If you are associated with marketing and advertising, you should read The Unpublished David Ogilvy. Actually, read it even if you aren’t.

David Ogilvy is widely-considered the father of advertising. He founded advertising, marketing, and PR agency Ogilvy & Mather in 1948, and his legendary campaigns include Dove, Guinness, Hathaway, and Rolls Royce, Schweppes. In 1962, Time Magazine called him “the most sought-after wizard in today’s advertising industry.”

That’s not all. He likely was the inspiration from “Mad Men” Don Draper.

Ogilvy loved making lists and the book has many of them. One of my favorite lists is the qualities he looked for in a leader:

• High standards of personal ethics
• Big people, without pettiness
• Guts under pressure, resilience in defeat
• Brilliant brains — not safe plodders
• A capacity for hard work and midnight oil
• Charisma — charm and persuasiveness
• A streak of unorthodoxy — creative innovators
• The courage to make tough decisions
• Inspiring enthusiasts — with trust and gusto
• A sense of humor

These qualities are appropriate for all leaders, not just those in the creative industry. I hope I live up to these standards.

This blog was originally posted on Manage by Walking Around on June 19, 2016.

A woman reacts during a referendum results party at the Lexington pub in London, June 23, 2016. A record number of registered voters were expected to decide whether Britain will leave the European Union. (Andrew Testa/New York Times)

Normally the rebels, when it came to the Brexit referendum, young voters overwhelmingly wanted to belong. A survey of 12,369 people by Lord Ashcroft Polls conducted immediately post-vote found that the younger the voter, the more likely they were to vote to stay in the European Union. While 73 per cent of 18-24 year olds and 62 per cent of 25-34 year olds voted Remain, 57 per cent of 55-64 year olds and 60 per cent of those 65 and over voted Leave.

A YouGov poll of 1,652 people conducted June 17-19 had similar findings. While voters in the 18-24 age group split 64/24 in favour of Remain, voters 65 and over swung the opposite way, splitting 33 to 58 per cent in favour of Leave. This prompted many on Twitter to share a chart showing the more years someone had to live with leaving the EU, the less likely they were to vote for it.

Wow. This says volumes about #Brexit voters. HT @mikeclay pic.twitter.com/vDO1CX5Y3y

— Weh Yeoh (@wmyeoh) June 24, 2016

Another YouGov poll found that, on voting day, 75 per cent of 18-24 year olds voted to stay in the European Union. While voter age is not recorded at the polling station, looking at districts with a lot of young voters largely backs up the pollsters’ claims. Urban areas where the average age was 35 and under overwhelmingly backed Remain. Districts with large university student populations, such as Oxford and Cambridge, were also Remain strongholds.

This generational divide is part of a growing trend around the world. In the United States, anti-establishment candidate Bernie Sanders has consistently outpolled Hillary Clinton among young people in their race for the Democratic presidential primary. Reuters currently has Sanders beating Clinton 62-25 per cent among 18-29 year olds despite the fact that she is the presumptive Democratic nominee and outpolls him overall.

It’s not just Sanders. While Clinton leads Donald Trump 40-31 per cent overall there’s a very different picture when it comes to young people. Clinton is still in the lead among 18-29 year olds, with 37-23 per cent, but fully 41 per cent said they would vote for a third-party candidate, refused to answer, or said they wouldn’t vote at all.

The appeal of alternative parties isn’t limited to the United States; non-traditional, anti-establishment parties are growing. Populist parties are on the rise in a dozen European countries stretching from Portugal to Hungary. In Austria, the leader of the far-right Freedom Party Norbert Hofer recently lost the presidential election by just over 30,000 votes. The Freedom Party is challenging the election result in Austria’s constitutional court and Hofer could still be sworn in as president.

Though the youth divide is probably the most dramatic statistical split, the Brexit vote also revealed a number of geographic divisions. Nearly 96 per cent of Gibraltar, a British territory nestled at the southern tip of Spain, which has been a source of dispute between the two countries for 300 years, voted Remain. Within hours of the result, Spain proposed that the United Kingdom agree to joint control over Gibraltar. Sixty-two per cent of Scotland and 56 per cent of Northern Ireland voted to Remain in the European Union. Nationalist leaders in both countries are already pondering independence from the United Kingdom.

The post What does Brexit reveal about a global generational divide? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Wearables continue to display strong growth in the first quarter of the year, reaching $6 billion in revenue on a 133 percent yearly growth.

The main factor for pushing wearables passed the $6 billion mark is the Apple Watch, which is already the most successful smartwatch on the market, despite being less than a year old.

See Also: Ericsson sees a wearable future that’s easy to swallow

Value per wearable grew at a rate of 50 percent yearly to $218, according to research firm Futuresource Computing, another potential factor of the Apple Watch growth in the first quarter.

If reaching the top of the smartwatch market wasn’t enough, the Apple Watch has also supposedly passed Casio, Citizen, and Fossil. Major watchmakers Swatch and Rolex are still ahead, but the insurgence of a non-watchmaker into the market may change in the industry’s perception on smartwatches.

Competition drives down fitness tracker prices

Activity trackers from wearable manufacturers like Fitbit and Jawbone surpassed 10 million in sales, but only noticed 18 percent growth in volume and an average price slump of 40 percent from 2014 to 2015.

That is mostly due to the Xiaomi Mi Band, sold in China for less than $30, alongside Fitbit, Jawbone, and other fitness providers expanding wearable options to include more economical options.

Due to the slump in wearable average price, spend in this area only grew by two percent in 2015 and Futuresource expects similarly underwhelming figures in 2016.

What we are seeing from market leader Fitbit leads us to believe that smartwatches with central fitness functionality may be the future. It launched the Surge last year, a fitness tracker with basic smartwatch functionality, and the Blaze is a continuation of this trend.

Despite the lack of spend in the fitness and health tracker realm, we are seeing large acquisitions take place in the industry for talent and tech. Nokia acquired Withings, the French wearable health firm, for $191 million; Fitbit acquired Coin for an undisclosed amount.

The post Apple drives wearables to $6 billion in first quarter sales appeared first on ReadWrite.

“I love spending all my time on admin and email”…said no sales leader ever. And yet, we spend hours each week answering one-off emails, repetitive questions, and managing back/forth communication between teams. The more successful we are in guiding our sales conversations to close, the more likely we are to power through our workloads at strange hours of the night.

Fortunately, there’s a simple sales hack that can save you hundreds of hours a year with minimal upfront investment— to create more thorough, comprehensive, and informative proposals that answer questions preemptively and set expectations with your prospects early on. Here are 5 must-have elements to include.

1. A Comprehensive Cover Letter

Why should your prospects work with your company instead of your competitors? You could always answer this question over a series of conversations. Or, you could put the information that your target audience needs in your sales proposals.

Put together a cover letter that explains your company’s value proposition and key differentiators. Here are the elements that you should include:

• A one-liner about your company
• A short background about how your company came to be
• Your value proposition
• Short testimonials
• Short competitor battle cards
• Partial client snapshot
• Answers to frequently asked questions

Follow the information architecture in this example, here.

2. Team Bios

Who’s going to be your soon-to-be customer’s point of contact, and what makes these people awesome? Make sure that your prospects know that their business will be in good hands. Give them a glimpse into your team behind the scenes with the following:

• A photo of each team member
• A brief, 3-5 sentence bio for each person describing the individual’s role, areas of expertise, past experiences and awards, and educational accomplishments if relevant
• A fun or interesting detail about each person’s personality

3. Case Studies

What can your company help your prospects achieve? Show results that you’ve been able to help similar businesses drive. Keep things short and easy to skim. Here’s what you want to include:

• Basic information about your customer and why they approached your company
• A discussion of your customers’ goals and pain points, if relevant
• An explanation of how your company provided a solution
• A description of the results that your company generated

4. Detailed Pricing & Product Options

Pricing will be a major consideration for whether your prospect will want to move forward with you. Create a summary of your pricing structure. If you don’t have one, include a summary of ranges, mentioning that you’ll tailor your pricing to the exact agreement that you forge with your customers. At a minimum, you’ll want to include the following details:

• A description of your price points and offerings
• The value that your company is able to provide
• Details around exactly what your customer is receiving
• Information that describes what makes your company unique

You can create a pricing sheet that is similar to this one, here:

5. Project Briefs

You’ll want to show your prospective customers how you turn your ideas and brainstorms into action.

In the creative and services world, this tool is known as a project brief: it provides an initial opportunity for clients to get their thoughts on paper. Other types of businesses, especially B2B sales organizations, can make use of this technique to increase long-term customer success. Your brief should include the following information about your customer:

• Challenges
• Goals
• Ongoing needs
• Questions
• Concerns
• Pain points

Here’s an example to follow:

Final Thoughts

The goal is to ease your prospects’ decisions cycles, alleviate questions, and move them to close. In a world where we’re all bombarded with more information than we can handle, simplicity will be our best sales asset. Focus on moving conversations forward, and your selling process will feel a lot less salesy.

PandaDoc enables you and your team with better proposals. Let us know how you make your proposals awesome in the comments below!

Have you ever wished there were more hours in a day? More days in a week?

I sure have.

For results-driven sales professionals and business leaders, it’s so easy to get caught up in the hustle and be buried in tons of work. Surely, most of us would do anything for a few more hours just to get more work done.

Well, we’ve asked 32 successful individuals to share their number one time-saving tip to help you take back some hours in your day.

Ready to get more done and have some time to relax?

Click on the names to read their time-saving tips.

◇ Navdeep Reddy ◇ Marcela Sapone ◇ Eric Dixon ◇ Matt Sweetwood ◇
◇ Calvin Correli ◇ Rodney Mason ◇ Emerson Spartz ◇ Ariel Levin ◇ Alex White ◇
◇ Kat Kuehl Boogaard ◇Marsh Sutherland ◇RJ Frasca ◇Debbie Millman ◇
◇ Alex Huggan ◇ Rick Ramos ◇ Gabriel Durazo ◇ Brad Berens ◇Raghav Mathur ◇
◇ Bobbie Carlton ◇ Thomas Kriebernegg ◇ Christopher Penn ◇ Eliott Wolbrom ◇
◇ Charles Pascalar◇ David Cancel ◇ Jon Tucker◇ Vicente Fernandez ◇ Nellie Akalp ◇
◇ Alan See ◇ Shantanu Rana ◇Krishnan Subramanian ◇ Keri Jaehnig ◇ Mike Allton ◇

Navdeep Reddy
Co-Founder at Enplug, Inc.

“While it may seem counter-intuitive as it actually requires an initial investment of time, my #1 time-saving tip is to first research whatever subject you are tackling. While quickly knocking away at any task might yield instant gratification, you might find yourself repeatedly encountering the same task and cumulatively sinking a large amount of time. A lifehack or software solution might exist that allows you to facilitate getting over your recurring roadblocks, or perhaps even automate and eliminate it completely–but you’ll never know until you look it up/ask.”

Marcela Sapone
CEO & Co-Founder at Hello Alfred

“This can apply to anything you want to get done, big or small. Work or personal. Get super clear on what your goal really is. Think deeply about it. What are you trying to achieve specifically? How will you know if you are successful? Spend a lot of time upfront making a thoughtful plan and then execute against it quickly. Clarity helps you avoid a lot of distractions, extra work, and time sinks.”

Eric Dixon
Lawyer and fixer. Blockchain technology inventor. Business advisor & strategist.

“The top time-saving tip is to think of your time as, literally, money. You have to make all of your time work for you. This includes sleep, leisure time, anything.

When you discover that any activity is not productive, you have to shift to something else immediately. You must always get the most that you want out of your time.

Time is a finite resource and it is the only thing that you absolutely control.”

Matt Sweetwood
Speaker. Author. Social Media & Photography Expert. Marketing & Business Consultant.

“The second I get a free moment after someone hands me a business card, I enter the information into my contacts, calendar or notes and actually dispose of the business card. I frequently do that while commuting. It immediately puts me in the position to have them sorted and organized before I even have to contact them again or I get too busy to do it – and maybe even forget.”

Calvin Correli
CEO at Simplero

“Take a break, get back to it with fresh eyes. Eliminate the things that don’t need to be done.”

Rodney Mason
GVP, Marketing at Blackhawk Engagement Solutions

“Schedule in advance on your calendar time for yourself every day to focus on the big picture.”

Emerson Spartz
CEO at Dose (Formerly Spartz)

“Research finds that interruptions consume 28 percent of the average knowledge worker’s day and dramatically slow down learning. The easiest and fastest way that I’ve found to eliminate these interruptions is with white noise (sounds like an air conditioner). I listen to white noise via the White Noise IOS app, and it helps me get in and stay in a state of flow. This has helped me increase my reading speed by at least 50 percent.”

Ariel Levin
Social Media Manager, Consultant & Strategist | LinkedIn Specialist at The Link

“My top tip for saving time at work is to plan your day before you start in the morning. I have a planning session every morning and assess my priorities for that day. Make a to-do list of urgent and important tasks and try to stick to it. Having your tasks mapped out makes procrastination less likely during the day. When it comes to goals, I find that when you’re specific about what you want to achieve, you have a much better chance of success.”

Alex White
Head of Next Big Sound at Pandora

“My number one time-saving tip is: to propose three possible times to get together in the initial email exchange coordinating a meeting along with preferred location or phone number. This will cut down 4-5 emails per person!”

Kat Kuehl Boogaard
Owner at Burst Communications, LLC

“My favorite time-saving tip is “batching”. I just started doing this recently, and it’s helped me so much! Using the batching method, you group similar items together (think answering emails or outlining articles) and then do them all together in one batch of time. It prevents that frazzled feeling you get from constantly switching gears. Plus, it feels so awesome to cross one big chunk off my to-do list at once!”

Marsh Sutherland
CEO CharityCheckin. UP Global Ambassador. AngelHack Mentor. Partnerships Director at CoFoundersLab.

“My #1 tip is to make a list of priorities to get done every day. and do them. I put them in order and put stars next to the ones that are absolute must dos that others are depending on me for.”

RJ Frasca
Director of Marketing & Product Development at Active Screening

“My #1 time-saving tip would be to define project requirements up front. Know who your stakeholders are, get their signoff, and make sure to collaborate closely with them throughout each phase of the project. This will help you manage scope creep, and keep everyone happier in the end.”

Debbie Millman
CMO at Sterling Brands. Host of the Design Matters podcast.

“My #1 time-saving tip is GET ENOUGH SLEEP. Getting 8 hours of sleep might seem like a time-waster, but it actually preserves your energy when awake, re-generates your brain cells so you are more efficient and also makes you feel less stressed when you need to get a lot done.”

Alex Huggan
Cheif Marketing Officer at ACEing Autism

My #1 time saving tip is: ‘plan effectively’ – proper planning prevents piss poor performance! The 6 “p’s”.

Rick Ramos
CMO at HealthJoy

“Make a Deadline – This tip might sound funny to some people but it works – create deadlines for anything you need to do. It puts a little pressure on yourself to finish tasks on a timely manner. The important part with deadlines is to make them realistic and take them seriously. Add it to your calendar and make sure to setup a few reminders. You’ll find yourself more focused on tasks and completing your to-do list much quicker.”

Gabriel Durazo
Lead Engineer & Co-Founder at CoachUp

“Just like with money, you save time by not spending it. Be mindful of your “time budget” before making commitments. Don’t be afraid to say “no”, and if you set a time to leave a meeting or event, stick to it!”

Brad Berens
Principal at Big Digital Idea Consulting, Inc.

“I’m the king of productivity apps, but my #1 time-saving tip is analog: it’s about what NOT to do, and it’s simple to say but staggeringly hard to do.

Here it is. Are you ready?

Don’t look at a screen first thing in the morning.

Any screen.

Don’t look at your computer. Don’t check email. Don’t look at Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Leave the tablet on the table. Don’t look at your phone — it shouldn’t be your alarm clock, by the way, or anywhere near your bedroom. Honest. Don’t. Touch. The. Phone. No, not even just to press the power button to see if there are any important texts or notifications. There aren’t. Don’t look. If you need to look at the weather, look out a window.

If you don’t do these things, you’ll reclaim your morning headspace, have a sense of what you need to do, what your priorities are, instead of reacting blindly to a series of inputs that seem urgent but which aren’t really important.

Oh, and if you can write down your top five goals for the day on a piece of paper–NOT a screen–when you finish work the night before, then you’ll be even more focused.

The best way to save your time is not to let other people waste it.”

Raghav Mathur
Co-Founder and CMO at Black Shell Media

“I’d say just jotting down everything I have to do or get to in a nice, prioritized to-do list is the best way to manage time. I use software like Trello to manage my workflow, and even if I have a few basic things to do, just writing them down and having it concrete in front of me makes everything seem so much more approachable. I save time I would otherwise spend worrying or switching gears since I have my workflow and routines all planned out and easy to reach.”

Bobbie Carlton
Founder at Innovation Nights, Innovation Women & Carlton PR & Marketing

“Cultivate the early morning hours for uninterrupted time to get things done. Whether it’s a writing project, getting a jump on email or just time for yourself nothing beats the pre-dawn hours.

Or…I also gang all those requests for coffee, lunch, “let me pick your brain”” into weekly office hours. For years I did a drop in Friday morning breakfast for anyone who wanted to meet with me. I had the rest of my time to get work done. And, I wasn’t driving all over town and interrupting my work day. “

Thomas Kriebernegg
CEO @ appers gmbh

“Have a clear structure what to do and try to focus as much as possible on single tasks. After you’ve finished the task hop on to the next one.”

Christopher Penn
Vice President of Marketing Technology at SHIFT Communications. Digital Marketing Executive, Best-Selling Author, Keynote Speaker, Ninja.

“Easy: understand the value of time slices. You might have 5 or 10 minutes between meetings. What can you do in that time if you focus? Life, especially in the business world, is composed of handfuls of time throughout the day. Be capable of using those time slices in order to maximize your productivity!”

Eliott Wolbrom
Chief Marketing Officer at Major Energy

“Early in my career, I found myself challenged coordinating long and short tasks throughout my day and week. The longer tasks seemed more important and that was where I was focusing most of my time with no real structure. This created time management issues where smaller – but equally as crucial – tasks would keep getting pushed off.

As a result of that learning experience, to better manage and save time, I am now disciplined in dedicating the first and last 45-minutes of my day to tackling tasks that can generally be handled in under five minutes. On a typical day, that adjustment results in knocking out 10-15 items off of my to-do list. I would also recommend keeping most emails to under 70-words. This saves time for the writer and reader and will generally yield a more productive interaction.

Charles Pascalar
VP of Marketing at Payless ShoeSource

“Do the hardest or most difficult thing on your to-do list first. Once complete, you won’t waste time thinking about it, you will feel a sense of accomplishment, and all the remaining items on your to-do list will be so much easier to finish.”

David Cancel
CEO at Drift. Entrepreneur. Investor.

“Allow yourself to be really bad at answering inbound emails. When checking an email only read the last 10 or so emails, ignore the rest. If something is important they will try to contact you via another channel or will send a follow-up email or emails.”

Jon Tucker
CEO at HelpFlow – Done for You eCommerce Live Chat

“Two options…

Make a List – Every Single Day

It takes time to create a list of what you’re going to focus on each day, but it’s time well spent. It ensures that you’re spending your time on the right things. I have been making a list for the following workday every day for the past 4 years.

It’s changed my life, as odd as that sounds – I know that I’m maximizing the impact of my time every single day, and it also helps me not stress about what I need to get done. Every day is mapped out the night before, so I just need to show up and execute.

Don’t Use Email for Team Communication

You need to talk to your team, but everyone else (customers, marketers, etc.) crowd your email inbox. Using Slack for internal communication can streamline communication. I integrated Slack into my team 2 years ago and it’s been a game changer.

The executives on our team run everything and we communicate a lot. But I’ve probably only exchanged 5 or 6 emails total with each of them over the last 2 years. We do everything on Slack, and it keeps things so much more streamlined and effective.”

Vicente Fernandez
CEO at Sportsmanias

“Stay prioritized—keeping a to-do list is an ideal way to maximize your day and ensure you’re spending time on your most important tasks.”

Nellie Akalp
CEO and Owner, CorpNet, Inc.

“My number one time-saving tip is to stay and remain organized by ending each day with a clear desk and an empty email inbox. For me, a large contribution to my success is due to keeping things organized so that when I get to work the next day I can get right to work instead of spending unnecessary time shuffling through paperwork or emails trying to find what I need. In addition, I am a big advocate of keeping meetings short and to the point. Conversations that are too drawn out, again in my opinion, are just a waste of time.”

Alan See
Chief Marketing Officer | AMA Content Marketer of the Year | Forbes Top 50 Most Influential CMO on Social Media

“Time” can’t be saved. There are only 24 hours in a day and once an hour passes it’s forever spent. We now live in an “attention economy.” Attention is scarce because each of us has only so much of it to give and it can come only from us. In fact, information overload has made attention the world’s most precious resource. In light of these facts, I closely guard my limited amount of attention, using it only for the things that I really care about. In short, if it’s not relevant to my needs, desires and goals I hit the delete key immediately.

Shantanu Rana
Co-Founder & COO – Eduvative Technologies LLP. Director of Development & Operational Management – EdTechReview.

“Pause, visualize your steps, consider the outcomes, calibrate them and then start working. Thoughtful 5 minutes would always save you precious 5 hours.”

Krishnan Subramanian
SVP Products and Strategy at CloudMunch

“Use DevOps approach to everything you do in life.”

Keri Jaehnig
Founder & CMO, Idea Girl Media

“When you own a business quite often you wear many hats–especially in the early phases.

We all need to delegate what we can to get offer the most value to our customers, and get the greatest return for our time. It will seem hard at first, but as your business grows, you can build a trusted team. Until then…

Trello is like a project management dashboard. It is totally customizable . You can implement to-do lists, due dates, collaborate with others or keep it private, apps for other tools you may be using, and there is are nifty archives and calendar feed functions. It’s up on my tabs all the time!

I have a separate board for each project (sometimes two), and it helps me plan, schedule, organize, store files, and more. So, it helps me save times in many respects. Most people that try it after I recommend it are thrilled with Trello.

Social media can take a lot of time if you want a solid presence that produces results. Think about it: Content creation, content syndication, profile management, networking the brand, social response, ad campaigns, keeping up on constant changes, brand and niche monitoring, reviewing analytics, and more. Consistently!

I find that scheduling content in advance allows time for more engagement, which is where the true value is. A tool like Hootsuite is a great starting point for scheduling and replying. When you are ready to develop systems, a terrific social media dashboard with many features is Sprout Social: Sprout allows you to schedule into the future very quickly, which is a huge time-saver. Additionally, their brand monitoring, smart Inbox, and reporting features are stellar! You’ll also like the dependability, smart search, and the auto-schedule for best times to post.

As a business owner, the real key is learning where you can delegate, and finding the best time-saving tools that fit your work style.”

Mike Allton
Chief Marketing Officer at SiteSell. Content Marketing Practioner at The Social Media Hat.

“My #1 time-saving technique has always been to recognize when a particular task is being repeated, and look for ways to optimize the repetition. For instance, when I find myself sending the same kinds of emails to prospects, I’ll take a version of the email and save it as a Note in Evernote. The next time I have to send that message, I already have a version ready to go that I can copy & paste and edit to suit my needs.

Evernote itself is a tremendous tool for saving time. I can save email templates, collections of hashtags for social media, usernames, social media posts, blog templates, pricing reference sheets… on and on.

The key is to begin to get into the habit of creating time savers for yourself. The more often you do it, the more aware your mind will be when new opportunities come up.”

1. Broken Links or Formatting Issues

First impressions are key, and if your new customer email has a formatting error or broken link you can likely say goodbye to their business. Quadruple check your email template to be certain information like names and phone numbers pull correctly and all images and hyperlinks direct to the correct location. – Chuck Cohn, Varsity Tutors

2. Too Many Messages

If you have multiple departments all sending messaging to the same list, it’s critical to make sure you aren’t inundating anyone (especially new signups) with too many messages. No one likes to be spammed, and the quickest way to encourage a customer to hit the “unsubscribe” button is by over-communicating. Instead, send fewer, more focused curated emails that add value to your customers. – Brittany Hodak, ZinePak

3. Pure Text

I’ve signed up for email newsletters from companies whose content I really admire, only to get a wall of text in their email newsletters. Even if content is king, design is needed to help the readers (especially those who are new to your message) digest all the information easily. Make sure you lead the eye with titles, sizing, adequate spacing, color (don’t overdo it), and images. – Dave Nevogt, Hubstaff.com

4. Lack of Valuable Content

The worst thing to send new subscribers is self-promotion. Think about what articles, videos, or walk-through your audience would actually find valuable. Get them on your good side before promoting your products directly. –John Rood, Next Step Test Preparation

5. Asking Them to Buy Too Soon

In sales, there are suspects (people who may eventually want to buy from you) and prospects (people who could actually purchase from you today.) Email subscribers need to be treated like suspects. It’s the equivalent of saying hello at a networking meeting. Don’t pitch to them until you have shown them what it’s like to work with you and how your services are the best solution for them. – Nicole Munoz, Start Ranking Now

6. Overdoing It

Your business might be your lifeblood, but for many customers it’s barely an afterthought. That’s why I try to keep emails to a bare minimum, and only send them if there’s a direct benefit to the customer. Otherwise, you’re doing more harm than good by cluttering their inbox and wasting their time. – Elle Kaplan, LexION Capital

7. Irrelevance

Cross-selling and upselling are important revenue generators, but off-topic, poorly targeted, and repetitive emails make me wish I’d never done business with the company in the first place. Email marketing automation is a powerful tool, but if a company sends me irrelevant messages, it, and future emails, will go straight in my spam folder. Keep it relevant, contextual, and personal. – Vik Patel, Future Hosting

8. Unfocused Efforts

Campaigns with a lack of focus are the most egregious mistake you can make when marketing to new customers. It’s important you set goals, define the purpose of the campaign, and target your customers’ needs and wants using methods which will both keep them engaged and illicit a response. – Blair Thomas, First American Merchant

9. Lack of Personalization

When a client speaks with one of our account managers about hiring a private investigator, they have usually shared personal information about their case. It is critical during any follow up to ensure the client we truly listened to their need. Personalizing emails to their specific information furthers our brand of giving them peace of mind when they need it most. – Jennifer Mellon, Trustify

10. No Unsubscribe Link

London (AFP) - Europe angrily demanded a quick divorce as sparks flew Saturday over Britain's seismic vote to abandon the EU, toppling Prime Minister David Cameron, pounding world markets and dividing the island nation.

European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker called for rushing Britain out of the door as the bloc grappled with the impending loss of one of the world's top economies, the first defection in its 60-year history.

Cameron announced Friday he would resign by October and let his successor lead the exit negotiations under Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty which sets out a two-year time-frame to leave. 

"I do not think it would be right for me to try to be the captain that steers our country to its next destination," the outgoing prime minister said as sterling, global stocks and oil prices plummeted.

Britons, many worried about immigration and financial insecurity, cast aside the prime minister's warnings of isolation and an economic disaster, voting 52 percent-48 percent in favour of "Brexit" in Thursday's referendum.

Moody's cut Britain's credit rating outlook to "negative", warning of the economic threat to the country.

"I do not understand why the British government needs until October to decide whether to send the divorce letter to Brussels," Juncker told German broadcaster ARD on Friday evening.

"I'd like it immediately," he added.

"It is not an amicable divorce but it was also not an intimate love affair," he said.

- Emergency meeting -

Foreign ministers of the six original EU members -- Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg -- gathered in Berlin for the first in a series of emergency meetings over the next week triggered by Britain's decision.

"We can't allow ourselves to slip into depression and inaction after this referendum," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said as he entered the meeting at a lakeside villa.

The Franco-German axis at the heart of the bloc, which was born out of a determination to forge lasting peace after two world wars, will propose "concrete solutions" to make the EU more effective, French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault told AFP.

EU leaders will open a two-day Brussels summit on the crisis on Tuesday.

Britain faced a historic break-up threat, too, as Scotland refused to be willingly dragged out of the 28-nation European Union when more than 60 percent of its people voted to stay in.  

Scotland's parliament held an emergency meeting Saturday. 

First Minister Nicola Sturgeon declared ahead of the gathering that a second Scottish independence vote was now "highly likely" after a 2014 referendum backed staying in the UK.

- Surprise, regret -

The vote, the culmination of an often poisonous campaign, exposed deep divides across British society, including between what The Independent newspaper called "those doing well from globalisation and those 'left behind' and not seeing the benefits in jobs or wages".

Young people, graduates, and big cities tended to favour "Remain". Elder, less educated people and rural populations were more likely to back "Brexit".

"I am worried, really sick for my children's prospects," said Lindsey Brett, a 57-year-old secretarial worker in central London.

"I am worried about all aspects: what it is going to do with our relations with the rest of Europe, with the rest of the world," she added. 

"I was expecting a Remain vote. I did not think we would come out."

Many others struggled to accept the outcome, too. More than 800,000 people have signed a parliamentary petition calling for a second referendum.

The referendum result caused the pound to fall to a 31-year low of $1.3229 at one point but it recovered some ground after the Bank of England said it stood ready to pump £250 billion ($370 billion, 326 billion euros) into the financial system to avert a crisis.

- 'Take a bow' -

European stock markets dropped around eight percent at opening before recovering later, while British bank shares lost a quarter of their value in morning trade. 

London's FTSE 100 index recovered to close down 3.2 percent. US stocks dived, with both the Dow and S&P 500 closing down more than three percent.

Britain's rejection of the EU is being seen as a victory for the anti-establishment rhetoric of the Brexit campaign, a feature of growing populism across Europe.

"Take a bow, Britain!", eurosceptic newspaper the Daily Mail wrote across its front page on Saturday.

"It was the day the quiet people of Britain rose up against an arrogant, out-of-touch political class and a contemptuous Brussels elite," it added.

The British vote will stoke fears of a domino-effect of exit votes in eurosceptic member states that could imperil the integrity of the bloc.

Dutch far-right MP Geert Wilders and French National Front leader Marine Le Pen immediately called for referendums on EU membership in their own countries.

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Why is the sales tech landscape so difficult to navigate?

Over the past few years, sales technology has seen explosive development. Today the market for sales tools is fragmented and highly competitive, with many different types of tools and many vendors in each category. Because the landscape is relatively immature, there is still some debate over what the categories should be called, and whether certain categories will go from nice-to-have to need-to-have tools. Together with ongoing feature build-outs and continual re-branding, the sales technology space has become difficult for buyers to navigate.

Early adopters have already been using sales technology for a while, but based on my conversations with practitioners, many of them are ready to try something new. Deciding whether to invest in the more established sales tech platforms vs. the rapidly innovating, newer vendors is a challenging decision facing buyers this year.

How can buyers organize the options available to them?

The sales tech landscape has been broken down and “simplified” in a variety of different ways to date. Based on my research, none of these views is quite satisfactory, either because too many options are omitted—some might argue this is for the sake of simplicity, but all too often it seems to be in the interest of the content’s sponsors—or because the organizational schema doesn’t provide a robust enough picture of how the tools will actually fit into the rest of the technology stack and day-to-day workflow. Often, these landscapes get some things very right, but at the expense of other elements. For example, this view from VB Profiles is highly inclusive of many vendors, and uses a complex categorical view by channel and goal, but ultimately is too crowded to be a useful discovery resource, and does not show who uses the tools or how they would work within your sales process. On the other hand, this view from TOPO does a great job of linking the different steps in an SDR’s specific workflow to different technology categories, but it doesn’t help buyers figure out which vendors (other than LinkedIn) can provide the pieces they need.

In the TrustRadius taxonomy, we aim to address this issue by categorizing products across three dimensions: by end-user role, feature set, and stage of the sales process.

We’ve organized the sales process into four mini processes, tied to different teams and initiatives: Marketing/Sales Alignment, Inside Sales, Quote-to-Cash, and Sales Performance Management. Each of these areas has inspired its own sub-categories of software tools designed to automate, improve, or report on that piece of the funnel. Most of these category terms are fairly well established, but vendors are constantly shifting their brand strategy and using new buzzwords to reposition their products—which do not change in functionality as quickly as marketing tends to change their branding. To be most helpful to buyers, at the drill-down level we’ve grouped products based on similar feature sets.

Sales performance management software is most often used by sales ops and sales managers. Although there is some overlap and the landscape will continue to change, our research shows four main feature groups within SPM in 2016: sales incentive compensation management (ICM), sales gamification, sales forecasting, and sales pipeline tools.

Where should buyers start with sales performance management (SPM)?

Although your evaluation process will depend on your specific timeline and the different players involved in the buying decision, here are three high-level steps to follow if you’re thinking about incorporating new tools into your SPM program:

1) Decide on your KPI strategy. Which KPIs will you track, and will this differ between sales teams? (For example, KPIs for Account Executives may be different than KPIs for SDRs.) Will quotas and compensation be based on revenue only, or on activity metrics as well? How frequently are you planning to adjust or optimize goals and incentives, and who will own this process?

2) Determine which pieces of the sales performance management process you have today are slowing you down, or are not yet possible because you don’t have the right infrastructure in place. Is the bottleneck happening because you can’t access the data you need in a timely fashion, because you aren’t tracking the right KPIs in the first place, or because you don’t have a way to use data insights to make changes to the plan moving forward? Or, is the issue coordinating the sales pipeline with Marketing/Finance? Answering these questions will help you determine whether technology can make the biggest difference at the sales ops level, rep level, or management level.

3) Identify a tool or set of sales tools that will address those areas. Realistically, some pieces of sales performance management are still going to be done with spreadsheets, or other more general solutions that are already in place and used across departments (like an LMS, BI tool, or CPM platform). It’s important to figure out which pieces of sales technology will solve your biggest pain points, and can be implemented within your current process/sales stack without interrupting revenue generation. Often this is a concern of both reps and leadership. But, if you’re able to identify a tangible problem with sales performance that the tool will solve, it will be much easier to justify the investment and measure success post-implementation.

Get a pulse on the SPM subcategories: Sales ICM, Forecasting, Pipeline, Gamification & Suites

Based on our review of product offerings and use cases, sales incentive compensation management (ICM) seems to be the most established area of sales performance management software. It’s especially useful for very large sales organizations where smart spreadsheets are not sufficient to maintain accurate accounting. Under these circumstances, often reps are relied upon to point out mistakes in their own bonuses. Because it is only in their interest to report underpayment, miscalculated incentive payouts that are not reported can add up to a significant sum. Thus, the ROI of an ICM tool can be easier to justify than with some other types of sales tech; this may partially explain sales ICM software’s earlier development and more widespread adoption so far. Xactly Incent, IBM Cognos Incentive Compensation Management, and Callidus Commissions are three examples of well-established products in this category.

Forecasting is a very well established use case—all Sales organizations do forecasting to some extent, in order to determine quotas, evaluate pipeline health, and justify sales performance to executives and investors. However, as of yet there are fewer sales-specific tools designed for forecasting on the market. InsightSquared is an example of a product specifically for the sales performance forecasting & analytics use case; it competes against manual forecasting procedures, forecasting delivered through CRM add-on modules (think Salesforce Analytics), or sales forecasts configured via a broader business intelligence solutions like Tableau. More technical forecasts for budgeting and quarterly planning tend to be handled by sales ops, whereas sales managers tend to handle back of the envelope forecasts to check in on reps’ progress against goals and determine how much prospecting/pipeline building needs to be done. Depending on how forecasts are calculated and displayed—how long they take to pull, as well as how accessible they are to reps and managers—they can enable (or hinder) agile sales planning.

Sales pipeline point solutions seem to be cooling down relative to the other SPM software categories. This is not because pipeline features are unimportant, but because the landscape is consolidating. Most of the products with this feature set have been developed by or acquired by CRM providers, such as Stitch (owned by SugarCRM), or are part of another broader performance management solution that includes forecasting, prioritization, or deal-routing capabilities. This is likely because in order to be useful, tools for visualizing and managing the pipeline must be tightly integrated with the deal data records and/or the tools that allow salespeople to take action on deals in the pipeline. Beyond the CRM category, there is crossover with sales enablement, sales training and coaching, predictive analytics, forecasting & ICM, and inside sales platforms. Salesforce.com, Pipedrive, NetSuite CRM+, Infer (Prospect Management), Clari, KiteDesk, Velocify, InsightSquared, and Insightly are examples of crossover tools that include pipeline features.

Conversely, gamification and sales coaching/training are emerging as use cases and software categories. Increasing interest in automating and centralizing these activities may be related to the trend around sales specialization as a strategy for growth, particularly with high-velocity SDR teams that need to be onboarded quickly. Still, at this point most of the options remain relatively small. In some cases the vendor itself is still a small company (like LevelEleven, Hoopla, or Ambition, which were founded to address these areas), while in other cases the product is part of a broader suite of sales tools that has an established customer base, but these modules are not yet widely adopted (as with InsideSales.com and CallidusCloud, for example). Based on feedback from sales leaders and practitioners, “gamification” is not usually considered a bottom-line priority, and it may be more difficult to justify the expense/change management of investing in a new platform, especially since it involves cultural modification. As a result, some vendors in these categories are re-positioning as sales motivation or sales activity management solutions, rather than calling themselves gamification software. Moving forward, we expect to see more competition develop between inside sales vendors that focus on prospecting activities (emails, dialing, etc.) and sales performance management vendors that focus on analytics and motivation, since both types of tools track activity metrics and are geared towards making reps more productive. There may be increased feature overlap, acquisitions and mergers, or simply competition for budget share as these value propositions converge. Already, ToutApp and InsideSales.com are two examples of inside sales vendors that also offer gamification.

There are also vendors that offer sales performance management suites, spanning multiple areas of SPM functionality and including features I have not focused on in this post, such as territory mapping, goal tracking, sales playbooks, collaboration, etc. As the landscape matures, it will be interesting to see which categories and capabilities users consider to have the biggest impact on sales performance, and whether point solutions or suite solutions gain more traction across sales organizations of different sizes.

Influencer marketing has become a popular, mainstream strategy to produce brand awareness, leads and sales. In fact, it may be too popular.

As more brands aggressively pursue influencers, the strategy has become less genuine. Costs for branded posts have skyrocketed. Unscrupulous “influencers” pad their accounts with fake followers to demand higher fees from brands. In addition, the FCC is cracking down on paid posts that lack proper disclosures, and Google’s new guidelines can penalize influencers who don’t disclose payments for backlinks.

Some say influencer marketing is dead or has become a joke. But many experts say the problem is not influencer marketing itself; it’s how companies implement the strategy.

To achieve long-term success, implementation of influencer marketing must become more PR-like and less overtly promotional. It must function more as earned media, not paid media. That means building long-term relationships with influencers and helping them produce content that’s original, newsy, authentic, interesting, educational and entertaining. That PR approach will produce increased readership/viewership and better believability. Ultimately, influencer marketing that mimics earned media will boost audience belief in the message.

These are some recommendations to improve results from influencer marketing:

Align your brand with the right influencers. Scott Disick, a television personality best known for his relationship with reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian, recently posted a photo of himself with a Bottea protein shake in a sponsored post. Patricio Robles at Econsultancy, asks why Bottea, a health and wellness brand, would align with a celebrity known for hard-partying ways and struggles with drug and alcohol abuse. Such misalignment leads to disingenuous content – and lack of credibility.

Working with influencers who are part of your market leads to more sincere content and increases the likelihood that people will believe the message.

Look beyond paid posts. The belief that brands must always pay influencers is a myth, writes Lee Odden at the TopRank Marketing blog. Odden quotes Stephen Waddington, chief engagement officer at Ketchum, as saying: “The notion that you can buy influencers like media is dangerous. It’s a relationship business, not real estate.”

Paid posts, the digital equivalent of product placements, should be considered. But when done alone, they will probably not “move the needle,” especially if they are not compelling and not clearly aligned with the influencer’s persona, experts warn.

While arrangements with paid influencers are usually clear, with written contracts and established timeframes, relationships with unpaid influencer are informal and less clear cut, writes Mention’s Content Marketing Manager Lindsey Prowse. Prowse cites the Skype Passion Project as an example of a superb unpaid influencer campaign. Skype sought unpaid ambassadors around the world to connect and share their passions. The campaign produced more than 100,000 website visits and over 5,000 campaign shares. The result: Ten percent of new website visitors downloaded the Skype mobile app.

Meet audience needs. Identify what the target audience wants to know and develop content that meets their information, educational and entertainment needs and preferences. Provide the selected influencers with bullet points of key points – and allow them develop their own creative approaches to the content. In other words, treat your influencers them like a journalist instead of a shill.

Seek product reviews. Reviews are an excellent tactic because they’re product-centric without being salesy, Prowse says. Influencers can share their individual story and experience, go into detail about using the product, and entertain their audience while still promoting the product directly.

Product reviews are often effective because people trust other consumers more than paid promotion for brands. “A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is – it is what consumers tell each other it is,” said Scott Cook, co-founder of Intuit.

Help influencers build relationships. Find an influencer in your niche whom you admire, and share their content on your own social media networks, recommends Steve P. Young, founder of AppMasters.co, in an Entrepreneur article. Be sure to tag the influencer so he or she knows what you’re doing. If that’s not enough, consider a charitable donation in the influencer’s name or interview them for your company blog.

Following these best practices can help energize your PR. “Influencers help brands stay relevant. They’re like the evolved cool kids from high school. And harnessing the power and trust that people have in influencers can really supercharge your PR campaign,” Prowse concludes.

Measure influencer results. Assign each influencer unique URLs linking to your website. Use content marketing metrics to measure increases in brand awareness, engagement, leads and sales produced by each influencer. In addition to media monitoring and measurement services, CyberAlert offers a comprehensive package of customized metrics for influencer marketing.

Bottom Line: As influencer marketing has become increasing pervasive, it has become less effective. Some influencer marketing efforts have even led to insincere content due to a mismatch of brand and influencer. PR can take the lead to revitalize the strategy though unpaid influencer marketing campaigns.

A version of this article was published on the CyberAlert blog.

Before you begin any content marketing campaign, you have to articulate goals.

There are two types of goals: strategic and tactical.

Strategic goals will go directly to your purpose: the why.

In theory, strategic goals should be relatively straightforward. You wouldn’t be creating a campaign if you didn’t have a strategic goal, right?

However, it’s important to craft specific strategic goals that truly describe what you are trying to achieve. These should be big ideas that will move your business or initiative forward.

Before you proceed with any type of tactical planning, or tactical goal identification for that matter, you should ensure that key stakeholders are in agreement around your strategic goals. If there is any miscommunication or divergent opinions as to what your strategic goals should be, then chances are your tactical execution will fail to deliver on your purpose, at least to someone.

At the end of the day, all goals must eventually deliver revenue. But, in order to get there, you may have to deal with some very specific issues that will move the market along. So, prior to establishing your content marketing goals, you will need to identify the list of business challenges associated with your new product or current situation.

The hard part now is deciding which challenges you can or should address through content marketing.

Content marketing is not suitable for addressing every business challenge you might encounter. Moreover, if you try to do too much with your campaign, you risk diluting your message or delivering a disjointed or fragmented set of deliverables.

To be effective, all of your content must work in harmony. As such, you need to ensure that your content strategy is focused on a discrete set of goals that are clear and achievable. Simply put, this means that you understand, and all of your key stakeholders are aligned around, the purpose of your content marketing campaign.

If you fail to align around a purpose, you will inevitably end up having a difficult conversation with your stakeholders to justify the point of your campaign or content marketing in general.

Tactical goals can come in all shapes in sizes. As the term implies, they relate to the performance of specific tactics. You may not be able to build out tactical goals at the outset of your planning process, simply because you haven’t worked through the tactics you’ll be employing just yet.

Your selection of tactical goals is almost limitless. So many marketing activities can now be measured so precisely that it really comes down to selecting just those tactical goals and metrics that are key drivers for your business.

Just a few examples include:

• Downloads of assets like white papers
• Views of infographics or videos
• Social media engagement including shares and comments
• Conversions via specific web pathways
• Web page views
• Number of contacts or leads generated
• The number of appointments or demos generated
• Pipeline value built

There are many other very specific things you could measure. The key is deciding on the information you should be measuring in order to move the needle for your effort. You don’t have to measure everything to have a good campaign.

At the end of every campaign, you’ll be measuring revenue in some form. That’s essentially a given. Revenue is the final result of any sales and marketing effort. Make sure you’ve established what your number needs to be and what you are specifically accountable for.

In a B2B situation, some revenue may be directly attributable to your content marketing efforts. Perhaps you have a solution that is self-service or sold via direct channels making revenue measurement much simpler.

If you’re involved in a complex sale, the more likely scenario is that revenue attainment will be a joint effort between marketing and sales. Take the time up front to consider how marketing efforts will be tracked and attributed so you can measure and justify your efforts.

It can be hard to forecast specific, quantifiable goals around how different pieces of content will perform. Sometimes it is just difficult to know up front what will resonate, no matter how well you know your audience. There are also factors out of your control, like how well Google ranks blog posts, for instance.

Your first goal should be to be useful to your audience. If you start there, then you have a good chance of seeing your tactical goals come to fruition.

The bottom line is that it’s impossible to know if you were successful if you don’t set goals, so do it!

This post is adapted from an excerpt of The Content Driven Product Launch, available on Amazon now!

If you want your sales team to be focused only on qualified and sales-ready leads, your company will have to establish an efficient lead management process – from demand generation to lead nurturing, to final hand-off to sales. In order to achieve your business goals and increase revenue, your marketing team needs to run sophisticated marketing campaigns to generate as many high-quality leads as possible. Once generated, intelligent lead scoring and prioritization process is required. The lead scoring is a sales and marketing methodology that assigns points and ranks leads to determine their sales-readiness. It is used to automate the ranking, grouping, routing and tracking of leads and is designed to ensure your company has a consistent process for lead management. The importance of accurate lead scoring cannot be underestimated:

• 45% of companies report that their sales reps need help figuring out which accounts to prioritize
• 80% of top performing companies use lead scoring as part of their lead qualification process

In addition, lead scoring makes it possible to funnel lead information directly to your sales teams. The activities of your sales team will be more efficient too, as the sales teams who prioritize their sales efforts are 18% more likely to achieve their revenue goals and 22% more likely to meet or beat their quota.

However, it is worth mentioning that an efficient lead scoring process needs to be tested, analyzed and tweaked regularly. Make sure score-based hand offs to other teams or campaigns are happening properly. This will also help you flush out any indicators that turn out to not be useful. You must take into consideration the changing market dynamics, new products and optimize your scoring system accordingly. Regular meetings with marketing and sales to review and update the most accurate scores are also necessary. More so, seamless integration of sales force automation and marketing automation on a single platform is imperative, as there is also a technical aspect behind transferring lead data into the sales pipeline. That’s why we advise you to download this practical eBook and learn the main benefits and key principals of lead scoring system.

Download eBook

This week we are proud to announce that our guest blog is by our two new interns, Amanda Seaton and Monica Zutter. This is their very first blog post, and I’ve got to say that I’m beaming with pride! They recently attended the second annual Sierra Sales Summit Conference, presented by the Professional Saleswomen of Nevada, also known as PSN. The conference had three expert speakers; Joanne Black, Vickie Musni and our very own, Alice Heiman. Each speaker took a unique approach to sales. Covering three powerful sales techniques. Amanda and Monica summarized the most important takeaways.

P.S. Show them some love by leaving a comment below!

1. Pack Your Pipeline With Hot Prospects

What if you could boost your close rate to more than 50%, get every meeting with one call and knock out your competition? America’s leading authority on referral selling, Joanne Black, taught us the importance of asking for referrals and how it can benefit your business. One of the hardest challenges, in sales, is producing a consistent stream of qualifies leads. Joanne’s solution is referrals!

Did you know that 83% of consumers are comfortable making a referral after a positive experience (Texas State University)? Are you asking for that referral? Joanne said it perfectly in her presentation, ” You don’t know who people know until you ask.”

#SalesTip: You don't know who people know until you ask. #Referrals
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Here are the 3 most powerful reasons to ask for referrals:

• Arriving pre-sold
• Earning trust and credibility
• Shortening the sales process

Many people struggle with asking for referrals. The most common reasons for not asking for referrals are they don’t want to intrude, they don’t know how to ask and they are worried the person may say “no”. Yet according to the New York Times, over 65% of new business comes from referrals. Referrals are powerful for your business, and Joanne taught us that there are a few traps you should avoid.

Here are Joanne’s 5 referral traps to avoid:

• Assuming your clients will refer you
• Forgetting to ask
• Thinking they don’t know anyone who would be a good client for you
• Not implementing a referral plan
• Relying on social media to generate all their leads

Joanne mentioned that we are hiding in our emails, text messages, cold calls, and social media. Communicating with people and building relationships is  the key to successful referrals. Joanne says, “Everybody knows somebody!” When starting to build your referral strategy start by reaching out to previous clients. According to Neilsen, customers are 4x more likely to buy when referred by a friend. They have to know you, like you and trust you to buy from you!

Want to know more about adopting a Referral Program for your business? Take Joanne’s Referral I.Q. Quiz and get a free checklist for where to start! Or check out Joanne’s two books:

• No More Cold Calling
• Pick Up the Damn Phone!

2. Understanding Personality Types will Change the Way You Sell.

Next, Vickie Musni taught us the importance of understanding different personality types and how that can affect your sales.

Knowing your audience and knowing yourself will increase your sales. It seems like common sense, however, many times we fail to take into account our prospects personality type when selling. In sales, personality traits play a key role in how a seller is making a sale or how a buyer is going to buy a product.

Vickie gave us a simple and effective way for understanding these different personality types. She uses four colors to describe the four most common types of personalities; Yellow, Red, Green, and Blue.

What do those colors mean?

Most people are a combination but will quickly relate to one of the colors. Vickie’s stressed the importance of how understanding people better will lead to more sales. She used the acronym “S.M.A.R.T.” during her presentation to touch on how personality goes into these important aspects of business.

What does SMART mean and how do personality colors apply to sales?

• Sales
• Marketing
• Abilities
• Relationships
• Team-building

You can use what you know about your personality to improve in all of the aspects above. Both in life and work we meet many different people all with different personality types and can build relationships more easily when we consider their style. 

Yellow: Make buying fun and social for yellow buyers. To get their attention while marketing; use infographics and try having easily accessible social media connects. In their abilities, they are outgoing and confident. Vickie recommends that yellows should “only share half of what pops into their heads.” She also recommends that a yellow personality should connect with referrals/prospects asap on social media.

Red: Practicality, plans and knowing what they want is what reds like in sales. Vickie explained that reds want their time respected as well. While marketing have clear navigation tools, checklists and bullet points for their practical and organized personality. Since reds can be impatient, while building relationships, Vickie recommends having reds connect with people before an event via phone or social media, to put them in the right mindset to meet people when they arrive.

Green: Being caring, flexible and relatable make green shoppers a bit easier to understand. They look for ease and comfort when shopping (tend to like online shopping), having comfortable backgrounds on websites can add to a green’s comfort. Building relationships can be tough for greens since they enjoy the comfort of their own home more than venturing out. Vickie recommends talking yourself into going to events since once you are there, you enjoy it. Push yourself to have more conversations  and Make sure your self-talk is helping you move forward.

Blue: When selling to a blue personality, BE PREPARED. Blue’s do their research on your company/products. Be ready to share testimonials about your business also. Have bullet points and “learn more” buttons when marketing to blue personalities. Blue’s should find an opposite personality to network with to help them meet more people.

Vickie’s presentation can help everyone in business, from nurses (possibly green personalities) to business owners (many are red personalities). It is important when working in sales to consider your customer’s personality type so you can interact in a way that is more comfortable for them, which will lead to a shorter sales cycle. As Vickie stated at the end of her presentation “Better relationships keep the sales coming in.”

Better relationships keep the sales coming in. #SalesTips
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To learn more about color personalities read her book:

• Personalities for Business

It was great hearing about how to recognize different personality types and how to apply that to your prospecting to get more sales. You can also apply it to your referral strategy to lead to more referrals!

3. Increase Your Online Influence and Authority to Get More Sales

The last speaker of the day, Alice Heiman, spoke on increasing your online influence and authority to get more sales. Alice reminded us of the importance online influence plays into sales. Whether you are in sales or the owner of a business, your online brand matters. It is important to choose the right social media channels, which depends on your market and ideal customer. Social media allows companies to share great content to attract and engage their customers. This does take time and Alice showed us efficient time-saving tools.

4 Time-saving tools :

• Feed.ly – to find content
• Pocket – to store the content
• Bit.ly – to shorten links to the content
• Buffer – to share the content

Social selling is networking. It is when salespeople use social media to interact with their prospects to build relationships. As salespeople, we must treat people as individuals. You cannot sell the same way to everyone because people are unique and have different needs. Alice taught us that all good sellers today must be good marketers and have an online presence. This helps them meet prospects and get to know them better and then share the information they need.

It is important to interact with others on social media and make your presence known. Share, like, and comment on people’s posts. This lets you be personal with potential clients, which helps with your personal brand. Your personal brand is your reputation and how people describe you. Your personal brand differs based off who you interact with, however, with customers and prospects it should be the same brand.

The Sierra Sales Summit was a great experience for all attendees. Each and every one of us walked away with more knowledge on how to get referrals, selling to different personalities and how to increase sales with your own brand.

#SocialSelling Tip: Social media delights our clients, not interrupts.
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How will you use the ideas from these knowledgeable speakers to increase your sales? Leave a comment below!

Professional Saleswomen of Nevada is a non-profit that provides professional development, networking and mentoring to sales women and men and donates to organizations that lift women up. One of the highlights of the day was when president Alice Heiman, delivered the check to Women’s Money board member, Julie Macc.

The post 3 Powerful Sales Techniques that will Energize Your Business appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.

Get ready, combustion jets may soon be a thing of the past.

NASA is currently working on a small, all-electric plane dubbed the X-57 as part of its X-Plane series. The project is part of NASA's 10-year plan to make a large hybrid jet that is greener and quieter than current planes and that has the potential to be sold commercially.

Here's the 5 biggest benefits to all-electric planes that NASA hopes to demonstrate through the X-57 project:

Electric planes are five times more efficient than combustion jets.

The X-57 wings will be long and skinny with six electric motors on each of the wings, as you can see above. Having electric motors on the leading edge of the wings reduces drag, making the plane more efficient.

"Electric motors allow you to redesign airplanes," Sean Clarke, NASA's principle investigator on the X-57 project, told Tech Insider. "The idea there is [the motors] won't interact with wingtip vortex that typically forms behind the wing in such a way that we will recover some of the energy that gets lost in that vortex and causes drag for the plane," he continued.

The operation costs are about 30% lower for electric planes compared to conventional jets.

Fuel is a major cost for operating a combustion airplane. An electric plane takes that problem out of the equation.

"Fuel is something like half the cost of operating these airplanes," Clarke said. "If you reduce the energy required by five times, and that's half the cost of the plane," you get a 30% reduction in operating costs.

Electric planes perform better when cruising.

The X-57 will be able to cruise at 175 miles per hour, Clarke said. Its ability to zip through the sky faster has to do with it having a skinnier wing, which allows for "high performance in cruise flight," he said.

One drawback: a skinnier wing makes it harder to land.

"If you have a wing that worked so well at high speed, it tends to land and take off at higher speeds as well, and [Federal Aviation Administration] has rules about keeping the land and take-off speed as low as possible," Clarke explained.

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WhatsApp is unquestionably one of the most popular messaging apps on the market, but the sheer volume of interaction on the platform is still shocking.

The company revealed in a blog post on Thursday that its users make more than 100 million voice calls each day, or more than 1,100 calls per second. This is even more surprising considering that the app just completed the rollout of its new voice-calling feature for Android and iOS users in April 2015.

These figures demonstrate the high engagement driven by over-the-top (OTT) mobile apps, as well as evidence that users are moving away from traditional forms of voice communication. The adoption of voice over IP services such as WhatsApp and Messenger, both of which Facebook owns, should worry telecommunications companies that rely primarily on cell data for revenue.

OTT is especially popular in developing markets such as India and Brazil where the cost of sending messages and making calls is much lowers through these types of apps than through cellular networks.

Finally, the high volume of voice calls on WhatsApp shows that consumers are using these platforms to do more than just send text messages. As the trend of using messaging apps in lieu of wireless networks grows, businesses would likely capitalize by shifting their products and services to the messaging platforms that spur the most user engagement.

Messaging apps are evolving beyond simple text messages to include commerce, file sharing, and more. And the evolution is just starting.

Will McKitterick, senior research analyst for BI Intelligence, has compiled a detailed report on messaging apps that takes a close look at the size of the messaging app market, how these apps are changing, and the types of opportunities for monetization that have emerged from the growing audience that uses messaging services daily.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

• Mobile messaging apps are massive. The largest services have hundreds of millions of monthly active users (MAU). Falling data prices, cheaper devices, and improved features are helping propel their growth.
• Messaging apps are about more than messaging. The first stage of the chat app revolution was focused on growth. In the next phase, companies will focus on building out services and monetizing chat apps’ massive user base.
• Popular Asian messaging apps like WeChat, KakaoTalk, and LINE have taken the lead in finding innovative ways to keep users engaged. They’ve also built successful strategies for monetizing their services.
• Media companies, and marketers are still investing more time and resources into social networks like Facebook and Twitter than they are into messaging services. That will change as messaging companies build out their services and provide more avenues for connecting brands, publishers, and advertisers with users.

In full, this report:

• Gives a high-level overview of the messaging market in the US by comparing total monthly active users for the top chat apps.
• Examines the user behavior of chat app users, specifically what makes them so attractive to brands, publishers, and advertisers.
• Identifies what distinguishes chat apps in the West from their counterparts in the East.
• Discusses the potentially lucrative avenues companies are pursuing to monetize their services.
• Offers key insights and implications for marketers as they consider interacting with users through these new platforms.

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 future of messaging apps.

Join the conversation about this story »

Something remarkable happened in Britain last month, though it largely went unnoticed. The left-leaning Guardian newspaper and the libertarian Financial Times carried opinion pieces, within days of each other, covering the same topic and making more or less the same argument: The recent rise in income inequality has been caused, in part, by the growth of “monopoly profits,” specifically monopoly profits said to be earned in the technology sector.

Did this signify the end of political polarization? Or was it a sign of the apocalypse? Probably neither.

But alarm bells should be ringing for technology billionaires, who have been suffering a real run of bad press. Apple’s efforts to protect its customers’ privacy first appeared to threaten public safety, and then inadvertently revealed how hackable its devices were.

Shortly thereafter, public outcry over alleged political bias in Facebook’s news algorithm led to hasty revisions to the algorithm and a meeting between CEO Mark Zuckerberg and aggrieved political groups.

Topping them all, news reports revealed that technology billionaire Peter Thiel made a secret effort to bankrupt Gawker — an initiative that would have made the most underhanded of Russian oligarchs proud.

These problems are, to some extent, idiosyncratic, but there is a larger structural issue. And that structural issue — which will not go away, and indeed will only escalate — is that many technology businesses are, as a result of the economics of their industry, “natural monopolies.”

That is, in many technology markets a single company tends to dominate because the economic advantages of being large (usually, the advantage of having lots of users) outweighs other sources of competitive advantage or disadvantage.

Unfortunately for the technology billionaires whose fortunes are produced by such economics, privately owned natural monopolies (and their owners) will almost inevitably become public enemies.

To see why, consider the fate of the so-called “robber barons” (such as Andrew Carnegie, Pierpont Morgan, and John D. Rockefeller) of turn-of-the-century America.

The first phase of the political backlash against the robber barons began as the first of them rose to economic dominance. Political leaders and the media began sniping at their excessive power and wealth.

For instance, the term “robber barons” itself, a pejorative reference to German barons who collected tolls from shipping on the Rhine, was coined in 1859, as America’s titans of industry, led by Cornelius Vanderbilt, consolidated their control of America’s transport networks (particularly rail).

In 1866, the New York Times wrote of Vanderbilt, who had achieved control of all rail lines leading to New York City, “We already begin to feel the first grinding…of the approaching tyranny of capitalists….Every public means of transit is in the hands of the tyrants of modern society.”

The second phase of the political backlash was led by economists. New theories and research revealed the causes and consequences of the robber barons’ activities.

Indeed, the term “natural monopoly” was coined in 1887, in a lecture by Henry C. Adams to the inaugural meeting of the American Economic Association. Adams announced new theories that explained how railroads inexorably became permanent, private monopolies.

His theorizing was simplistic by today’s standards, but his research gave ammunition to calls for the government to step in.

Hence the third phase of the backlash was, inevitably, regulation. Antitrust laws were developed. But governments proved reluctant to engage in antitrust breakups, as these were what we in the modern day might call the “nuclear option,” hugely disruptive to industries and investments.

Thus, governments tended first to opt for regulatory oversight as the solution to monopoly.

The robber barons, perhaps surprisingly, embraced this oversight — indeed, they sometimes asked for it, perhaps hoping it would alleviate the rising political pressure.

Elbert Gary, head of U.S. Steel (which at the time controlled more than 60% of America’s steel output) put it this way: “I would be very glad if we had some place where we could go, to a responsible governmental authority, and say to them, ‘here are our facts and figures, here is our property, here our cost of production; now you tell us what we have the right to do and what prices we have the right to charge.’”

Going even further, one of the financiers of U.S. Steel argued that well-regulated monopoly capitalism would be “socialism of the highest, best, and most ideal sort” — an indication of the political climate of the times.

But ultimately, such cooperative attitudes did not prevent the fourth and final phase of the backlash: breakup or nationalization. Ultimately, oversight was ineffective; the private monopolies continued to generate vast profits and dominate their industries. Some businesses, including U.S. Steel, were broken up by antitrust authorities; others, like Amtrak (the U.S. long-distance passenger rail monopoly), were nationalized.

Admittedly, it took a long time to progress through these four phases. Political attacks against the robber barons began in the mid-1800s and escalated as economic research gave the attackers ammunition in the 1880s and 1890s. Regulatory oversight came into vogue in the early 1900s. Breakups and nationalizations began in earnest in the 1910s and 1920s, but U.S. Steel’s breakup took until the 1930s, nearly 40 years after the first phases of the backlash.

In our times, the backlash against internet billionaires has in most cases reached the second stage. Political sniping has begun — mostly in Europe, although Donald Trump has made comments about Amazon’s “antitrust problem,” for instance.

Economic research has followed. Some of the most politically potent research, linking monopoly profits with inequality, has been pursued by the U.S. President’s Council on Economic Advisors. Thus far the research has gained the most press in Europe, where the next phase, regulatory oversight, has progressed dramatically in the past year.

This year Google and Facebook both made large, arbitrary tax payments to the UK government in excess of their legal obligations. Like U.S. Steel, they asked government authorities what they should pay in order to take off the political pressure, and were told (or negotiated) a figure.

In addition, the EU has launched antitrust investigations, most dramatically against Google. Although antitrust authorities are involved, this is not yet the fourth stage; instead of breakups, the proceedings will almost certainly produce more fines and more oversight.

So what’s the likelihood that the fourth and final phase — antitrust breakups or nationalization — will ensue? For the time being, it is difficult to envision such measures in the technology sector, which continues, at least in the U.S., to be celebrated as an engine of innovation.

But this final phase of the backlash will almost certainly come. The history of the U.S. robber barons makes it naïve to presume otherwise.

The strangest thing about Brexit is that, of all the members of the European Union, Britain had the weakest case that it would be better off leaving.

Britain had managed to get itself a deal where it got only the good bits of the EU — free trade and an integrated market, and free movement of people within the union — while keeping its own currency and its own passport controls. The British relationship with Europe was a model for what a slimmed-down, good-parts-only European Union should have come to look like.

If anybody should have wanted to leave, it's Greece, which has been forced into fiscal and monetary policies that are impoverishing its populace. Or Germany, which will be on the hook indefinitely to repeatedly give Greece just enough money to stave off political collapse.

Instead, Britain is leaving, while Greece commits to mass unemployment essentially forever.

You may have noticed a theme in my writing recently: That maintaining a flawed status quo can be preferable to radical change, especially when that change is in an uncertain direction. Just because the EU is deeply flawed does not mean leaving it will make things better for Britain — especially when the worst part of the EU (the euro) will still be there, hobbling Britain's trading partners, even as Britain's own economy falters due to uncertainty and new economic barriers.

The reaction from financial markets has been swift and negative, a fact that matters a lot for ordinary people, not just those who are invested in British stocks or had bets on exchange rates.

Stock prices are falling because Brexit makes business investment in Britain less appealing. That will mean fewer jobs and less wage growth. Homebuilder stocks are much lower because fewer people are going to be able to afford to buy homes in Britain. The weaker pound will mean higher prices in Britain almost immediately for gasoline and other goods that trade on global markets; in other words, ordinary British people's real incomes have already fallen due to this vote.

Stock markets are lower around the world because Britain's exit from the EU is likely to reduce global economic output.

There are silver linings: The falling pound is a symptom of reduced economic prospects for Britain, but it is also a stabilizing device that will make British exporting firms more competitive, helping to offset a likely decline in domestic demand.

Tourism is an export, and Donald Trump is right that a lower pound will induce more foreigners to come play at his Scottish golf course, so long as they're not turned off by the Trump name. This is a good time to book a vacation to London.

But as Larry Summers notes, Brexit will also cause economic harm on the continent, which will not be offset by a similarly sharp weakening of the euro (which has weakened against the dollar today but strengthened against the pound).

This will make the economic situation even more dire in southern Europe, with increased political instability likely to follow. The rush by investors out of the pound and into the yen will hamper efforts to inflate and stimulate the economy in Japan. Instability in Europe also means a stronger dollar, which will hurt American exports.

If all this instability were likely to change the EU for the better in the long run, it might be worth it. But Brexit does nothing about the two biggest problems in Europe: the unsuitability of the euro for many of its members, and public dissatisfaction with the failure of European governments to control migration into Europe.

The not-so-secret idea behind the euro — that fiscal integration would come later, whether the public wants it or not, because it is necessary to make the eurozone work — was foolish, because European countries lack the political will to support each other fiscally at great, ongoing expense. It's become a cliché to say that monetary union is impossible without fiscal union, but the eurozone countries seem determined to find out how long it is possible to go on with one but not the other.

Fiscal integration is very expensive for the rich bits of a fiscal union. Connecticut sends several percentage points of its GDP every year in fiscal transfers (that is, federal taxes that exceed federal spending into Connecticut) to support poorer states like Mississippi. Connecticut has several reasons for putting up with that — being part of the United States raises productivity overall, there is a sense that we are all Americans in this together, and we've been doing it for over 200 years — but I have no expectations that German and Dutch voters will ever willingly sign up for a similar deal with Greece.

Because a eurozone breakup is unthinkable and European fiscal integration is unpopular, the unsustainable status quo in the eurozone is likely to be sustained for a long time, causing great misery in countries like Greece and Spain. Brexit does nothing to fix it — and ongoing economic weakness on the continent will continue to be contagious to Britain.

On the migration question, Britain already has the passport controls it needs to keep unauthorized migrants out. The Brexit vote reflected a desire to reduce authorized immigration, but it's not clear it will achieve that end — lots of legal immigration is already from outside the EU, and Britain is likely to have to agree to free movement from EU countries if it wishes to maintain its trading relationship with them, as Switzerland and Norway have done.

Basically, Brexit was a tantrum. Britons looked at an institution that was flawed and unresponsive and did a thing that doesn't fix the flaws and hurts Britain's own economy.

This vote reflects the error of direct democracy: The British public made a bad choice, and there's a reason we usually have voters delegate decision-making to informed elected officials instead of deciding policy on their own. But the vote also reflects the errors and hubris of European political elites, who gave voters an institution so flawed and so allegedly irreversible that they felt compelled to act out in whatever way was available to them.

The acting-out options available to voters on the continent — far-right parties like the National Front — may be worse than Brexit.

The best case scenario is that Brexit leads to a rethink in Brussels, and an effort to produce an EU that is more accountable and leaner — and ultimately, to find a way to unwind the euro, which will never work well without a fiscal union, which the people of Europe will never want. But I am not holding my breath for that.

The likelier outcome is more muddling through, more economic stagnation, and more voter anger — all of which will have to be managed without Britain as a partner.

SEE ALSO: An anti-Brexit politician asked the question voters all over the world should consider

Join the conversation about this story »

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Nigel Farage (front), the leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) reacts with supporters, following the result of the EU referendum, outside the Houses of Parliament in London, Britain June 24, 2016. (Toby Melville/Reuters)

European Council President Donald Tusk’s warning was dire when he spoke to the German newspaper, Bild, a couple of weeks ago. “As a historian I fear that Brexit could be the beginning of the destruction of not only the EU but also of western political civilization in its entirety.” Now that the UK has voted to leave the European Union, what will be the fate of the powerful alliance of 28 member states—and which nations could be the next to go?

Immediately following the shocking results of the Brexit referendum, right-wing, populist or anti-immigration political leaders and parties in Sweden, Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Italy demanded a similar vote. A large proportion of that is likely mere noise that stands no real chance of gaining traction, but it’s certainly in the air.

Sweden and Denmark in particular are worth watching. Both countries were closely aligned with the U.K. on a host of policy issues, and they’re likely to feel they’ve now lost a powerful ally. The two Scandinavian countries have relatively robust political and economic systems, and may chafe at the idea of buoying up weaker southern European partners.

There has also been widespread angst in Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands over their ability to absorb and integrate the high numbers of newcomers taken in during Europe’s refugee crisis. All three nations have seen the rise of right-wing, populist politics in response, mirroring the growth in popularity of the U.K. Independence Party that helped propel the “Leave” campaign to victory.

There are also acute fears that Greece, sagging under a tattered economy and an influx of migrants, will be kneecapped by the economic impact of Brexit within the EU, and also see its exports to the U.K. fall and tourists stay away as the pound takes a hit. The U.K.’s exit could also make the EU jittery and less inclined to compromise internally—something that could push Greece, as one of its most troubled members, out the door.

The specific concerns of those countries aside, a poll by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center of almost 10,500 people in 10 EU nations in April and May demonstrates deep veins of frustration running through member states and citizens. Most dissatisfied overall are Greece (just 27 per cent view the EU favourably), France (38 per cent), the U.K. (44 per cent) and Spain (47 per cent); the median across all countries polled was 51 per cent. In contrast, happiest with the EU are Poland (72 per cent favourable), Hungary (61 per cent) and Italy (58 per cent).

Refugees are the biggest sore point, with the overwhelming majority of citizens polled telling Pew they disapprove of the EU’s handling of that issue. Greece (94 per cent), Sweden (88 per cent) and Italy (77 per cent) are the most dissatisfied, but in reality, no one is happy on that front (the Netherlands, for instance, is the least disapproving—and even there, only 31 per cent approve of the way the refugee crisis is being handled).

Overall, 70 per cent of citizens thought the U.K.’s departure would be a bad thing for the EU. What remains to be seen is whether these percolating frustrations will be enough to push any other nations to follow suit, whatever the cost. “Every family knows that a divorce is traumatic for everyone,” Donald Tusk told Bild.

The post After Brexit, who could be next to bolt? appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Brexit is over, as we all know, and while the referendum is non-binding, it still comes as something of a shock. Why would the majority of voters in the UK decide to leave the EU? Why vote against self-interest?

The Remain faction made a rhetorical mistake early on, and stuck by it. They appealed to economic efficiency. By joining and remaining in the EU, the UK (and its neighbors) would, they argued, benefit from lower transaction costs of all sorts. Life would be easier and better because of the economic efficiencies – the movement of goods and people around the EU, for instance, and the managing of cross-border business deals would encounter far fewer frictions if the UK remained than if it exited. Case closed.

For many, though, that argument clearly fell flat. It not only ignores history, social institutions, and heritage, it diminishes and often dismisses them. Arguments rooted in economic efficiency cannot trump (if you’ll pardon our using that term) appeals to emotion.

It reminded us of the lesson Uber learned when it tried to convince riders that surge pricing was a good idea. This is what Uber used to have to say about surge pricing.

Uber rates increase to get more cars on the road and ensure reliability during the busiest times. When enough cars are on the road, prices go back down to normal levels. It’s important to know that you’ll always be notified in big, bold print if surge pricing is in effect. When rates are more than double, the surge confirmation screen also requires you to type in the specific surge multiplier to ensure you understand what rates to expect.

On its face, surge pricing is a good idea, or at minimum an economically sensible one. By raising the price of a ride during peak demand, Uber gets more drivers on the road, matching supply with demand. But when unexpected events – like a shooting or hostage crisis – raised prices dramatically during an emergency, appeals to “supply and demand” were the last thing that angry customers wanted to hear even if what Uber was saying happened to be true (that higher prices would have gotten more drivers to site of the shooting and provided more safety).

But appeals to rational economic principles fall flat in the face of intense emotion. When you know there’s someone with a gun in your neighborhood, you really don’t want to confront higher prices in your ride app; it upsets you to think that a company is profiting from it. When UK voters are frightened into demanding tighter border controls amidst an international migration crisis, it’s not useful to hear from economists that immigration is typically good for everyone in the longer run.

The Remain faction eventually got the message, and began appealing to the UK’s historic role in leading Europe, but it was already too late. Gordon Brown’s “leader not a leaver” video – filmed in the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, destroyed by the Nazis and preserved as a monument to European peace — was right on the mark. But when your best plea comes from one of the least popular Labour governments ever, that’s a new kind of problem.

Brexit may be a disaster (although we still have to see what Parliament decides to do, and if the EU offers the UK better terms to get them to stay), but it’s also a useful reminder. When your opponents flawlessly employ the principles of change management – even if only by accident – you’d better have something better than appeals to efficiency up your sleeve.

Over the history of marketing, there has been little ability to actually test and measure the ROI of advertisements, campaigns, and engagement. Unless you had the budget of Coca Cola or Microsoft, it was almost impossible to know what traffic sources were driving new customers. Then came the internet and for a few years marketers and businesses failed to harness the power of data-driven analytics and that was okay. But it’s now 2016, and there are still an alarming number of companies that have no idea what inbound marketing analytics they should be tracking.

With Google Analytics and other marketing automation tools, it is now possible to be a data-driven marketing scientist that uses creativity AND metrics to inform decisions. So with that in mind, here are marketing analytics you should be tracking:

1. Organic Traffic and Keyword Ranking

Keyword optimization is your way to communicate with search engine algorithms in a way that shows what your website is really all about. Each page you create is a new opportunity to rank for a new keyword and drive new traffic to your website. If you are not driving organic traffic through website pages and blogs, you might be failing to check some of the necessary boxes (either with content or keyword selection).

Benchmarks: This number is going to vary a little bit by industry and product, but across all of our current clients, the average is 40% of all website visits come from Organic Search. When you are doing inbound marketing at full strength, all of your traffic sources should be increasing, but organic search is the primary indicator of how well you are doing with the content creation piece of the process.

2. New Leads/Conversion Rates

As marketers, we know that when it comes to traffic, more is better, but if that traffic isn’t converting into relevant business leads, then it’s not really doing us any good at all. It’s important to create relevant offers that connect with your visitors and potential customers that will help move them from strangers who don’t know anything. A lot of companies miss the mark on this metric by creating content offers that are too company-specific. Be helpful, inform your visitors.

Benchmarks: Sitewide, you should be aiming for 3-5% conversion rate on all your website visits. However, your individual landing pages should be getting a 15-20% conversion rate at the very least. Some of our clients’ really popular pages get around a 40% conversion rate.

3. Session Duration

The session duration of an average user on your site is a very telling metric. Creating “sticky” content that encourages visitors to stay engaged, visit another page, or watch a video will help you increase the duration. Measuring session duration is especially important as it relates to your organic visitors, because Google is monitoring how effective the search results are. If someone visits your site and leaves in under 20 seconds, that sends negative SEO data to Google.

Benchmarks: Every website is going to be different. Take a look at your Google Analytics data and start working on ways to incrementally increase the average session duration. Can you add more links to your blog post and website pages? Maybe you need to add relevant Calls-to-Action on your best performing pages? Or try adding some video that keeps users engaged.

4. Video Engagement Rates

If you are going to go through the time and effort to add video to your website, then you should definitely be tracking more than the views. We hear a common myth all the time that shorter video is better, but just like any piece of content, what matters is the quality of the video, not the length. If you have an awesome, compelling video story that keeps people engaged, they will keep watching.

We recently launched a new Stories for the Soul video that was about six-minutes long. Conventional wisdom would tell you that people stopped watching after the first minute of the video. But that wasn’t the case at all. Our video had an 82% engagement rate overall and 78% engagement rate through the 5:24 mark.

Benchmarks: Measuring engagement rate is less about shooting for a specific number and more about understanding how your audience engages with videos. Do they fall off around the 1-minute mark? Will they stay for 5 minutes if they find it engaging? Are there parts of the video that lots of viewers are re-watching? Without measuring your videos, there is no way to analyze and improve them in the future!

5. Cost per Lead/Cost per Customer

Do you know how much it costs for you to acquire the leads you are getting today? Is it $2,000 or $200? By calculating the cost of your marketing efforts and dividing by the total number of leads/customers converted, you can start to get an idea of the cost per lead/customer. Your cost per lead and customer is going to depend on your business and your average lifetime value of a prospect. You should have a lower cost per lead if your lifetime value of a customer is $2000 vs. $200,000.

Benchmarks: Again, this number is going to vary a lot by industry, company, and product value. Create a spreadsheet, and track your averages on a monthly basis and look for trends. If there are marketing activities that lead to more customers at a lower cost, then make sure you are doing more of those activities.

These inbound marketing analytics will help you get an understanding of the effectiveness of your campaigns. We love to help companies optimize their inbound marketing process, so if you are looking for help identifying where you need the most help, we’d love to do a free marketing assessment.

Traders reacted swiftly to a Brexit “Leave” vote. (Thomas Samson/AFP/Getty)

I keep reading that Canada needn’t worry too much about Brexit because we do so little trade with the United Kingdom—only about 3% of merchandise exports are purchased by our Motherland. In other words, as long as the United States keeps motoring along, we will be fine.

But the implications of Brexit in the U.S. is precisely the point. America’s economy is doing OK—but it is fragile. (There is a reason the Federal Reserve keeps balking at raising interest rates.) A fresh bout of market volatility could hurt business and consumer confidence. That could crimp household demand and business investment, the two things that drive imports.

Brexit has awakened dangerous forces in the world economy

More important is what Brexit is likely to do to the U.S. dollar.

The International Monetary Fund said this week that the American currency could be overvalued by as much as 20%. Such assessments lack precision, but the point is straightforward: the dollar’s strength is impeding the ability of U.S. companies to compete for international sales. The IMF listed the greenback’s current value as a risk to growth. The Fed also has expressed concern about the dollar this year. American companies used to do most of their business at home. But they became bigger exporters after the Great Recession because domestic demand had shrunk. The days when a stronger dollar was unambiguously good for America’s consumption-led economy are over. It is at best a mixed blessing now.

If the U.S. dollar was a drag on the world’s biggest economy earlier this week, it is even more so now. When the world’s traders get nervous, they buy Treasuries and other U.S.-dollar assets. It was up more than 2% against a basket of other major currencies. That is a big move in one day. (Not as big as the pound’s record plunge, to be sure; investors also took refuge in the Yen and the Swiss franc.) Most analysts assume Brexit will keep the Fed from raising interest rates, in part because that would out more upward pressure on the currency.

The most optimistic economists assume the turbulence in global financial markets will recede once the initial shock of Brexit passes. The pound could rally a little. But it is hard to imagine a scenario in which everything reverts to the way it was on the morning of June 23. There us simply too much uncertainty about what is in store for the U.K. A recession is entirely possible. Investors will be less than keen on holding British assets. The U.S. dollar quite likely has entered a new phase of excessive strength.

That won’t be good for the U.S. economy and, therefore, a threat to Canada’s export prospects. Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz likes to say a higher dollar is a natural way of sharing U.S. demand with the rest of the world. Brexit will test the limits of America’s benevolence.

How the “Brexit” vote risks the global economy—and Canada’s

MORE ABOUT BREXIT & THE ECONOMY:

• Brexit has awakened dangerous forces in the world economy
• How the “Brexit” vote risks the global economy—and Canada’s
• 5 “Brexit” market strategies Canadian investors need to know now
• Here’s how to protect your portfolio if interest rates go negative
• Nine ways to improve Canada’s international trade strategy
• What worries the Bank of Canada even more than housing? China
• Why are Canadians turning their backs on free trade?
• What Canadians need to know about doing business in India now
• BDC CEO Michael Denham on helping Canadian firms go global
• The Bank of Canada is changing how it talks to Bay Street
• Five ways global trade will change for Canada in 2016
• Services matter—but making stuff is the core of any strong economy

The post Canada’s real Brexit worry should be the surging U.S. dollar appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Have you ever been in a situation where you’re just about ready to jump off the cliff out of your sheer aggravation of something?

Well, that’s pretty much how frustrated my client was when he talked about how terrible his ecommerce site’s sales conversion was.

He said that he worked with a couple of different online marketers in a span of 3 months just to figure out where the problem is, yet still to no avail — he’s still getting very little to no sales at all from his ecommerce business.

Friends, I know that my client isn’t the only person struggling with this kind of challenge. I for one have felt the same frustration in the past, and it sure isn’t easy. Considering how the problem can come from bazillions of different angles, you need to have persistence and a clear strategy to be able to figure out where the problem might be coming from, so you can find the best solution for the problem.

Instead of telling you how to fix your sales conversion problems, however, I’d like to share with you the six burning questions that you need to reflect on.

If you take the time to think about these questions, I am confident that you’ll be able to pinpoint where your sales conversion issues might be coming from, and be able to address them accordingly.

Let’s hop right in.

1. Is your checkout process turning off your visitors?

Have you heard of the $300 million button story? The gist of it is a major e-commerce site was missing out on $300 million worth of annual sales because of their checkout process.

Because they didn’t allow their web visitors to buy any of their products without registering first, this caused them all sorts of problem.

This cements the idea of how important your checkout process is. In the story above, they fixed the problem by simply taking away the “Register” button, and replacing it with a “Continue” button with a simple message saying, “You do not need to create an account to make purchases on our site. Simply click Continue to proceed to checkout. To make your future purchases even faster, you can create an account during checkout.”

We’re talking about one button here. This one adjustment in their checkout process led to the major ecommerce site’s number of purchasing customers going up by 45%, which translated to $300 million on the first year.

2. Do you have a live chat support?

63% of customers said they were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat as opposed to one that doesn’t. – Source (Furstperson.com)

Pretty amazing, isn’t it?

The figure above is a clear indication of how powerful a live chat support feature is for your ecommerce site.

The thing about having a live chat support is it enables you to address whatever concerns your audience have that’s preventing them from making the decision to buy.

Imagine wanting to buy a nerf gun for your son’s birthday that’s going to be about four days from now. You already have the money on hand, but you’re thinking twice about buying the nerf gun because you aren’t sure if the merchant can send the merchandise via express delivery.

What are you going to do at this point? Will you still use the contact form or email them about your inquiry? We all know that most merchants would usually take 24 – 48 hours to reply. Or, will you look for other sites that sell nerf guns?

Your answer is probably the latter, isn’t it?

You’ll be amazed at how often missed opportunities like these happened to ecommerce site owners.

If you want to keep your customers from going to your competitors just because they have unanswered questions, then you need to install a live chat support feature on your ecommerce site now.

3. Have you been using your discount coupons effectively?

According to RetailMeNot, “96% of consumers use coupons.”

I was mindblown when I first saw the data. I mean, I’m sure everyone has an idea of how coupons are such classic workhorses for ecommerce sites, but 96%? Really? I would never have guessed the figure to have ballooned that much.

By now, I’m guessing that you are convinced at how fantastic discount coupons can be when growing your ecommerce sales. In fact, you’ve probably already added a discount coupon on your site at this point.

However, I hope you aren’t limiting the way you use your discount coupons by only adding them on your site. More than doing that, you can also add your coupons on high-traffic community driven sites that people look into to find discount offers.

I’m talking about reputable discount coupon sites like Dealspotr.com. A quick visit to their homepage and you’ll realize that the users are very active.

You’ll see people sharing, commenting, and upvoting each other’s coupons. These are the kind of user engagements that will help make your discount offers go viral. Of course, the more people see your discount offers, the higher the chances of people buying.

4. Is your ecommerce site optimized for conversion?

When you mapped out your ecommerce site’s design and functionality, I hope that making it easier for your users to buy any of your products was on top of your list.

I know it’s quite tempting to add all sorts of nifty features on your site, but you need to realize that sometimes, adding too many of these can distract your web visitors. Instead of them buying, they end up doing other things like sharing your product page or clicking away to read your previous customer’s testimonials.

While there is certainly some value in compelling your community to share your pages, you need to remember that having your page shared isn’t your goal. Your goal is to get them to buy. Anything else comes second.

5. Is your website traffic highly targeted?

There is no point in you getting hundreds of thousands of monthly visitors that are interested in learning about car spare parts if your ecommerce site is all about selling skin care products.

None of them are going to buy from you.

Not only will your bounce rate skyrocket (which may lead to you having all sorts of search engine ranking problems), but there’s even a chance the web visitors will end up bashing you for attracting them to your site.

No matter where you look at it, it’s a lose-lose situation.

That’s the importance of attracting highly targeted traffic.

One of the best ways to get highly targeted traffic is to do guest posting. If you aren’t quite familiar with the process, then you can check out the comprehensive guide that I’ve written about guest posting.

6. Do you have an amazing product? No Really!

There’s a reason why I added the “No Really!” bit in my subhead. There are those who choose to see their product as something more than what it is. This happens when the site’s owners are sick and tired of spending any more of their resources on product development because of the budget constraints.

Look. If you are truly serious about getting more sales out of your ecommerce sites, then you need to give yourself some serious gut check. You need to take a look at your product for what it is and evaluate its quality without any biases.

A good measuring tool to peg the quality of your product against with is your competitor’s product. If you feel that your product (or your business) doesn’t have a distinct advantage over your competitor’s, then you might want to address this obstacle first.

What’s next?

Is your ecommerce site on a sales slump? What do you feel is causing it and what are the action steps are you taking to remedy the situation.

Please share your ideas in the comments section below. Cheers!

Every organization feels the effects of seasonality on traffic and leads throughout the year. Some more than others. Here are 4 areas to focus on to help your marketing team overcome the seasonal peaks and troughs

SEO & Content creation:

Identify the topics that are seasonal to your persona. Use Google trends to identify seasonality of these topics. Here is an example, I gave in a HubSpot Academy Broadcast. If you are a patio furniture retailer, you know that your audience is only deeply interested in purchasing during the spring and summer. By identifying other areas that your persona may be interested in, you can create content to promote and products to sell during non-peak patio furniture season. Here is a grid that lays this out:

This grid shows topics that your patio furniture persona may also be interested in throughout the year.

Research the seasonality of secondary and tertiary topics in your industry. Start creating content now that you know will be relevant through those other seasonally relevant times of the year. Further, if you already have a piece of content aligned with a certain time of year, and then if a news story breaks during that time, you have a MAJOR newsjacking opportunity here. Tie the pieces of content together and share away.

Social Media

Gary Vaynerchuk’s book on using social media for business gives us some clear ideas on how we can align seasonality or demand with our social selling efforts. @GaryVee talks about providing value to your customers throughout the year with content and helpful advice. If you’re constantly providing value and NOT always asking for a favor of ‘buy my product’, then when it comes time for selling season, the more salesy types of offers/requests won’t fall on deaf ears.

Paid Search and Paid Social:

Doing paid search or social? Prepare to have extra budget during peak times of the year. Organizations that using Adwords or paid social can expect more competition and rising ad costs during these times. You have a few options here:

1. Join the pack: Run ads during seasonal peaks and try to beat out your competition through better creative, clickthrough rates and conversion rate optimization. With this option, expect to pay the higher rates for ads while the seasonal search demand is peaking as well.
2. Get out of the game during primetime: Counter-intuitive to the first option, you can lower your budgets during peak times of the year. Then re-allocate that spend during the rest of the year to support your inbound content campaigns and other products that sell throughout the year.

Regardless of what option you choose, know your customer acquisition cost is so that you can automatically turn your ads off when your cost per conversion rises above a certain level. There is no reason to bring on customers if you’re not going to break even.

Email Marketing

We’ve all felt the holiday email pressure heat up at the end of the year. Seems as if every company is emailing daily to promote 24-hour sales and last-minute offers. When building out your email promo calendar, make sure you understand the lifecycle or buyers journey stage of the contacts on your list. By understanding your buyers journey, you can align your email marketing efforts with the place at which your buyers are educating themselves. Even if it is a seasonally hot time to buy your product, if a user is very early in their buyers journey, don’t shove your product down their throat too soon….or you can expect increased database churn. The holidays (or your seasonal peaks) don’t give you an excuse to abuse your contact list.

Another way to use email during peak times of the year to create an integrated calling / emailing campaign with your sales team. Create a schedule to send out relevant, helpful emails, and then have your reps reach out to those folks to see if they have any questions or need help.

What are some ways you overcome seasonality to drive business in slower months? Or become more efficient during peak season?

It’s 4 pm, and the clock is ticking. Only an hour left before my deadline and all I’ve got on the page is a blinking cursor. I contemplate smashing my laptop in frustration, but remember that everything automatically saves to “The Cloud.” So I’ve got no choice but to find a way to start this post. That’s when it hit me. All I need to do is tell a story.

If you’re still with me, then you’ve just witnessed the impact that storytelling can have and how it can pull people into hearing your message. Now imagine if you used this engagement tactic in your inbound marketing strategy. Big brands like Coca-Cola have mastered the art of storytelling, which entices audiences to buy their products in an attempt to be a part of the stories they create. After all, who hasn’t seen a commercial of someone sipping an ice cold drink on the beach and wished we were there?

But just how critical are stories to your inbound marketing success? Let’s find out.

Why are Stories Important to Inbound Marketing

We’re often taught that a good headline is the key to increasing traffic to business’ website or blog. The more enticing a headline, the more traffic you’ll get. While in some ways this is true, an attractive headline won’t be enough to keep a prospective lead on a page. Stories, however, are.

By nature, our brains crave stories. When we listen to or read a story, our brains become more active and act as if we’re living the tale rather than hearing about it or reading it. Because of this, we become more engaged in a story and are likely to remember details from it more than a list of facts. That’s why when we find a good story, we can’t seem to tear ourselves away from it.

Think about it. Have you ever gotten lost in a really good book that you couldn’t put it down? The same concept applies when we use stories for inbound marketing.

Structuring your website and blog with compelling stories and great headlines won’t just attract more website traffic, it’ll boost reader interest and increase leads and conversions for your business as well.

How to Use Storytelling in Inbound Marketing

The options are endless when it comes to using stories in your inbound marketing strategy. Here are some of the best practices you should consider.

Understand Your Target Audience

Before you should even start developing a story for your inbound marketing strategy, take the time to understand your target audience. What types of content topics would they be interested in? What are the solutions they need? Once you’ve gotten to know your target audience, you’re ready to start the structure of your story.

Think About Your Writing Style

You also want to think about your writing style. It’s best to create website copy in a more conversational tone. Doing this provides an easier way to incorporate stories naturally. Most importantly, it delivers the personal tone that attracts and entices your consumers.

Make the Story Personable

Consumers can sniff out a sales piece and exit your website within seconds. However, implementing stories into your inbound marketing strategy can keep them on the page longer and even turn them into customers. Why? Because storytelling can provide the interpersonal relationship consumers crave. According to Business2Community.com, topics that focus on human interest like customer success stories can captivate their attention and evoke a positive, emotional connection to your business.

Incorporate Emotions

Using storytelling tactics in your inbound marketing strategy should spark emotion within your readers. These emotions can play a big role in whether your potential customers will choose your service or product. Use these emotions to structure the content in a way that shows that you can provide the solutions to their problems. The best way to do this is to tell a story of how you can solve the issues they are currently facing.

Make Your Copy Descriptive

According the Sensible Marketing, the most effective stories paint a picture with words. So avoid using graphs and tables. Instead, describe the benefits of your product and services. For example, if you’re ta dealership, try writing a guide to why a customer should to choose a specific model in your inventory and describe the benefits its most important features can provide for them. This will hold the readers’ interests better than just providing a list of features and will show them the exact reasons why they should purchase that car.

Inbound marketing and storytelling go hand in hand. So take the steps needed to ensure marketing success for your business and incorporate these best storytelling practices to your next campaign.

And to really help you ensure inbound marketing success, check out our free Create Killer Landing Pages eBook to help you better engage visitors and convert leads.

Stream’s Kick-Start Step

Storytelling isn’t limited to your website’s blogs. You can also use it to give potential customers an inside look at your company to build trust. One way to do this is sharing the story of your business’ founder and how they build your company. You can also post employee and customer stories about how your product or service has helped them.

Let’s face it. There are hundreds of blogs and articles out there about how to improve your LinkedIn profile. They cover all the basics and give such tips as changing your photo, your headlines, or skills. To be blunt, all those articles on Google that tell you you’ve got to change your photo or headline simply just don’t cut it. None of these articles help you understand why. They also neglect to let you know about the single biggest mistake you’re making on your LinkedIn profile.

Your LinkedIn Profile: Your Digital Newspaper

Right now, I want you to close your eyes and imagine that you are now the CEO of a digital newspaper called “Me Inc.” Your digital newspaper is your LinkedIn profile. It is a microsite of Me. Inc. – of you. As that digital newspaper owner, you have a very small readership and your goal is to grow your subscribers, just like every other newspaper.

Once you realize that the only way you’ll grow your ability to make more money is to grow your subscriber base, you’ll shift the way you approach your own digital newspaper.

As you are the sole owner of Me. Inc., you can decide what your ideal number of subscribers should be. Perhaps you’ve decided your readership will either be your 15 named accounts you’ve been assigned or the territory you’re going to work, or the inbound leads you’ve been working in the organization.  Whatever you decide is the ideal number of subscribers that your digital newspaper needs to flourish, you’ll then change how you leverage your LinkedIn profile to address this particular target market.

Every time you add a new subscriber into your database, three things happen.

1.You’ll increase the exposure you have to that new subscriber.

When you’ve read a regular newspaper, you drop it off to your neighbor’s front door. By doing so, you’ve increased the exposure that the neighbor will know who you are. Your LinkedIn profile works the same way.

Actionable step: Engage with your network by commenting on their posts and shares.

2. You’ll increase your virality.

You’ll increase the chances that whatever content was within your newspaper, that next door neighbor will read it, clip the coupons, and pass it on. You increase the potential you become more viral.

Actionable step: Leverage your insights to create content that engages prospects on LinkedIn Publisher. When you publish a blog on this platform, all of your posts get added to your profile and here’s the kicker: it will notify your network that you published content which will further increase our visibility of your profile. They’re accessible to anyone which has the opportunity to go viral. So not only can they be viewed by your existing connections but your post can reach second and third degree connections outside of your network. This will immensely grow your readership and simultaneously grow the subscription for your digital newspaper.

3. You’ll increase the ability to penetrate the mindshare of that subscriber.

This means that you get your subscribers looking out for your next article, coupons, etc.

Actionable step: By consistently creating content and publishing it through LinkedIn Publisher or status updates, your prospects will grow to see you as a resource. You inevitably become an expert within your community. They will get to know you and your content which helps you build a relationship with your subscribers. Make it a daily routine to consume and share content with your network on a consistent basis. This can be done through platforms like Hootsuite, Buffer or if you have an employee advocacy tool.

Once you believe in You Inc., and you believe you can increase exposure to yourself, and the ability to go viral, and you can then start changing the way people think—the mindshare.

Then you can then take a look at the functions in LinkedIn like the photo and headline, and make the front cover of your LinkedIn profile into something you think would be valuable to your readership and help you grow more subscribers.

Check out the ebook ‘Where Does Social Selling Fit In The Buyer’s Journey?’ to learn more about how this tactic and many more can provide value and insight to potential buyers.

The post ​The Single Biggest Mistake on Your LinkedIn Profile appeared first on Sales Hacker.