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HAVANA – Six airlines won permission Friday to resume scheduled commercial air service from the U.S. to Cuba for the first time in more than five decades, another milestone in President Barack Obama’s campaign to normalize relations between Cold War foes.

The airlines — American, Frontier, JetBlue, Silver Airways, Southwest and Sun Country — were approved by the Department of Transportation for a total of 155 roundtrip flights per week. They’ll fly from five U.S. cities to nine cities in Cuba other than Havana.

U.S. law still prohibits tourist travel to Cuba, but a dozen other categories of travel are permitted, including family visits, official business, journalist visits, professional meetings and educational and religious activities. The Obama administration has eased rules to the point where travellers are now free to design their own “people-to-people” cultural exchanges with little oversight.

Most of the airline service is expected to begin this fall and early winter, the department said.

Approval is still required by the Cuban government, but the carriers say they plan to start selling tickets in the next few weeks while they wait for signoffs from Cuba.

More than a year ago, Obama announced it was time to “begin a new journey” with the communist country. “Today we are delivering on his promise,” said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx.

As it considers opening routes to Havana, the department’s selection process has been complicated because airlines have requested far more routes than are available under the U.S. agreement with Cuba. A decision on Havana routes is expected later this summer.

The routes approved Friday were not contested because there was less interest among U.S. airlines in flying to Cuban locations other than Havana. The routes include service from Miami, Chicago, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The Cuban destinations are Camaguey, Cayo Coco, Cayo Largo, Cienfuegos, Holguin, Manzanillo, Matanzas, Santa Clara and Santiago de Cuba.

All flights currently operating between the two countries are charters, but the agreement the administration signed with Cuba in February allows for up to 110 additional flights — more than five times the current charter operations.

The Transportation Security Administration is in the process of completing a security review of Cuban airports expected to have direct flights to the United States, and it is working with the Cuban government to schedule and complete the security assessment of any additional airports that propose to begin service, the agency said.

American Airlines has been the most aggressive in its approach, requesting more than half the possible slots to Havana plus service to five smaller Cuban cities. The airline has a large hub in Miami, home to the largest Cuban-American population. The Fort Worth, Texas-based airline has also been flying on behalf of charter companies for the longest time, since 1991.

U.S. airlines have been feverishly working to establish relationships with Cuban authorities. For instance, American had a number of meetings this week in Havana with Cuban aviation and banking officials.

“We have been working for months on this plan,” Galo Beltran, Cuba country manager for American Airlines, told The Associated Press this week during the trip to Havana. “For us, it is going to be fairly easy because of the experience we have.”

Cuba already has seen dramatic growth in flights. Last year, it saw 18 per cent more passengers than in 2014, according to government aviation officials.

Currently, 46 airlines fly to Cuba, including Air France, Aeromexico, KLM, Air Canada, Aeroflot and Iberia.

Cuban aviation officials say they are ready for the extra flights but that questions remain, especially at Havana, about where the additional planes will park.

There has been plenty of interest by Americans in visiting Cuba since relations between the two nations started to thaw in December 2014. Nearly 160,000 U.S. leisure travellers flew to Cuba last year, along with hundreds of thousands of Cuban-Americans visiting family.

Prices for an hourlong charter flight now are about $500. Commercial airlines will probably offer flights for significantly less, although none has publicly discussed pricing. The check-in process for charters is also a cumbersome one, and the companies lack the traditional supports of commercial aviation such as online booking and 24-hour customer service.

___

Lowy reported from Washington.

The post US airlines to start scheduled flights to Cuba appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Bradley Farrell, founder of the new, internet-age-friendly auction house The Finest Automobile Auctions, can certainly prove his classic-car chops.

A collector specializing in pre-war Bugatti's, he will show one of his cars at the Pebble Beach Concours de'Elegance, one of the classic car world's elite events this summer.

"The sound of a Bugatti, the visceral experience of a Bugatti. The engineering is in my opinion unsurpassed," Farrell told Business Insider. 

"It's unique in so many ways and it's hard to not fall in love with one."

Farrell also has a passion for taking pictures of his pet goats atop his Ferrari 430.

The first auction for his new marquee will take place this Saturday at the Elegance at Hershey, in Hershey, Pennsylvania and just up the road from the home of the ubiquitous chocolate brand.

Farrell's brand has partnered with the online bidding facilitator Proxibid, which will allow technologically-inclined customers to purchase a $500,000 Bugatti via their iPhone, if they so choose.

"Look, the internet has broken everything, it's broken medical, it's broken music, many things. I think for the auction world it has yet to break through," Farrell said.

The Facebook-era has created a new generation of young, wealthy potential enthusiasts, and Farrell believes the well established auction houses have yet to find them.

"The younger buyers are plentiful. It's about how you reach them and how you make them feel connected to your brand," Farrell said.

While the auction at Hershey will favor cars of interest to Farrell personally — the sale features several examples from his personal collection — the company plans to adapt to different settings.

"The auction we're planning in Aspen will be very different," Farrell said. 

"Most of the cars that I love, the French pre-war cars, those are the cars I collect, aren't of the right demographic for Aspen — it's more of a sports car auction or utility vehicles."

Farrell also expressed an interest in finding prospective clients cars that they can enjoy not just as investments, but as experiences.

"If a car speaks to them, then they should buy it, because the enjoyment that they will get out of the car will surpass any value that you can extract from it," Farrell said.

"I don't want people to look at cars as investments. I know that's strange to hear from an auction house, but that's the passionate side of me."

SEE ALSO: Tesla says accusations that it hid Model S trouble could be motivated by short sellers

The Elegance at Hershey is know primarily for pre-war cars. That's why The Finest's docket include cars like this beautiful 1939 Bentley Mark V Three-Position DHC, coachwork by Saoutchik. (Estimate: $850,000 - $1.2 million)

Or this exceedingly rare 1927 Bugatti Type 38A.

It is only one of 39 ever built. Estimate: $400,000 - $600,000

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Mark Zuckerberg had $1 million in the bank at the ripe age of 22, while Larry Ellison didn't reach millionaire status until age 42. Today, they're both billionaires.

Some successful entrepreneurs strike it rich early on. For others, it takes decades.

Using an infographic from UK-based web platform Fleximize, we've broken out the age at which Zuckerberg, Ellison, Cuban, and other self-made billionaires made their first million.

SEE ALSO: This Steve Jobs quote perfectly sums up the difference between billionaires and the rest of us

Mark Zuckerberg: 22

The Facebook cofounder and CEO became a millionaire in 2006 at age 22.

It didn't take long for him to make the leap from self-made millionaire to billionaire. At the age of 23, Facebook's IPO made Zuckerberg the youngest self-made billionaire in history.

Today's estimated net worth: $43.9 billion

Evan Spiegel: 23

The Snapchat cofounder and CEO became a millionaire in 2013 at age 23.

Two years later, the value in his Snapchat shares reached $1 billion, making him a 25-year-old self-made billionaire.

Today's estimated net worth: $2.1 billion

Sir Richard Branson: 23

Britain's high-profile billionaire earned his first million in 1973 at age 23.

Nearly two decades later, the Virgin Group founder reached self-made-billionaire status at age 41.

Today's estimated net worth: $5.1 billion

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

As products, organizational needs and customer buying cycles become more complex, so do the skills needed in order to be a successful salesperson. Just think about the intricacies involved in selling Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) software to a Fortune 500 company in today’s landscape, versus selling typewriters to a secretary pool in the 1950’s. Sales professionals are constantly having to learn detailed information about massively complex systems and effectively sell them to customers who have varied and far-reaching needs to address. However, there is one aspect to the act of selling that has remained largely the same throughout the centuries: psychology.

While it would be much easier if all buying decisions were reduced to budgets and features, psychology does play an important role both for customers and sales representatives. A poor understanding of your target customer’s psychological motivations can leave you with a sales strategy that can’t stand on its own in the face of intense competition, but you can use psychological practices to your advantage in order to better engage your prospects and your employees, encourage trust and openness, and open the buyer’s eyes to new possibilities.

Combine psychology with math

Psychological studies have detailed the existence of the so-called observer effect, wherein people change their behavior when they are aware that they are being watched. Most of the time this takes the form of wanting to prove you excel at something when you know that special attention is being paid to a particular behavior; sales managers can use this to inspire their sales team to operate at peak productivity levels.

Once you have developed metrics for tracking the performance of sales reps, share detailed information with them involving what specifically is being monitored and how this information will be used. When it comes to performance metrics, openness is always the best policy. Not only will the observer effect encourage them to do their best, but they will perform with more confidence knowing exactly what is expected of them.

Emphasize storytelling

The drive to tell stories and develop patterns is instinctively human, dating back to the oral histories that were passed along well before the advent of writing. Every sales journey tells a layered and complex story, and the clarity and nuance with which you convey the story can have a real impact on your customer’s ultimate decision. Just as people are more than willing to abandon a novel or abruptly quit binge watching a show with unclear character motivations and nonsensical plots, customers will quickly walk away from a deal if they can’t grasp where they fit in the story.

Encourage your sales professionals to ask, “why?”

The concept of empathy is largely undervalued in business transactions, and it lies at the very heart of most questions that begin with, “why.” The very act of asking “why” involves attempting to understand something that had not occurred to you earlier, often by putting yourself in someone else’s unique situation.

When faced with a setback in a conversation with a potential customer, any decent sales professional should ask themselves why the customer reacted the way they did. Perhaps you haven’t thoroughly explained a crucial component of the value proposition, or maybe they believe that discussing price at this stage in the process is distasteful. In certain circumstances, the answer to why you can’t close a sale is because your product is not equipped to address the customer’s specific pain points as they stand now, and avoiding pushing too hard could help preserve the relationship for the future. Your customers are far more likely to value a relationship with someone who wants to actually help them solve their problems, rather than one who approaches them only as potential revenue.

Nurture, and never abuse trust

Trust is one of the most fragile bonds in any human relationship; it is notoriously difficult to earn and simple to demolish. Abusing someone’s trust is an easy way to damage both personal and business relationships, but at least personal connections are likely to give you another chance based on familial obligations or time invested together. Sales reps do not have this luxury with their customers, simply because a spurned customer usually has so many other options at their disposal. And just as salespeople shouldn’t take advantage of a client’s trust, neither should you do the same with your team members.

Understand the role of emotion in the buying and selling process

The idea of a potential sale hinging on a customer’s emotional journey may sound frightening to sales professionals, since we are taught to believe that emotions can be unpredictable and entrenched. In reality, most customers go through a fairly standard emotional arc when they are faced with an important buying decision, and you can use this fact to engage them appropriately as they reach each stage.

For instance, it would be unproductive to keep referencing your customer’s competitors once they have moved past they envy stage, as it will only serve to make them feel like less of a priority and dilute the strength of your relationship with them. Similarly, you probably can’t do a very good job of generating excitement until you understand what they are likely to get excited about.

In 1981, MTV’s arrival changed the shape of the music industry. Suddenly, video was essential for music promotion.

It’s 2016, and video has become essential again. This time, for social media marketers.

In her Mention webinar, social media expert Lauren Teague highlighted the importance of video for social media marketers – especially for mobile. According to Cisco, mobile video will make up 75% of global mobile traffic by 2020. Social media marketers need to keep up.

To give you some ideas, we’ll look at 4 very different social platforms for video marketing, their key characteristics, and help you create content that succeeds.

Let’s start with a classic.

1. YouTube

YouTube is hardly a secret. Forty-six thousand years’ worth of video is watched every day on the site, and it’s made stars out of Justin Bieber, PewDiePie, and Psy.

Because YouTube is so popular, we almost forget that it’s a social network. But users connect with one another, share ideas, and find exciting new content – just like any other network. Plus, it’s the second largest search engine in the world (after Google, its parent company). This makes YouTube’s potential even more exciting.

Why use YouTube?

YouTube videos help your brand:

• Gain authority
• Build your brand
• Find new PR opportunities
• Showcase your products
• Feature customer testimonials

Here’s how they help.

Gain authority

A key strategy of inbound marketing is to increase trust and respect for your brand. When people trust you, they’re more likely to buy your products and share you with friends.

Use YouTube to present research, discuss trends, and demonstrate new products. Make your brand (and its people) a trusted voice, just as you do with your blog.

Build your brand

People are on YouTube to watch videos, not to buy. The platform is primarily for entertainment and education, rather than breaking news or exclusive deals.

PR opportunities

Videos have a good chance of being picked up by journalists, as they’re rich media. Good video press releases can have a broad reach, since everyone embeds YouTube videos.

Use a monitoring tool to help you find influencers talking about your industry. Offer them a great video to share, and everybody wins.

Show your products in use

A great example of this is GoPro. They built their name with spectacular videos showing cameras in action.

Customer testimonials

Create emotional, passionate videos featuring your customers. A little music and sharp editing will make your brand seem more appealing to potential customers.

Apps like Boast, CameraTag, and Bravo make creating video testimonials simple. They let you create recording pages, where customers can leave a video message. Like a video voicemail. With these tools, you don’t even need your own camera to make video content.

How to produce great YouTube content

The key to great YouTube content is storytelling. Brand Stories found that the best YouTube marketing is:

• Authentic: real is better than glossy.
• Relevant: to your products and your audience.
• Collaborative: work with influencers to increase exposure.
• Engaging: make interesting videos full of calls to action. Ask for comments and shares.
• Regular: consistently create quality videos, on a regular basis.

Once you’re producing interesting, informative videos, you need people to see them.

YouTube marketing has a wide range of angles. What’s important is raising awareness of your brand, highlighting your products, and making shareable videos.

2. Snapchat

Snapchat is growing at an astonishing rate. In May 2015, users were watching 2 billion videos a day. By the end of February 2016, it was up to 8 billion.

Gary Vaynerchuk (aka Gary Vee) says Snapchat is the next big social network for marketing. It’s wise to listen to Gary.

Why use Snapchat?

• Young user base. Snapchat is usually associated with millennials. 60% of Americans aged 13-35 use the app. Brands targeting them have the perfect venue.
• Older people are catching on. Snapchat’s fastest growing demographic in 2015 was 25-34 year olds (103%), and 35-54 year olds were the second-fastest. If you think you can reach an older audience, give it a shot.
• Own the screen. When a user opens your snap, it fills their smartphone’s whole screen. However briefly they see your brand, their attention is undivided.

How to produce great Snapchat content

Snapchat videos only last 10 seconds, and are designed to be watched in portrait. So your YouTube videos won’t work here.

According to Huge Inc, the best Snapchat content includes:

• VIP access to events
• Behind-the-scenes sneak peeks
• Slice-of-life vignettes
• Humor

It’s important to provide users with unique Snapchat content, since they can skip it so easily.

Stories

Stories are a series of snaps stitched together into one, watchable repeatedly by any of your followers for 24 hours. With stories, you’re not limited to 10 seconds – just 10 second “scenes.”

These should be the focus of your strategy since they let you paint a fuller picture of your brand. They have the added benefit of remaining active, so users can recommend them to one another.

Have a big event coming up? Create a story at the event, and let Snapchat followers feel like they’re there.

Curated channels

Snapchat also curates its own stories from time to time. Based around a theme, location, or event (Halloween, Coachella), advertisers can create short campaigns to fit the channel.

In 2015, Coca-Cola took advantage of the Back to School channel. The 10-second clip was deemed a success, thanks to its high energy and organic use of Coke branding. Fifty-four percent of viewers completed all 10 seconds.

One criticism of Snapchat advertising has been its lack of targeting. By placing ads in curated channels, you increase the likelihood of reaching your target audience.

Promote your personality

Snapchat is inherently casual. Show the human side of your brand. Find interesting voices within your brands and let them be spokespeople.

Clothing retailer Everlane holds “Transparency Tuesdays,: where they show followers around their workshop and answer questions. “No fancy cameras. No editing. Just raw, live, footage…it’s the platform for the modern generation.”

It’s hard to ignore the sheer popularity of Snapchat. Brands with a youth-oriented focus should think very seriously about joining the party.

3. Vine

Owned by Twitter, Vine is a social network for creating and sharing short videos. Very short. In fact, Vines are only six seconds. This creates a challenge for marketers. But just as self-destructing Snapchat content might seem like doom for brands, Vine’s length can lead to creativity.

Why use Vine?

• Bite-sized videos
• Highly shareable
• Low effort, low cost

Bite-sized videos

Remember, we’re creating mobile video content. A six-second clip is just the sort of thing users will watch on the bus and share with friends. Popular mobile video is often short and sweet. According to Dan Frommer of Quartz, “Vines seem exactly the sort of mobile-native content ‘snack’ that people would watch on a smartphone.” This may be why, at last count, Vine loops receive 1.5 billion plays daily.

Highly shareable

Like GIFs, Vines tend to capture social media users’ attention. Twitter users are unlikely to stop scrolling to watch a long video, but a six second video is an easy time investment. For this reason, Vines have a habit of going viral. They’re also easily shared on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest. And while you can’t share a Vine directly on Instagram, you could easily upload the same video to each platform.

Low cost, low effort

Don’t get me wrong, some Vines are little six-second works of art. But Vine users are accustomed to a range in quality, and many of the most popular ones have a “DIY” feel. Much like Snapchat, Vines can even benefit from a natural or spontaneous feel.

Create great Vine content

What kinds of content should you consider creating? Ideal Vines include:

• “Hacks” and tips
• “Unboxings” and product launches
• Highlights from live events
• Product action shots

Brian Gavin Diamonds’ videos are a good example of Vine marketing done well. With a small budget, they created short videos showing how an idea can lead to the perfect engagement ring.

They worked with influencers to achieve over 6 million views, and hundreds of Twitter shares. Whereas competitors saw decreased sales in early 2015, Brian Gavin reported significant growth, and attributed much of it to their Vine marketing.

Vine isn’t for everyone. For some, the six second limit is too cumbersome. If that’s you, Instagram now supports videos of up to 60 seconds. That might be a happy alternative.

For those who want to make easily shareable, bite-sized clips, Vine is an interesting place to start.

4. Periscope

Periscope makes live streaming easy and portable. It lets you broadcast on a public platform for anyone to watch, or invite selected users for private broadcasts.

Videos can be watched on the app for 24 hours after the initial broadcast. You can also save the broadcast and share it, like any other content.

It isn’t the first app for live streaming – Meerkat is a popular competitor, YouTube offers it, and Facebook has made a feature.

We’re focusing on Periscope because of its popularity and link to Twitter. If you prefer another option, go for it.

Why use Periscope?

Live streaming lets your brand:

• Promote its personality. Be funny, informative, or sincere. Whatever your brand’s voice, you have the opportunity to present it directly to viewers.
• Put a face to the name. Give viewers an introduction to interesting people within the company. This lets your brand feel more human.
• Answer questions. Periscope users can ask questions during the video, for you to answer as you broadcast.
• Interact with customers. Some brands even provide live tech support through Periscope.

Twitter integration

Owned by Twitter, Periscope videos are easy to share there.

If you have a large Twitter following, there’s no need to build one separately on Periscope. Viewers don’t even need to download Periscope to watch (unless they want to comment).

Plus, Twitter has 320 million monthly users, so the potential audience is huge.

Added bonus: These videos take up a lot of Twitter real estate. Just as images make your tweets stand out, Periscope videos do the same.

Create great Periscope content

Classic Periscope content includes:

• Live events
• Breaking news
• Q&As
• Product demos
• Behind-the-scenes sneak peeks

In 2015, Adidas live streamed football/soccer player James Rodriguez signing his new contract:

Live streaming gives news an even greater sense of immediacy. You can’t get any more “new” than “live.”

Keep an eye on Blab

It’s worth mentioning a new competitor to Periscope. Blab combines up to four live streams at once. It’s marketed as Periscope for groups.

Designed specifically for conversations, it works like a chat show. There are four empty seats, and anyone can request access to them. If the host accepts you, you’re in. The conversation can be seen by anyone with a link.

It’s an interesting app for brands with good influencer networks, as thought leaders from all over the world can be brought together into the same live feed.

Conclusion

Well, that’s four social media platforms. Five if you count Blab. Hopefully you’ve come away with new ideas for social marketing.

Video is only going to get easier, better looking, and more widespread. These trends will make it even more important. Brands need to create video marketing strategies sooner, rather than later.

"Software eating the world" is the basic philosophy behind all of Andreessen Horowitz's investments. But the Silicon Valley VC has a few specific areas of tech that are lighting up its radar right now.

With $1.5 billion in a new fund to invest in startups, managing partner Scott Kupor told Business Insider about a few areas the firm is super excited about:

• Machine learning and artificial intelligence: "The applications are all across the board," Kupor said. Chris Dixon led the firm's investment in Comma.Ai, a self-driving car and artificial intelligence startup. Now it's looking for more companies that are using machine learning to drive decisions.
• Virtual reality: Andreessen Horowitz already made one successful investment in Oculus, which sold to Facebook for $2 billion. Now, it's looking at companies that are making VR content. "That's an area where we've been spending a lot of time and you'll see us do more there now that the platforms are kind of established," Kupor said. Beyond content, the firm is also looking for companies who are applying virtual reality to industries in ways it hasn't seen before. 

• Enterprise infrastructure: "We continue to think we're at the early stages of what's really the transformation happening of enterprise IT. So you're going to be seeing us doing a lot more storage companies, networking countries, infrastructure applications... All this stuff where you have enterprise buyers on the other end," Kupor said. Andreessen Horowitz added Martin Casado as a general partner in February to help leads its investments in the enterprise space.
• Financial services: Historically, this hasn't a big space for the firm, but it brought on Alex Rampell to oversee its investments in fintech. "You'll see us do things around the lending space, potentially insurance, other things that are happening in financial services we think is really interesting," Kupor said.

While Kupor called out these four areas specifically, it doesn't mean the firm is not interested in any company that falls outside the categories. The firm is still looking for entrepreneurs with big ideas that have the software to back it. "For us, we're always looking for companies where software is the differentiating factor of the business," Kupor said. "It's dangerous in this business to red-line areas."

SEE ALSO: Andreessen Horowitz just raised $1.5 billion to invest in the next big thing

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Google opens up a 21,000-square-foot campus in South Korea for startups

Less than 1% of leads generated will ever become customers

Too many salespeople complain that their company’s marketing just isn’t working – it doesn’t have any impact on their accounts’ spend and anyway, ‘it just isn’t relevant’.

Humans like to hear messages that closely reflect the situation we are in. For instance, if you were trapped in a broken elevator then you would be much more inclined to read a manual about how to get out of a faulty lift, than if you were sat on the beach on holiday (although the Get Out of A Broken Lift for Dummies Manual is my go-to holiday read). When customers are facing a particular challenge, they are much more inclined to be open to hearing about your solution to those problems.

But that’s what you are already trying to do, right? You think about your customer’s industry, take note of those challenges and structure your entire sales messaging around those challenges (or at least I hope you do if you’ve ready any of my previous blogs on honing your sales messaging or getting customer conversations right).

Content marketing (download a quick how-to guide here for B2B marketers) is great for getting specific messages in front of target clients, but account based marketing is the next evolution for enterprise sales strategies where sales reps are targeting large accounts or key account planning.

What is Account Based Marketing?

Account based marketing is defined by Gartner as the process of identifying ‘expansion opportunities from within an existing customer base’ based on creating ‘relevant content based on life cycle journeys’.

It is, in simple terms, a way of tailoring your marketing to specific customers, or even just one customer if they are worth it or strategically important enough. This way, you can thoroughly research your key customers, and target them with the messaging that you know will resonate, rather than guessing what might interest a broader range of customers.

This helps you to start offering a highly specialised and personalised marketing experience for your customers – increasing your credibility and alignment to their specific situations, plans, objectives, challenges and initiatives.

All of which is desperately needed, quite frankly, in an era of marketing where Forrester reports that less than 1% of leads generated will ever become customers. Some statistics are so alarming that it is worth pausing for a moment to think about what it means for us as marketers and sales people. Does it mean that marketing isn’t working and generating the right kind of leads or that sales people are doing a phenomenally bad job of converting those leads? Perhaps it’s a combination of the two issues – but either way, these are expensive mistakes to make when money is tight and marketing budgets have to deliver.

And the statistics back up the efficacy of Account Based Marketing (ABM), with research suggesting that 80% of marketers report that ABM outperforms other marketing investments. I think this must be down to the fact that no other marketing effort is going to be as personalised to specific customers as Account Based Marketing, therefore the chances of messages resonating with customers is instantly higher. You are, in effect, bypassing the first hurdle when you embark upon account based marketing.

Getting started with Account Based Marketing

The first step to getting started with Account Based Marketing is trialling it with a handful of customers – maybe even just starting with 3 clients to test if it works for you – after all, different marketing methods work for different types of businesses – there is no one size fits all approach despite what creative agencies might try to tell you.

Once you have selected your target clients – you also need to define the target roles you are going to be focused on when selling into your clients. Using social selling tools such as Artesian help you to stay updated with your prospects – keeping track of their activities across social media (in a less creepy way than that sounds), enables you to be well prepared for any sales meeting. But this also helps with marketing efforts – allowing you to build almost real-time marketing campaigns to target your prospects based on information they are sharing across their social media platforms.

An example of how you can use customers’ social media feeds to inform your account based marketing could be that you have seen that your prospect has made a recent acquisition that will result in a doubling of staff – and you sell a HR software platform so it’s great news for you. Your marketing efforts could then focus around how your software platform is perfect for companies struggling to integrate new employees, or around the pain of company mergers and acquisitions. It doesn’t matter that this particular campaign relates to only 1% of your target market, because if it increases your chance of winning this particular client that you’re focused on then it’s worth the effort. And, after all, you’ll be targeting the other 99% of prospects with your ongoing generic marketing efforts so you aren’t losing out. You’re just dramatically increasing your potential for conversion.

How does Account Based Marketing impact on sales activities?

This strategy then translates perfectly into your sales efforts, as your sales teams have very specific conversation starters to take into your clients – and collateral that relates directly to the needs of the customers they are going to visit.

And very often, this collateral doesn’t require a huge amount of time and effort to create – you can often take more generic content that you already have and tailor it to suit certain client scenarios. For instance, if you sell HR software, you probably have content around how it helps to keep track of large amounts of employees and multiple different teams. It wouldn’t take much to integrate some specific messaging around how business acquisitions complicate employee management activities.

B2B Account Based Marketing Checklist

To help you on your way, here is a really simple 5 step checklist to get you started on an Account Based Marketing campaign and test out if it can work for you:

• Select just one account to target; this account should be big enough to generate news and social media updates and have multiple potential buyer contacts within the account.
• Within that account, define which job roles you are targeting and look up contact names for those roles in LinkedIn. e. I want to target Logistics Managers, and John Smith is a Logistics Directors at ABC Company.
• Find out what those contacts are talking about on social media, and combine that with recent news and press releases published by the overall organisation.
• Create marketing collateral and messaging that aligns to those specific topics and get that out onto platforms where your client can see it – by doing so, you will probably also attract the attentions of clients in a similar position to your target customer.
• Follow up with those contacts you found via LinkedIn, targeting them with messaging around how your product/service will help the specific challenges to their business that you have identified from your research and the outcomes they could hope to achieve with your product.

Obviously no marketing effort is guaranteed but by being very specific to a client in your messaging, your chances of success should increase. Bear in mind that if it doesn’t work, it could be down to any number of factors, such as the particular customer you picked, the contacts within the account you chose or the type of messaging you tried, or even the time wasn’t right. However you should be able to pick out some elements that could work in future campaigns to help you get it right next time and be more targeted in your approach.

We’ve also just published a mini-guide on Content Marketing for Tech Companies which is a good place to start.

 

Understanding the CEO’s role in eliminating wasted marketing spend and increasing sales results—the final of a multi-part blog series.

Many challenges facing Sales and Marketing have been around since the beginning of time. The two organizations don’t understand each other, and often point fingers: Sales says marketing delivers bad leads; and marketing says sales doesn’t follow up. Both are working toward different, conflicting metrics.

Despite the counsel of leaders in this field—many of whom were quoted in this blog series—companies continue to waste marketing dollars, and sales continues to struggle to meet revenue goals.

I maintain, as do many of my peers in the industry, that the age old misalignment of marketing and sales is something that the CEO needs to address. Far from being beneath them, sales and marketing conflicts need to be a top priority for CEOs, who stand to benefit in a big way by setting the stage for these two organizations to work in sync. The company leader’s abilities to articulate the direction of the company in the context of the offering, the market and why what they sell is better and different is right up there at the top of their job description. Without that, and without careful oversight of the marketing and sales process, the bickering goes on and the results fall short.

Our latest blog series outlined 7 truths that CEOs need to know to help them help their sales and marketing teams eliminate wasted marketing spend and increase revenue. Each were covered in detail, and referenced thought leadership from industry leaders.

By being proactive when it comes to the 7 truths about sales and marketing that CEOs need to know, companies can go a long way toward achieving marketing ROI, and driving revenue results. It’s not easy, but it’s absolutely doable. A summary:

1. Define a lead 

If your teams aren’t aligned in their understanding of what you sell and who you sell it to, you’re wasting time, blowing money and giving your competitors advantage.

Brian Carroll, chief evangelist at MECLABS and Marketing Sherpa agrees: “Still, most of the companies I meet with do not have a Universal Lead Definition (ULD). An astounding 61% of B2B marketers admit to sending 'leads' directly to Sales without qualification, according to a Marketing Sherpa Marketing Benchmark Report.

“Are these truly leads? Not really. Anyone who expresses interest in what you sell is an inquiry, not a lead. Experience has taught me that only 5% to 15% of inquiries are ready to speak to Sales. However, as many as 80% of inquiries will be ready to speak with Sales in the future. If you send leads too soon, Sales will discard them, so you must nurture them until they fit your ULD.”

2. Drive revenue from all sources

Inbound, nurture and proactive outbound are all reliable sources. Why not use all the tools in your toolbox? Only with an allbound approach will you be able to effectively meet your revenue goals.

Matt Heinz, president of Heinz Marketing, says in his blog: “Inbound marketing can be both highly effective and highly inefficient. If you’re relying on inbound marketing and leads only today, you will soon reach a point at which you can no longer effectively scale your business.

“Why? Because as wonderful and cost-effective as inbound leads are, you have little control over the qualification of those leads. Yes, you can customize your content, triggers and lead registration assets to focus on a particular, designed customer segment. But the majority of the leads you generate will still likely not be ready for your sales team, be ready to buy, or even be the type of customer you want to sell to.”

3. Make marketing accountable

Marketing needs to be accountable for sourcing revenue and given credit accordingly. Marketing adds more value and performs better by having skin in the game.

James Thomas, Allocadia’s chief marketing officer, blogged on the IBM commerce site: “Never has it been tougher to be a CMO. Not only do marketers need to keep up with the growing marketing technology landscape, but they also need to rapidly respond to changing trends. CMOs are also tasked with growth and demand generation, while finding ways to deliver a cohesive story in a multi-channel environment.

“Given the complex challenges, it’s no wonder only 34% of CMOs are able to quantitatively prove the long-term impact of their marketing spend on their business. The call for ROI is getting louder from the C-suite, too. Nearly 6 in 10 CMOs say they feel increased pressure from their CEO or board of directors to prove the value of their marketing."

4. Document the cost per lead

This needs to be documented along with the cost per sales-accepted lead, per sales-qualified lead, and closed deal. Know what you’re paying (and what you’re getting) and keep close track so you can continuously optimize your lead generation, qualification and nurturing processes.

Karl Schneider of the Pedowitz group weighs in: “The problem for most marketers making this shift is thinking that the primary Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) they should be watching are the sheer volume of leads they produce and the average cost thereof. While those are good metrics to keep an eye on, they are extremely shortsighted because true performance is measured in outcomes (such as revenue) rather than outputs (such as lead counts).

“The reality is: sales doesn’t want lots of leads—they want leads that will buy. They want leads that are ready for a sales conversation and can be moved into AND THROUGH the pipeline. In other words, sales wants more from less—not the other way around!”

5. Keep leads from being ignored

Borrow an idea from our forefathers, and put a Judicial Branch in place, to make sure you’re getting return on marketing investment. The Judicial Branch, which should include the CEO, is there to align the efforts of sales and marketing.

The folks at Wheelhouse Advisors concur: “In spite of the fact that sales and marketing have a vast number of common goals and objectives, the two have always found it tough to work together. And this is really bad news for businesses. The inability of sales and marketing to collaborate and work together towards common goals can seriously hurt growth and performance: it’s been estimated that lost sales productivity and wasted marketing budget costs companies AT LEAST $1 trillion a year.”

6. Nurture leads until they’re ready to turn over to sales

Not the right time? Need not realized? Budget not in place? Decision maker not yet named? When marketing nurtures across multiple cycles, they’ll triple marketing return.

Here’s what Jay Gaines of SiriusDecisions has to say about nurturing: “Salespeople disqualify leads all the time, and while a number of these disqualifications are legitimate, many others (e.g. tried calling a few times, got no response and gave up) are not. The question is, what happens next? In many organizations, the answer is nothing, which means that incorrect disqualification will almost never be exposed, causing good leads to fall through the cracks.”

7. Develop a guide

Make it easy for sales with a guide titled, “What is a Lead and How to Follow-up on One.” Even experienced sales people often give up on leads too soon. Put a best-practice process in place and make sure reps continuously follow it—and prevent your given-up-on leads from making their way to your competition.

I have written that effective lead follow-up involves three components: preparation, communication and execution.

Preparation is about spending 15 minutes to understand what the company offers, its market and the competitive situation, and researching the prospect on social media. This small effort, which is often overlooked, can mean the difference between being ignored or welcomed by the prospect.

Communication is about following a strategic plan-of-action in sales follow up, understanding that it takes eight to 12 touches even on the most qualified leads to schedule and complete the first call or face-to-face meeting with a prospect. Careful review, specific communications, persistence (even in the face of a no-show) and the discipline to reheat the lead are required to win.

Once contact has been made, execution comes into play. Recognizing where the prospect is in the buying process is key to driving the sale. If a sales rep is asking the prospect to agree on a generic solution, when the prospect has not yet identified a pain or need, it will be difficult to advance the buying process.

In the end effective sales lead follow up is critical to increasing marketing ROI and driving revenue. This is a yet another truth about sales and marketing that CEOs need to know.

How engaged is your CEO in these 7 truths? What are ways you’ve found to help them focus on sales and marketing issues?

Are bad sales habits hindering your team’s success? CMO Council reports that every year $1 trillion dollars are lost due to lost productivity and poorly managed leads. That’s a lot of money down the drain. Though your team may need some more advanced training, these 7 mistakes can help your team take a step in the right direction to improvement. Make sure your SDRs stay away from these seven deadly sales habits.

1. Forgetting to follow up with prospects

Whether a prospect tells you to follow up next week, next month, or 6 months from now, it is important that you do not let them slip through the cracks of your pipeline. Set yourself a reminder in your calendar, as well as a task both a week before the scheduled follow up AND the day of, so you don’t forget. If you don’t follow up at the appropriate time, you may have missed out on a potential opportunity with a customer.

2. Being lazy when logging notes and activity

Make sure you write down everything and anything after a conversation with a prospect. This includes referrals, qualifying information, a day and time to follow up, etc. If you do not log your call notes, the next time you go to speak with that person, you will have no clue where the conversation left off. A best practice to counter this is to actively take notes while on a call. Even if they are fragments or chicken scratch, you can formulate a more formal summary of your notes after the call.

3. Spelling and grammar errors

This may seem silly, but spell check exists for a reason! Read an email out loud to yourself before sending it, especially if it is going to someone in the C-level suite. Don’t blow an opportunity to get a meeting by calling them the wrong name, spelling the company name wrong, or writing an email entirely in run-on sentences.

Download The Sales Development Messaging Toolkit for a messaging refresher.

4. Failure to acknowledge time zones

You may be on your second cup of coffee for the morning, however a prospect on the west coast may still be sleeping! Pay attention to where you are calling, and make sure you do not wake anyone up. In addition to being mindful of time zones, make sure that when you schedule appointments with prospects that you coordinate time zones between your sales rep, the prospect, and yourself. It would suck if the prospect hops on the call and no one is there or vice versa.

5. Forgetting to reschedule meetings

If your prospect does not show up for the meeting you booked with your closing rep, be sure to reschedule as soon as possible! Forgetting to reschedule a meeting is like throwing the opportunity down the drain. Sometimes things do come up (family emergencies, company meetings, etc.) But it is YOUR responsibility to get back in touch with the prospect to reschedule for your team.

6. Reading off of a script (or sounding generally monotonous)

If you use a sales script, don’t get in the habit of reading off of it word for word. Scripts are great when getting acclimated with new campaigns, however they are meant to guide the conversation, not dictate it. If you are provided with a script, make it your own so that you don’t sound monotonous.

7. Messy sales development process and technology

Make sure you are keeping your prospect relationship management platform organized. If a contact is no longer with the target account you are working to break into, make sure this is noted so you don’t waste time calling or emailing them again. Updating lead statuses are essential to maximizing your time as an SDR. If you’re working out of a messy, outdated database you are only making your job harder for yourself.

If you realize you fall into any of the categories above, don’t worry – it’s not too late! Shake off these seven deadly sales habits so you can not only improve your sales efforts, but also ensure you are not putting your team or campaign in jeopardy.

Economist John Kay, who writes for the Financial Times, delivered a powerful, eminently readable critique of the finance industry last month at the Bank of International Settlements conference.

The speech guts the claims of the finance industry to be unique in its importance and in the applicability of general good practice to its operation. Every industry -- dairy, widget manufacturing, coffee shops, search engines -- claims it is doing something unique, but governments and economists treat these claims with deserved scepticism. Whatever unique characteristics these industries have, they're swamped by their foundational similarities.

But finance claims to be really, truly different, and credulous economists buy these claims -- and let the industry get away with all kinds of terrible, destructive conduct that no other industry could pull off.

I thoroughly recommend this sprightly, easy to understand paper as an introduction to the unchecked problems of finance, which have weakened the foundations of so many other parts of our lives.

Finance exists to serve households and businesses. Individuals and companies engaged in finance should have specific knowledge of at least some of the needs of these users of the financial system. We need focused financial businesses with a clear productive purpose and a management system, governance regime and capital structure appropriate to that purpose. We should aim to restore and nourish the rich variety of institutions and organisational forms that existed in the finance sector before the 1980s.

It is possible to have a smaller, simpler, financial services system that is better adapted to the needs of the non-financial economy -- an efficient payments system, effective capital allocation, greater economic stability, security in planning and managing our personal finances, and justified confidence in the people who advise us. We will not wake up tomorrow, or next year, and find such a reality. Is it therefore pointless to articulate that vision? I do not think so. My experience in public policy, business and the academic world has led me to believe in the truth of KeynesS remarks on the long-run power of ideas.

"Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are generally distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back."22 Today, thank goodness, we have few "madmen in authority". The ideas here are intended to represent a guide for the democratic politicians who will be confronted with the next financial crisis. We need a restructuring of the finance industry, to provide a provisional blueprint for how thoughtful policymakers might prepare for the next crisis, and an illustration of how they might have used the control of the finance sector they achieved in the aftermath of the crisis to more useful, and long-lasting, effect.

Finance is just another industry [John Kay]

“Finance is Just Another Industry” [Naked Capitalism]

(Image: Eat The Bankers, Adam Smith, CC-BY-SA)

Children usually don't like to be told what to do — especially if that instruction is followed by the dreaded, "Because I said so!"

Growing up, the editors and reporters at INSIDER, Business Insider and Tech Insider were no different. And so, to teach us important life skills — and get us to complete simple tasks — our parents had to resort to trickery and other brilliant schemes.

From bribing us with beanie babies to designating the family home a "no whining zone," here are some of the best tricks our parents used. 

My mom made me touch noses with my sister to get us to stop fighting.

"When my sister and I were little and used to fight a lot, my mom would make us stand with our noses touching until we said 'I love you' and hugged each other.

"It taught me to argue with her, especially in front of my parents. And now I actually don't argue with anyone very often." — Courtney Verrill (Visual Features Intern, Business Insider)

 

My parents called our house a 'no whine zone' to get us to stop whining.

"My house growing up from day one was deemed a 'no whining zone.' That's just the way it was. Whenever my siblings or I would whine, my parents would just say, 'This is a no whining zone,' and we listened and we stopped.

"It's definitely made me see the upside of things and to be a problem solver, instead of sit on my butt and whine."— Lauren Browning (Associate Social Media Editor, INSIDER)

My parents made me recite the months of the year every night until I learned them.

"When I was little I could not remember the months of the year for the life of me. It was starting to get a little weird that I still didn't know them so my parents made me recite the months in order every night before I could eat my dinner. I learned in a hurry after that."— Molly Sequin (Science Intern, Business Insider)

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Drag-and-drop programming tools like Ready could teach anyone to code, and make creating apps as easy as creating a newsletter or website. And in creation, there’s power.

The post What happens when anyone can code? We’re about to find out appeared first on Digital Trends.

It’s hard to deny that Apple is pretty great at presentation. Former Apple speechwriter Jayne Benjulian explains one key that helps the company perfect their speeches: choosing your audience.

Read more...

AGUA CLARA, Panama – The first test runs along the newly expanded Panama Canal began Thursday as tugs nudged the bulk cargo carrier Baroque into the first level of locks on the Atlantic side of the canal.

The expanded locks have increased the technical difficulty of manoeuvring larger ships through the canal. But some of the challenges were eased by the weather during the test run, with it being a sunny day without much wind.

And the Baroque, at 836 feet in length, is not as big as the New Panamax behemoths, which measure up to 1,200 feet and which will begin transiting the waterway when it is opened.

The Baroque, rented for the operation, wasn’t carrying cargo on the first run through the Agua Clara locks, which took about three hours.

“The test went very well,” said engineer Giuseppe Quarta of Salini Impregilo, one of the firms contracted to build the expansion. “Today, we weren’t worried about the time.”

Workers and canal administrators were on hand to witness the tests, and workers unfurled a banner that read, “We built the canal.”

The formal opening of the expanded canal is scheduled for June 26, about a year and a half behind schedule.

The $5.25 billion expansion is expected to double the canal’s capacity, tap new markets such as liquid natural gas shipments and cut global maritime costs by an estimated $8 billion a year.

Under the new system, tugboats have to engage in tricky manoeuvrs in a confined space inside the locks themselves to keep the bulky New Panamaxes from banging into the walls or even crushing the tugs if they lose control.

Under the old system, tugboats’ engagement with ships had been limited to guiding them in open waterways and to the entrance of the locks, where powerful locomotives known as “mules” took over, latching on and keeping the vessels in place as the water level is raised or lowered.

The post Test runs start for Panama Canal expansion appeared first on Macleans.ca.

It’s estimated that 100,000 technology startups reach the basic funding stage every year. Angel investors (including friends and family members) help about half of these companies with their initial development. Fewer than 10% (about 4,000) are then able to show enough promise to actually receive a first round of capital from venture or private equity sources.

If you are an entrepreneurial manager who has reached this milestone, it’s a major achievement — your technology has progressed from an interesting concept to a promising commercial opportunity. You’ve probably demonstrated your product’s potential with a subset of customers, and now experienced investors are willing to place a bet on you.

The challenge becomes how to sell your product and create a sustainable revenue stream, so that you can further develop your product offerings, build your infrastructure, repay your investors, and pay yourself. Unfortunately, many tech startups get stuck at this stage because they can’t quite figure out a scalable way to go to market. Often, this is because they’ve been founded by technologists, and sales is not an area of expertise. Or perhaps it’s because the only person who is passionate enough to sell the product is the person who developed it. Or people may believe their invention is good enough to sell itself. So sales doesn’t become a focus of attention until cash starts to burn.

Figuring out a go-to-market approach is no trivial exercise — it separates the companies that will be successful and sustainable from those that won’t. In our work with startups over the last several years, we’ve heard dozens of questions related to how to start thinking about sales: Should we put together a direct sales force or sell indirectly through others? If we sell directly, should we organize salespeople by market, industry, geography, company size, or some other principle? Will our salespeople require technical support and work in teams? Should we bundle maintenance and other services into our sales approach, or sell them separately? Can we get our product to market through other channels, such as social media or advertising? What about pricing? The list goes on.

The problem is that these are fundamentally the wrong questions to begin with. They all focus on the perspective of the startup and the technology, but startups need to take their customers’ perspective to understand how to approach the market. They should think about what the customers are trying to achieve and what problems they need to solve — and then think about how the product can help them be successful.

For example, earlier this year a five-year-old software company asked us to help its sales team do a better job of selling to large enterprise organizations. The company was already breaking even operationally after two rounds of funding. But despite some successes in pilot projects, the salespeople had not been able to expand their deals from “interesting trials” into ongoing revenue streams.

After talking with the VP of sales, the CEO, and several of the account managers, we realized we had heard a lot about the software’s virtues but much less about the customer problems and pain points that the software was meant to address. Eventually we asked this team to focus on three large enterprises and to describe the business challenges these potential customers were facing. Once they developed this context, the salespeople were able to identify a number of very large opportunities where their software could help.

For instance, they learned that one strategic objective of the customer was growing its data center hardware business. They then saw that their software, which could help data centers reduce operational costs, could be incorporated into the customer’s equipment just like word processing software is embedded into personal computers. This led them to see that one way to bring their product to market was to partner with this customer (and others like it) instead of selling directly to data centers. In this way their “customer” could actually be an important part of the go-to-market strategy.

Veteran salespeople might recognize this “consultative selling” approach and dismiss it as old hat. The point, however, is that the consultative selling mindset needs to start before the go-to-market approach is developed, and it must evolve as the sales strategy evolves. Figuring out how you go to market is not a one-time exercise for a new company; it should be an ongoing process, constantly informed by a deeper and deeper understanding of customer needs and how your product can meet them.

If you are part of a startup or a relatively new company that needs to accelerate revenue growth, consider how this approach might apply to you. Start by identifying a small number of very specific customers — either companies (if you are a B2B player) or desired consumer segments (e.g., urban professionals with specific characteristics). Then put yourself in the shoes of these customers by thinking about their issues and by talking to them not about your product but about their challenges and pain points. (Startup expert Steve Blank, for example, suggests that you talk to dozens of potential users as part of a “customer development” process.)

Once you’ve taken these steps, you can begin to experiment with a go-to-market approach with the expectation that you’ll continue to refine and change it based on experience and further insights.

Figuring out an approach for going to market is one of the toughest things for a startup to do. But without understanding the customer’s issues, it’s almost impossible to get right.

When was the last time you met a thriving salesperson who was uncomfortable or easily intimidated by negotiations? Everyone wants a deal. It doesn’t matter how much value your product or service comes packed with, a buyer will always happily …
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Infographics are one of the best ways to not only turn your text content into something much more valuable, it’s also a great way to promote your content and gain powerful backlinks to your site. However, before all of that takes place, you need to first understand how to create an infographic, the elements that make it popup off the pages and also why some infographics go viral when others don’t.

In this article, we are going to cover seven different things to consider when designing your next infographic. By the end of this article, you will not only know how to create a winning infographic, you will also have some actionable tips to help you with the outreach and promotion process as well.

How to Create a Winning Infographic in 7 Steps

Before even starting on your design, you need to figure out why you are creating an infographic in the first place. The last thing you want to do is invest hours of your own work or hundreds of dollars on a custom design, only to find no one really has a use for your infographic in the first place. Follow these seven steps to create an infographic that will continue working for your site and brand for months and even years to come.

1 – Collect and Analyze Your Data

The success of your infographic is going to come down to the amount and the type of data you include in it. This means you are going to want to make sure it’s all niche focused, provides value and also translate well when visible in graphic form and only a few words of text.

2 – What Type of Infographic Will You Create

While you may think all infographics have the same concept, there are actually many different types that you can create. Picktochart has a great review on each of these concepts, which are: visualized article, flow chart, timeline, useful bait, versus, numbers, photographic and data visualizations.

3 – How are You Going to Design Your Infographic

The next step in the process is to decide how you are actually going to create your infographic. There are several self-serve platforms available now that make infographic creation easy, or you could simply hire a professional designer or team to make sure you get exactly what you want. Both solutions work great, it’s just a matter of which is you prefer and meets within your budget.

4 – Writing a Great Article to Complement Your Infographic

Once your infographic has been created, it’s time to go live with it on your site. In addition to placing the image on your site, it’s highly recommended that you add an in-depth article on that same page as well. This will help your content rank higher in the search results and also give a deeper analysis on the data within your infographic as well.

5 – Using Social Buttons and an Embed Code to Allow for Easy Sharing

Of the many benefits of having your own infographic, getting other sites to link back and share your content is among the most valued. To make this process easier, site owners should include social sharing buttons on all of their pages while also including an embed code for other site owners to grab your infographic. With an embed code in place, other sites just need to copy/paste your code to have the infographic shown on their site.

6 – Outreach and Guest Blogging on Other Sites

One of the most time-consuming areas of getting the most out of your infographic is the outreach and content promotion that goes along with it. While there are many free ways to promote an infographic, guest blogging and outreach are two of the most effective ways. Approach other relevant sites in your industry to see if they would be interested in sharing you

7 – Analyze Backlinks and Who is Sharing Your Infographic Content

The last step in the process is to measure your results. Having an infographic is great, but if you aren’t sure how effective it is for your outreach, marketing, and lead generation, what’s the point? Use tools like Google Analytics and backlink tools to see who is linking to your site and how it’s getting shared on social media.

Now that you know what it takes to create a killer infographic design and how to promote it afterward, follow these steps to increase your outreach and marketing today.

“Will this drive revenue?”

This is the classic question, asked by anyone responsible for determining the value of business programs and assessing budget. But when it comes to content, the right answers still elude many marketers.

For marketers pursuing more budget and resources, it’s critically important to know how to measure the impact of every content asset created and program executed. Unfortunately, connecting the right data points to prove the value of content is challenging at best, and smoke and mirrors at worst.

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You need to know how to measure the impact of every #content asset & program executed via @EricaLindberg_
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Half of executives admit their data-driven marketing efforts are lagging or siloed, and another 22% report their data-driven marketing efforts are virtually non-existent, according to a Forbes Insights’ report.

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50% of execs admit their data-driven marketing efforts are lagging; 22% report they are non-existent by @Forbes
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Marketing Insider Group CEO Michael Brenner confirms, “We have not done a good job of presenting marketing in the context of strategic business value. I’d say CMOs that don’t have these numbers need to get them. It’s not a matter of life or death – or just about keeping their job – it’s a battle that needs to be fought for the strategic importance of the marketing function overall.”

You need to connect content to revenue.

We put together a free collection of templates to help you build a complete marketing metrics dashboard. But for this post, we take a deep dive into how to actually calculate marketing impact on revenue. We used a reverse-engineered funnel approach to project revenue goals for sales and marketing teams and to map content to these goals.

How to connect content to revenue

First, let’s cover some ground rules.

There is no “easy” button. There are no shortcuts to managing and leveraging data analytics and insights. Because a single content asset can be used by different teams at different points in the sales cycle, it’s important to have a solid cross-functional and integrated tech stack to ensure that you’re getting good data. If you don’t trust your data sources, you’re unlikely to benefit from their insights.

Sales and marketing are both accountable for revenue. To connect content to revenue, your marketing and sales teams need to be tightly aligned to the same business objectives, company messaging, and agreed-upon processes. Because so much of the buyer’s journey is self-service and digital, it’s critical that marketing and sales messaging stays in sync. Otherwise, the hand-off from marketing to sales, for example, from marketing-qualified lead (MQL) to sales-accepted lead (SAL) to opportunity (OPP), will feel disjointed and leave your prospect feeling confused.

Step 1: Determine revenue goals

By establishing revenue goals first, marketing and sales can work together to determine what percent of revenue the marketing team must contribute on an annual and quarterly basis.

Work backward from these goals to calculate volume at every stage of your marketing and sales funnel. These stages are different from company to company, but common examples are opportunities, MQLs, and net new leads. Keep in mind that marketing is nurturing and preparing leads for the sales team, so you’ll want to factor in the average length of a sales cycle to determine how far in advance marketing needs to deliver opportunities to sales.

For example, if the company has an average deal cycle of 90 days, marketing needs to deliver enough opportunities 90 days (one quarter) in advance of the expected closed-won deal.

Use this basic formula to calculate needed marketing-driven revenue based on overall business growth goals – total revenue multiplied by percent of marketing ownership equals marketing revenue contribution.

Next, calculate how many closed-won deals marketing needs to generate for the next sales cycle to meet marketing’s revenue contribution number – marketing revenue owned divided by average deal size equals number of marketing-generated closed-won deals.

Finally, decide on a conversion model to determine the conversion rate needed between each stage of the funnel (ex: lead to MQL, MQL to SAL, SAL to OPP, OPP to REV) – number of leads from current stage divided by conversion rate of previous stage to current stage equals number of leads needed at previous stage.

These numbers serve as a benchmark when calculating the return on investment for individual content assets.

Step 2: Map marketing programs and content to KPIs

Once you’ve established baseline goals that have been agreed upon by both sales and marketing leaders, you can map your content to those goals.

Begin by confirming your success metric at each stage of the buyer’s journey. For example:

• Awareness/investigation stages (top of funnel)
  • Success metric: Marketing-qualified lead
• Comparison stage (mid funnel)
  • Success metric: Sales-accepted lead
• Consideration/purchase stages (bottom of funnel)
  • Success metric: Closed-won deal

Now that you have baseline success metrics established, you can understand how individual content assets support pipeline velocity.

To frame content within the pipeline model, map your marketing programs at each stage. This helps you understand what types of content to leverage at each stage to meet your conversion goals.

In the example above, we have outlined the programs we want to execute to drive conversions (from leads to marketing-qualified leads) at the awareness and investigation stages. Based on the number of MQLs needed and historical performance data, assign a value to each program.

Let’s break it down even further.

Step 3: Apply content scoring

Now that you’ve mapped your program and content to goals, you can dig into individual assets.

Engagement metrics such as “likes,” clicks, shares, and downloads give marketers valuable insights into the types of content topics and formats resonating by channel. However, to tie content to actual revenue, you have to apply a scoring model.

The most common way to determine the content score of any asset, campaign, or category of content – specific topics, themes, or formats – is to evaluate each buyer’s movement through a stage of the pipeline and the content consumed during that stage. You also can apply a first-touch/last-touch weight-attribution model, but for these purposes use an equal distribution model.

To get an accurate picture of how an individual piece of content performs at each stage of the buyer’s journey, perform this operation across all buyers at each stage based on individual buyer journeys, and then sort by individual asset, campaign, and category.

When you apply the scoring model across each stage, averaged across all buyers, you get a reporting model that looks like this:

Using this framework to set revenue and conversion goals by team and by implementing the content scoring model, you can connect content to revenue. Calculating content ROI manually is tedious but absolutely necessary for positioning your marketing team as a critical department that drives revenue.

Your content matters – now go prove it.

Want to score high with your audiences? Download the 2016 Content Marketing Playbook with 24 top tactics.

Cover image by Prawny, Morguefile.com, via pixabay.com

The post How to Prove Your Content Is Driving Revenue appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Bike and motorcycle theft is a stinking, slinking and subtle affair, but inventor Yannick Read wants to blow it wide open. His extreme bike alarm, called the Bike Mine, would harness all the explosive noise and surprise of an actual explosion to arm your ride against interlopers. 

How does it work? By strapping an actual explosive charge and detonation chamber to your bike. Does that sound dangerous? ...Yes, Virginia, it does sound dangerous. Does it sound like it could scare the brains out of a potential thief and alert me that my precious steed was moving unbidden? Also yes.

To make this thing work you Velcro the chamber to part of your bike or motorcycle, place a charge in the chamber, and use a titanium lead to attach the spring-loaded hammer to a part that would revolve if moved. If this trigger does move, it releases the hammer, gracing you with a blinding and deafening 150 decibel explosion, not an easily-thieved bicycle.

If that doesn't say Death To Bike Thieves better than some stupid sticker, I'll eat my obnoxious messenger cap.

The steel body of the unit contains the blast and makes it–ostensibly–safe and legal for personal use. Since a lot of theft takes place at night or in low visibility conditions, the sonic impact would be paired with pretty big visual surprise value (Holy shit, why is this bike on fire?) and potentially impaired sight. The overall impact of the alarm might not be enough to totally stop a dedicated or professional thief, but the noise would be enough to draw some attention even in jaded and noisy neighborhoods. 

The viability of this alarm as a successful deterrent depends enormously on where you leave your ride, and the likelihood that it could be triggered by something other than thievery. Motorcycles are fairly stationary once parked, but bikes are lightweight and can get squirrely if parked poorly.

My own bike shed houses a herd of expensive but under-ridden bikes, and an alarm like this on the easiest to reach or hardest to replace would make a lot of sense. But if I lacked secure parking spaces or had to share my stable with other bumbling humans, like some kind of peasant, this would be less smart… Unless you think terrorizing honest people or testing your own cardiac strength are secondary benefits. 

It's no replacement for a good lock and good luck, but all in all this is a badass design, executed with fun and flair by the same guy who brought to us the Guinness Book-confirmed World's Loudest bike horn. Which is to say: screw the neighbors if you can made bike safety this awesome.

The Bike Mine Kickstarter campaign runs through June 24, 2016.

In the first post of this two-part series, I addressed a key question that often surfaces about who owns the renewal. In this post, I’ll address the most frequent question I’m asked by customer success leaders—what is the best compensation plan for Customer Success Managers (CSMs)?

Compensation Plans for Customer Success Managers (CSMs)

There’s wide debate in the customer success discipline regarding the best structure for a CSM compensation plan. Typically, I see the following three CSM compensation models:

• Base Only – pure base salary with no bonus or variable component
• Base + Bonus – base salary with a small bonus structure, usually in the form of a Management by Objective (MBO) bonus
• Base + Variable – base salary with a variable component to not only reward for performance, but also to provide more upside for over-achievement against targets.

I’ve tried all three models over the years and prefer the third model: Base + Variable.

Before I explain the benefits of a variable compensation plan, let me discuss the deficiencies of the first two models.

Three CSM Compensation Models

1. Base Only

In my opinion, a CSM compensation plan that is 100% base salary is a mistake. Base only compensation plans do little to align CSMs to company objectives and also provide no additional incentives (other than personal pride and work ethic) to achieve or overachieve the expected performance standards. CSMs are neither impacted by severe under-performance, nor rewarded for over-performance. A base only plan typically leads to mere status quo across the team.

How to Transition Comp Plans

If your CSMs are currently on a 100% Base Only compensation plan and you’d like to switch to another model, what’s the best way to migrate your current CSM team to another comp plan with the least disruption?

For new employees, it’s easy. Just start them on the new plan. But for current employees, you need to migrate with care and consideration. Some may consider just ripping the bandaid off, lowering their base, and implementing a bonus or variable plan. Doing so will be a hard pill to swallow for the CSMs as they are used to (and rely on) their current base salary.

Instead, consider adding a bonus or variable comp on top of the base salary (if you have the budget to do so) or using annual pay increases as a way to slowly migrate in the direction you’d like. Instead of increasing the base salary, put all the increases into a bonus or variable plan for the CSM. While this tends to be a viable option, it will typically take time for the annual pay increase cycle to complete the transition.

2. Base + Bonus

The Base + Bonus option is a great step in the right direction. As stated above, usually the bonus is in the form of an MBO plan in which the CSMs are measured against a handful of key objectives – individually and/or as a team. Ideally, most objectives are quantitative and aligned to the important KPIs of the business (retention, upsell, cross-sell, NPS, # of case studies, etc.). However, many times MBOs also have one or more qualitative objectives as well, such as contribution to the team, leading a special project, etc.

Adding the bonus structure is a step in the right direction as it aligns performance to company objectives and rewards accordingly. However, from my experience, a bonus structure still has a few shortcomings.

Shortcomings of Base + Bonus Model

Let me highlight one challenge by sharing an example.

At Omniture, one of our Strategic CSMs in EMEA was assigned to a strategic account that was a Global Fortune 100 company. The CSM worked tirelessly the entire year to successfully manage this customer and drive value across their global entities. For most of the year, the CSMs counterpart on the sales side of our business was nowhere to be seen, only occasionally popping into the equation to see how things were going.

At the end of the year, the strategic customer signed a multi-year, multi-million dollar renewal that significantly changed the trajectory of our relationship with that customer, largely due to the tremendous work of the CSM. At the time, we were compensating our CSMs on a mere bonus structure and this CSM probably made $2,000 on the renewal. You can imagine the frustration of the CSM who came to me and said, “Why is it that I did all the work throughout the entire year to ensure this strategic account renewed (and they renewed in a big way), and yet I get a $2,000 bonus and the sales rep (who did nothing all year) bought a new yacht with his commissions?” And he was right. That is when I became converted to at Base + Variable plan.

3. Base + Variable

I’m a fan of a Base + Variable compensation plan because I believe it provides the best alignment with the core objectives of the CSM team, drives clear accountability for performance (or lack thereof), and generously rewards CSMs for achieving or over-achieving their targets.

Variable on Retention and Growth

I’m a big believer on keeping things simple so I recommend focusing the CSM comp plan on their two main objectives: retention and growth (expansion). You may have other key performance objectives you’d like your team to execute against (NPS, adoption goals, DELTs, quarterly team projects, etc.) and that’s just fine. But I would track those separately and focus the compensation plan on 2-3 KPIs, in this case, retention and growth.

Building Out Your Variable Compensation Model

Since Base + Variable is my favorite compensation model for CSMs. Here is a little more details on how to approach setting it up. My first advice when building a variable compensation plan for CSMs is to keep things as simple as possible and focus on 2 or 3 (max) KPIs. With that in mind, let’s break down the key elements to consider when designing a variable compensation plan for your CSMs.

4 Key Variable Compensation Elements

1. On-Target Earnings (OTE) Split

First, determine the ideal base-to-variable compensation split for your CSMs. This will designate the portion of the on-target earnings (OTE) that will be allocated to base salary vs. variable compensation.

I like to see the base-to-variable split anywhere from 70/30 to 80/20 against the total on-target earnings (OTE). If the variable comp is greater than 30%, it starts looking like a sales compensation plan; however, if the variable is lower than 20%, the variable portion isn’t large enough to drive the added motivation and starts looking like a simple bonus plan.

A good compromise is a 75/25 base-to-variable split. In that case, CSM with an OTE would have 75% ($75,000) allocated to base, and 25% ($25,000) allocated to variable compensation.

2. KPI’s for a Variable CSM Comp Plan

Next, identify the KPIs that will be the basis of your plan. In the spirit of keeping things simple, I prefer to focus on the two main objectives of a CSM: core retention and expansion (growth). For both KPIs, I’d focus on revenue – core revenue retention (excluding cross-sell & upsell) and revenue expansion (up-sell and cross-sell).

Some will disagree with measuring CSMs on retention and growth, preferring to measure them on customer satisfaction or other objectives (NPS, adoption goals, DELTs, quarterly projects, etc.).

However, ultimately your business is expecting your CSMs to retain and expand your customer revenue so don’t beat around the bush and just measure them against those metrics. They are aligned to core business KPIs and aren’t “squishy” as Jason Lemkin would say.

3. Variable Split

Now that you have your 2 KPI’s identified, you need to determine how much of the variable portion will be paid against each KPI. I suggest you mirror the OTE split ratio (keep it simple) and use the same percentage split for retention vs expansion. Focus the majority of the variable on retention to reinforce the fact the CSM’s primary responsibility is retention.

Variable Split Example

Referring back to our example above, with a 75/25 OTE split you will then mirror that with a 75/25 retention-to-expansion split for the variable portion of the comp plan.

OTE Variable Split to Achieve OTE

OTE = $100,000
OTE Split = 75%/25% base-to-variable
Base = $75,000
Variable = $25,000

OTE Variable Comp with % Weight

Variable Split = 75%/25% retention-to-expansion
Retention = ($25,000 * 75%) = $18,750
Expansion = ($25,000 * 25%) = $6,250

4. Variable Targets, Payouts & Accelerators

Now the final component of the variable comp plan is setting the targets, payouts and accelerators for the team. (Note, I prefer to use the word “target” and “payouts” vs. “quota” and “commissions” to distance – or differentiate – this plan from a sales plan.)

For each KPI, determine the target retention number and expansion number you want the CSMs to hit in order to receive 100% of their payout for each period (month, quarter, or year). It’s important to work with your CFO to ensure that the combine targets for the team are completely aligned to the targets for the company, otherwise the misalignment can be costly.

Once the target has been set for 100% payout, then determine the sliding scale for under performance as well as over-achievement. I prefer to give CSMs accelerators to reward over-achievement and monetary upside for extraordinary results.

Here is an example of a sliding scale for each KPI.

Revenue Retention Target = 90%

Revenue Expansion Target = $50,000

One way to simplify the expansion variable compensation payout is to just pay a small percentage of all expansion dollars which will naturally reward higher for over-achievement. If you go with that option, you may consider whether to cap the upside or leave it uncapped.

Percentage of Expansion Revenue Variable Compensation Model

This model has the following advantages:

1. Incentivizes the CSMs with a small variable compensation plan while still keeping them clearly differentiated from a more leveraged sales compensation model which is typically closer to 50/50 or 60/40.
2. Focuses the CSMs on their primary responsibility of retention while rewarding their efforts that result in growth (expansion, upsell, cross-sell).
3. Rewards the CSMs with upside as they exceed their retention and growth targets.
4. Aligns sales and customer success to ensure they are collaborating effectively to drive retention and growth across their shared book of business.

On this last point, I’d consider a reverse comp model for sales with their variable comp focused 75% on new business growth and 25% on retention. This ensures the primary responsibilities of sales and customer success are reflected in their respective comp plans and aligns them in a complementary way to drive growth and retention.

I hope this helps guide you as you build out your customer success compensation plans.

Check out our resources below for more customer success best practices and insights for how your organization can approach customer success with the customer at the center:

eBook: 5 Ways to Surprise & Delight Your Customers

Could be a friend who can talk you into anything or a coworker who somehow closes the toughest of deals: sales superstars–they exist.

In the high-turnover world of sales, they are those who thrive, succeed, and make a huge impact in whatever environment they are in.

So, what makes a sales superstar? Is it sales DNA? Is sales DNA even a thing?

It’s nearly impossible to pin down a single trait that would make a salesperson a superstar–but we tried to come close.

We asked 20 sales and business leaders:

What’s the number one trait of sales superstars?

The answers are very insightful. Take time to read each one and pick up nuggets of wisdom to help you push yourself and your team toward the right direction.

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CLICK A NAME TO READ THEIR ANSWERS

• Grant Cardone • Dave Kurlan • Deb Calvert • Tom Hopkins • Ian Moyse •Lori Richardson •
• Jeb Blount • Kristin Zhivago • Mark LaCour • Jamie Shanks • James Potter •
• Eric Loflohm • Bob Phibbs •Rico Wyder • Mike Trow • Mark Tewart • Sandi Lin •
• Elizabeth McLeod • David Towne • Samar Singla •

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The greatest salespeople, no matter what the buyer says, states or demands, under no circumstances, ever disagrees or makes the buyer wrong or suggests their request is impossible.

Once you perfect this simple strategy, it will save your sales. The old saying, “the customer is never wrong,” is not true.

In fact, often, the customer is wrong, or they even lie, but that doesn’t mean you should call them out or make them wrong. When you tell someone you can’t, won’t, not allowed to or that’s impossible, you cause the customer to become defensive, more dug into their position, and make them less likely to agree.

Understand that all variations of no, not, never, can’t, won’t, against our policy, and impossible must be avoided.

Train, drill and rehearse agreeing with the customer. My cloud-based sales university, CardoneUniversity.com, has built-in drills to make sure you get this handled and quit blowing deals.

Any and all variation of no and can’t must be eliminated from your vocabulary.

You may think, “I don’t want to mislead the customer. I’m going to over promise and be unable to deliver.” There’s an art to telling a customer, “I’d love to make that happen for you,” instead of, “that’s impossible,” or, “I can’t do that.”

The problem is, as soon as you say no, or that you cannot do something because you are ‘so honest’; you just eliminated any chance of being able to do anything for the customer.

The next time a customer asks for the impossible say, “I never say ‘no’ until I have to.”

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Grant Cardone is the sales guru. He is a New York Times best-selling author,
international speaker,and is considered the top sales training expert in the world.

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The use of the word trait suggests that the answer should be a personality trait.

However, there isn’t any one personality trait that is predictive of success in sales.

We can substitute skill, strength, attribute or characteristic, but each has its drawbacks.

Prospecting skills and closing skills are most desirable, but without appropriate selling strengths to support them, the skills alone may not be enough. Those strengths are important, but without sales process and methodology to direct them, no single strength is enough either.

Attributes are subsets of Sales Core Competencies, which include a combination of strengths and skills, but even those, without strong commitment to execute, can fall short.

Therefore, my long, but justified answer, is the commitment to do whatever is required to achieve success – on a call, in a meeting, in a sales cycle, with an account, always.

Dave Kurlan is a top-rated speaker, best-selling author, radio show host, successful entrepreneur, top-notch blogger,
and sales development industry pioneer. He was inducted into the Sales & Marketing Hall of Fame in 2012.
He is the CEO of Kurlan Associates Inc. and Objective Management Group, Inc. (OMG).

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No trait matters more in selling than determination, an unshakeable resolve.

Superstar sellers can’t be deterred when in pursuit of a goal.

They display fortitude or “grit” in overcoming obstacles and relentlessly moving forward because they are bound and determined to succeed.

Superstars simply don’t give up.
They dig in when the going gets rough, and they work ahead to
steel themselves up for those tough times by recognizing and maximizing opportunities.
They believe they will reach their goals and, as a result of their drive, they do.

Deb Calvert is a renowned keynote speaker, a Top 50 Sales Influencer,
UC Berkeley Instructor, author of the DISCOVER Questions® bestselling book series,
and President and Founder of People First Productivity Solutions.

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Being disciplined is a decision we make every waking moment of every day. We can either take life as it comes, or we can learn and take the steps necessary to build the lives of our dreams.

In the early days of my sales career, I attended a training where the speaker said, “Find out who the most successful people are in your local area and invite them to lunch.” I looked around my community and invited one of the most successful businessmen to lunch at one of the nicest local restaurants. I was quite surprised when he agreed.

Being young, and nervous, about meeting with this man, I didn’t know what to say. He finally asked why I had invited him. I told him about the speaker’s suggestion and that I was curious to know how he became so successful.

He then offered to give me the words he lived by…the words that made all the difference in the level of success he had achieved. I was so excited until I realized I didn’t even have a piece of paper to take notes of this conversation. I grabbed my napkin and pen to write down whatever he was about to tell me.

He began by telling me that there would be days I’d hate him for sharing this advice. And there would be days he would bless me for it.

Then, he gave me what I refer to as The Golden Dozen– twelve words that changed my life forever:
“I must do the most productive thing possible at every given moment.”
That’s the essence of discipline.

There will be times when the last thing we want to do is to make one more call, or handle paperwork. But they’re pieces of the puzzle of success. When we concentrate on productivity, it’s amazing at how much more successful we become.

And, please note that laying on the beach in Hawaii can be productive, too, as long as it’s a recreational or restorative time that will allow greater productivity when returning to our main work.

I know that’s a long story to explain how to develop discipline, but I find in teaching that people remember advice better when it’s attached to a story.

Tom Hopkins is a sales expert, sought-after speaker, and author of top sales books
like How to Master the Art of Selling and When Buyers Say No.

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My number one superstar sales rep trait, if I could select only one, would have to be
reps who exhibited habitual strong exploratory questioning techniques,
AKA ‘two ears, one mouth syndrome’.

Digging deeper on prospect customer’s needs, issues, wants, wishes, etc., and understanding the Why’s Whats, Hows and What if’s at a deeper than surface level.

The more you understand and know the better you can quantify if you are a good fit for the client, what their ‘true’ selection criteria (with weightings) is and act accordingly to maximise both of your time and your capability to win the business.

A high proportion of sales people still do surface level qualification and miss getting good direction from the customer.

Be like a child again, be inquisitive and ask lots of questions; ask Why, Why, Why and often you will be surprised what you dig up and find out!

Ian Moyse is one of the leading executives and thought leaders in the Cloud Solutions industry.
He is the Sales Director at Axios Systems & UK Sales Director of the Year 2015 (ISMM),
who was awarded a 2015 Power Profile by LinkedIn.

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Oh, I have two.

A superstar sales rep is a student – a learner – no matter how long
they’ve been in professional sales.

They look for cues, patterns, and the unspoken. They are also coachable, which ties into being a learner – the desire to improve.

0px; text-align: center;”>Lori Richardson is a top sales influencer and strategist.
She is the founder and CEO of Score More Sales, a sales consultancy that works with
technology brands worldwide to drive sales growth.

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The path to superstar-level success in sales is brutally simple.

So simple that it’s a Paradox of Basics: A truth that is so blatantly obvious it has become impossibly invisible. It’s also a truth that remains frustratingly elusive for most salespeople, causing so many promising, intelligent, talented people to fail miserably in sales.

What’s the secret that separates superstars from everyone else, and why do they consistently outperform other salespeople?

Superstars are relentless, unstoppable, fanatical prospectors

They are obsessive about keeping their pipeline full of qualified prospects. They prospect anywhere and anytime—constantly turning over rocks looking for their next opportunity. They prospect day and night—unstoppable and always on.

This is why superstar salespeople out-earn and out-produce their peers. It’s why they take home the awards, spiffs, and trips. It’s why superstars are not one hit wonders – their full pipeline allows them to produce exceptional results year in and year out.

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Jeb Blount is the founder of SalesGravy.com and bestselling author of Fanatical Prospecting and People Buy You.

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I think the number one trait of superstar sales reps is bravery.

Salespeople need to be brave enough to pursue the conversations needed to make sales.

And when those conversations happen, they need to be brave enough to meet the prospect where they are in their buying journey, and to let the prospect lead the conversation. This means to not sell while selling, to back off, to stay in listen mode during the whole conversation, to work on the tradeoffs with the customer, and to finally let the customer decide that he’s ready to buy.

Customers don’t need us anymore to find out which solutions are available, but all of us need someone to talk over the tradeoffs with once we are ready to pursue a particular course of action.

Salespeople must be brave enough to let that conversation go in whichever direction is best for the customer.

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Kristin Zhivago is an expert sales coach, marketer, and customer success professional.
She is the president of Cloud Potential.

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The #1 trait of superstar sales reps in 2016?
They are exceptional problem solvers.

Prospects and existing clients are looking for solutions to their business issues. And if you can identify, articulate, and solve those issues, not only will you be a top performer but clients see you as an asset to their organization. Not as a vendor.

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Mark LaCour is one of the leading experts in oil and gas sales. He is the founder of Modal Point

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A never quenched thirst for learning and development.

Nearly every sales organization in the world is the same. 20% of the sales team produces 80% of the results – the ultimate Pareto Law.

The superstar 20% is almost always reading, learning, watching, training and evolving their craft. We have empirically proven with Social Selling that learning behavior has a direct correlation to sales actions & results.

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Jamie Shanks is an expert in social selling and digital marketing.
He is the CEO of Sales For Life, a leading social selling company whose thrust
is to help sales departments socialize the top of their sales funnels.

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Relationships = They listen more than they talk and give more than they take.

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James Potter is the LinkedIn Man.
He is the director of the company with the same name where he helps businesses;
people break down their barriers to sales by being themselves.

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The #1 trait is self-motivation.
They have the ability to solve problems from their internal drive.

Eric Lofholm is a seminar leader and sales scripting expert.
He’s also the founder and president of Eric Lofholm International, where they help people make more sales.

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A superstar is always curious about behavior. Cause and effect.

What did they just say that got a good reaction? If they missed a sale, when did they feel it went bad?

Hacks repeat themselves and sound like it because they are just vomiting the same stuff on everyone.

The superstar may say many of the same things but knows how to make it sound fresh because they can micro-adjust their presentation on a dime based on what they read from the other person – and shut up long enough to process all of it.

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Bob Phibbs is the Retail Doctor.
He is an expert speaker on retail sales, training, and marketing.

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Capability to adapt and conform.

Sales rockstars have a very specific quality of continuous adaptation in any situation.

This could be in a sales meeting when adjusting a client conversation, picking up on hints and details what the client says, and guiding the client to realised themselves why they need this product. This could be to adapt to a changing process internally and to efficiently accomplish what is conform to the company but fits the client’s requirements.

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Rico Wyder is a mobile expert, author & angel investor.
He is currently Tickled Media’s Regional Vice President of Product.

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Being diligent and organized.

In today’s world of increased competitor attack and ‘noise’ from social media. Most, if not all, prospects and customers need to be guided and helped through the sales cycle.

The most successful sales superstars are those that are diligent and organized in their opportunity analysis and follow up.

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Michael Trow is a marketing, sales, and systems expert helping small businesses grow.
He is the president of Alderbest CRM.

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Two words: resilient and persistent.

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Mark Tewart is an automotive industry sales expert, motivational speaker, consultant,
and author of How To Be A Sales Superstar. He is the founder and president of Tewart Management Group.

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Organization.

Sales is a metrics driven funnel combined with the art of conversation. The best sales reps are highly structured about their time and activities in order to generate maximum results.

Sandi Lin is a customer onboarding and success expert. She is the CEO and Co-founder of Skilljar.

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We assume that salespeople are primarily motivated by money. We couldn’t be more wrong.
After spending a decade studying top performing sales organizations, I’ve found that the salespeople who sell with Noble Purpose, those who earnestly and factually understand how they make a difference to their customers, outsell salespeople who are primarily focused on sales targets and money.

These findings are a wake-up call for companies and a game changer for any leader who wants to grow sales performance.

Elizabeth McLeod is the Vice President of McLeod & More, Inc.,
a leading sales leadership consultancy helping clients drive revenue and do work that makes them proud.

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My own answer (and I’m a CPA, not a marketer) is that the number one trait of superstar sales reps is

focusing on people who have the means and the interest in buying,
and then not taking no for an answer.

David Towne is the Chief Financial Officer of Perry S. Marshall & Associates,
a consultancy that helps entrepreneurs find freedom and autonomy through direct marketing.

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Persistence.

Samar Singla is one of India’s most promising young CEOs.
He heads two successful tech companies: Click Labs and Jugnoo.

Go ahead and take these lessons. Use them to improve and push yourself and your team. Working towards being a sales superstar sounds like hard work–but the fulfillment and rewards are surely worth it.

What if email didn’t exist?

It sounds crazy, right? We send and receive more than 215 billion emails a year, and that number’s projected to hit 257 billion by 2020.

More email means more noise. That’s why we’re always sharing tips on how to write high-quality emails, and why HubSpot’s Marketing Blog recently unsubscribed 250,000 unengaged readers from our email list. If we all sent fewer, better emails, we’d probably all see a rise in engagement and have less of a complex about email.

But it’s not easy to make that shift -- especially since there are 2.7 billion current email users who’d have to buy into changing their behavior. So until we have an email revolution, the easiest way to declutter our lives might be to get rid of email altogether.

Thierry Breton, CEO and chairman of information technology services company Atos Origin, agrees. In a 2011 press release, Breton announced the firm would be a zero-email company by 2014 -- replacing all email-based internal communications with “new collaboration and social media tools.”

Breton told the BBC he launched the policy to improve his workers’ lives, and drew inspiration from younger employees who had never used email before Atos, instead relying on instant messaging tools and social networks to communicate.

“I started an in-depth study with our consulting practice to see how many internal emails the 80,000 employees of Atos were receiving,” Breton said. “We realized they found 15% of the messages useful, and the rest was lost time.”

As part of the rollout, Atos even acquired social networking company blueKiwi to both use its services to help employees get to zero email and add a new line of business to its offerings.

Five years later, the Harvard Business Review reports that while Atos still isn’t quite at zero-email status, they have made significant progress.

“The company has reduced overall email by 60 percent, going from an average of 100 email messages per week per employee to less than 40,” David Burkus writes. “Atos’s operating margin increased from 6.5% to 7.5% in 2013, earnings per share rose by more than 50%, and administrative costs declined from 13% to 10%. Obviously, not all of these improvements were the result of banning email, but the correlation is certainly strong.”

Burkus also reports that a growing body of research shows email can actually be bad for us. He cites a 2012 Association for Computing Machinery study that found that people multitasked less, focused better, and were less stressed (measured by wearable heart rate monitors) when they were cut off from email for five days.

And while most companies probably won’t eliminate email from their workflows any time soon, many are moving toward reducing overall email load by banning any sort of email (external or internal) for smaller windows of time. Fulfillment company PBD Worldwide has declared Fridays email-free since 2006, and design agency Reliable PSD designates one day a week where employees can only email for the first and last hour of the day, Fast Company reports. Executive vice president of operations at U.S. Cellular Jay Ellison told NPR he's also implemented email-free Fridays.

It’s hard to imagine the sales profession -- or frankly any profession -- without email. But as email has become more ubiquitous and its toll on our productivity and stress levels grows, it doesn’t require a huge leap to expect that more and more businesses are going to invest in better ways to communicate.

If that happens, it pretty much guarantees a shakeup for salespeople. Maybe salespeople will need to rellocate the time they previously devoted to email and call prospecting (phones and voicemails may be on their way out, too) to creating full-funnel content that compels buyers to reach out to reps. Perhaps we’ll see a heavier reliance on referral sales and word-of-mouth.

It’s also possible that if more and more businesses follow Atos’ lead and scrap internal email, it’ll be easier for salespeople to stand out in buyers’ inboxes. But whatever happens, you can be sure that the landscape of sales will look very different if email were to ever fall by the wayside.

What do you think of these companies’ decisions to partially or completely eliminate email? Do you think email will ever be replaced by another medium of communication? What do you think will happen to sales if it does? Let us know in the comments below.

Content marketing aligns perfectly with the way many B2B buyers search for solutions to business problems.

The majority investigate online, beginning with search engines and continuing on provider websites.

Your ability to develop a powerful content strategy that creates a clear path to your solutions is essential in B2B lead generation.

The following are important tips to help improve your content strategy to align with your typical buyer’s process.

Research Your Readers a.k.a. Know Your Audience

Consider an author writing a book that he hopes is a best seller. To achieve commercial popularity, the author must write a book that speaks to readers in the intended genre.

In the same way, your content must speak to the needs and interests of the buyers interested in the solutions you offer.

Research the interests, motives and problems of people that consider each of your solutions. Build buyer personas to develop a full profile or view of these people.

Then, create content that matches. Creating content just for the sake of creating content, no matter how good it is, is not enough.

Establish Thought Leadership

Powerful content marketing is about creating a path.

Think about Hansel and Gretel leaving bread crumbs. You first connect with buyers, typically after a search, and then create a trail of crumbs to your solution.

In your search engine optimisation strategies, consider your content as answers to problems people research.

Use this initial content to establish thought leadership. Show that you recognise the problems a buyer faces, prove knowledge and expertise, and then invite them for more education on your website.

Convert with Diverse Content

On your website, it is important to give a clear, concise and in-depth perspective on the solutions you provide.

Whether it is the first step or the next stop in the buyer’s journey, make it simple for a prospect to connect with your opportunities.

Add images, graphics, white papers, case studies and videos to your website content to enhance your story.

Show and tell a prospect why your particular solution offers benefits that best address the deep pains he, or she, is experiencing.

Include a compelling call to action, such as an invitation to download a document, try your solution for free or receive a demonstration.

Get Some Help

Content marketing is a lead generation strategy that is different from those historically employed by most sellers and marketers.

Therefore, you might be better off hiring a firm that specialises in content marketing and content syndication to develop and distribute your message.

A speciality firm will work closely with your internal marketing teams to formulate the best content strategy to optimise your lead generation success.

Conclusion

Powerful content marketing is much more than simply mass-producing articles for your company blog.

It is a strategy designed to create a path for a buyer already engaged in solution investigation. Build a diverse content mix, and consider the advantages of integrating a speciality firm into your plan.

Contact us now to find out how Internal Results can help with your content marketing lead generation strategy.

How do you determine the optimal number of sales calls your representatives should make?

This number is an important, sought after metric to sales managers and representatives who want to gauge what it takes to be successful.

The question is, how do you come up with a number that’s truly useful? Is there an optimal number? I want to explain why that “magic number” of calls per day is subject to many factors that are specific to your company, your company’s sales culture, and your company’s sales technology.

The number of calls you need depends on their quality. I believe this perspective can help you arrive at a “magic number” that is based solidly in the reality of your specific sales environment, and not just an arbitrary number you pull out of a hat like the magician with the rabbit!

What Factors Can Affect Your Ideal Number?

Consider each of the categories below as factors that affect the number
of calls per day that your SDRs can make.

• The list of contacts – who determines the list of prospects that the SDR should call? And what information does the SDR get about this prospect besides contact information?
• Outbound prospecting guidance – what details are documented about making calls? Is the call guidance script known to work well?
• Number of Meetings – how much time is the SDR expected to spend attending meetings? Is the balance of time considered?
• Training – What is the quality of training, and how much time does the SDR allocate to training?
• Available resources – What resources can the SDR access, and is this support enough?
• Time spent with sales counterparts – Inside sales representatives can learn from others who contact the prospect – how good is this communication and how much is available?

Your organization’s answers to these questions will be unique to your setting. The important thing is to recognize their impact on the quality of each phone call your representatives make.

For example, even the most determined and hard-working SDR who makes 100 calls a day may be uncovering too few real opportunities.

Some Real-Life Examples

100 Calls Per Day

In a real-life case, I had the opportunity to work with a tenacious and disciplined person who made 100 calls per day. In this case the leads passed to Sales were not considered quality leads by the receiving representatives.

The level of effort is not at fault. Rather, the process did not entail having a meaningful conversation or connecting with the right contact.

Some of the problems were that these calls:

• Addressed non-C-level executives
• Consisted of a non-compelling opening
• Included minimal to no research
• Included poor qualifying questions
• Lacked lead definition and understanding
• Failed to uncover the prospect’s business challenges
• Mistook the response of “call me back in a few weeks/months” for interest
• Failed to engage with prospects in a business conversation
• Were poorly controlled
• Were quick calls

50 calls Per day

I worked with another group of SDRs, each who made 50 calls per day.

These representatives were more relaxed, and this enabled them to be more themselves and less tense while on the clock. They also had the time to do a bit of research on each contact and account. With that said, they were able to have more conversations and – quite frankly – to have more meaningful engagements with prospects and clients.

This led to a great quality of leads that were accepted by the sales representatives.

30 Calls Per Day

What happens in an organization that tasks SDRs to call on accounts they know very little about? What if these representatives have been trained in a procedure to research their prospects using LInkedIn, annual reports, press releases, and other information about their contacts before calling them?

It is possible to generate high quality leads even if call volume is low. Is this the right number for your team?

Other factors you will need to evaluate include:

• How you use call automation technology
• How easily you can access your pre-call research when you connect with a contact
• How you leave voicemails or recorded messages to make your calls “warm” to prospects

As you can see, there are many factors that determine the number and quality of calls an SDR can perform in a stated period of time.

To help you identify the most important factors for your organization, see our free guide, The Ideal Number of Sales Calls: How Many Calls Should a Sales Development Representative Make Daily?

This article is just a sample of the full content — get instant access to this free ebook in our Resources section.

 

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on quite a run, from Google’s AlphaGo, which earlier this year defeated Go world champion Lee Sedol four games to one, to Amazon’s Echo, the voice-activated digital assistant.

The trend is heating up the sales field as well, enabling entirely new ways of selling. Purchasing, for example, is moving to automated bots, with 15%–20% of total spend already sourced through e-platforms. By 2020 customers will manage 85% of their relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human. Leading companies are experimenting with what these technologies can do for them, typically around transactional processes at early stages of the customer journey.

For example, AI applications can take over the time-consuming tasks of initiating contact with a sales lead and then qualifying, following up, and sustaining the lead. Amelia, the “cognitive agent” developed by IPsoft, can parse natural language to understand customers’ questions, handling up to 27,000 conversations simultaneously and in multiple languages. And because “she” is connected to all the relevant systems, Amelia delivers results faster than a human operator. Of course, there will be occasions when even AI is stumped, but Amelia is smart enough to recognize when to involve a human agent.

Insight Center

As we learned from researching our book, Sales Growth, companies that have pioneered the use of AI in sales rave about the impact, which includes an increase in leads and appointments of more than 50%, cost reductions of 40%–60%, and call time reductions of 60%–70%. Add to that the value created by having human reps spend more of their time closing deals, and the appeal of AI grows even more.

Clearly, AI is bringing big changes. But what do they mean for sales — and the people who do it? We see two big implications.

The Sales Role Is Going to Change Completely

The “death of a salesman” is an overplayed trope, but the road ahead does mean significant changes for how sales work is done. The changes are primarily focused on automating activities rather than individual jobs, but the scale of those changes is likely to profoundly disrupt what sales people do.

We analyzed McKinsey Global Institute data on the “automatability” of 2,000 different workplace activities, comparing job requirements to the current capabilities of leading-edge technology. We found that 40% of time spent on sales work activities can be automated by adapting current technologies. If the technologies that process and understand natural language reach the median level of human performance, this number will rise to 47%.

Pity the parts salesperson, an occupation where 85% of all activities have the potential to be automated with today’s technology. Gathering customer or product information to determine customer needs, processing sales or other transactions, taking product orders from customers, and preparing sales or other contracts collectively account for approximately three-quarters of a parts salesperson’s time — and all can be automated. On the other hand, most of a sales manager’s activities, which involve strategic decision making and employee supervision and coaching, cannot be automated.

Sales People Will Need to Develop “Machine Intelligence”

Much of the focus on AI and automation has been on which jobs or tasks will be replaced. That’s understandable, of course. But it’s clear, if less explored, that sales leaders and reps will continue to be crucial to the sales process even as they adapt to working with machines.

The “human touch” will need to focus more on managing exceptions, tolerating ambiguity, using judgment, shaping the strategies and questions that machines will help enable and answer, and managing an increasingly complex web of relationships with employees, vendors, partners, and customers.

Machine learning and automation tools, for example, will be able to source, qualify, and execute far more sales opportunities than reps can keep up with. Sales leaders therefore need to develop clear escalation and exception protocols to manage the trickiest or most valuable situations, making sure a sales rep keeps a robot from losing a big sale.

While machine learning will continue to evolve, for the foreseeable future senior executives must point the technology in the right direction. They’ll have to think about a number of questions: What sorts of decisions should be automated? Which kinds of automation will help deliver on strategic growth goals? What are the legal and risk implications? How will vendor and technology relationships need to be managed and integrated to create the greatest competitive advantage?

There are implications too for the hiring and managing of sales reps. An empathetic personality will still be important, but beyond their relationship skills, reps will succeed based on their ability to understand and interpret data, work effectively with AI, and move quickly on opportunities. That’s a very different sales profile from the one many companies recruit for today.

Machines are already doing many sales jobs more effectively and efficiently than their human counterparts, and boosting customer satisfaction in the process. How sales leaders respond will determine what the future of sales looks like — and how well it works.

Every supplier knows the drill: You identify your most valuable customers and classify them as “strategic accounts.” You can’t afford to lose them. Whatever they ask for, you deliver with your best team and best turnaround — even if it’s unreasonable or unprofitable. The customers know they are a strategic account, so they’ll try everything to wring out cost savings. Even customers that use extensive analysis and a rigorous qualification process to identify the ideal vendor have learned that discounts will flow if they put a supplier through the procurement price “buzz saw.” It’s a brutal process. No wonder a recent study showed that salespeople worry more about the price conversation than any other part of the sales cycle.

But you can shift the conversation away from ruinous discounts and back to firmer footing by introducing a new word to your lexicon: “preferred.” You are the “preferred vendor” for your strategic accounts, and though they may put you through a gauntlet, they need you, too — they’ve chosen you because they believe you are the best solution for their needs. Smart sellers identify when they are in the preferred supplier position and don’t given in to customer demands for discounts by cutting their prices. After all, price concessions just train the customer to expect more price concessions in the future. Here are three ways to shift the conversation.

Focus on the value you create for these customers. There’s a reason you’re their preferred supplier. Focus on that, and stop wasting energy worrying about losing the business. Instead, worry about giving up too much in the process, because you’ll never get it back. Procurement tactics are designed specifically to rattle the confidence of salespeople and executives so that agreements are made in the heat of the moment when they threaten to take the business away. Customers know that if you are worried about losing the business, you’ll grant bigger discounts.

Limit the involvement of senior executives in negotiations. Yes, I do mean that. Procurement people are specifically trained to get senior executives to the negotiation table because those executives are able to, and often will, grant bigger discounts — much bigger. But a better role for senior executives is to support the salespeople and managers to hold the line on price and protect value. If executives want to develop better account relationships, they need to do it before negotiation time.

If a customer is really pressing you for a discount, talk about features or services the customer would be willing to give up to get it — a “give-get.” These little gems force buyers to recognize that while they may be able to reduce costs, there will be less value in the solution offered. Give-gets force the discussion from price back to where it should be: value. This leads the conversation away from haggling, to a more illuminating and productive discussion around what the customer really values. They show their hand when they say, “Wait a minute.”

Finally, don’t sweat delays in these negotiations. If your customer goes dark, doesn’t return phone calls, and ignores you, don’t get rattled. Remember, you are their preferred supplier for a reason, and there will likely be substantial switching costs if they want to change vendors. Silence is a powerful negotiation tactic; don’t let it pressure you into giving a revenue-destroying discount.

Negotiations with major customers can be stressful, but an understanding of the value you provide, using tactics like give-gets, and not falling for tactics like silence can move the relationship back to where it should be: cooperative, collaborative, and based on trust.

DID YOU KNOW: 67% OF LEADS IN 2016 ARE GENERATED BY COMPANIES WITH AN ACTIVE BLOG?

As someone who has live through the digital age, and has been working in the world of social media for 7 years, I love a good statistic. I find that businesses who don’t stay as up to date as possible, tend to fall behind their competitors. I make it an important task of mine to stay as relevant as possible, and know the marketing statistics that are important to what I do.

Marketing is my speciality so I do my research, and find out the latest 2016 statistics. This allows me to provide social proof to those who might be doubting social media, and the benefits it can bring.

If, like me, you find Marketing statistics insightful, and important, please see a breakdown below of statistics on Content Marketing, Email Marketing, Digital Marketing, Social Media Marketing and Mobile Marketing.

CONTENT MARKETING

When looking at 2016 content marketing statistics, I found it interesting to read that businesses and marketers are starting to lean towards more content-focused marketing. 76% of digital marketers said they will produce more content in 2016, and 51% said they are going to increase their content marketing spend.

Whilst 88% of B2B marketers are using content marketing as a part of their marketing strategy, only 32% have documented their content marketing strategy. LinkedIn is the most popular social media platform with 94% of B2B marketers using the network as a part of their strategy. Twitter followed behind with 87%, Facebook with 84%, YouTube at 74% and Google+ at 62%.

The most effective piece of content marketing used by B2B marketers is Infographics, with 63% of people using them, said they were effective. Surprisingly, only 51% of business owners said that content management was extremely important or “critical” to their customer journey. I can only see this increasing as we move into 2017 and beyond.

EMAIL MARKETING

Email marketing has been extremely important to my overall marketing strategy, and I have personally reaped the benefits of great email marketing. According to Econsultancy, 78% of their study believe that all email communication will be personalised in the next 5 years.

Email should not be discounted. It is 40x more effective at acquiring a new customer than Facebook or Twitter. Looking at personalisation; emails are 26% more likely to be opened if they have a customised email subject line.

Email has ranked highest in terms of ROI compared to other marketing strategies, and 78% of consumers rank email as the most preferred communication platform.

Don’t forget your social sharing buttons in emails. Emails that include them, have a 158% higher CTR (click through rate) than emails that don’t include share links.

DIGITAL MARKETING

Digital marketing spend is at an all time high, and is predicted to grow 12.9% over the next year, making the internet the largest advertising medium in 2016 (overtaking TV).

Marketers said that email provides the best impact at 26%, followed by SEO at 17%, paid search at 15%, social media at 5% and display advertisement at 5%. We, as consumers are still wary of advertisement. 54% of internet users will not click on a banner ad because they do not trust them.

Video marketing is taking a huge step forward in 2016. 88% of businesses say that video is an important part of their digital marketing strategy, with a further 64% of businesses believe that video marketing has directly lead to an increase in sales.

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Social media has been a game changer over the last 5 years. It now plays as large a role in a purchasing decision as TV with 57% of customers saying they are influenced by positive comments about a brand online.

Within the next 5 years, dedicated social media marketing budgets are likely to increase from around 10% to 25%. Identifying ROI is one of the top three social media challenges, with 60% of marketers stating this.

A huge 80% of marketers identify “engagement” (likes, shares) as the most important metric for assessing social media marketing success. Audience size comes in second at 61%, followed by website traffic at 56%.

When looking at what tools are used to measure social media marketing success, 65% of businesses use native analytics provided by the social networks themselves. Social media management platforms like Hootsuite follow close second at 62%, with Google Analytics coming in third at 59%.

Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are said to drive the most referral traffic, whereas LinkedIn, YouTube and Google+ drive the most engaged traffic. 58% of marketers say original written content is their most important form of social content. 19% say the same about original visual content (e.g. infographics). 10% say curation of others’ content is most important.

MOBILE MARKETING

By 2019, mobile advertising will represent 72% of all digital ad spending. Only 68% of companies have integrated mobile marketing into their overall marketing strategy. This will increase as we move to 2017 and beyond.

Google have said that 61% of users are unlikely to return to a website they had trouble accessing on mobile, and 40% will head to a competitor instead. If this isn’t enough to make you think about mobile marketing, 83% of mobile users say a seamless experience across all devices is extremely important and 57% said they will not recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site.

Pinterest is the most mobile social network with 64% of its referred traffic coming from a smartphone, or tablet device.

I have shared a lot of great information above, so make sure you take your time to digest all of the statistics that are important to you, and your business.

Please click here to see the sources of the statistics shared above.