Rnordman

This past May, a person that I have a lot of respect for graduated from college. A few days after he graduated, he asked me a very simple question: If you were in my shoes and graduating from college all over again, what would you do differently?

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Slack is a team messaging app that has created a great deal of excitement since its release in February 2014. Those who use it love it, as shown in its high engagement rates.

If you’re considering implementing Slack as part of your marketing efforts, here are some statistics courtesy of DMR. Slack currently has 3 million daily active users and is growing at a rate of 3% to 5% each week. Over 75% of Fortune 100 companies use Slack and there are over 60,000 teams on the platform. Users actively spend 140 minutes per weekday on Slack. There’s no doubt that Slack’s highly engaged user base is growing fast. The opportunities for marketers to use the app to build a Slack community are, obviously, huge.

The team-orientation makes the platform a natural for building out your Slack community just like you would on LinkedIn or Google+. There are far fewer groups on Slack than there are on LinkedIn, so there’s little competition for getting new members. Of course, you can just participate in relevant groups, but you’ll gain the greatest return by creating your own. Although creating a group on Slack is free, it does require some time and effort to build and sustain your community.

Choose Your Slack Community Topic

The first step to creating your community is deciding on a topic. Broad topics have the potential to attract the greatest number of people. So think about the type of community your target market would be interested in joining. If you’re targeting prospects and customers, make sure your theme is related to your product or service. If you’re creating a community to build thought leadership among your peers, focus on a subject in which they are interested.

Create Your Slack Community

Now that you’ve nailed down the theme of your community, it’s time to create it. You’ll be asked to provide your team name and a URL. Your best bet is to keep things simple yet descriptive. For example, if your theme is B2B marketing, then you could call your group “B2B Marketing” and use the URL b2bmarketing.slack.com. Your community will be active once this is completed.

Invite People to Your Slack Community

One thing that makes Slack a little different from other platforms is that joining a group is by invite only. That means team administrators or owners need to invite someone to join their Slack community. Although Slack has the means to send and manage those invitations, do not send them out indiscriminately. According to Slack’s help center article “Slack may limit a team’s ability to send more invitations if a large number have already been sent but very few have been accepted”.

Besides, it’s not realistic to build a large community by inviting people to join one at a time through Slack. Currently, there are no integrations that simplify the process. However, there are a couple of hacks that make the process easier.

There is a WordPress plugin that automates the sending of Slack invitations through a signup on your WordPress site. Users simply enter in their email address on a form and the invitation gets sent. This means that only people that want to be invited to join your community get an invitation through Slack. So there’s no worry about hitting any invitation limits as described above.

An alternative is to create a signup form using either Typeform or Google forms where people can enter their email address to receive an invite. The only drawback is that you still need to manually go in and bulk download this list of emails to Slack so invitations can get sent out. Although there is a way to automate the process with this Typeform hack, it does require some programming ability.

Once your signup form is ready, start promoting that link on social media and request to have it added to various Slack lists. Be aware that it will take some concerted promotional effort on your part to get the ball rolling.

In a future post, we’ll explore Slack integrations and how marketing teams can use them to be more productive.

Forget that '$100' pricetag. Try '$99.99' instead.

Credit is convenient, but paying with cash has a subtle impact on your mindset that you can use in your favor. A recent study found that paying with cash actually makes us value our purchases more.

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Imagine for a moment that you’ve hired a new employee.

Would you expect your new hire to figure everything out on their own?

It’s likely you’ll have a new hire checklist to be certain your new employee gets the information they need to be successful.

Those first few days are important for setting exceptions and building their personal investment in your business.

Shouldn’t you do the same for your new email contacts?

It turns out those first few messages your new contacts receive are also crucial for setting expectations and building their personal investment in your business.

If your new contacts have to wait for your regularly scheduled email, it’s possible that you lose the momentum started when someone makes the decision to join your email contact list.

And they may also not quite understand or reap the full benefit of your regular scheduled emails because they’re coming into the middle of the conversation.

How can you take care of your new email contacts?

An automated Welcome Series, of course. This automated series of emails allows you to set the stage for your new contact while increasing engagement and sales at the same time.

The best part is that you set up your Welcome Series once, and it works for you indefinitely. The experience is the same for your first email contact or your thousandth.

What should you send in your automated Welcome Series?

Plan on sending at least three automated emails to new email contacts.

1. Welcome/Fulfillment

The Welcome email is crucial. Imagine someone walked into your store, and everyone ignored them. If you don’t send a Welcome email, you’re doing exactly that.

The purpose of that Welcome email is to reaffirm your contact that they’ve made a great decision to join your email list.

And to fulfill on any offer that you made in exchange for their email address. Special offers are one of the reasons why people sign up to email lists.

When should you send your Welcome/Fulfillment message?

Instant gratification is crucial at this stage. Schedule this email to send immediately after someone joins your list.

What should you say in the Welcome/Fulfillment email?

Something along these lines:

Thank you for joining us!

You’ll receive two more emails from us over the next five days, and then you can expect to hear from us on a [frequency] basis with [general content of your on-going emails].

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the link at the bottom of every email we send.

[Your offer will likely be one of the following. Choose the ONE that works for you.]

• Here is your [coupon/download].
• Here is our [provide something your new contact should know about. For example, link to a schedule, menu, or some other helpful information].
• Visit us at [website/physical location].

Shouldn’t a welcome email be enough?

I know, what you’re thinking: Why do I need to send more than a Welcome email?

The problem with only sending a Welcome email is that most people tend to overstuff it with information. The more you try to add to a single message the less effective your email becomes, simply because you’re trying to do more all at once.

You also miss the opportunity to get your business in front of your contact multiple times at a point when they’re highly engaged.

A short series of emails designed to increase engagement and sales with your new contacts works best.

Here’s what you should send in email two.

2. Invitation to Connect

New contacts may not be familiar with the way your business operates and the ways they can connect with you if they need help. Use your second email to get them the information they need about your social channels, a topic that most customers want to know about, or how they can contact you if they have questions.

When should you send your Invitation to Connect email?

Send this email about two days after they’ve received the Welcome/Fulfillment email.

What should you say in your Invitation to Connect?

Try one of the following:

We’re on social! Connect with us so you can be among the first to hear about new updates and so you can engage with us and our other [fans/followers/members of the community].

Follow us on social: [Links to social channels]

—

Most new contacts want to know about [topic] so we’re making it easy to get the information you need.

Visit [page] on our website

—

We’d love to hear from you! Give us a [call/email] so we can [benefit to calling. For example, answer your specific questions, provide a free consultation, something else you offer].

Get in touch with us at [phone number and/or contact email].

You’re ready for email three.

3. Get to Know Your Contacts

The more you know about your email contacts, the easier it is for you to inspire action by sending them relevant information and offers.

Use your third email to get to know a bit about your new email contacts.

When should you send your Get to Know Your Contacts email?

Send this email about four days after your “Invitation to Connect” email.

What should you say in your Get to Know Your Contacts email?

Try one of the following:

We’d love to learn a little more about you so we can deliver you a special gift on your birthday.

When is your birthday? [Link to update profile form or single question survey]

—

We’d love to learn a little more about you so we can tailor the emails we send to your specific interests.

What are you interested in? [single question survey]

—

We’d love to learn a little more about you so we can give credit where credit is due.

How did you hear about us? [single questions survey]

—

Don’t be afraid to modify these scripts to match the tone and personality of your business.

The key is to focus on your new contact and provide them value with each message.

Use the scripts above as a guide. Pretend you’re speaking to your new contact face to face. How would you say it? That’ll help your email feel personal and less like a script.

An automated Welcome Series that feels personal is what you want.

By setting up and including these three automated emails in your Welcome Series, you can take advantage of the early stages of this relationship to capture more engagement and sales.

Don’t let this highly-engaged state of your new contacts slip away from you. Set up your series to trigger whenever someone joins your list.

Want more help with your automated Welcome Series?

Register for our upcoming Virtual Workshop: Automation: How to Create a Welcome Series to Increase Sales and Engagement on Thursday, July 28 at 2 pm ET. (Register even if you can’t attend live. We’ll send you a recording.)

Trying to expand the reach of your business? Email list building can be a difficult task to tackle if you’ve never done it before, but these seven tips should get you well on your way to creating a strong email list of interested readers. Remember, any time you collect an email address to add to your list, you must take a few steps to ensure you comply with Canada’s anti-spam laws. Most importantly, when asking people to sign up, you must clearly identify your business, you must obtain express consent from the individual (ask them to agree to receive your marketing materials or newsletter), and you must allow them to unsubscribe from your emails if they wish.

1. Tie sign-ups to a free download on your site.

One of the simplest methods available to you as a business of any size, a free giveaway works wonders for getting customers to willingly part with their email addresses and any other personal information you might need to build your list. Make sure you’re offering real value with whatever you’re giving away. Downloadable eBooks, checklists, and how-to guides work great for this – offer your customers just a bit of your expert knowledge in exchange for their email.

2. Put out a call to action on social media.

Remember, there are plenty of people out there who would like to be on your email list, but don’t know about it yet. So put out the call on your social media accounts, to get everyone up to speed. You’ll find that many of the same people who like or follow you will be eager to sign up and get more insight, news, bargains, etc.

3. Attend networking events and reach out.

Networking events exist for a reason: they work. For small businesses, one of your best resources for finding partners and B2B customers will be your local chamber of commerce. If you’re willing to invest a bit more in putting yourself out there, then the next stop will be trade shows, conferences, and other events associated with your industry or field. Make it easy to sign up: have a mobile device handy, or a QR code, or take down information and sign people up manually after.

4. Incentivize sign-ups with coupons or discounts.

Do you have a wallet full of store-specific discount cards and the like in your wallet? Most people do. Use that same principle to build your own list—tie discounts and coupons to your newsletter, and give customers a good reason to go out of their way, even if they’re not the newsletter type.

5. Ask customers at your brick-and-mortar to sign up.

If you run a brick and mortar location, don’t fall into the trap of separating your web activities from your physical activities: marketing is marketing, outreach is outreach. Let customers fill out sign-up sheets at the register, hand out flyers or put up posters with QR codes linking to sign-up pages, etc.

6. Set up a referral system for employees and customers.

Word of mouth works wonders for email list building, as much as it does any other marketing endeavor. Which means that if you give employees and customers a good reason to shill your list to everyone, you’re going to get a lot more signups than you would keeping all the responsibility to yourself.

7. Make sure you put a CTA on all content.

If you run a blog, tweet funny graphics, post on forums, send out emails on other lists, advertise on associates’ newsletters, or promote another type of content, don’t forget to make an appeal to viewers to sign up for your list at every reasonable opportunity.

Remember, these are far from the only email list building tricks out there. Don’t be afraid to experiment!

LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman shares the biggest mistakes he sees LinkedIn users making – and how to correct them.

If you truly want to craft a killer LinkedIn profile, the guy who helped create the world’s largest social network for professionals has a few tips.

During a video interview, LinkedIn Co-Founder Reid Hoffman shared the biggest missteps he sees users making with their LinkedIn profiles.

(WATCH: How To Create a Killer LinkedIn Profile)

What follows are four specific tips Hoffman says will help separate your LinkedIn profile from the rest of the pack on the network. And, given that LinkedIn now has roughly 435 million members in 200 countries, that’s quite a pack!

Tip 1: Get Found!

“We live in a networked age. So what’s your strategy for being found?” Hoffman asks during the video interview. “Someone might be looking for you – your product, your specific skill set. Be able to be found.”

The more completely you fill out your profile, Hoffman says, and the more information it contains about who you are and what you do for others, the better chance you have of being discovered on the network.

Tip 2: Have a Goal!

“You should have a goal for your profile,” Hoffman says. “With my profile, I look at who I want to target and have my profile appeal to.”

Hoffman goes on to share one on of my favorite tips – to make your profile what I call “client-facing” – meaning it’s written in a way that appeals directly to your ideal employer, client or customer.

The key is this: It’s not as much about listing out your work history and job duties like a résumé as it is showing how you can help your ideal customer or employer achieve his or her professional goals via the products, services or skill sets you provide.

“Have your profile written from a viewpoint [that appeals to] the people searching for or reading your profile,” Hoffman adds. “And they read it, and think, oh, [you are] someone I want to talk to!”

Tip 3: Be Unique!

Although LinkedIn is a “professional,” suit-and-tie type social network, that doesn’t mean you have to scrub all traces of personality and individuality from your profile page, photos or posts.

No matter what type of product or service you provide, people still want to work with other people. As a result, we naturally gravitate toward hiring and partnering with people we know, like and trust.

If your LinkedIn profile is a faceless avatar with no information beyond a dry description of the job duties you perform or services you provide, it will be difficult to bridge that gap with potential customers and business partners.

“What things are uniquely you?” Hoffman asks. “You can put in your hobbies, but it’s not so much those personal things even as it is some genuine expression of what kind of work you do, what you’re an expert in, the kind of things you’re interested in.”

Tip 4: Get Social Proof!

Some of the most underutilized and undervalued tools on LinkedIn, according to Hoffman, are endorsements and recommendations.

The reason is simple – because LinkedIn requires users to attach their real name, face and profile page with any endorsement or recommendation they give someone, it reduces the likelihood of fake testimonials.

“That is a very useful thing,” Hoffman says. “There is an incentive for people not to lie in public.”

When you endorse someone or write a recommendation for another person on LinkedIn, the whole world sees your name, face and public information attached to it.

“When someone is looking at your profile, and is looking to present you with an opportunity, they are going to see that you are someone they want to talk to,” Hoffman says. “Because it’s not just you saying that you’re good at something – other people are saying it, too.”

So, if you haven’t already, now would be a good time to take Hoffman’s advice and start putting these tips into action with your LinkedIn profile!

(Note: If you want additional help, I have a free video training series called “How To Create a Killer LinkedIn Profile!” that takes you step-by-step through the entire process!)

Silicon Valley is a revolving door of startups, big tech companies, VCs, and innovation — things are always changing. 

But there are those that have weathered these transitions and changes year-in and year-out, becoming the most seasoned and experienced in the tech world. 

Business Insider recently released its annual Silicon Valley 100 list, highlighting the people in tech who have made a difference this past year, of which many are longtime tech veterans over the age of 50.

They've seen the boom and bust of many technological feats and can feel where the industry is going.

Read on to learn about some of the most experienced people in the business over 50.

Additional reporting by Julia Naftulin, Tanza Loudenback, and Alexa Pipia.

Edited by Alex Morrell and Matt Rosoff.

David Boies, 75

Lawyer and board member, Theranos

Boies has provided legal counsel for a slew of troubled tech startups, ranging from Napster to Hampton Creek and now Theranos. The legal expert is defending the company from inquests by several government agencies and is considered a force to be reckoned with — he helped the US win the 1998 case United States v. Microsoft Corporation, in which the government accused Microsoft of becoming a monopoly.

David Drummond, 53

Senior VP of corporate development, Alphabet

With Google's restructuring into Alphabet, Drummond was pulled up to the top to oversee mergers and acquisitions for all of Alphabet's ventures. He previously acted as Google's first outside lawyer, working with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to secure Google's earliest financing rounds. Drummond also still sits on the board of Uber.

Tom Reilly, 54

CEO, Cloudera

Cloudera, a software company launched in 2008 that aims to help businesses — more than 20,000, in fact — make sense of huge data sets, has raised more than $1 billion in private funding. Investors include Intel, Google Ventures, and MSD Capital.

The company has been considering an initial public offering for more than a year to maintain its dominance in the market, but Reilly said in April that Cloudera would enter the public market only "when we've reached the right scale, when the business is more predictable, when there's greater visibility." They may have good reason to wait a while longer: Fidelity, another investor in the company, marked down the value of its Cloudera stake, along with stakes in several other startups, by 37% in March.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

It's lonely at the top.

Being the boss comes with a ton of pressure. And when you're in a management position, it can be difficult to evaluate how you're doing.

Are you striking the right balance between commanding respect and appearing accessible? Are your employees responding well to your style of leadership? Are any of your actions breeding resentment in the office?

Being a good boss is crucial for your organization — a third of employees in one survey revealed that they'd quit a job because of a bad manager, as Business Insider previously reported.

So how can managers tell if they're doing a good job? You can't exactly go wandering around the office asking people — that would look pretty weak. But employee satisfaction and engagement surveys aren't a bad idea.

Here are other, more subtle signs that you're killing it as the boss:

SEE ALSO: Here are 4 things all great bosses do

You don't have obvious favorites

Playing favorites is a great way to torpedo office morale. If you make it clear that a certain person is the apple of your eye no matter what, then that'll just encourage your other employees to give up on trying to impress you.

You treat your employees like human beings

Unfortunately, some bosses seem to feel that hurling insults and abuse at people is an effective motivational technique. In most cases, this simply isn't true. If you value your employees as human beings, then you're already a huge step above many managers.

You're willing to try new things

Good bosses adopt certain methods because they're the best way of doing things — not because they've just fallen into certain habits. The best managers give their employees a little room to experiment and innovate.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

While all consumer demographics have increased expectations for customer service, it’s the world’s newest and biggest generation of customers that are creating a seismic rumbling in “I want it my way, I want it now” support.

Millennial customers, commonly defined as the consumer collective born between 1980 and the early 2000s, are collectively expected to spend more than $200 billion annually starting in 2017 and $10 trillion during their lifetime. From music to gaming, to hospitality, retail and real estate, millennials are wielding their purchasing power with higher expectations for engagement.

Millennials extensively research and follow brands online both before and after purchases, making up their own minds about quality, value and customer care via social media, online reviews, communities, the search engines and other avenues, rather than being told what they should think and feel based solely on advertising and marketing messaging.

Microsoft’s new State of Global Customer Service Report confirms that this youngest set of customers is upping the ante for customer service innovation, which is a key part of the customer experience. Take a look at these breakouts by age around areas such as mobile customer service, self-service, social and customer loyalty:

Great Expectations

1. 68% of 18 – 34-year-old consumers have higher expectations for customer service today than they had just one year ago (compared to 56% across all age groups and 47% of consumers ages 55+).

2. 78% of 18 – 34-year old consumers expect a customer service agent to know their contact and product information as well as service history when they contact a brand for assisted service (compared to 72% across all age groups and 66% of consumers ages 55+).

3. 68% of 18 – 34-year-old consumers have stopped doing business with a brand due to a single poor customer service experience (compared to 60% across all age groups and 54% of consumers ages 55+).

Self-service, Mobile and Chat

4. When engaging with a brand or organization for customer service, 65% of 18 – 34-year-olds’ interactions now begin online (compared to 55% across all age groups and 46% of consumers ages 55+).

5. When beginning an online customer service interaction, 36% of consumers ages 18 – 34 start on a mobile device rather than a desktop or laptop computer (compared to 28% overall who start on mobile and 21% of consumers ages 55+).

6. 60% of consumers ages 18 – 34 regularly use live chat for customer service (compared to 45% across all age groups and 32% of consumers ages 55+).

7. 89% of 18 – 34-year-old consumers have used a search engine to try and find the answer to their customer service question (compared to 75% across all age groups and 60% of consumers ages 55+).

8. 84% of millennial customers have used a self-service portal for customer service (compared to 73% overall and 63% of consumers ages 55+).

9. For millennials, 81% have a more favorable view of a brand or organization if their customer service portal is mobile-responsive (compared to just 66% overall and 53% of consumers ages 55+).

Social Customer Engagement

10. Almost half (47%) of consumers ages 18 – 34 have used social media to complain about a brand’s customer service (compared to just 29% overall and 12% of consumers ages 55+).

11. 52% of 18 – 34-year old consumers have used social media to ask a customer service question (compared to 31% of consumers overall and 13% of age 55+ consumers).

12. And if you were wondering if your brand should continue to invest in social media as a customer service channel (or give customer service access to your brand’s social media properties to respond to customer service questions), 64% of consumers ages 18 – 34 say they believe social media is an effective channel for customer service, compared to 45% of consumers overall and 27% of those ages 55+.

The statistics above show where the future of customer service – and customer expectations and preferences – are heading. Is your brand innovating for the next generation?

The term “organizational culture” can obscure an important truth: An organization often contains many cultures. This is true even if your organization is located entirely in one country, or even at one site.

Because each business unit or team may have their own subculture, working effectively across the organization requires skill in working across cultures.

Doing this requires three steps: understanding what culture is and how it works, identifying the cultures of your team and the teams you work with, and designing how you and the other teams will work together.

Understand what team culture is and how it works. A team’s culture is its shared values and assumptions, and it results from a mix of elements: the organization, industry, geographic region and nation, and profession or function the team represents. Values are things we consider worth striving for, such as honesty, accountability, and compassion. Assumptions are beliefs we hold about how the world works or how things are related. For example, you may assume that people generally want to do a good job, or that people are more committed to a decision when they are involved in making it. A team manifests its culture in many artifacts, including norms that lead members to act in certain ways and to create structures, processes, and policies. It’s important to distinguish between a team’s espoused culture and the one it operates from. The values that team members say they operate from are the espoused culture — which may or may not be what they actually operate from.

Identify your team’s and other teams’ cultures. To determine how cultures differ, you need to identify the values and assumptions that constitute them. And to do that you need to operate from the assumption that differences are opportunities for learning; if that thinking isn’t already part of your culture, your joint exploration may quickly devolve into conflict as each team describes how the other’s culture is a problem. To avoid this, consider finding a facilitator or consultant to help you.

You and Your Team Series

Managing Across Cultures

Three years ago my stepson received his MBA along with a terrific job offer and moved to Washington DC. It wasn’t long after the move that he recognized a huge void in his life – there was no place for him to grab healthy, prepared meals. Working extremely long hours, he had no time to grocery shop and cook for himself. And being a long-time fitness and nutrition fanatic, the idea of eating fast food wasn’t attractive to him. Out of this void came the idea for a new company delivering chef-prepared, dietician-approved, ready-to-eat meals.

       * Image via Pattyfarmer.com

From the start, he knew he’d need advice on marketing and I was happy to jump in. Although, honestly I didn’t know how much value I could add given that my focus is nearly 100% on B2B marketing and certainly 100% on enterprise-level organizations. What I did know was the importance of eating right and the impact it can have on your life. I shared his passion and agreed that there was a place in the DC market for his offering. But what did I know about the food delivery business? And what did I know about marketing to millennials, his primary target audience? I’m not even on Instagram.

As he gets ready to launch the new business next month and I reflect over the past two years of his work I realize that there really aren’t huge differences between enterprise, B2B marketing efforts and startup B2C efforts.

The big and obvious differences in his B2C space are:

1. Social media is a game changer
2. Blogging is critically important
3. Purchases are highly transactional. You have mere seconds to capture someone’s attention (vs. a six-month sales cycle for a large enterprise purchase).

What’s more fascinating to me than the differences, however, are the similarities.

1. The importance of research

I’m sure many startups occur without much research, which is why the vast percentage of them fail. I’ve also worked with many enterprise companies who want to bypass conducting proper research. Thankfully, my stepson believes in the value of it. And since there was no piggybank to fund his effort, he knew he had to build a convincing business plan to raise the startup money. Months were spent running numbers, evaluating competitors in other geographic markets, counting customer purchases, identifying the proper target audience segments, and conducting menu tastings. One of the research areas I most often see my enterprise clients ignore is buyer research. If you don’t understand your buyers – what drives their need and purchase – then how can you market to them? The importance of understanding your buyers is something that doesn’t change between small B2C and large B2B companies.

2. The importance of branding

Let’s face it, establishing a strong brand can take an inordinate amount of time and money. But the difference in effort between a small and large company is becoming smaller and smaller given Web 2.0. In today’s digital world, a small company can “look” much larger than it is. Thus, the importance of brand becomes more similar as well. In doing competitive research for the startup, we found that most brands weren’t highly professional and/or weren’t carried through entirely across the user experience. We knew that since our offering was going to be an entirely digital experience, at least in the beginning, having a unique and consistent visual brand was vital. And that meant having crisp guidelines, that ALL resources follow, across everything from logos to tone and photography. Consumers of both B2C and B2B solutions are bombarded every day more and more with marketing messages. Brands must stand out, cut through the clutter, and engage. It really doesn’t matter the size of the company or the price of the product.

3. The importance of user experience

For most enterprise level companies, the thing that comes to mind when you talk about user experience is obviously the web, but what clients often do not think about is that the user experience has to carry through to any human contact as well – from a lead follow-up outbound phone call to a field sales rep meeting.  Additionally, the larger the enterprise and the more complex the organization’s solutions are, the more complex the experience tends to be both on the web and in person. Internal and organizational complexities are often reflected externally as evidenced by websites that a visitor is unable to navigate (and thus abandons) or by a follow-up phone call from someone whose attitude, tone or even language doesn’t make for a pleasant user experience.

For smaller consumer-oriented companies, especially 100% web-focused companies like my stepson’s, the web user experience requires special attention. Actual purchases and subscriptions will happen on the web so everything from sign-up, to scheduling deliveries, to pausing deliveries must be on-brand and user-friendly. Carry that over to alerts when the food is on the way or the tangible experience with packaging and heating instructions once the food is delivered.

In today’s society of immediate gratification, if an unpleasant user experience occurs consumers know that there are plenty of other options literally just a click away. Because of this the importance of the user experience cannot be stressed enough, whether it’s a startup food delivery service or an enterprise organization.

For everything that my stepson thought he needed to learn from me, I’ve learned an equal amount if not more from him. It’s given me a new perspective while at the same time solidified in my mind how important research, brand, and user experience are.

Author: Jennifer Harmel @JenniferHarmel2 EVP, Demand Process Strategy Practice and Principal, ANNUITAS

The post Lessons Learned From a Startup appeared first on ANNUITAS.

People and professionals in organizations can have different intentions while working towards the accomplishment of organizational, as well as, individual goals. Understanding the difference between intent-driven and goal-driven behaviors allows for deeper levels of understanding buyers (customers). Leading to more effective online engagement, content design, and sales conversations.

The relationship between intent and goals is a very important one. Understanding this relationship allows for a deeper analysis of buying behavior and what truly is driving purchase decisions. Primarily, it helps with making sense of the tasks and activities buyers perform.

Tasks Versus Goals

This is also an important principle behind buyer insights research and buyer persona development. The many articles, books, and promotional material written about buyer personas, in general, are missing this key point. Whereby what is being professed is getting a little deeper in demographics and describing tasks and activities of buyers.

For example, we see plenty of hyperbole around the buyer’s journey today. Oftentimes, these exercises lay out the tasks and activities buyers may take along a journey. However, what is missing are the intent and the goals driving a person or a team to embark on such a journey.

I spoke recently with a CMO from a high tech company and here was his perspective on this:

“We recently spent a lot of time on developing a buyer’s journey view of our customers. Yes, we used the help of a third-party firm. Frankly, I was disappointed. The analysis of the chronological activities is helpful. But was it something that was going to really transform our marketing? I don’t think so.”

The issue this CMO faced is that the focus of the buyer’s journey was on tasks and activities and not on intent and goals. This issue is prevalent in misguided buyer personas also. Where what is documented amounts to glorified job descriptions of the tasks and activities buyers perform. Falling under this category is such things as priorities, preferences, buying criteria, and etc. because they are related to how one goes about performing their tasks and activities.

I believe this perspective from a Senior Director, Marketing from a SaaS and Cloud-based provider I interviewed a few months ago edifies this point:

“It was an interesting process. I found that, yes it was good to know things like what were the priorities of our customers, what they did in their job, and what they did during certain stages of the buyer’s journey. In the end though, there was something missing. Like, I never got the sense I knew what was important to them or even why it was important.”

This is a common refrain I hear from those who have not tackled buyer persona research with the all-important focus on goal-directed behaviors.

The Connection Between Intent And Goals

In order to generate improved online engagement, content design, and sales conversations, organizations need to gain a deeper understanding of the intent behind tasks and activities. At the same time, come to grips with how certain intentions are related to specific goals. Doing so provides the deeper level of understanding required to create resonance with customers in all aspects of marketing and sales.

For instance, an individual in a B2B organization may perform the activity of online research related to supply chain management. The intent may be related to intra-department discussions on how they have kludged homegrown applications that no longer are adequate. And, it is time to explore alternatives. Yet, there is context related to goals, such as creating faster delivery of critical components to established customers due to new market needs.

Drawing such connections requires sound qualitative research practices in gathering buyer insights. Well beyond the basic line of win/loss or profiling oriented type of rote questioning. Which, unfortunately, due to the popularity of the term buyer persona, are being misrepresented as buyer persona research.

Transform Marketing

Based on a slew of surveys over the past two to three years, it is clear that the failure to connect with buyers continues to persist. This persistent failure has marketing transformation on the minds of many CEOs and CMOs. With transformation meaning how to reorganize, as well as, realign marketing and sales efforts around the customer.

Gaining deep insights into the connection between buyer intentions and buyer goals can lead to reaching this key aspirational target on the part of CEOs and CMOs – to transform. Buyer persona research can play an important role in helping to achieve transformation. Providing it is done with true qualitative buyer research principles. And, is focused on understanding the goal-directed behaviors of buyers. Which is, at the heart of buyer persona research in general.

When marketing is able to gain such deep understanding, it can transform itself from just marketing to the tasks and activities of buyers. They can transform by mapping to the intentions and goals of their buyers. Putting their organization, in the eyes of customers and buyers, as the one organization that can help them to best accomplish their goals.

(The need for transformation in marketing is a growing concern for many CEOs and CMOs. One company focused on transformation successfully has been GE. In order to make their brand stand out, they are gaining a deeper understanding of what their customers are attempting to accomplish and how they can impact that endeavor. In this video, GE CMO Linda Boff reviews how GE is undertaking transformation efforts.)

Today, buyers are in charge. Mystery in the sales process is over. We research someone online before agreeing to a first date -- is he a creep? We fire up LinkedIn an hour before an initial business meeting -- does she have anyone I know in her network? We watch on-demand movie trailers before deciding which film to see that night at the theater. We check out restaurant reviews and browse menus before booking a reservation.

We’re in a new world. But you know that because you’re living in this new world every day.

Even though sales managers understand the role of web content in the buying process, many still run their teams the same way they did 20 years ago. Intellectually, we all know what’s happening, because we all use the web and social networks to research products and services.

Many sales directors I’ve met go online regularly to purchase expensive products without talking to a salesperson -- a set of golf clubs, for instance -- then tell me their market is different and insist their salespeople use the cold-calling, hard-sell approach to sales they learned in the 1980s.

It’s amazing that vice presidents of sales will go to the mailroom and systematically throw all of what they call “junk mail” into the bin without reading it, and a moment later march down the hall and insist that the marketing department create a “direct mail campaign.”

I don’t understand why these sales leaders don’t recognize the hypocrisy at work here -- they themselves don’t respond to traditional sales techniques, yet they insist that the salespeople who work for them practice the same outdated strategies.

There’s a huge disconnect between the sales strategies and tactics that worked last century and what works today. And just as buyers operate in real time today, sales strategies must become more agile as well.

Just because you rely on salespeople to interface with buyers doesn’t mean you need to stick to the same old strategies and tactics. Rather than a one-size-fits-all sales strategy, evidence suggests that an agile sales approach works best today.

“Agile” refers to both the individual as well as the entire sales team, both of whom should be focused on being hyper-responsive to buyers. Instead of forcing buyers into the company’s sales process, an agile company responds to individual buyers based on what they are doing and how they are interacting.

As an example, the buyer locates the top six vendors for a purchase decision. She researches what their products do. She looks at their price books. Sometimes she can try their product for free. And oftentimes, she can even buy it right on the website.

However, the salespeople need to bring more value to the buying process than just basic information found on a website. And that value is being able to transform the website’s generic messaging into specific information tailored to the needs of a particular buyer. Today the most successful salespeople play a role much like a consultant.

When a particular buyer has done as much self-education as possible and is ready to have a conversation about his or her particular needs, the agile sales component comes into play. The buyer has read content on the company’s site, followed its blog and Twitter feeds, and perhaps has participated in a webinar. The buyer is ready to discuss details. 

The Decisive Advantage: Speed

With buyers having access to much more information than ever before, salespeople now enter the buying process later, at a moment of enormous opportunity. When a buyer raises her hand, it’s very likely she has already educated herself based on the content on your site and elsewhere. She knows the basics and wants more. She’s indicating that she wants to speak with you about something specific.

But this also poses a challenge. Not only do buyers need a salesperson with more knowledge than what appears on your company’s site and blog, but they also expect a much quicker interaction.

When buyers express interest, they expect contact right away. Now. Not tomorrow. Not this afternoon. Now!

It’s easy to tell people to respond in real time. But it’s not easy to actually implement this strategy.

The best organizations use a combination of humans and technology, much like an air traffic control system. Technology can take you only so far; eventually, you’ll need someone to make a decision about each inquiry that comes in. And just like that air traffic controller, it must be done instantly or there might be a crash.

If your marketing team does an excellent job creating content for your buyer personas, it’s also likely that the number of inquiries will grow quickly. Over time, you can start to use technology to do a first pass on lead qualification in real time; however, it’s important to monitor the filters carefully when they are first instituted to make sure the parameters are properly defined.

It is best to use an algorithm when dealing with high-volume responses because the clock is ticking, but implement this only with constant human monitoring, and quickly adjust and make changes as required.

Editor's note: This post is an excerpt from "The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business" and is republished here with permission.

Author: Kevin George

As an email marketer, subscriber engagement is undeniably one of the most critical factors that makes or breaks your efforts in converting your subscribers into lifetime customers. Considering that 54% of US and Canadian consumers consider ending their brand loyalty if they are sent irrelevant content and offers, according to CMO Council, what’s the way forward?

Repeated surveys have proven that transactional emails are more effective at engaging subscribers and result in greater ROI than bulk emails. In fact, Experian reports that the average revenue per transactional email is two to five times greater than standard bulk emails and that they have almost eight times the open and click rates. Yet, out of all marketers, only 40% are using transactional emails.

The Components of a Transactional Email

A transactional email, otherwise known as an operational email, is essentially a personalized email that’s system-triggered by a subscriber’s unique behavior during an online transaction (registration, form-fill, purchase, etc.). Here are a few best practices to consider as you’re developing your transactional email campaign:

• Send it from a recognized ‘From’ address. No one likes seeing emails from do-not-reply@xyzdomain.com.
• Use a subject line that clearly summarizes the purpose of the email. Avoid adding promotional language in the subject line or your email could be flagged as spam.
• Write copy that acknowledges and thanks the subscriber for their activity and conveys excellent customer service. While the CAN-SPAM act allows a transactional email to be used for promotions, the message of the email should primarily be transactional in nature.
• Include a recognizable and clickable brand logo and incorporate your brand colors to boost brand recognition.
• Use links that serve a specific purpose.
• Be friendly, informative, and timely.

If you aspire to join the 40% marketers who are sending transactional emails and seeing serious results, then sending friendly, timely, and informative emails is a must. Here are six types of transactional emails you can send your subscribers based on their behavior:

1. Email Address Confirmation/Registration Emails

If a buyer subscribes to your newsletter, fills out a form, or registers for an event or webinar on your website, send them an email to confirm their action. This enhances the customer experience and sets the tone for building a trusting relationship. You can also use these emails as a double opt-in for subscribers to confirm their email address. Some businesses do this to confirm that subscribers enter valid email addressed, which is a great way to keep your database clean.

Email address confirmation and registration emails are also a great way to provide your subscribers with additional information they may need like your contact email, phone number, or social media profiles, and it opens the door for them to connect with you in different ways. For example, Best Buy’s welcome email contains various calls-to-action (CTAs) to help subscribers learn more about their different services.

2. Password Resets

If your website has a portal for visitors to log into, make sure that when your subscribers request a password change, they receive timely, personalized, and clear instructions regarding the password reset procedure. Moreover, with the prevalence of phishing activities, adding a link or email where they can report unauthorized password requests strengthens your credibility. This email from Treehouse has clear instructions on how to perform a password reset, an alternate link, and a contact email for any issues that come up.

3. Order Confirmation Emails and Purchase Receipts

After subscribers make a purchase or register for a conference, follow up with an email that confirms their order and includes their shipping information and tracking links when applicable. Buyers are often eager to view their order confirmation because it provides reassurance that their purchase was processed and gives them information on when they’ll receive their order. This order confirmation email from Fitbit includes a receipt and link to check the order status in real-time.

Take advantage of your subscriber’s high level of engagement by showcasing customer testimonials or cross-selling relevant products, services, or events. In fact, Experian reports that transactional emails that include cross-sell items have 20% higher transaction rates than those without.asking for referrals within the email. You can also use order confirmation emails to ask your subscribers for referrals. For example, Skillshare includes a referral code at the bottom of their receipts to encourage their subscribers to refer their friends. 

4. Feedback Emails

There is always room for improvement, and one of the best ways to improve the customer experience is to understand how your buyers feel. Ask your subscribers for feedback directly based on the proper context (e.g. after they book a trip from your website or 3-months into their software subscription). Since their feedback can be extensive, you may want to provide a CTA to a landing page to collect it. For example, after a game, the Arkansas Razerbacks send attendees an email thanking them for attending, recapping the scorecard, and directing them to click a link to take a survey about their experience. 

5. Reactivation Emails

Reactivation emails are sent to subscribers who have previously interacted with brand, but haven’t continued to engage. This could include consumers who abandon their shopping cart before making a purchase, email subscribers who haven’t been opening your emails, or existing customers whose subscriptions are expiring soon. Target your offers based on each subscriber’s behavior and lifecycle stage (e.g. send more aggressive offers to subscribers with lower engagement or existing customers who are likely to churn).

Reactivation emails are a great way to keep your brand top-of-mind and remind your subscribers about the value your brand provides. You can take a humorous approach like Bonobos or send a clear-cut email that gets to the point like Apple Music.

6. Website/App Extension Emails

Increase engagement by bridging the divide between your different channels. By providing in-email functionality that connects to your website or app, subscribers have the freedom to interact with you on their preferred device. For example, LinkedIn sends a CTA email when you receive a new LinkedIn invitation that is personalized and prompts the user to confirm the invitation.

No matter what industry you’re in, transactional emails can help you generate more revenue, build brand loyalty, and improve your email deliverability. Are you ready to take them on? Trigger away!

Are you currently sending transactional emails in your campaigns? Share your tips and tricks below!

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6 Types of Transactional Emails That Every Email Marketer Should Know was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 6 Types of Transactional Emails That Every Email Marketer Should Know appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Account Based Sales and Marketing takes an entire team to get the ball from one side of the field all the way to the other and across the goal line. No single player can take on the opposing team alone. Many different teammates touch the ball multiple times throughout the drive to the end zone, which makes each handoff critical. If you don’t spend time perfecting this, you risk dropping the ball – a turnover that could lead to your competitors cashing in on your lost opportunity. That’s exactly why we wrote Bridging The Gap: The Ultimate Guide To Account Based Marketing & Sales Alignment For Predictable Growth.

We know that clean data should be a primary goal if you’re trying to effectively use an Account Based Strategy – or any strategy for that matter. There are de-dupe tools, mass lead converter programs, automatic lead routing systems, and other technologies of the sort. But in reality, that only corrects bad behavior that salespeople have already learned or inadequate process development.

Clean data can’t fix a bad sales process.

Sales and marketing efforts are only limited by the quality of your data and depth of your strategy. It’s very important to invest the time and energy to get this right. The cost of not establishing these essential components of an account based approach, especially at the handoff, is more than you think, leading to

Here are the four key factors you need to get right in order to master the handoff and close large accounts:

1. Balancing business objectives with individual activity metrics
2. Knowing when to disposition out accounts and move on
3. Establish the right qualification process and/or criteria
4. Creating the best handoff experience for the prospect

Let’s take a deeper look at each and dive into how you can avoid dropping the ball.

Just because it’s easier to get someone to say “yes” to a demo, doesn’t mean the SDR needs to schedule one. If an SDR passes along too many weak leads, the AE will be wasting time with non-buyers. If an SDR is spending too long qualifying a lead and the AE’s pipeline dries up, there’s no one to talk to.

There must be clear, concrete criteria for when an SDR can call a lead “qualified,” and ready to pass off to an AE.

Avoid creating situations where an SDR might qualify a lead just to hit a quota.

1) Balancing Business Objectives with Individual Activity Metrics

We all know that sales and marketing traditionally don’t get along. Marketing is often measured and compensated on different metrics (such as total traffic to the site and MQLs) while sales is often measured on completely different metrics (such as meetings booked and deals closed). The wider the net you try to cast with your marketing, the less qualified incoming leads are going to come in. You can see why the two teams get along like cats and dogs. Now, account management/customer success is putting on the gloves and stepping in the ring to fight because they now have to deal with the promises the marketing and sales teams are making.

Part of the solution is to implement a Service Level Agreement (SLA), which is meant to establish similarly quantified agreements between the three teams and aims to put them on similar revenue quota and business objectives/results. Establish an SLA that defines what a qualified lead is, when that leads should be passed to the next stage, how the conversion at each stage occurs, and so on. This way, all three teams are accountable to each other.

Even though the entire team is now held to the same business results, each team still needs their own activity metrics, otherwise, you don’t know which levers to pull to reach those business objectives. You’ll have to decide which are the most important to your business, but here are some sample metrics to get you started.

MARKETING OBJECTIVE METRICS

1. MQLs
2. Webinar & Event Signups
3. Sales Information Requests
4. Lead Response Time
5. Ad campaign click-throughs

BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT ACTIVITY METRICS

1. Outbound Calls
2. Meaningful Conversations
3. Leads Worked
4. Meeting Set
5. SQLs

ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE ACTIVITY METRICS

1. Meetings Completed
2. Pipeline Generated
3. Opportunities Created
4. Opportunity Win Rate

ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT METRICS

1. Customer Churn Rate
2. Contract Retention Rate
3. Contract Length
4. Renewal Rate
5. Customer Expansion Revenue

2) Know When to Disposition Out Accounts and Move On

Not all your accounts are going to close, which means you have to know when to call it quits and disposition out an account. Saying no is always hard, but when building your playbook you must develop a set of rules your team follows.

So, when should you disposition out an account? The real answer to this question depends on a few critical factors, such as deal size, sales cycle, total addressable market, account penetration and account engagement, to name a few. See how this can get complicated?

When you’re dealing with large deals (seven and eight-figure ACV), and long sales cycle (18+ months), your rules and guidelines for when to disposition out an account are going to be looser than small ACVs and short sales cycles. However, it’s established rules are equally important for both situations and must be established upfront.

For example, if you’re 60 days past your close dates, but you’ve just won a champion on the inside at the c-suite, you’d be damn sure to keep going. On the other hand, that same champion on a low four-figure deal with a short 3-month sales cycle can throw your bookings numbers and pipeline health off. At the least, these accounts can be put on a long-term marketing nurture campaign until they meet show strong buying intent.

Another piece to think about is your total addressable market. If you’re targeting Fortune 500 companies, there’s little room for error, which mean you’ll be more careful to close an opportunity and move on to the next account because your pool of account to draw from is extremely limited.

3) Establish the Right Qualification Process and/or Criteria

Qualifying a lead means scoring them on a set of key attributes that tell you if a lead will be a good fit for your company. However, in an account-based approach, all accounts you’re prospecting into are already pre-qualified, so that means you’ll have to drill down further and establish more specific qualifying criteria. This is usually based on buying signals rather than demographic and firmographic data.

To identify which buying signals make an impact on your sales cycle, start with your highest performing accounts, and identify what they have in common. Basically, you need to conduct a won sales analysis.

Once you’ve completed your won sales analysis and uncovered the strongest buying signals, it’s imperative that you have a well-structured sales process (have I emphasized this point enough yet? Check out Bridging The Gap for more on this).

There are many ways to execute the handoff. For example, your SDRs book the meeting for the AE, then sets an appointment action for a future date in Salesforce or your CRM and assigns it to him/herself. The AE marks the appointment complete and changes ownership once the meeting happens. However, if the prospect doesn’t show up, the SDR maintains responsibility, and the lead owner doesn’t change.

Lars Nilsson, VP of Global Inside Sales at Cloudera and who coined the term Account Based Sales Development states: “I called it ABSD because it is very much the SDR who has the focus and control of both the technology and the multi-step processes that have to come together in order to execute a flawless outbound campaign. The SDR is, in essence, the quarterback for ABSD and can allow for scale across your target accounts.”

If you don’t have a defined process starting with your SDRs, no-shows get lost and slip through the cracks. If you’re getting a lot of no-shows, that means your SDRs qualifying criteria needs to be revisited or you’re incentivizing your reps on the wrong activities.

4) Creating the Best Handoff Experience for the Prospect

We’ve all been there… you’re eager to test out a new product or service, so you schedule a demo via the company site. But it takes a painful qualifying conversation with an SDR, a sloppy handoff, another semi-qualification call (because the SDR didn’t ask the right question or didn’t leave the notes for the AE), which results in a rushed demo and poor experience. Now, you’re frustrated with the company whose product you were previously excited to learn about.

I tell you this experience first hand because when I was in the market for a marketing automation platform, I chose Hubspot because the other company I was evaluating provided the most painful buying experience I have ever encountered.

To make the handoff experience tolerable, and even pleasant for the prospect, a proper email can do the trick and make the handoff seamless and painless. Drawing much inspiration from Richard Harris, this email handoff approach is very effective. Immediately after sending the calendar invite for the agreed upon demo time with your AE, send a follow-up email that could look something like this:

There’s one other option used for higher-touch sales processes or higher-value target accounts. Have your SDR join the first call and do the handoff in the meeting itself. This would require the same email, but the SDR’s responsibilities would extend to the opening of the meeting/ first demo call. Your SDR should do the following:

1. Open the call and re-establish rapport
2. Make a more formal introduction to your AE
3. Summarize the three key points from the discover call, taking no more than 30 second (you better have good notes!)
4. Set the agenda and the desired outcomes
5. Let your AE take over!

This same process can and should be implemented after your AE closes the deal and hands the account off to your account/customer success manager. This approach builds more trust and provides a better experience all around. Remember, though your jobs are different, everyone is on the same team.

In his book Amp Up Your Sales, Andy Paul makes a compelling argument that how you sell is as important as what you sell. Providing a better sales experience can be another point of differentiation for your organization.

There’s more to mastering the handoff than what I can cover here on a single blog post, and mastering the handoff is only one small aspect of an account based strategy. We cover that and more in our new ebook Bridging The Gap: The Ultimate Guide To Account Based Marketing & Sales Alignment For Predictable Growth.

Everywhere you turn right now, it feels like there’s something being written about Account Based Selling or ABS. Although ABS is not new, analytics and automation are breathing new life into this sales methodology.

To learn more about this approach and get real-world practical tips for its implementation, I sat down with Kai Larson, a senior sales operations executive and consultant at SalesOnward. Kai shared with me the following seven things that sales managers should know and do before they go out and jump on the ABS bandwagon.

#1. Know when not to do account based selling

First, before you do anything, be sure you understand when you should not adopt this model. ABS requires more work on the seller’s part, including a high degree of personalization, and takes longer. ABS works best for strategic/complex sales that require multiple levels of buy-in. Low value/high transaction sales tend to not benefit from this model.

If you don’t need this type of sales approach to close deals, why would you do it? Generally speaking, the less buy-in you need for a sale, the less likely you need to adopt an ABS model. However, if you’re selling into enterprises, where more buy-in is required to purchase your product or services, this model works well.

#2. Research target accounts

If you don’t know the type of accounts you’re targeting, or are interested in targeting a new account base, do your homework.

• Talk with your company’s success leader. What customer profile spends the most? What customer profile is happiest with your product or services? What customer size buys your solution most frequently?
• Run closed opportunity reports by industry in your CRM. Uncover the top 2-3 top industries/markets that buy your solution.
• Talk with your CEO and executives. What is their vision for the company? What profile do they think the company should be targeting?

Be sure to add in revenue, employee size, and location (if desired) to your target list and whittle down to 10 accounts per AE or so at a time to maintain focus and make it easy to measure execution.

#3. Identify target personas

You can’t have a single point of contact with account based selling. Reps need to go wide and deep when working an ABS model – engaging with multiple contacts fitting your buyer persona at every prospect company. This can mean that they need to engage with 10 people in a single account. If a sales VP is your target persona, you can’t just stop there. You will want to surround your target with outreach, including the CEO, sales directors, managers, AEs, and SDRs so that you can really understand the company’s pain points and goals. Once you are armed with good data, you can ‘earn’ the right to speak with your real target by sending a message that shows the legwork that you have done and calls out the specific value you have uncovered that matches with the executive goals.

#4. Engage continuously

Be sure that reps understand the level of engagement that’s needed and that they use a multi-touch approach with each contact. They need to do research to find publicly available information about challenges the company faces and work these into their outreach via email, call, and use social channels to successfully penetrate an enterprise account.

Just as reps need to go wide and deep in identifying contacts, outreach must also be wide and deep. When engagement occurs, reps should listen for data nuggets that can be used to personalize their next outreach. With engagement occurring across multiple contacts, someone will surface as the champion. Yet, because you started on a path with multiple contacts, you also have the ability to circle back to them if needed to drive the process. Meaning if you have had a conversation with someone, you can always go back to that contact again without it feeling like you are ‘going around’ your champion and risking breaking rapport.

#5. Monitor and measure activities

Make sure that reps are doing activities at the designated level. You need to know whether reps are sending and making the right number of emails and calls. How do you know?

In the past, sales managers might cobble together multiple solutions to try to put together a picture of rep activities. The process is painful, the tools don’t work well together, and the data can be unreliable – causing friction between manager and rep. Today, there are sales platforms using engagement analytics that can provide single pane of glass visibility so that you can easily and accurately monitor people, processes, and opportunities.

#6. Synchronize sales systems

When you sell in an enterprise model, everyone needs to be on the same page. The left hand needs to know what the right hand is doing, or you end up with egg on your face. You need to ensure data accuracy in systems. To do this systems need to be seamlessly integrated, and updates need to be made in real-time.

#7. Personalize content

According to Aberdeen Group, best-in-class organizations achieve up to a 21 percent stronger lead acceptance rate and a 36 percent higher conversion average by using sales tools for content personalization at the sales rep level. With ABS, you need to be sure that content is personalized to specific areas of buyer interest and to their specific pain points.

ABS can be a preferred go-to-market strategy for your business, but before you start, be sure that you understand when it works best and what you need in place for your team to succeed.

Every sales team needs leads — but the best sales teams know how to make every lead count. Our e-book, Get More From Your Leads, shows you how to jumpstart your lead management strategy.

I was going through some of the articles I ‘d saved on Pocket recently, and I came across this awesome post from Rebekah Radice’s blog which was a recap of the #InfluencerChat on Twitter. One of the questions asked to the community, was how would they spend their time if they only had 45 minutes to manage social media.

So it got me thinking; if I only had 45 minutes to spend on social media each day, how would I spend it?

As this might be the reality for many of you, especially if managing social media is only part of your day-to-day let’s take a look at how you can make better use of your already limited time.

Here’s a breakdown of the tasks and the time I’d spend on each:

Curating Content – 5 minutes

When it comes to content curation, it all boils down to being aware of who your audience are. What would they find useful and what would they be more inclined to share? Knowing this will help your content curation tremendously as you’ll know what content to look for from your trusted sources. Keep in mind, that valuable content can be found in third sources as well. Which makes content curation even more important in supercharging your Social Media Marketing.

A common best practice is a content mix of 20/80 which translates to 20% content that you create and is relevant to your brand and 80% third-party content.

A few tools to help you speed up the process of content curation for social media:

Feedly: Gather all your favorite news sources on Feedly and browse them every morning to find relevant, useful content to share and of course use it as an inspiration for creating your own content. One of its helpful features is that it immediately gives you an idea on what’s most shared on a given day with the number of shares being shown next to each headline.

Unroll.me: You probably hate email as much as everyone else but email and newsletters can deliver some hidden gems ready to be tweeted. Unroll.me might come in handy in this case. What it does is gather all your newsletters in one place delivering all-in-one emails you can easily browse.

Smart content recommendation tools: Answering to Twitter marketers’ need of curating content, there are quite a few brilliant tools that recommend you content you can share on your social media platforms. Content that is relevant to you and your audience. Nuzzel and Mentia are both tools that can recommend to you relevant content to tweet, based on your community and the topics you are interested in.

Creating Content – 15 minutes

The audience’s attention span on social media is extremely small. This means that in most cases you have at best, a couple of seconds to grab their attention. So you’d better bring your A-game when it comes to crafting content for social media.

Think of it like this, your content is consisted by three elements: The content itself, the blog post, the Slideshare, the infographic or whatever it is you’re sharing, your headline, in other words your few lines of copy that promote this piece of content and whatever enhancers you’re planning to add (images, videos, etc.).

The piece of content itself needs to correspond to three core values. Value, Relevance and Consistency.

The three elements of irresistible content

Great content is obviously content that is shareable. A recent study by researchers at Cornell university has found that people share a tweet when it adds information, it is formatted as a news headline and it agrees with the community’s ways of expression.

But what is it that makes content irresistible and impossible to ignore? Three elements: value, relevance, consistency.

1.Value

The first question your audience will ask themselves before they go on and share your content is “what’s in it for me?”

In other words, the greater your value proposition the more likely your content is to get shared. Valuable content is content that is useful, informational, educational and of course entertaining.

Creating value for your audience requires knowing who your audience is, what do they like and what they would find useful.

Surveys, social media monitoring and tools like Google Analytics will provide you with insights on who is your audience, where they’re coming from and what is their online behavior. This will help you decide which content is valuable to them and try to cater to their needs and resolve their problems.

2. Relevance

Again, this requires understanding the basic characteristics of your audience and who they are. This way, you can figure out what type of content would be relevant to them.

It is important to keep in mind that the element of relevance is twofold. On the one hand, it refers to content that is relevant to your audience and on the other to hand to content that is relevant to your brand’s identity.

Value and relevance might be hard to achieve but once you do, you will start attracting quality audience that will help your business grow to the right direction.

3. Consistency

Consistency is the third element of what constitutes good content. Content consistency means staying true to what you and your brand stands for, being consistent about how your content is presented, maintaining your tone and voice and posting your content on a frequent basis.

Being consistent about the content you share on social media will help you build your brand’s credibility and develop trust with your audience. This way, people will know what your content is about and will keep coming back for more.

Copy

David Ogilvy, the father of advertising said:

On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.

Telling a story on social is no easy thing. According to Copyblogger, on average, 8 out of 10 people will read your headline, but only 2 out of 10 will read the rest. However, there’s one more reason why the most important element of your social media post is the copy itself: headlines are basically a way to set the tone for what your audience is about read.

But what makes a good headline? Kissmetrics suggests the SHINE formula:

• Specific: Be as specific and concrete as possible using facts and figures
• Helpful: What is the problem this piece of content is the answer to?
• Immediate: Create a sense of urgency, showing why your audience should engage with your content at that given moment.
• Newsworthy: Nobody will engage with yesterday’s news, especially on Twitter. So keep it fresh.
• Entertaining: To really stand out, make your headlines interesting.

As in any other form of marketing, psychology plays a major part in social media. Each of your posts are able to trigger some sort of emotion for your audience. However, there are certain emotions that are more contagious than others.

Positivity

When I was a social media intern at Greenpeace International I remember my boss always saying that good news travel faster. And she was absolutely right. Researchers from the Universities of California and Yale found that positive emotions spread quite fast on social networks. So sharing something happy and lighthearted is more likely to make your tweets successful.

Rise and shine! #Solarpower is growing rapidly in the US. https://t.co/6SW8rMkE5b #renewables pic.twitter.com/0ACvMnRELR

— Greenpeace (@Greenpeace) March 15, 2016

Surprise

The Harvard Business review identified surprise as the most powerful marketing tool and science seems to support this argument. Researchers from Emory University and Baylor College of Medicine found that surprise is stimulating the human brain in a positive way. Their findings suggest that the brain finds unexpected pleasure more rewarding than expected ones.

Luckily, Twitter provides you with different ways of engaging your audience, such as Twitter polls, sweepstakes and contests. Check out some surprising ways to engage with your Twitter audience here.

Curiosity

Carnegie Melon University professor George Loewenstein suggested that the gap between what we know and what we want to know is basically a curiosity gap. This means that what can really trigger curiosity is when we notice a gap in our knowledge.

Publishers like Upworthy and Buzzfeed are famous for embracing Loewenstein’s information gap theory not only in their articles but also in their tweets. What can you learn from them? Giving just enough information leaves your audience no other choice but to ‘ask’ for more by clicking on the links you tweet.

Refugees arrive without backpacks, so these women found a way to make them — from boats. https://t.co/jSaxE2Xx4X pic.twitter.com/Ko78ZNmqdc

— Upworthy (@Upworthy) March 9, 2016

Visuals

Research has shown that visuals are processed 60,000X faster in the brain than text. And on social media with all this overload of information you have nothing more than a split second to capture the audience’s attention. Therefore, visuals can help you stand from the crowd.

Now, let’s take a look at three tools that are simple to use without necessarily requiring pro design skills.

Canva

Canva is a great tool for creating professional looking images for social media in less than 3 minutes. The best part is that you shouldn’t worry about the size of your images since Canva offers templates of visuals for all major platforms.

Piktochart

Piktochart is great for creating infographics in just a few minutes. What is helpful is the wide range of themes to choose from and the freedom the tool offers in customizing templates to fit your style and needs.

Wideo

Wideo is a handy tool for creating videos for social media, quickly and easily. The free version allows you to choose from a selection of templates and produce videos up to 45 seconds which is the ideal length for a social media post.

Scheduling – 5 minutes

Although there are some general rules of thumb on the posting frequency for each social media platform, the ultimate posting recipe is different for every account as it often depends on the industry and audience, the type of content you post and of course the platform itself.

Take a look at a handful of tools to speed up scheduling your content across platforms.

Twibble

Twibble is a cool tool that will automatically post your blog posts on Twitter with amazing visuals to go with. All you need to do is set up the RSS feed and specify how often you want to tweet, hashtags and attributions. Twibble then will start scanning your source for blog posts and automatically post them to your Twitter feed using the posts featured image.

Buffer

Buffer is one of the most popular schedulers for social media and for a good reason. A few months ago, Buffer integrated Pinterest, which is a big plus and which means that buffer now supports all the major social media platforms with the exception of Instagram. You can either let Buffer suggest you times to tweet or set up your own custom content schedule.

Friends+me

Although it started as a Google+ tool, Friends+me is a good alternative to Buffer that allows you to schedule content from anywhere on the internet.

Engaging – 5 minutes

This is something that some social media managers neglect as they spend so much time and effort on the content they will post and on measuring how this content is distributed and received. But social media is not just a distribution channel for your brand and are definitely not to be treated as the platform for sharing your press releases.

The idea is to be conversational and interact with your community. Spending as much as a few minutes a day asking questions, replying to comments, engaging with your community and sharing their content can really make a difference.

Analyzing – 10 minutes

Every social media manager knows that analyzing and testing your social media activity can make things much easier in the long run.

It might come as a surprise, but a recent survey revealed that only 15% of brands are able to quantify the impact of social media on their business.

So how are you going to determine whether your social media efforts are actually making a difference for your business? What key measures will you use to evaluate social media strategy effectiveness?

This infographic that surfaced a few years back, reveals what KPIs social media marketers focus on to quantify the impact of social media marketing on their business.

For example, if your social media marketing goal is to increase conversions through social media, which let’s just face it, is the ultimate goal for any brand on social, then using Google Analytics, you can track all conversions throughout platforms by checking the Conversions report under Acquisitions > Social.

Convince and Convert have put together a great guide of top Google Analytics reports every social media marketer should keep an eye on that cover different goals and KPIs. Check it out.

Avinash Kaushik is suggesting among others, three main metrics:

• Conversation rate, in other words, how much conversation your brand stirs on social media.
• Amplification rate, how much your message is being shared and what is its reach.
• Applause rate which is how much minimal interaction (favorites, likes and +1s) your content receives on social media.

These groups of metrics point to social media exposure which translates to brand awareness, brand influence, engagement and leads or sales.

So don’t let anyone tell you that time and resources spent on social media might be better spent elsewhere. Social media can not only help you build awareness for your brand but also establish yourself as a thought leader in your field and ultimately generate leads.

In fact, a recent research conducted by LinkedIn revealed that:

• 81% of SMBs currently use social media to drive business growth and 9% are planning to use it in the future.
• 3 in 5 SMBs say it helps to gain new customers.
• 91% of hyper growth SMBs say it is effective for increasing awareness and 82% for generating new leads – which is more than 58% higher than the stated effectiveness for non-growth companies.

And although social media may not be necessarily a shortcut, it can definitely become a marketing power tool in your hands.

Thinking ahead – 5 minutes

Without a social media action plan sooner or later you’ll reach a social media marketing dead-end, struggling with growth, engagement and measuring the impact of your social media activity on your business.

Spending as much as 5 minutes a day looking at your metrics and making iterations where you see fit, is the way to stay on top of your social media game, in small steps.

Experimentation, A/B testing and a good tracking system will provide you with all the answers you need. Some of the KPIs to look at:

Applause rate per post

This one is easily calculated across social media by dividing the number of favorites, likes or +1s by the number of social media posts within a specific period of time. For example, for Twitter, say I wanted to calculate the applause rate of my tweets during the past week, I would divide the total number of favorites (in my case 8) by the total number of tweets I sent during the week (that would be 10 for me). So my applause rate for the past week would be 0.8.

Conversation rate per post

Your conversation rate is defined by the total number of mentions or comments divided by the number of social media posts over a specific period of time.

Amplification rate

Your amplification rate is perhaps the most important engagement metric as it suggests brand visibility and awareness is the total number of retweets or shares by the number of social media posts.

Clicks and visits

This is another important engagement metric to measure in order to identify the traffic your social media activity generates. Keep a close eye on your Google Analytics dashboard and monitor visits for each of the messages you post across all social media platforms.

Depending on your marketing goals and specific marketing and social media campaigns that you might be running from time to time, the engagement metrics you focus on obviously differ. If for example you are running a promotion through Twitter, tracking conversions on top of everything else is very important.

Qualitative metrics

This part doesn’t necessarily have to do with numbers but it’s more of a qualitative approach on your social media engagement analysis.

Often times, people reach out to you on social media with comments, feedback, ideas or issues they might be experiencing. It is important to keep track of these messages in order to identify any emerging patterns but also use this information to report this first-hand input back to others in your company.

Total engagement

While breaking down your total engagement rate by type and level of engagement gives you much more perspective on how engaged your audience is, calculating the total engagement for a specific period of time is important.

Your total engagement rate on every platform is calculated by the total number of interactions (likes, shares and comments on Facebook, retweets, mentions and favorites on Twitter and so on), divided by the total number of posts shared on each platform.

For Twitter, you can even use this information to decide when it is the best time for you to tweet. For example, checking my Twitter interactions for last week, I see that I scored high engagement last Wednesday which probably means that Wednesdays at 5 pm is a good time for me to post content on Twitter and boost my engagement rate.

Conclusion

Even though priorities are different for every brand, having a clear idea on how much time you spend each day, completing what task will help you better understand whether your time investment actually has an impact. But more importantly, you’ll be able to ultimately improve your productivity and make sure you allocate your time wisely.

I’m curious! How would you spend your 45 minutes? Let me know in the comments right below.

 

WASHINGTON — Despite promising “the truth, and nothing else” in his convention speech, Donald Trump presented the nation with a series of previously debunked claims and some new ones Thursday night — about the U.S. tax burden, the perils facing police, Hillary Clinton’s record and more.

A look at some of the Republican presidential candidate’s claims and how they compare with the facts:

___

TRUMP: “Decades of progress made in bringing down crime are now being reversed by this administration’s rollback of criminal enforcement. Homicides last year increased by 17 per cent in America’s 50 largest cities. That’s the largest increase in 25 years.”

THE FACTS: A rollback? President Barack Obama has actually achieved some big increases in spending for state and local law enforcement, including billions in grants provided through the 2009 stimulus. While FBI crime statistics for 2015 are not yet available, Trump’s claim about rising homicides appears to come from a Washington Post analysis published in January. While Trump accurately quotes part of the analysis, he omits that the statistical jump was so large because homicides are still very low by historical standards. In the 50 cities cited by the Post, for example, half as many people were killed last year as in 1991.

___

TRUMP: “The number of new illegal immigrant families who have crossed the border so far this year already exceeds the entire total from 2015. They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.”

THE FACTS: The pace of releasing immigrants is driven not by the Obama administration, but by a court ruling. A federal judge ruled last year that the government couldn’t hold parents and children in jail for more than 20 days. An appeals court partially rolled that back earlier this month, saying that parents could be detained but children must be released.

By the standard used by the government to estimate illegal border crossings – the number of arrests — Trump is right that the number in this budget year has already exceeded last year’s total. But it’s down from 2014.

___

TRUMP: “When a secretary of state illegally stores her emails on a private server, deletes 33,000 of them so the authorities can’t see her crime, puts our country at risk, lies about it in every different form and faces no consequence – I know that corruption has reached a level like never before.”

THE FACTS: Clinton’s use of a private server to store her emails was not illegal under federal law. Her actions were not established as a crime. The FBI investigated the matter and its role was to advise the Justice Department whether to bring charges against her based on what it found. FBI Director James Comey declined to refer the case for criminal prosecution to the Justice Department, instead accusing Clinton of extreme carelessness.

As for Trump’s claim that Clinton faces no consequence, that may be true in a legal sense. But the matter has been a distraction to her campaign and fed into public perceptions that she can’t be trusted. The election will test whether she has paid a price politically.

___

TRUMP: “The number of police officers killed in the line of duty has risen by almost 50 per cent compared to this point last year.”

THE FACTS: Not according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund, which tracks police fatalities daily. The group found that the number of police officers who died as of July 20 is up just slightly this year, at 67, compared with 62 through the same period last year. That includes deaths in the line of duty from all causes, including traffic fatalities.

It is true that there has been a spike in police deaths from intentional shootings, 32 this year compared with 18 last year, largely attributable to the recent mass shootings in Dallas and Baton Rouge. But that was not his claim.

And overall, police are statistically safer on America’s streets now than at any time in recent decades.

For example, the 109 law enforcement fatalities in 2013 were the lowest since 1956.

___

TRUMP: “My opponent has called for a radical 550 per cent increase in Syrian (refugees). … She proposes this despite the fact that there’s no way to screen these refugees in order to find out who they are or where they come from. I only want to admit individuals into our country who will support our values and love our people.”

THE FACTS: Trump persists in making the bogus claim that the U.S. doesn’t screen refugees. The administration both screens them and knows where they are from. The Department of Homeland Security leads the process, which involves rigorous background checks. Processing of a refugee can take 18 months to two years, and usually longer for those coming from Syria. Refugees are also subject to in-person interviews and fingerprint and other biometric screening.

For all that caution, U.S. officials acknowledge that the Islamic State group could try to place operatives among refugees. Last year, FBI Director James Comey said data about people coming from Syria may be limited, adding, “If we don’t know much about somebody, there won’t be anything in our database.”

TRUMP: “Two million more Latinos are in poverty today than when President Obama took his oath of office less than eight years ago. Another 14 million people have left the workforce entirely. … President Obama has almost doubled our national debt to more than $19 trillion, and growing.”

THE FACTS: Trump is playing with numbers to make the economy look worse than it actually is. The sluggish recovery over the past seven years has been frustrating. But with unemployment at 4.9 per cent, the situation isn’t as bleak as he suggests.

Trump’s figure of 14 million who’ve stopped working since Obama took office comes from the Labor Department’s measure of people not in the workforce. It’s misleading for three reasons: The U.S. population has increased in that time; the country has aged and people have retired; and younger people are staying in school longer for college and advanced degrees, so they’re not in the labour force, either.

A better figure is labour force participation _ the share of people with jobs or who are searching for work. That figure has declined from 65.7 per cent when Obama took office to 62.7 per cent now. Part of that decrease reflects retirements, but the decline is also a long-term trend.

On national debt, economists say a more meaningful measure than dollars is the share of the overall economy taken up by the debt. By that measure, the debt rose 36 per cent under Obama (rather than doubling). That’s roughly the same as what occurred under Republican President George W. Bush.

The Hispanic population has risen since Obama while the poverty rate has fallen. The Pew Research Center found that 23.5 per cent of the country’s 55.3 million Latinos live in poverty, compared with 24.7 per cent in 2010.

___

TRUMP: “Another humiliation came when President Obama drew a red line in Syria, and the whole world knew it meant absolutely nothing.”

THE FACTS: Trump’s reference is to a threat by Obama for retaliatory strikes if Syrian President Bashar Assad used chemical weapons against rebels _ and he’s basically on target. When Assad crossed Obama’s “red line” in 2013 by using chemical weapons, the U.S. president backed down.

Obama’s two secretaries of state, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, pushed for intervention, as have a former defence secretary and CIA director. But Obama as commander-in-chief has the last word, and nothing has swayed him thus far.

___

TRUMP: “When that same secretary of state rakes in millions and millions of dollars trading access and favours to special interests and foreign powers, I know the time for action has come.”

THE FACTS: That’s a somewhat overheated take on a legitimately troublesome issue for Clinton.

Although financial disclosures show she earned only her government salary as secretary of state, she made more than $21 million afterward, over three years, for speeches and appearances for private companies. None of those speeches was paid for by foreign governments, but some groups she addressed could be counted as special interests.

As well, the Clintons’ family charity, the Clinton Foundation, received millions of dollars in donations while she was secretary of state, some from foreigners. And Bill Clinton earned millions making appearances and speeches for foreign corporations and organizations while his wife was at the State Department.

___

TRUMP: “After four years of Hillary Clinton, what do we have? ISIS has spread across the region, and the entire world. Libya is in ruins, and our ambassador and his staff were left helpless to die at the hands of savage killers. Egypt was turned over to the radical Muslim Brotherhood, forcing the military to retake control. Iraq is in chaos. Iran is on the path to nuclear weapons. Syria is engulfed in a civil war and a refugee crisis now threatens the West. … This is the legacy of Hillary Clinton: death, destruction, terrorism and weakness.”

THE FACTS: It’s an exaggeration to suggest Clinton, or any secretary of state, is to blame for the widespread instability and violence across the Middle East.

Clinton worked to impose sanctions that helped coax Tehran to a nuclear deal with the U.S. and other world powers last year, a deal in which Iran rolled back its nuclear program to get relief from sanctions that were choking its economy.

She did not start the war in Libya, but supported a NATO intervention well after violence broke out between rebels and the forces of dictator Moammar Gadhafi. The country slid into chaos after Gadhafi was ousted and killed in 2011, leaving it split between competing governments.

Clinton had no role in military decisions made during the 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. Republicans’ claim that high-level officials in Washington issued a “stand-down” order delaying a military rescue in Benghazi has been widely debunked.

On Iraq, Clinton as a senator voted in 2002 to grant President George W. Bush authority to invade Iraq, but has since said it was a “mistake.” Many in the Middle East do not regret Saddam’s ouster and regional allies allowed U.S. bases in their country to support the war. But many also now fear the Islamic State group, which rose in the chaos of Syria’s civil war and Iraq’s security vacuum.

___

TRUMP: “America is one of the highest-taxed nations in the world.”

THE FACTS: Trump continues to repeat this inaccuracy. The U.S. tax burden is actually the fourth lowest among the 34 developed and large emerging-market economies that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Taxes made up 26 per cent of the total U.S. economy in 2014, according to the OECD. That’s far below Sweden’s tax burden of 42.7 per cent, Britain’s 32.6 per cent or Germany’s 36.1 per cent. Only three OECD members had a lower figure than the U.S.: Chile, South Korea and Mexico.

___

TRUMP: “My opponent wants to essentially abolish the Second Amendment.”

THE FACTS: Hillary Clinton has not proposed any revocation of the constitutionally protected right to bear arms. She does support a ban on certain military-style weapons, similar to the law President Bill Clinton signed in the 1990s. That ban expired after 10 years and was not renewed. Clinton also backs an expansion of existing criminal background checks to apply to weapons sales at gun shows. The checks now apply mainly to sales by federally licensed gun dealers.

 

The post Fact checking Donald Trump’s RNC speech appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Training magazine's 2016-2017 study showed the average annual training budget for companies under 1,000 employees was $290,000. For companies between 1,000 and 9,999 employees, that budget grew to $3.7 million. And for companies with 10,000+ employees, the budget balloons to $13 million.

Clearly, if your team needs sales training, there are a lot of options available. But before your company forks over any more of your hard-earned revenue on sales training, check out the hours of free training on YouTube.

To help you find the right ones, I invested a few hundred hours sifting through dozens of these channels to create a guide to sales training video channels on YouTube.

Warning: If you’re supposed to be productive today, bookmark this post and come back to it. Otherwise, you might spend all day on YouTube.

Best Sales Videos

Sales Videos by Well-Known Selling Experts

1. Jeffrey Gitomer

Jeffrey Gitomer, known to many as the King of Sales, is the author of 13 sales books and a National Speakers Association Hall of Fame member. You might know him from The Little Red Book of Selling, the best-selling sales book of all time (and one of our picks for 10 must-read sales books for rookie reps).

With his books translated into 14 languages, he is literally known the world over for his simple, insightful, and direct sales advice. After watching a few of his videos, go re-read one of his books. I guarantee you’ll hear his voice in your head.

I recently featured a few of Gitomer’s videos on writing sales emails on this blog. But my favorite video is "Stop Closing and Start Providing Value, or Lose to Price."

Watch "Fear of Rejection is Bogus!" too: It thoroughly explains the attitude salespeople need to have to be successful.

2. Jill Konrath

An award-winning author and highly sought-after keynote speaker, Konrath provides practical and modern strategies in her videos to help sales teams generate and close more leads.

She is an expert at advanced prospecting strategies including positioning value to prospects through messaging and a big advocate of the mantra "Always Be Learning."

To drive home the importance of silence in sales (especially when it's uncomfortable), I often recommend the video “Stunningly Unused Sales Technique." And my favorite is "3 Components Every Value Proposition Must Have."

3. Influence at Work

Robert Cialdini, Ph.D., is the founder of Influence at Work. He's dedicated the majority of his career to researching the psychology of influence, and I keep a copy of his book “Influence: The Science of Persuasion” in my car’s CD changer.

Admitting to listening to a CD might seem really dated, but the fact that I haven't purchased any CD in more than a decade just shows how amazing his stuff is.

The video you should watch first is “Science of Persuasion," where he explains the six principles that guide human behavior. Don’t just listen -- the video boasts really slick animation that accompanies the audio. (I can’t wait for autonomous cars so I can watch these on the road. I wonder if they’ll have disc changers or YouTube in them -- Elon?)

Another must-watch video introduces the core concept of a book Cialdini co-authored with Steve Martin and Dr. Noah Goldstein called “The Small Big” -- the secret to finding the smallest change that will have the biggest impact.

4. Art Sobczak

Sobczak is known for his hands-on, practical advice for telephone and inside sales professionals. He pioneered the concept of “Smart Calling,” an approach to proactive prospecting that starts with researching prospects in order to break through the barrage of cold calls buyers now tune out. He published a best-selling book of the same name.

Most of his videos share how to to do smart calling, including “How to Quit Cold Calling and Smart Call Instead."

But my favorite are his more creative videos, including "Make Sales Great Again" and this mock commencement address video, “The Commencement Address Graduates Need to Hear, But Won't.” It rings true, and if you're a new graduate or ever have ‘experience issues’ in the workplace, watch it.

5. Brian Tracy

Tracy’s company, Brian Tracy International, offers training on a variety of subjects. They provide sales training as well as other topics applicable to advancing your sales career, such as personal development, time management and leadership training.

Over the last 30 years, Tracy has consulted more than 1,000 companies, and has spoken to more than 5 million people at over 5,000 talks in more than 70 countries. At 72, he’s not slowing down, addressing more than 250,000 people at keynotes per year.

If his stamina alone isn't enough to inspire you, his YouTube channel -- "Success Channel" -- will. It features his renowned seminars on leadership, sales, and management effectiveness.

In one of his most recent videos, “Applying the 80/20 Principle to Goal Setting," he teaches salespeople how to apply the Pareto principle to goal-setting in order to speed up your success.

For a more thorough look at maximizing your sales productivity, watch “Tips to Structure Your Day."

6. Dave Kurlan

Dave Kurlan, world-renowned expert on sales hiring, sales development, and sales management (and a personal mentor of mine), is the bestselling author of "Baseline Selling," as well as owner of training firm Kurlan & Associates and salesperson assessment firm Objective Management Group (OMG).

OMG’s assessments are used by hundreds of sales training organization around the world to assess salespeople, giving Kurlan access to more data about more salespeople than anyone else.

Despite Kurlan’s access to a ridiculous amount of data and insights, he manages to keep his YouTube videos for salespeople simple and actionable. He and his associates from Kurlan & Associates discuss sales and management tactics on YouTube.

A must-watch, and his most-watched video is about getting salespeople to stop making excuses. And if you’re in sales management, watch "Use of Assessments When Hiring."

7. Mike Weinberg

After I tell new salespeople to read "Baseline Selling," I follow it up with Weinberg’s "New Sales: Simplified."

If you’re wondering why your new sales aren’t soaring, watch Weinberg talk about the importance of having the right sales DNA.

8. Gerhard Gschwandtner

As CEO of Selling Power Magazine, Gschwandtner is no stranger to telling great sales stories. On his channel, he interviews the world’s sales experts, including many of the ones I’ve listed above.

Listen to his interview with Cialdini, titled “How to Persuade without Pressure."

Watch “How to Teach Business Acumen to Salespeople” to learn about the importance of being able to talk numbers and finance with business leaders, with guest Julie Thomas, CEO of ValueSelling Associates.

With more than a million views on his channel, Gschwandtner is delivering lots of value to lots of salespeople.

9. Mark Hunter

Mark Hunter, also known as The Sales Hunter, is the author of "High Profit Selling" and an in-demand speaker and workshop facilitator. As an 18-year sales veteran of multiple Fortune 500 companies before starting his consultancy, he knows what he’s talking about.

In most of his videos, Hunter offers tips on how best to improve your close rate by fine-tuning your negotiation skills.

For a taste of his videos and his expertise, watch "3 Fatal Mistakes When Giving Your Price."

Learn about Hunter’s three T’s of negotiating (time, trust, and tactics) in “Negotiation Skills that Rock.”

Videos by Accomplished Sales Consultants

10. Jim Pancero

For over 40 years, Jim Pancero has been delivering sales training, keynotes, and consulting. He’s a feet-on-the-street sales consultant who has helped over 600 sales teams across 80 different industries.

An expert in both sales, sales management, and proactive customer service, Pancero focuses exclusively on B2B selling where products are relatively high-priced and complicated to sell.

For an introduction to his expertise, watch “Your Price is Too High! 7 Steps to Defending Price."

11. Trish Bertuzzi

You might recognize Bertuzzi from her must-read book, "The Sales Development Playbook." She also makes regular appearances around various YouTube channels.

Learn about the biggest problems in sales development, get her thoughts on the account-based model, and learn inside sales mistakes.

Whichever video you choose, Bertuzzi will leave you with solid lessons and actionable steps for becoming a stronger salesperson.

Videos by Up-and-Comers

12. Will Barron

Will Barron is as much a blogger and podcaster as he is a salesperson. His Salesman.Red blog and podcast reaches more than a half a million people each week.

More than any other, he seems to be connecting with millennial salespeople -- not just because he's speaking to them on their medium of choice, but because young hustlers love his tone and in-your-face, somewhat irreverent style.

He has frequent guests on his video podcast who are sales heavyweights, and intermixes them with short, informative video rants where he’s the star. He also shares sales lessons from famous people like David Bowie and Barack Obama and creates videos featuring them and their advice.

To get a taste of what the kids are watching these days, watch Barron’s play-by-play of an argument about persistence and harassment in prospecting between two sales video heavyweights, Grant Cardone and Gary Vaynerchuk.

If you’re really ready for some of Barron’s blunt advice, watch "Shit Salespeople Say on The Phone."

See why I love Salesman.Red? Brothers from another mother, maybe?

13. Marc Wayshak

Wayshak sold his first business at 23, the one he started to put himself through college. His bestselling book "GamePlan Selling" is a favorite here at HubSpot.

What I love most about Wayshak’s videos are their simplicity. He’s one of the few tried-and-true sales experts who has also mastered the craft of producing high-quality videos for YouTube.

To see what I’m talking about, watch "5 Easy Phone Sales Tips."

In a rut? Watch (and complete) Wayshak’s "5-Day Sales Challenge" to get back to the basics and put new prospects into your funnel.

14. Sales for Life

Helmed by Jamie Shanks, one of the world's leading experts on social selling, Sales for Life provides training, a community and coaching for social selling. Featuring Shanks’ partner, Amar Sheth, Sales for Life's Social Selling in 60 Seconds videos are a quick and easy way for you to learn why you should integrate social into your sales process.

As an Active Listening advocate, one of my favorite videos of Sheth’s is "4 Simple Reasons Why Salespeople Should be Chief Listening Officers," in which he discusses the importance of listening to what your prospects say on social sites.

Sales for Life also has a series of videos featuring social selling tools, including HubSpot Sales.

15. Jennifer Gluckow

Just as the title of Jennifer Gluckow's channel -- Sales in a New York Minute -- suggests, her videos teach you successful strategies that will have you closing sales in less than a minute.

As a local, face-to-face salesperson herself, her videos effectively cover the importance of networking, prospecting and in-person selling.

If you’re a member of a Business Networking International (BNI) group, you’ll recognize the advice in “The Secret to Smart Networking.”

And just when you thought you might be too old to take a selfie, watch how Gluckow uses selfies to personalize her follow-ups.

16. Annette Lackovic

Annette Lackovic, also known as Netty ‘D, puts a very fun spin on her sales videos and aims to encourage female entrepreneurship. Watch Lackovic’s intro video to get a full appreciation for how rapping can make sales training more fun.

If Fergie (of the Black Eyed Peas) did sales training, this is what it might sound like. Personally, I’m hoping she teams up with Jill Konrath and Brian Tracy to create a full music sales training group. Who knows, Maybe they can open for BEP's reunion tour?

Also check out “How to Set Up a Sales Follow-Up Call" and "Top 10 Expo Stand Tips."

17. Vanessa Van Edwards

As a body language and behavior expert, Vanessa is more of a researcher than a salesperson herself. In a way, she’s a younger, female version of Robert Cialdini.

Backed by years of research and study, her videos and workshops can help you sell yourself, your business and your product -- whether you’re trying to land a date or close a deal.

Check out her dance moves on "5 Killer Science Based Sales Techniques" (the techniques are smooth too).

Or need a reminder of how to work a room at a networking event or make a great first impression in your first face-to-face meeting with a new prospect? Watch "8 Steps for Approaching Someone New."

Videos by Top Sales Consulting Firms

18. Sales Benchmark Index (SBI)

SBI is a “management consulting firm specializing in sales and marketing that is dedicated to helping you Make Your Number.”

Focused on helping larger companies improve their sales results, SBI's YouTube channel covers sales strategy at a leadership, and management level as opposed to most other channels that emphasize helping individual reps.

Their videos follow an interview format and are filmed in their own studio, featuring SBI's own marketing and sales consultants.

For a sample, watch "How to Beat the Competition and Increase Revenue Growth."

Unlike most sales experts on this list, SBI is also an expert at leveraging marketing to predictably generate revenue.

Especially in big companies, it’s critical to align marketing and sales. If you fit this ticket, watch “Aligning Your Content Marketing Strategy with Your Company’s Overall Objectives."

19. Sandler Training

With franchise-owned training centers around the world, Sandler Training is a leader in sales, management, and corporate training, as well as business consulting and coaching.

First created by David Sandler in 1967, The Sandler Selling System, was one of the first consultative selling systems that’s still very applicable today. Now led by Dave Mattson, Sandler has grown to be one of the largest and probably the most recognized sales training company in the world.

Today, their training has expanded beyond sales training to include courses on enterprise selling, sales leadership, and customer service to name a few.

To get a feel for the importance of some of their time-tested lessons, watch: "You Have to Learn to Fail to Win, Sandler’s Rule #1." Another one of my favorites is "Answer Every Question with a Question."

20. Alexander Group

The Alexander Group is a sales management consulting service provider. They help companies drive ROI and improve revenue -- and they share data-driven insights that steer the sales industry as a whole.

They have a great library of quick five-minute-or-less videos perfect for fitting in between phone calls and meetings.

I'd start with a few of their most recent offerings covering how to support the rise of subscription-based sales, handle the post-acute seller, and drive high revenue growth.

21. Richardson

Founded by sales and sales coaching expert and 10-time author Linda Richardson, the Richardson Group is a 130-person strong global sales training and development organization.

Like Sandler, they have developed their own selling methodologies, but focus on building a customized sales training strategy and performance improvement plan for each client.

In many of their videos, the Richardson Group provides a sneak peek into their training services with actionable sales tips.

Watch this video to learn a simple four-step model for handling any sales objection.

Videos by Sales Technology Companies

22. Sales Scripter

Sales Scripter helps sales teams create consultative sales processes through materials such as question sheets, email and voicemail templates. Their channel previews the sales process creation process embedded into their software.

Want something immediately actionable? Watch this recorded webinar, “Building a Value Proposition that Generates Leads.”

23. LinkedIn Sales Solutions

Linkedin’s Sales Solutions channel features videos explaining how to use Sales Navigator, testimonials from customers, as well as instructional social selling videos from social selling experts, Joanne Black and Neal Schaffer.

See how Linkedin Sales Navigator helps salespeople more easily connect with the right prospects. And learn how to leverage Linkedin to begin conversations from Joanne Black.

Videos by HubSpot Academy

HubSpot’s YouTube channel covers both sales and marketing topics. Always experimenting with new platforms for our own marketing and sales, we started using YouTube to get our message out in 2008.

Visit HubSpot Academy for countless sales training videos that are actionable, full of real-life lessons, and broken into "snackable" chunks. You can also get Inbound Sales Certified online. And our YouTube channel even has a sales training video playlist.

24. Aja Frost

If you're searching for the right career in sales or are mentoring a salesperson just starting off in their career, this video is a helpful primer on the most common jobs in sales -- and how to land them.

25. Kyle Jepson

Hiring is one of the most difficult challenges sales leaders face. When is it time to hire new salespeople to grow the company, and when is it just time for the salespeople you have to put their heads down and grind? This video shares how to create a foolproof hiring strategy for your sales organisation.

26. Kyle Jepson

Need help creating your sales playbook? This quick video shares expert opinions from sales pros who have grown companies successfully. Find the sales methodology that will work best for your business today.

Videos by Niche Sales Training Channels

27. McDaniel Real Estate Systems

McDaniel Real Estate Systems is a live video podcast featuring two real estate practitioners, Greg McDaniel and Matt Johnson.

They cover real estate sales best practices including marketing, lead generation, prospecting, securing listings and farming neighborhoods.

From watching a bunch of their videos, it’s clear that McDaniel helps real estate professionals project confidence in their words and actions.

To get a taste, watch "How to Prospect Like a Rockstar." They also post interviews with top producers like Misty Soldwisch, who sold 359 homes last year.

28. Steve Richards

Automotive sales easily gets one of the worst reputations in sales. Steve Richards provides car sales tips and shows auto salespeople how to overcome their biggest challenges.

I particularly love Richards’ video titled, “If you can’t justify the price, you don’t belong in sales,” where he shares three ways to deflect price objections.

While his tactics are a bit too slick for my taste, his approaches are solid. And who am I to judge? I’ve never sold a commodity that can be instantly price-shopped via the internet.

29. Sean T. Bradley

Another channel aimed at automotive salespeople is Sean T. Bradley TV. Bradley’s channel has a bit higher production value than Richard's.

But so that you can compare these two channels’ advice head to head, here’s a video on handling price objections in a very different way.

Many of Bradley’s videos focus on motivation, organization and inspiration, like this one from his Make Money Mondays Series.

Videos by Modern, Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) Magic Makers

30. Cesar L. Rodriguez

As a speaker, sales trainer, and success coach, Rodriguez focuses exclusively on direct sales and network marketing programs.

He’s an executive director of LegalShield, an MLM opportunity that provides human resources to small businesses. He has thousands of people in his organization, but spends most of his time training and coaching now.

Watch "How to Eliminate the Pain & Fear of Rejection." And learn how to use Judo-like sales moves to close analytical and skeptical prospects.

31. Matt Morris

If you’re in sales or a business owner yourself, Matt Morris of The Unemployed Millionaire should be your idol. (After watching his stuff, he’s definitely my newest one.)

The author of eight bestselling books, Morris achieved millionaire status at 29 years old after being in debt just a few years earlier.

He’s built massive multi-level sales teams for multiple direct selling organizations, as well as one of the largest personal development organizations in the world. He’s also visited 70 countries.

Feel like a slacker yet?

If so, watch some of his videos for inspiration. He’ll urge you to chase after bigger dreams, while showing you the incredible life that network marketing can enable you to have.

Here's "How to Define Your Purpose." Also check out "Lifestyle Freedom."

Videos by Inspirational, Entrepreneurial Motivators

32. Tony Robbins

Robbins is an amazing person. After being chased from his home by his mother at knifepoint when he was 17 years old, he is now the most well recognized motivational speaker in the world.

In between speeches, though, he’s also a ridiculously successful entrepreneur (chairman of a $5 billion holding company), best-selling author and a philanthropist who helps millions of people around the world.

He is driven by his mission to help people in all of his pursuits. Check out his video "Change Your Life -- Be a Leader" to get inspired. And learn about the importance of coaching from the master himself.

33. Gary Vaynerchuk

With over 240,000 subscribers, Gary Vaynerchuk's channel is a must-watch. The brash social media star has built two successful companies into the tens of millions of dollars revenue range and written several best-selling books.

If you’re looking for inspiration to get started doing something you can love, watch this video -- "6 Minutes For the Next 60 Years of Your Life."

And you have to watch “The Most Important Word Ever," because you need to know the most important word ever, right?

34. Tai Lopez

Lopez lives the good life and works smarter (and harder) than your average bear.

At a young age, Lopez discovered what many people go years without knowing when he asked his grandfather for the answer to “life’s hard questions."

His grandfather responded by sending him books to read, suggesting that no one knows all of the answers. That started his love affair with learning and lead to him reading literally thousands of books and seeking out some seriously successful mentors.

Lopez is now an “investor, partner, or advisor to over 20 multi-million dollar businesses.” His videos cover way more than just sales, helping his followers achieve “the four pillars of life: health, wealth, love and happiness” too.

A constant learner, many of Lopez's videos feature videos with lessons from other entrepreneurs. Here’s an interview with someone you might recognize.

The volume and quality of sales training content on YouTube is high. It’ll take you a while to get through this list, let alone the rest of the sales training content on the site.

But this is just the start. These videos should lead you to better sales results, but they'll also direct you to more training and more insight from these and other sales experts.

When it comes to prospecting and sending cold outbound email, sales enablement content is your best friend. Targeted collateral sets your cold outbound email apart by showing that you understand your prospects and what type of content matters to them.

Sales enablement content is so important for the buying journey that your sales and marketing teams should be thinking about your buyer personas and the different types of targeted content to support prospects throughout their buying journey before you build your first lead list.

By aligning sales and marketing, your prospecting and cold outbound email strategy is targeted around the messaging you plan to share with these prospects. This alignment forces your efforts to be strategic.

Why is sales enablement content so important for cold outbound B2B email?

Prospecting and reaching out to cold prospects is tough. While it’s no longer 1995 where everyone is terrified of talking to strangers online, people are still weary of receiving emails from people they don’t know.

Sharing sales enablement content in your cold outbound email campaigns builds trust. Sending targeted blog posts, case studies, and testimonials show prospects that you are legitimate, that you understand their pain points, and that you can provide value. Salespeople and marketers alike have the responsibility of educating prospects at the top of the sales funnel, resulting in more engaged and qualified prospects.

Today’s B2B buyer completes 57% of their buying journey before the sales rep is even engaged. Additionally, Consumers are anywhere from 66-90% through the buying process before they speak to a vendor or sales person.

That’s a whole lot of missed opportunity if you’re not educating buyers in the top of your funnel. Buying behavior has evolved so that consumers are more likely to spend time researching, educating, and servicing themselves prior to engaging with sales – salespeople should evolve as well.

This is especially true if cold prospects aren’t responding to your first or second outbound email. Here at LeadFuze, a typical cold email looks something like this:

The goal of the first email should be to create the impression that your outreach is a 1-off personal email. If your first or second email goes without a response, this is a huge red flag that (1) the prospect recognized they don’t know you (2) the prospect doesn’t trust you or (3) the prospect doesn’t identify with your messaging.

The third email in your outbound campaign is a great time to prove that while the prospect might not know you, that you do know something important about them. You can do this by sharing a blog post that resonates with their experiences. For example, if you’re sending emails to HR managers about their document solutions including a blog post about common HR paperwork mistakes and how to avoid them will show that you understand what’s important to them specifically.

In today’s digital world, by the time a sales rep gets involved with a prospect, the prospect already has an opinion about your company, your product, and maybe even you personally as a salesperson. Consumers are education-hungry and most people don’t want to be sold, as much as they want to make a smart decision for themselves. Luckily, by sharing sales enablement content throughout the buying journey you can shape and reshape buyer perspectives as they evolve through your sales process.

Touching base sooner and with more relevant content earns more closed deals than waiting until your prospects are further down the sales funnel to start shaping their perspectives.

Benefits of sales enablement content in your campaign include:

• Showing that your messaging is catered specifically to your prospects
• Building trust and credibility
• Establishing you and your company as thought leaders
• Sharing a story and creating an emotional alternative to the status quo
• Addressing common objections or the competition

Understanding Buyer Personas and the Buying Journey

Understanding your buyer and their journey is key to selling your product or services. From educating customers and building trust at the top of the funnel to handling objections and sharing success stories in the bottom of the funnel to nurturing and continuing education with existing customers – sales enablement content is a crucial part of any sales strategy.

When you’re ready to incorporate content to you sales strategy, a great place to start is with content mapping. The process will be unique to your specific company and buyer personas. HubSpot’s Corey Wainwright has a few great strategies for getting started here. He recommends you ask yourself the following four questions when you’re creating content mapping strategy:

1. What are the logical pathways to take a lead from awareness to evaluation to purchase?
2. What specific content assets can be deployed along those pathways to help advance leads to the next stage in the buying cycle?
3. What content assets are you missing?
4. How do you need to adjust the messaging in those content assets to align with the persona to whom you’re speaking?

Understanding the unique sales processes for different buyers and working backward to produce sales enablement content helps to be sure your content is delivered to the right buyers at the right time.

Best Practices for Sales Enablement Content

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’ve found a ‘silver bullet’ solution with sales enablement content for cold outbound B2B email. You should be constantly reinventing and improving your strategy and content over time and based on your campaign’s performance. Below are a few strategies to keep in mind:

Access Gaps in your Content Strategy
What part of the buyer’s journey is lacking content? What are the frequent objections your sales team is hearing and how can marketing produce content that addresses those objections?

Re-Use Content
Are you measuring the success of your content and re-using your most valuable content or formats?

Make Collateral Accessible
The American Marketing Association discovered that 90% of marketing materials go unused by sales reps. Using sales enablement software and providing reps with easy access to these materials is key to their success.

Leverage Content Analytics
Identifying successful content is easy when you have analytics to back up the success and failure of different content strategies. When sales reps have access to content engagement analytics, they can more effectively understand a buyer’s journey and the context of the buyer’s perspective.

If you’re a marketer in Canada or you market to Canada, then you’re more than likely familiar with the rules and regulations of Canada’s Anti-Spam Law (CASL). As a refresher:

• CASL is a set of regulations that prohibit you from sending commercial electronic messages to those who have not opted to receive them.
• A commercial electronic message (CEM) is an electronic communication (e.g., text messages, emails), sent to an electronic address (e.g., an email address, a mobile phone number). It does, in the main, encourage the recipient to engage in commercial activity. An example would be an advertising message, or an email with a coupon.
• If you are sending a CEM to an electronic address, then you need to comply with three requirements. You need to: (1) obtain consent, (2) provide your identification information, and (3) provide an unsubscribe mechanism.

Caveat: This is not legal advice. If you have questions about what you need to do to comply with CASL, seek qualified legal counsel.

How does CASL affect marketers?

CASL is a law that was passed to help cut down spam messages sent and received, but it does pose a certain challenge for marketers trying to get their message to prospects. In compliance with the new law, many Canadian marketers are being forced to rethink their digital marketing strategy.

If you have a large list of people who have already opted in to receive your email communications, then that’s great! However, the majority of organizations are still in the process of enticing prospects to fill out a form and proactively subscribe to commercial email communications.

Even with these new regulations, marketing automation remains a key tool for successful digital marketing. While many people think first of email marketing when they think about marketing automation, the reality is that email is just one small portion of its capabilities it has in store. Marketing automation functionality goes well beyond email, and can be leveraged throughout the entire customer lifecycle, from building brand awareness, to driving demand, to expanding customer relationships.

Check out these proven ways to leverage marketing automation beyond traditional demand generation email marketing.

Build Brand Awareness

Creating a strong brand is essential to the discovery stage of the buyer’s journey, and for keeping a company top of mind for customers. Use marketing automation to maintain consistency across the brand, optimize your content for search rankings, and to get the most from live and virtual events.

• Influencer relations – Score the actions of press, analysts, and bloggers so you can see who your most engaged and interested influencers Be aware of the pages they visit on your site, what they’re interested in, and the emails (pitches, press releases, events) that they’re engaging with. You can use this intelligence to prioritize who you pitch and what your talk track is.
• Press release attribution and corporate communications – Create trackable URLs for press releases to tie PR activity back to the lead-to-revenue process. You’ll be able to look at multi-touch attribution and how press releases contribute to a sale. You can also use marketing automation to create and execute internal newsletters, emails, etc. (and track employee engagement).
• If you’re actively recruiting top talent (you always should be!) use marketing automation to identify and nurture prospective employees.
• Brand identity management – Make sure your brand is consistent across all teams and channels. Control your visuals, including brand look and feel, logo usage, and header/footers with marketing automation. Additionally, you can create approved templates and distribute them in your media library for other marketing and sales departments to use.
• Event management – Get the most out of your events. Know who to invite, and manage all communication, before and after the event, with more precision and less effort. You can create an automated workflow (save the date, official invite, seats are limited, registration responder and reminders) to make it easy. Then re-use and refine the workflow for the next event.

Drive Demand

Move beyond building your brand, and drive people to your business. Marketing automation can help create, track, and analyze how your customers interact with your company, giving you insights into how to effectively engage with them. Marketing automation also provides a variety of ways for you to collect email addresses from your prospects. From there you can email interested prospects, without violating CASL or other SPAM laws.

• Attract potential customers – You can schedule social promotions of your pages, content, and forms using marketing automation, run AdWords programs targeted at look-alike traffic, and add website visitor alerts so your sales team knows when a prospect is on your site.
• Convert website visitors to sales leads – Use lead capture forms in your marketing automation platform to turn website traffic into actionable leads for your sales team. You can also use marketing automation to test landing page copy, headlines, and calls to action to see what works best and drives the most leads for your company. Integrate with a CRM so that as soon as a leads qualify or take some action that indicates sales-readiness they flow to your sales team for follow up.
• Prioritize and nurture leads – Implement a lead scoring system within your marketing automation system that ranks prospects based on their engagement with your brand, and on profile characteristics, that way the sales team can follow up with the hottest leads first. Lower scoring leads can stay in an automated lead nurturing program full of relevant education content and resources until they’re ready to be passed to sales.
• Enable better conversations – By integrating your marketing automation with CRM you’re able to give your sales team a detailed history of each lead including their website activity, email clicks, media downloads, video views, and more. With this insight, sales can understand the pain points and interests of each prospect, and have the most relevant conversation.
• Support your sales team. Your best potential customers will opt in and become leads. Create email templates so your salespeople can have approved, on-brand messaging to send to leads.

Expand Customer Relationships

Once you’ve converted your lead to a customer, use email and other automated communications to keep relationships healthy (a business relationship is considered explicit consent within CASL laws). After all, retaining and expanding customer relationships is your most important source of continued, reliable revenue.

• New customer onboarding and education – Refine your onboarding to the most effective process, and automate it with 30-, 60-, and 90-day onboarding drip programs. Use newsletters and new feature announcements to keep your customers in the loop, help them expand their use of your products, and let them know their satisfaction matters.
• Customer retention: usage & surveys – Help your customers become power users by hosting webinars to introduce new features or new ways of using existing ones. You can automate all communications before and after the webinar. It’s also a great idea to set up triggered communications based on product or feature use (or non-use). You can deploy surveys and invite your customers to analyze the results.
• Upsell and cross-sell – Leverage marketing automation, CRM, and ERP data to understand when a buyer is ready for upsell. You can look at pages visited, datasheets downloaded, renewal information and payment history and tie it to engagement data to understand when to reach out for an upsell or cross-sell.
• Advocacy and loyalty – Apply a score to customer behavior and engagement to identify who your advocates and most loyal customers are. You can do this by applying a score to webinar attendance, event registration, emails opened, product usage, referrals given, user-groups joined, etc. The higher the lead score, the more likely the customer is willing to be an advocate for your brand!

Email is an important part of an overall digital marketing strategy, but don’t forget that it’s just one piece of the puzzle. Digital marketing, it its entirety, is about making sure your brand is easily found, establishing trust with your customers and prospects, and delivering high quality educational content and resources. Marketing automation allows you to easily build assets, streamline your marketing processes, and tie shared goals and measurements of success together throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

Top-performing marketing leaders understand the need to allocate their time and resources across the entire spectrum of marketing, acknowledging that an effective marketing strategy goes well beyond just driving demand for sales. Download Act-On’s eBook, Rethink Marketing [Automation], to see how you can leverage marketing automation to build brand equity, drive demand, and expand customer relationships.

There was a time when people made frequent trips to the library, eagerly waiting for that new release to become available.

Bedtime rituals involved turning pages as opposed to scrolling up and down a screen. 

For some, books are still a treasured part of daily life. But for an increasing number of Americans, books are falling by the wayside in favor of other leisure activities.

A 2015 survey from Pew Research Center found that only 72% of American adults read a book (either print or digital) that year, a drop from 79% in 2014. 

Some people have substituted streaming reading with TV binges, which we often do when we're stressed, tired, lazy, or avoiding a task that we really don't want to tackle. 

But staring at screens isn't doing your brain — or your health — any favors.

Bingeing on your latest show addiction might satisfy your desire for instant gratification, but it's likely to disrupt your sleep quality and leave you feeling groggy when you make it a daily part of your evening routine. 

Reading, on the other hand, is more likely to improve your sleep, according to Van Winkles. Not to mention the long-term benefits it brings, like the ability to see situations from various viewpoints, increased intelligence, and reduced stress. 

Here are nine motivating facts to get you off the computer and into a good old-fashioned paperback:

SEE ALSO: Here's a science-backed trick to convince other people you're smart

DON'T MISS: 7 bad speaking habits that turn people off immediately

Reading literary fiction can reduce your need for 'cognitive closure,' making you better equipped to deal with uncertain situations.

Source: Creativity Research Journal

Reading can reduce stress by allowing you to enter a literary world away from the anxieties of your own life. Reading can also physically relax you by reducing heart rate and soothing tension in your muscles.

Source: Taking Charge of Your Health and Wellbeing, University of Minnesota

Reading novels can make you more empathetic toward others, particularly when you're extremely immersed in the story.

Source: PLOS ONE

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Some of its wisest teachings are hundreds of years old.

The marketing environment continues to grow ever more demanding. As the speed in which business is conducted gets faster, we marketing professionals need to keep up. We must get better and better at showing customers that our goods and services provide for their needs and wants.

Technology can help us do that. Of course, this is much easier said than done.

Not only must we master the technology that consumers use, and use often, but we also are obligated to our executives- whether clients or the C-Suite- to show that our efforts are not merely fancy, but effective.

Now especially with calls for more “transparency”, brands and clients are expecting to see higher sales results with data proving that marketing is the direct stimulant.

But how?

If we are keen on using the Internet of Things (IoT), the products and services that connect the consumer to the world around them, we can accurately and gleefully present marketing return-on-investment (mROI) to those who demand it.

The IoT culture can display marketing return on investment due to:

1. Engagement
2. Convenience
3. Brand carryover
4. Measurable Data

Engagement
The exciting premise with tying IoT to marketing metrics is the fact that consumers willingly and actively engage with the devices and products with little influencing. Seeing how and why they interact with their gadgets, and gathering information will help marketers see what may have triggered them to purchase or not to purchase, visit sites on a tablet, smartphone or laptop, and much more.

Convenience
The average consumer hates making difficult choices, so if the IoT can help them make the decision-making easier, then it establishes a path of least resistance (PLR) to the products or services at hand. This is a fantastic way for marketers to see how quickly a consumer relies on the information and advertising provided to them, and to observe what they do. Imagine a consumer playing a video game, orders a pizza in the game, and is then able to watch the delivery person come to the house from their phone. Or, imagine a parent is out of town and gets a notice from the fridge that the kids are running out of food and is sent coupons based on past purchases. The parent acts on the promotions, and the babysitter can run out to the store and meet the waiting cashier to grab the groceries. And ALL that data is captured and reported.

Brand Carryover
It is hard to see how our marketing and advertising activities truly affect a customer’s purchasing decisions. An ad that a consumer sees 4-5 days ago, could influence their purchase much later. Using the IoT however, could aid in assigning the credit to which ads and activities helped. Picture a runner is using MapMyRun to track her miles. After 6 months, her mileage counter shows she hit 300 miles. After that, a display ad of the new Under Armour Speedform pops up. Two weeks later, she’s in her local running store and purchases a pair of Speedforms using AndroidPay. With the IoT working together, marketers will be able to attribute the UA ad on MapMyRun as the initial purchasing touch point.

Measurable Data
With all the mentioned examples, one can see that the marketers are entering into a new era of data reporting. No longer can marketers cling to TV ad numbers like coverage and eyeballs and hope for a slight percentage increase in sales. Using the IoT, marketers can prove, with scary accuracy, the mROI. And for marketing as an industry, that’s a good thing.

Despite billions of dollars invested in big data and analytics, the simple truth is that most projects and programs fail to meet expectations. And we have figured out why: analytics forces changes on the C-suite that the CEO has to anticipate and manage, but many don’t.

From how we choose presidents to what movies we choose to watch, big data and analytics have become integral parts of our lives. But for too many companies, analytics is an unsolved puzzle with the pieces flung all over the floor. In research spanning 20 years, we closely examined 36 companies in eight industries to find out why companies are struggling. The findings show that fewer than half of analytics programs met initial return-on-investment (ROI) goals.

But poor ROI is only part of the story. Other signs that something is wrong included:

• A high level of frustration with analytics projects among leaders
• More than half of senior executives experienced a backlog of at least two years on critical new analytics applications
• Chief Analytics Officers (CAOs) were frequently replaced. (Insurance, a very analytics-intensive industry, saw nearly half of CAOs changing roles over an 18-month period.)
• Frequent restructurings of the analytics function
• Too many calls for outside support from consultants

These are not minor problems, and the fixes are not easy. While CEOs typically understand the transformative potential of big data/analytics, they often do not consider the flip side of the coin — that analytics efforts unleash forces within an organization that can threaten the analytics program itself. These forces must be understood and managed for the entire initiative to succeed. The CEO has to work on four things:

Actively manage C-suite dynamics. Every C-suite maintains a delicate balance of power. When the CEO assigns ownership of analytics, that executive will command bigger budgets and more time on the board agenda and will oversee a powerful new pool of resources. Simultaneously, other executives will not only experience a loss of influence but also feel vulnerable. This vulnerability frequently compels traditionalists to resist analytics.

CEOs must anticipate this reaction. Start by talking openly about the journey and the inherent sense of vulnerability executives are bound to feel as the business model changes. Being transparent about the level of expected change and the different skills executives will need to manage the change gets the dialogue above the table. Finally, the CEO must identify the executives most vested in the status quo and proactively manage their resistance — up to and including weeding out the obstinate ones.

Choose the right analytics leader. Seemingly, the simple solution would be to just hire a highly technical person or an analytics evangelist who preaches the potential of big data. But that is not always the case. This is about more than technology. While technical competence is a starting point, the CEO should choose an analytics leader with three distinct qualities: (1) an ability to collaborate, have his or her ideas shaped by others and to champion the ideas of others; (2) an understanding of how the enterprise currently operates and a vision for how analytics could drive the company to a brighter, perhaps radically different, future; and (3) the hunger to create an environment of discovery, where the data is allowed to shape the future of the company. The high turnover rate among CAOs mentioned earlier is a clear signal that finding the right analytics leader is a difficult task.

Challenge existing mental models. High-achieving executives have been shaped by the pivotal experiences of their careers, yet analytics requires executives to think beyond these mental models. The CEO must identify rigid modes of decision making among leaders, make it clear that the analytics era demands a new way of thinking, both individually and collectively, and guide them to that light.

Executives who are attached to the status quo and fear change will succeed in only one way: misdirecting the analytics initiative and perhaps killing it altogether. Ironically, this allows them to actually gain stature as the “innovators” are discredited and C-suite power shifts back to how it was.

Many CEOs underestimate the impact of mental models in the innovation process, often assuming that “thinking outside the box” exercises address the issue. As one financial services CFO told us, “Our mental models were so rigid that even how we thought about data itself needed to be challenged. [Information] had been a source of political capital — to be hoarded and primarily used to fight internal battles. We are only now coming to grips with the notion that the fate of the company is dependent on our collective and strategic use of information.”

Create an environment of rapid innovation. Successful analytics programs require a type of learning that few organizations are innately capable of. Analytics can enable breakthrough innovations but only if the environment supports open discovery and experimentation. If the analytics effort is anchored to traditional learning processes, it will not move fast enough to achieve meaningful change and competitive advantage. This “minimum velocity” at which insights must circulate to fuel innovation is widely misunderstood. Hampered by silos, incentives, and legacy behavior, most companies never approach it. A common sign of a low-velocity environment is an overreliance on problem-solving competitions, such as Kaggle. While these tools are invaluable and a crucial component of any program, they are just tools and, like any tool, can become a crutch if larger issues are not addressed.

Experimentation must be rewarded — something too few companies do. In the survey we conducted last year, we found that only 17% of companies tied innovation to compensation.

The rapid generation of big data over the past few decades has given rise to stunning capabilities — and there are no signs it will slow down. But in order for their companies to fully exploit them, CEOs must step up; they cannot abdicate leadership or delegate responsibility. The good news for the many companies struggling to optimize their big data/analytics investments is that they are not alone. The race for competitive advantage can still be won.

Beep, beep. You got a discount!

Wait…what!?

If you thought SMS marketing went extinct long ago, then you’re WRONG.

Actually 97% of text messages are opened. What’s more, 77% of loyalty program members also said that they would be happy to get loyalty updates in SMS.

SMS might just be what your marketing strategy needs. Check out the infographic below, designed by Trumpia, before starting your campaign for some tips and tricks.

Rewards programs are also welcome on mobile

Vibes reported that 77% of loyalty members said that their brand loyalty would be affected positively, if they received messages on their mobile which notified them of special offers or surprise gifts for their birthdays. But be careful because, according to the latest reports, millennials tend to lie about their birthdays to get loyalty discounts sooner. So consider sending your surprise gifts on the anniversary of their enrollment in your loyalty program.

And the good thing is that you can involve your loyalty program in every part of your mobile strategy. Just see how Starbucks did it!

Starbucks has the following in their mobile app:

• Mobile loyalty card: Starbucks loyalty members can earn rewards by purchasing through the mobile app, or simply scanning their recipe to it. The cool part here is that this also helps the company collect more customer information, like member preferences.
• Digital wallet: Starbucks let’s customer load money onto their loyalty card and mobile app, too, in order to pay for their future purchases. Business Insider reported that, because of this feature, customers have loaded $1.2 billion on their Starbucks cards so far (the plastic cards and the app combined)… which means that they have more money than some banks!
• Order & pay ahead service: This is one of the best features on their mobile app! Customers can order what they want, pay for it, then pick it up at the closest franchise. Goodbye, long waits in line! The success of this service is apparent. In fact, pay ahead represents 10% of total transactions at Starbucks.

Okay. Starbucks has effectively shown how you can inspire some serious engagement in your mobile app ALL THE TIME. But there’s another trend we should mention when it comes to mobile: Facebook bots acting as personal shoppers in messenger. And it works! Spring recently launched this feature, allowing 1,000+ brands and retailers to sell their products there.

And it’s really simple: the bot asks what you are looking for, you choose your gender, then you’re presented with different product categories of clothes, shoes and accessories. After choosing what you want, via thumbnails with links to the products, you can check the items themselves, and make the purchase right through Messenger. Awesome, isn’t it?

“Instead of browsing a website, customers will have a conversation with the e-store’s bot, the same type of experience customers get when they go into the retail store and are served by a salesperson.” says Dorit Deddi from mmuze, a Chatbot-as-a-Service company.

See? It’s worth encouraging customer loyalty on mobile.

Mobile is the future. So BE THERE. A loyalty program can help you. If you’d like to introduce one to your e-commerce store, then a ready-to-integrate solution like Antavo is the way to go. Sign up for a free VIP demo to see how we can help you.

Did you learn from this article? To get more great posts about e-commerce marketing and customer loyalty delivered straight to your inbox twice a week, sign up for our newsletter. Let’s keep in touch!

Everyone throws around strategy and “strategic initiatives” and any other number of words that have strategy attached to them pretty randomly lately.

And, in most cases, I feel like these conversations are based on little understanding of what will really make your strategy sell or successful.

Because in reality, a successful strategy is built on one key concept that should drive every decision that you make once you have discovered the answer for your company.

To phrase it in the form of a question, any great strategy begins with answering this one simple question:

What is the value that we are creating for our clients?

This is the jumping off point for every action you take and every decision you make.

Does it reflect the value that you are creating?

Does this decision reflect the value you want to create?

Simple, right?

So how do you make sure you are focusing on answering this question and putting the answer at the forefront of every action you take?

Here are a few ideas:

1. Make sure your value is clear, present, and focused on your customer:

If we aren’t careful, we can find ourselves delivering a value proposition, but just not one that is focused on our customers and potential customers.

To make sure you have a clear value proposition that is going to deliver a solid, action oriented strategy, you need to make sure you are focused on your customers and potential customers.

This means that you need to understand what is bugging them.

You have to have a grasp on the challenges that they can’t solve themselves.

You have to be current on the industry standards that may be aren’t working for them or that are evolving.

And, you have to be able to think about them in the context of how they are going to change your partners situation.

2. You need to constantly be bringing in new ideas:

One of the big issues for a lot of companies is they get trapped in the world of their own company and own organization.

That’s why it is important that you constantly look for ideas and solutions from all the sources around you.

If you are in technology, look at consulting or sports or retail.

If you are in retail, ask yourself what are professional services doing well.

Or, if you are in marketing, maybe you can use something the sales team is doing right.

Or, maybe the operations side has an idea that will be powerful if used by the tech team.

Wherever it is, you need to focus on finding and applying ideas from different sources in new ways or in new industries.

3. Always be looking how your value can evolve and grow to keep your clients in the best position to succeed:

One thing you need to always keep in mind is that you absolutely have to be focused on growth and evolution.

This is pretty clear to most, but they are also ideas that can easily slip into the background if you aren’t careful.

The key to long term value creation and having a strategy that focuses on the value you create for your clients, you must always focus on evolution and growth because if you don’t grow and evolve, your business will begin to fall behind.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

Sales of the iPhone SE are eating into sales of its high-end iPhone 6 and 6S devices in the US, according to estimates from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP).

While the news indicates that the US is a viable market for smaller-screened smartphones, the popularity of the device will likely have an effect on the average sales price (ASP) of Apple’s devices during the quarter.

The survey of 500 iPhone owners in the US found that in Q2 2016 — its first quarter on the market — the iPhone SE accounted for 16% of total US iPhone sales. Comparably, the iPhone 6S accounted for 39%, and the 6S Plus accounted for 26%, giving these two devices a total of 65% of US device sales during the quarter. That’s a considerable drop from sales of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus during the same period in the year prior, when the flagship devices accounted for 82% of total US device sales. 

There are two key takeaways from the performance of the iPhone SE during Q2 2016:

• The iPhone SE is an effective tool for getting latent users to upgrade. 33% of consumers who purchased an iPhone SE during the quarter upgraded from an iPhone 4S or older. That’s compared with 17% of iPhone consumers who upgraded to the 6S and 6S Plus and 12% who upgraded to the 6 and 6 Plus.  
• The iPhone SE may be eating into potential sales of the higher-end devices. While Apple launched the product to entice latent iPhone owners to buy a new device, it may have also enticed buyers who would have otherwise purchased an iPhone 6S of 6S Plus.

The global smartphone market is expected to slow considerably over the next few years. Despite a record-setting holiday quarter, 2015 was likely the last year of double-digit growth for smartphone shipments.

Mature markets were at the heart of this year’s deceleration. Adoption has reached new highs in key markets in the United States, Europe, and China. The pool of first-time buyers in these countries is shrinking rapidly, and sales are now primarily coming from phone upgrades.

Meanwhile, emerging markets will continue to see robust shipment growth. India and Indonesia, in particular, will help fuel a large share of the shipments growth within the global smartphone market over the next few years.

Will McKitterick, senior research analyst at BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on smartphones by country that forecasts the market through 2021 to reflect slower, stabilizing growth in the long term.

Here are some key points from the report:

• The global smartphone market is still growing at a steady pace due to more widespread adoption in emerging markets. We estimate the global market will hit about 2.1 billion units shipped in 2021.
• Shipments growth over the past few years has been driven by the falling price of smartphones, which has made handsets more accessible in emerging markets. The average selling price of a smartphone in India nearly halved between 2010 and 2015.
• With relatively low smartphone penetration, we forecast Indian smartphone shipments to grow rapidly over the next five years. Nevertheless, India has a long way to go before it surpasses China as the world’s leading market for smart handsets. India is estimated to account for roughly 10% of the global smartphone market in 2016, considerably less than China’s 30% share.
• The global platform wars are over, even as smartphone adoption continues to rise across various markets worldwide. Android and iOS are estimated to account for 97.3% of global platform market share in 2015, compared to 96.3% last year.
• Apple closed the year with another strong quarter on the back of its iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus launches. Still, the vendor saw a slight decline in YoY growth of its share of the market in the face of stiff competition from Samsung and Chinese vendors such as Huawei.

In full, the report:

• Forecasts global smartphone shipments through 2021.
• Explores why India is the next high-growth smartphone market.
• Breaks down the global smartphone platform wars.
• Discusses smartphone vendor performance market share.

To get your copy of this invaluable guide, choose one of these options:

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the smartphone market.

Join the conversation about this story »

B2B marketing and sales is a drawn out process that takes months, or longer, to convert leads to customers. That extended timeframe means tons of touchpoints, multiple leads from single accounts, lots of nurturing, and too many opportunities to fall into marketing hell.

But, if you know what to avoid, it’s much easier to navigate the marketing landscape and steer clear of traps. Below, read about the 9 circles of B2B marketing hell and what you can do to avoid them.

Limbo: Transitioning from Demand Gen to ABM

Account-based marketing has been a hot topic for B2B marketers over the last year, and for good reason. According to ITSMA, 80% of marketers measuring ROI say that ABM outperforms other marketing investments.

But deciding between ABM and Demand Gen can leave you in limbo. When do you begin to switch to ABM and how do you get started?

The first step to getting out of Demand Gen limbo, is to recognize that it’s not an either/or situation. Account-based marketing tactics are great, but they’re not one-size-fits-all. For many companies, a good mix of both is the marketing sweet spot.

As a general rule of thumb, as you move up market to closing enterprise deals, the use of ABM tactics increases along with deal size.

Anger: Getting Frustrated with Poor Conversion Results

You’ve taken careful steps to do everything right, setting up the campaigns properly and outlining a nurturing plan. You launch and then sit back and wait for the conversions… but, prospects aren’t converting nearly as well as you expected and that means you’re no longer on track to hit goals.

This scenario has high potential to drop you into the anger circle of marketing hell. It would be easy to throw your hands in the air and say, “I did everything I could and prospects aren’t converting, I give up!”

The key to avoiding this frustration is to use it as a learning process. Think about why prospects aren’t converting. Maybe a different CTA would work better, or maybe the distribution list isn’t targeted enough.

Analyze attribution data to investigate the prospects’ journey and see where you’re losing them. Then, use that information to run A/B tests, optimize the routes that are converting, and provide a better user experience for site visitors.

Gluttony: Focusing on Quantity over Quality

There’s a difference between busy and being productive. Sure, you can push out multiple pieces of content a day and saturate the market with your thoughts and your brand, but how much value are you really gaining from that?

Marketing gluttony is the focus on quantity over quality, and it drives your brand to becoming infamous instead of famous.

In B2B marketing, quality should always be a goal. It’s more valuable to create a single great blog post or highly educational ebook (“great” meaning they drive opportunities and revenue) over multiples of either of those that only drive a ton of unqualified leads.

Think about it. Would you rather received one email a week with valuable information relevant to you, or receive several emails a day with multiple pieces of content?

Take the time to produce quality work. Your customers and your bottom line will thank you for it.

Fraud: Being Dishonest about Product Capabilities

As competition grows within your industry, it’s natural to want to be the best at everything. However, it’s highly unlikely that your product is the best solution for every prospect who comes knocking at your door.

Avoid over promising what your product can do. When you play all features like strengths instead of being honest about what services your product can and can’t provide, you fall into the fraud circle of hell.

What’s the point of making a prospect believe your product is the best for them when it’s not? All that leads to is a bad review and a lack of long-term client relationships.

It’s better to be truthful about product capabilities. Prospects are much more likely to trust you if you’re honest about what your product does well and what other software might do better. Stick to highlighting product strengths. Your leads will appreciate the honesty, and then when you do say that you are the best at a certain feature, they will believe you.

Having every imaginable feature doesn’t make you a great product, focusing on what you do and doing it well, does.

Heresy: Click-Baiting Your Content

Page views are great. They validate your work and make you feel good. So it’s easy to get sucked into creating content simply for clicks. Developing outrageous headlines for blog posts or ad copy for landing pages, might drive a lot of traffic, but that feeling of success is temporary and provides limited business value.

Ad copy and headlines should line up with the content being delivered. Otherwise, you fall into clickbait hell, and although you’ll gain page views, you’ll lose respect in the process.

Instead of a leads goal, marketers should have a revenue goal. That way the whole organization is optimizing for the same metrics and Marketing is focused on producing quality content that drives clicks that convert, not just a high volume of clicks.

Lust: Falling for the Latest Trends

Digital marketing is constantly evolving, which makes it seem like there’s a hot new trend every month. These trends are shiny and new and promise increases here and improvements there. But be warned, not every strategy or tactic will be right for your business.

Marketing lust can lead you in a million different directions. To avoid this circle of B2B hell, document a marketing strategy for your department. If new trends arise, it’s definitely worth it to investigate them and how they can work for your organization. But the key here is to do the research to see what’s is best for your company before jumping on board.

Being first isn’t as important as being accurate.

Greed: Prioritizing Short-Term Results

As we mentioned earlier, the process of B2B marketing and sales is long. Today’s culture of instant satisfaction may be good for social networks, but it lands you in the greed circle of hell when you’re a B2B marketer.

Creating short-term goals and celebrating their achievements is a necessary aspect of business, but prioritizing short-term results over long-term business growth is damaging.

For example, say you publish an ebook and start directing site visitors to a landing page with a form-fill to download the content. A month after publication you take a look at the data and realize there aren’t many downloads. If you’re only focused on the short-term, you may stop promoting the content and hide it in the depths of your site. However, if you take a look at the download to opportunity conversion rate after several months, it could show that the ebook is driving an above average number of opportunities. Meaning, it may be worth it to put even more money behind promoting the content.

Patience is key in B2B marketing. To really measure success, marketers must track and optimize past the lead stage of the funnel. Instant results are a potential indicator of success, but when it comes to B2B marketing outcomes, the tortoise beats the hare.

Violence: Blaming Sales for Low Close Rates

Sales and Marketing alignment provides a solid foundation for company success. For that reason, the teams need to be friends who work together, not enemies who play the blame game.

For example, say Marketing delivers a bunch of leads to the sales team and goes out to happy hour to celebrate hitting the monthly lead goal. Sales follows up with the leads and only converts a small number of them, missing their monthly goals. Marketing blames Sales for not closing deals, and Sales blames Marketing for delivering unqualified leads. Tensions rise in the process and the business struggles to grow.

To prevent this, Marketing and Sales should work together to develop a plan that brings in quality traffic and outlines the number or type of touchpoints that define leads as qualified.

Once the teams are on the same page, Marketing will deliver qualified leads and sales will close more deals. Then everyone can go to happy hour together.

Treachery: Reporting Data that Lies about Results

If you can’t trust your data, what can you trust? Most marketers today use more than one channel (paid search, paid social etc) to advertise to potential prospects. The problem comes when the data from all of these separate channels needs to be pieced together to map the customer journey.

The individual platforms don’t communicate with one another to reconcile data, meaning that a visitor could click on an Adwords campaign on Monday, LinkedIn campaign on Tuesday, a Facebook ad on Wednesday, and then convert on Thursday. Each of those marketing touches would claim 100% credit for the conversion. Marketing would get credit for three conversions, when in reality, it was only one.

To avoid data treachery, you need a single source of truth for marketing data. Each channel and campaign should be run through a marketing attribution solution, so all data is consistently tracked and accounted for. An effective attribution solution should source original data, integrate with marketing automation and the CRM, track all offline and online channels, and connect to revenue so Marketing is given accurate credit for its efforts.

When marketers have access to accurate and fair data, they’re able to make decisions with confidence.