thought about these potential problems, demonstrates to your customers that you have a really good understanding of the issues that they are facing, the effect on them, and that you ‘speak their language’.

How To Increase Your Sales

Selling by Problem Solving, not pitching

“A man who buys a drill doesn´t want a drill. He wants a hole.” – Theodore Levitt

And this is the basic premise behind selling a solution to a problem, not your product. People don’t buy a product or service because they want you or it. They buy something because they want the result of you or it. Bear this in mind when you are talking to people – you are there to solve their problem, not pitch a product.

What makes you different from the guy down the road?

One of the keys to marketing your business is to show how you are different from the guy down the road. What is your USP? Do you concentrate on solving customer problems, or helping them to solve their own problems, for example? Sometimes having a more specific niche is better than being an all-rounder as people will search you out as an expert in your field.

Now Let’s Put It All Together To Get More Clients

So now that you know who your target market is – the target market that you want – and that you don’t want, it´s time to come up with your strategies to appeal to these people in particular.

Your Website

Your website is the face of your business – just like your shop or office front, your receptionist and your sales rep – so you need to make sure that it is giving off the right image of your business.

This will go a long way into making sure that the right people are attracted to your website. Other important factors include:

• Using language, fonts and images similar to that which your target audience will use, but which is also appropriate to your business and the level of professionalism that you want to portray.
• Give appropriate information – what is it your target market needs to know before buying? Think about the personas you created earlier, what would they want to know – about your product, specifications, how to use it, how it can solve their problems, as well as reviews from people like them, explaining how great your product or service is.
• Make it easy for your target market to contact you and buy when they want to. Make sure that you add contact information with names and addresses (physical and email) and maybe have live chat feature or contact form. Remember: Only ask for the least amount of information for you to be able to answer the query or process a sale. A contact form or checkout procedure with unnecessary fields will put visitors off from purchasing or enquiring.
• If you are going to offer something for free in exchange for contact details or a newsletter, make sure that you are offering something which your target market would like to have. You can ask people during your interviews about what they would value and exchange their details for. Customers are pretty savvy these days, they know they’ll end up receiving further emails from you so you better make it worth their while, or they’ll just unsubscribe. Try to make it something that will help them or amuse them which is related to your business. For example, an e-book or free samples.

Search Engine Optimisation

Search Engine Optimisation needs to be built into your website from the ground up. It should guide the structure, navigation and choice of content. This means it will be baked into your digital marketing from the start and save you plenty of time and money further down the line.

Use your marketing personas to guide you to:

• Choose the right keywords to optimise for based on how and where your ideal customer searches for products and services just like yours.
• Research the most relevant and successful competitors in your field, analyse their SEO strategy and take the best parts.
• Find out where they search for advice and reviews and what blogs they read. This will give you a target list of highly relevant and topical websites to obtain backlinks from.
• Do they use and click on paid search listings or do they stick to the natural search results? This gives you the opportunity to promote yourself using Search Engine Marketing as well as organic SEO.
• Do they look for a local business when they’re searching or are they looking for a well known national provider?

Content Marketing

There is no point in having an amazing website if no-one is seeing it – it’s like having a great advert that no-one sees. One of the best ways to get your website found amongst all of the other websites is by content marketing. By regularly releasing useful, interesting and informative content, you can help your website rank among the top on search engine results lists.

So how can you make sure that your content marketing will attract the right customers? Well, the key is to put yourself in their shoes. You can use your marketing personas to work out what you think would be interesting and informative to them. You should also consider the following:

• What format would they prefer? You don’t have to write. You could put out content in the form of video, infographics or a podcast – or mix it up.
• Make your content output regular and consistent – think about what you think your target audience would want.
• Write about topics which you believe that the customers you are trying to attract would want to know about. A good way of coming up with content is by coming up with a FAQs list and answering these.
• Think about where you are going to publish your content…

…which brings us to the next stage.

Social Media

It is a crime for any business not to use social media for marketing as it is such a powerful tool. The key here is to ensure that you choose the right platform. This is where your research will really come in handy as you need to know which social media platforms are most used by your right customers.

Each social media platform is used by different demographics, so it is important that you use these same ones, and follow the guidelines on the best way to use each platform. For example, you would use LinkedIn in a different way to Twitter or Facebook.

From this, you can then go on to start to looking for and engaging with your potential customers, get them visiting your website, and, start buying!

Tapping into existing audiences made up of your ‘ideal’ customers is one of social media’s main attractions, it can be time-consuming but worth it. Especially if you are a relatively new start-up with a small marketing budget.

Most social media channels now offer a paid advertising service. This can help boost your visibility on the various platforms even further, leading to more shares, more followers and ultimately more revenue.

Blogger Outreach and Guest Blog Posting

Blogger Outreach and guest blog posting are great ways of building your brand, increasing traffic to your website and ranking higher on search engines. If you do it in the right way, you can ensure that you have a direct route through to a ready-made audience comprised of the ‘right’ customers that you are trying to attract.

The process of blogger outreach and guest blog posting is all about building relationships with influential bloggers and website owners in your field, and raising your profile with their audience, a kind of digital PR. Over time this process develops your own audience. The blog articles you offer need to be of very high quality but they can link naturally back to your website, building authority and traffic.

You can find out who the influential bloggers in your industry are, through simple research online. You can also go back to your marketing personas to find out what things were of interest to your right customers, and then find some influential bloggers in these areas. Another great way to find out what blogs interest your target customers is to ask them if they regularly read any blogs – and if so, which ones.

When you are making your approach to blogs and writing your posts you need to make sure that your content is relevant to the blog and interesting to their readers. Most bloggers will allow you to add editorial links back to your blog articles, so long as they’re relevant, whilst other may restrict you to an ‘author bio’ at the end of your article with links through to your website and social accounts. Make sure that if people comment on your posts, you are ready to respond.

You can also return the favour and invite other people who are well-known in your field, or seen to be a ‘guru’ of something that is relevant, to write a guest post on your site.

Conclusion

Attracting the kind of customers that you want is the key to ensuring the longevity of your business. By really understanding who they are, where they come from and what makes them tick, you can really begin to market at them specifically and start to see your hard work pay off.

You may have heard this statistic about the importance of the customer experience, but it is certainly worth a reminder – “By 2020, the customer experience will overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.” In fact, 86% of buyers are already willing to pay more for a better customer experience. It doesn’t matter what industry you are in, improving the customer experience brings some very real benefits.

According to research by Genesys, the top three reasons why businesses stated that they proactively manage and invest in customer experiences are to:

• 42% – Improve customer retention
• 33% – Improve customer satisfaction
• 32% – Increase cross-sell and up-sell opportunities

As companies are expected to compete mainly on the basis of customer experience, one of the most important tasks will be to ensure consistent multi-channel communications.Aberdeen Group Inc. claims that companies with the strongest multi-channel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers, as compared to 33% for companies with weak multi-channel strategies.

Companies with strongest multi-channel strategies retain an avg. of 89% of their customers.

;With more consumers today starting their purchase journey on mobile devices, marketers must place renewed emphasis on optimizing the mobile experience as part of a successful multi-channel strategy. According to a Mobile Consumer Study by Adobe, “Today’s mobile users have an insatiable appetite for mobile satisfaction—and companies that miss the mark are consequently folding to the competition. If consumers can’t find what they want, when they want it, they’ll find another brand in as little as two minutes who will deliver.”

Failure to deliver a great mobile experience can cause missed opportunities and lost revenue. According to WOW Local Marketing, 52% of customers are less likely to engage with the company because of bad mobile experience. Because a poor mobile interaction can be so detrimental, 84% of customer-centric companies place extra emphasis on the mobile customer experience.

Understand Your Customer’s Needs

An exceptional mobile experience certainly encompasses tactics such as ensuring websites are mobile-optimized, emails use mobile-friendly design, and loading speed and other design elements are optimized. But to truly cater to mobile consumers, businesses must understand these consumers, what drives them, and the context in which they are using mobile devices.

For example, are they using their mobile devices to buy products, or to research products to later purchase online or in store? Do they use mobile to research across multiple sites, check social reviews, search on a brand’s website, or to perform local search for a phone number and directions to a brick-and-mortar location? Or do they use mobile for all the above?

Just as important as understanding how mobile is used across the purchase journey is understanding consumers on a deeper level – their overall online and offline behavior, demographic and lifestyle characteristics, and what influences them to purchase. Knowing what motivates consumers is challenging, and according to IBM research, just under half of businesses (48%) say they have a good understanding of the types of content that make people more likely to buy, the reasons for making a purchase (43%), and the value of visitors from different sources of traffic (48%).

Why Personalization Matters

Mobile users consider their devices to be a part of themselves. A study of mobile behavior by ExactTarget found that 85% of respondents said mobile devices are a central part of everyday life, signifying connectivity to all that’s going on in their world. Mobile connectivity also represents personal space that can be customized to meet one’s needs. Companies must ensure that their messages to mobile consumers are also personalized based upon consumer behaviors, demographics, interests, and according to their stage in the purchase journey.

Consumers research and interact with multiple brands along the purchase journey and will seek out those companies who can deliver a deep level of engagement and rich experiences. This requires that marketers have the proper blend of consumer insights and real-time information, such as in-the moment browsing data, content downloads, or interactions with emails. In the online world, reacting and engaging with on-the-go mobile and digital consumers quickly and with relevant messaging is challenging. In fact, 33% of marketers cite delivering relevant and contextual challenges as one of their top challenges in optimizing the customer experience.

Marketers can implement technology solutions to perform data integration, advanced analytics and real-time campaign deployment within a single platform. Rather than having separate solutions for data management, channel execution, analytics, and so on, a single platform can perform all these functions to help marketers get to the right insights faster in order to deliver automated and contextual messaging at the right time. In doing so, marketers can create a highly personalized and relevant experience for their mobile consumers.

According to an interview with Simon Horton, founder of ShopIntegrator, “Mcommerce is seen as a quicker, easier and more convenient alternative to other shopping channels, and mobile customers are not tolerant of anything less than that. Getting the mobile customer experience right can open up a number of doors for businesses across their other channels.”

Download our Customer Experience Marketing Strategy Guide and learn best practices to gain more wins on the customer experience battleground.

There’s been a flurry of interest in Product Marketing of late. This shouldn’t be a surprise given that Product Marketing is a frequently misunderstood function. But it’s not new. And I also wouldn’t go as far as to say that we’re in the midst of a renaissance or that we’re redefining what it is. The flurry seems to be drawing from the fact that early- to mid- stage companies are struggling to figure out when and how to weave Product Marketing into their businesses.

Fortunately, we can shed some light on this subject by looking at some examples. Before we do that, to get things started, it’s important to make sure we have a shared understanding of what Product Marketing is.

The Nerve Center

Product Marketing is often described as a nerve center or hub that connects and aligns product, marketing, and sales. Which sounds pretty important, right? Well, it is. In every successful business, there is always at least one person who has a well steeped understanding of the market, buyers, and needs that are being addressed. An oversimplified definition of product marketing could go something like this:

Product Marketers utilize knowledge of the market, users, buyers, and products to craft a go to market strategy that better informs and educates marketing and sales as well as prospects and customers to drive business.

To break that down into more detail, here are some of the specific things that Product Marketers do:

• Market Knowledge: Segmentation, user and buyer personas, purchase motivators, competitive intelligence, use case scenarios, and customer problems
• Business Strategy: Go to market strategy, sales strategy, channel strategy, market strategy definition
• Tactics: Lead generation plans, customer retention programs, branding, awareness, field marketing plans, campaign definition, analyst relations and press/media relations
• Content: Messaging, sales training, FAQs, documentation, brochures and data sheets, demos, web site content, lead gen content (e.g. ROI calculator), blog posts, case studies, press releases
• Optimization and Market Learning: Key business metrics, pipeline tracking, website metrics tracking, customer advisory boards, focus groups and user groups

There’s often some discord on a number of the responsibilities listed above. One common debate is where responsibility for positioning and messaging belongs. For example, in a mature organization, you’ll often find that Product Marketing owns positioning while the Creative and Demand Gen teams are provided some creative freedom to craft the messaging. The nuance here is “what we want to say” vs. “how we want to say it”.

Another area of debate is related to the marketing programs strategy. A core tenet of Product Marketing’s function is to understand the buyer and as a result this often translates into knowledge of how and where to reach these people. Depending on the market you sell to, your Demand Gen team may be in a position to own this part of the strategy. For example, at my company, Attend, we sell event technology to marketers. So, our marketing team is very well versed in how to reach our target audience. In previous jobs, I was selling to IT. So, the Product Marketing team was better positioned to guide this part of the discussion.

The debate goes on. For example, in larger companies, there’s often Business Analyst teams that handle all of the analysis and reporting. The net-net on this is that Product Marketing is really a “hub” that can absorb any of the responsibilities covered above. Because it is positioned at the core of the business, where product, marketing, and sales meet, it can be a critical function particularly as a company grows. To that end, I’d like to shift our focus to how the role and responsibilities of a Product Marketer evolve as a company grows.

The Three Phases

Believe it or not, the Product Marketing function is almost always present in a company regardless of the stage of growth it is in, even if the role or organization doesn’t exist. I’ve had the fortune of filling this function and role at companies in all stages of growth: a Fortune 500 tech giant, a growth stage company that had a successful IPO, and an early stage startup. In each of these cases, the need for Product Marketing was paramount.

Based on my experiences and a number of people I’ve spoken with on the topic, I’ve come up with a pretty simple way to explain the evolution of product marketing. The table below breaks it down into three distinct phases: The Farmer, The Grower, The Harvester. Please excuse the farm nomenclature but it seemed to line up pretty well!

Here’s how I’ve seen this in practice:

The Farmer (early stage startup): In many cases at this stage, the CEO or CTO, often a founder, it still playing the Product Manager role and fulfills the Product Marketing duties opportunistically. This role is almost always more product management focused due to resource constraints and a small sales team. They need to make sure they’re building the right product first before becoming expertly focused on how to sell it. Some sales enablement content is created but at a limited scale. Generally this “product” person is more focused on messaging and growth. As Saeed Kahn said in a recent OpenView blog, “your title means little and what you do means a lot”. That rings true at this stage.

The Grower (growth stage): At this stage, Product Marketing responsibilities are often woven into a hybrid Product role that is also accountable for all Product Management responsibilities. I’ve seen this model evolve into a business/product owner model. This is pretty common in companies that have multiple product lines where more focused business oversight is needed. This lasted until the company reached ~800 employees. Now that company has a Product Marketing team that reports into the CMO.

The Harvester (Fortune 500): When a company has tens of thousands of employees, organizational structure is pretty well defined. In this case, Product Marketing was part of the Marketing organization and Product Management rolled up into Engineering. The Marketing Programs team owned execution of a go to market strategy that was crafted by Product Marketing. On a more tactical level, Product Marketing was also tasked with working with internal teams to ensure readiness for product launches. This included sales and marketing enablement — i.e. training and educating these teams on the go-to-market, positioning, messaging, differentiation, etc. Product Marketing also created all of the demand gen and web content but it was ultimately made ready for consumption by a creative and web team.

Putting it to Use

It’s critical to understand the Product Marketing function and to define and staff these roles in the right ways as the company grows. The reason to hire is not simply to reduce the burden of another team, but to bring a better understanding of the buyers and market into the company and optimize how the company markets and sells to those buyers.

There are a bunch of ways out there to help you evaluate how a Product Marketing role can fit into your organization. The RACI framework is a pretty popular one that helps cross-functional teams evaluate where to draw the lines on responsibility, accountability, and general involvement. At the end of the day, you all have the best barometer on your businesses. You’ll know pretty quickly if your current team has the capacity to take on these responsibilities and when it’s time to scale a Product Marketing function.

The post How to Build and Scale a Product Marketing Function appeared first on OpenView Labs.

All sales functions are connected, and sales analytics is what ties them together. The number of calls your Sales Development Reps make affects the leads they generate, which in turn affects the demos they set for your Account Executives, and so on and so on.

All the answers and insights you’ve ever wanted about your sales team are right there at your fingertips, you just need to know how to speak the language. And the language of successful sales teams is analytics.

The language of successful sales teams is analytics.

Measuring key performance stats and creating a data-driven sales team can be the proverbial Rosseta Stone for deciphering how an individual rep or team is performing, what’s likely to happen in the future, and how performance can be improved. Every sales rep should understand the basics of sales analytics and sales operations professionals need to know the most essential metrics backwards and forwards.

That’s why we created our newest eBook, “The Essential Guide to Sales Analytics.”

Download the eBook today

This eBook compiles and defines all the key metrics your sales team should be tracking. With helpful definitions and an explanation of the value each metric provides to a sales team, this eBook is an essential tool for any sales operations professional or a sales rep looking to have a better understanding of their performance.

The eBook is divided into three sections:

Beginner Analytics: These are the easiest metrics to track and the ones you absolutely must be monitoring.

Intermediate Analytics: These metrics are slightly more complex and add more clarity to your sales operation.

Advanced Analytics: These metrics are the hardest to track, but offer the most detailed insights into your sales performance.

Within each one of these sections, the metrics are divided by sales function, so you’ll know exactly where to apply them for maximum effect. Those sales functions are: sales development, closing deals, and performance analysis.

So whether you’re just getting started with sales analytics or you’re looking to spot check your existing data-driven sales organization, this eBook will be a tremendous resources for years to come.

Download your free copy of the guide today!

The post Introducing the Essential Guide to Sales Analytics appeared first on SalesLoft.

Commentators and researchers have focused on the crucial role of the CEO in leading effective corporate action to promote high performance, high integrity, and sound risk management. What receives far less attention is that, more and more in our increasingly complex, volatile, and fully-globalized business world, the effectiveness of such action depends on a powerful partnership between the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and the General Counsel (GC). This critical alliance needs and deserves much greater analysis and application.

The CFO-GC alliance has always been important because the finance function and the legal function are truly the nervous system of the corporation—sending critical signals to all parts of the company about the accuracy of the financials and compliance with law. But, the integration of finance and legal is even more consequential today because what the corporation can and cannot do across the globe is affected directly not just by financial and commercial issues which the CFO analyzes but, increasingly, by evolving “business and society” issues which the General Counsel and the corporate law department must address. These issues include legislation, regulation, litigation, enforcement, investigations, geopolitical risk, demands for ethical actions, and public criticism, affecting all the functions of the corporation in their interaction with all levels of global governments (central, regional, local). Especially in light of ever-increasing variety and intensity of stakeholder demands on the corporation, these business and society issues, under the purview of the GC, must be closely fused with the CFO’s financial and commercial analysis to serve the CEO and top business leaders when they make and implement core strategic and operational decisions.

Indeed, due to increased commercial complexity in global companies as well as the growing impact of business and society issues, the expertise, quality, breadth, power, and compensation of the General Counsel have increased dramatically in recent decades. At many firms, the GC has replaced the law firm senior partner as primary CEO counselor, becoming a core member of top management and participating in decisions and actions not just about law but also about business. Also, the GC now often leads units beyond the legal department, such as public affairs, taxes, and environment. In more and more global companies, the CEO, directors and other key stakeholders see the GC as having importance and stature comparable to the Chief Financial Officer. It is primarily the GC who must navigate complex and fast-changing law, regulation, litigation, public policy, politics, media and interest group pressures across the globe, often in a public, outward-facing role as negotiator, spokesman or representative. As a result, the optimal CFO-GC alliance is now much more like a peer relationship, jointly coordinating and overseeing fundamental corporate issues of performance, compliance, ethics, risk and governance, and organization. Here is a brief discussion of how the alliance works in key areas:

Performance. Financial, legal, ethical and risk perspectives obviously need to be integrated when the corporation is making decisions about new deals, about new types of customers, new geographic markets, new technologies and new products. For example, the financial and legal staffs are bound at the hip on the various phases of mergers and acquisitions, from the memorandum of understanding, to representations and warranties, to due diligence, to definitive agreement, to closing and then to deal integration. On major deals, the GC and CFO are strong partners on a personal level because the robust integration of their complementary views on key issues can spell the difference between success and failure, both in closing and in subsequent performance. For example, failure to identify a serious accounting or environmental failure of the target company in due diligence can lead to a major criminal or civil liability for the acquiring company after the deal is sealed.

Compliance. Although the CEO and division heads should, in my view, be the ultimate leaders of the corporate compliance program, the CFO and GC jointly share responsibility for actually designing and implementing the systems and processes that ensure adherence to formal legal and financial rules. Compliance always has been and always will be a basic corporate responsibility, and any such program must be comprised of three essential elements: protection, detection, and response. What’s radically changed in recent years is complexity. Responding effectively to this means the CFO and GC, working with Compliance and Risk, together develop a robust method of process mapping, risk assessment, and risk mitigation relating to those formal rules that apply to all corporate functions—e.g. sales, marketing, manufacturing, intellectual property—in all business units in all geographies. Ideally, the legal and financial staffs together conduct compliance reviews which report up to the CEO, CFO, and GC, and also act as core investigators in the event of a major compliance failure like bribery or accounting fraud in a major overseas division.

Ethics. In exemplary corporations, the CFO and GC jointly staff the systematic processes the CEO and top business leaders use in voluntarily adopting vital global standards for the corporation, which go beyond what the formal rules require. Once the company establishes these ethical positions on key issues—whether on global sourcing or greenhouse gas reduction, or extra consumer protections—they are implemented systematically just like formal, mandated rules. In my experience at GE, what worked best is to have the CFO and GC jointly identify a range of possible ethical issues for consideration; help select a salient sub-set for analysis; and then develop options to guide the ultimate decision-making process by the CEO and the board of directors. Deciding among those options involves a combination of considerations both prudential (enlightened self-interest of the company) and moral (rights of—duties to—others) which vary with context. Decisions about not doing business in a corrupt nation are very different than those considering whether to voluntarily reduce the corporation’s emission of greenhouse gases. And then, of course, there are costs. The CFO and GC determine together whether the cost of a particular voluntary global standard is amenable to hard financial analysis (e.g. cost of reducing pollution) or if it turns on a broad-gauged judgment about corporate reputation without financial precision (benefits of imposing labor standards on third party suppliers).

Risk. The CFO and GC are key in developing together, with business leaders and other staff officers, safety processes, management practices, and a safety culture to handle both economic and non-economic risks beyond legal and ethical threats. One key to this partnership is identifying risk priorities—whether economic (e.g. leverage and liquidity risk, operational and technology missteps, or macroeconomic threats) or non-economic (e.g. injuries to third parties from company processes/products, security and safety, and country/geopolitical risk). A second key dimension is justifying the costs of instituting prevention and response steps for risk events that may not happen—especially for the vexing issue of low probability/high impact catastrophic threats. The CFO and GC can work up pro forma cost scenarios and also look to analogous disasters (e.g. the Challenger explosion, Hurricane Katrina, the Siemens bribery scandal, BP gulf explosion) to explain the types of adverse effects/costs which could happen and which investments in prevention and response make sense in attempting to avoid or mitigate the disaster.

Finally, and most importantly, the CFO and GC must support each other as “statespersons” in a corporation. This means asking first whether a corporate action complies with legal and financial rules, but asking last whether an action is “right” in terms of the corporation’s mission of high performance with high integrity and sound risk management. To be effective statespersons, the CFO and GC must manage a dynamic tension: acting as “partners” to the board of directors, the CEO and top business leaders, but also, ultimately, as “guardians” of the corporation. And they must work together to help create a pervasive culture of integrity under CEO direction. Business pressures, practices, attitudes, and internal politics (a courtier’s desire to please the CEO) can create obstacles to the statesperson’s role, the partner-guardian fusion, and the integrity culture.

A strong, respectful, mutually-supportive partnership between the Chief Financial Officer and the General Counsel is one critical way to overcome these obstacles. More broadly, that alliance has become an imperative, helping global corporations to be more responsive, resilient, and effective in a fast-changing and ever more complicated world where commercial and societal issues are intertwined.