Rnordman

When your content is created for an audience and it resonates with them, it scales.

The answer isn’t producing more content. The answer is finding who your audience is first. When you find your audience, it grows.

Is the content you are creating connecting with others?

As we all become engulfed with the new ‘Hello’ single from Adele on every radio station, it becomes the equivalent of producing the lowest common denominator for a mass market. It’s safe, it connects and within a week everyone knows about it.

However, what if you moved away from trying to have as many slices of the same cake and trying to appeal to as many people as possible but build a powerful direct connection with a niche audience?

Someone Who’s Not For You

Back to Adele. On YouTube she has amassed a massive 6.8 million subscribers, but that is pretty loose change compared to KSI with nearly 11 millions subscribers.

You are probably thinking ‘Who on earth is KSI?’

That’s ok, he’s probably not for you.

However his 2 billion views mean something to the gaming community. It connects and boy, does it scale.

KSI is 22 years old and from Watford and his YouTube videos are a mix of FIFA commentary/tips, challenges, pranks and all wrapped up into the ‘banter’ category.

According to Variety, he is one of the most influential and bankable people according to 13 to 17 year olds (see…this is all about owning a niche). It’s more move over PewDiePie and goodbye Johnny Depp.

Having amassed this following naturally makes him attractive to brands (he was a member of The Sun’s online team at the 2014 World Cup), but more importantly with his ongoing and committed content he has built a loyal audience. When he endorses products to his audience, his audience listens, takes note and reacts.

Whilst everything is built around a channel owned by somebody else (Google), if KSI decided to leave YouTube and set-up via his own website, the audience would follow. They are not there for YouTube, they are there for KSI.

It was this audience that helped position him at number 30 in the charts in March this year with his song, “Lamborghini” and Island released his debut album, “Keep Up” in 2016. Great work for someone who built an audience around YouTube videos (that started in 2011) and now creating revenue channels in different spaces.

Lets not also forget his book, I Am A Bellend, released at the end of September 2015.

Please don’t think I’m using this as a platform to sing the praises of someone who I can’t identify with.

He’s still probably not for you, and not for me. KSI represents the Loaded magazine mindset for the Tinder generation. However, I take my hat off to him and what he has achieved by owning his media.

That Link With What YOU Do

I am not here to comment on the output of content, but to highlight that from a centre of gravity (his YouTube channel), he has created satellites that are drawing people back to his space. The satellites represent the sales of books, singles, gigs and albums that all become the gravitational pull back to his primary source (his YouTube channel).

So how does this relate to you?

If you just have one place called a blog and you concentrate purely on this space for your content marketing efforts and that is it, you are probably wasting time.

Your blog can become the main planet with a gravitational pull, but there has to be activity within your solar system.

By activity, I mean a bank of assets that can draw back to the primary space. Whether events, podcasts, videos, reports, email, even print, but created on a consistent basis all form the ongoing content created for an audience that all comes back to a theme of what you stand for.

Ok, it may not be ‘bants’ but the role that you provide to others is to make their lives easier/more knowledgeable. When it comes to buy, you are committed to providing value beyond what you primarily do as a business.

The big point I am trying to make here and using the example of KSI is that more content is not the answer; the answer lies in controlling your network and commanding the media.

You have to understand the environment that you are within and the entire space that you are part of.

That Tiny Space You Have Banked On

A website is a small space to reside within. Perhaps it’s time to showcase what you know and have learnt to others in a more personal way (from the event that you control through to speaking at industry related events). This all comes down to creating a better experience for a customer and also a prospective customer.

This all represents having clarity with a voice that leads to others who will stand by you. I know I tend to use Jimmy’s Iced Coffee as a pretty well worn case study, but this is the kind of approach I mean.

The iced coffee is in the chiller aisle with every other huge brand that has been around for much longer and larger ad budgets, but that’s ok. Jimmy’s Iced Coffee isn’t just about a drink to have mid morning, but people buying into a lifestyle of freedom, not compromising and independence (backed up by the ‘keep you chin up’ #KYCU mentality).

Discovering and sharing your own voice will optimise you.

Whilst the likes of KSI and Jimmy’s Iced Coffee may not necessarily have the B2B link that you are probably looking for, their whole approach is exactly the same.

When you mean something to others and not try to appeal to everyone, you speak to a niche. A connection is then made.

Where we are heading is into a bloody crusade for direct relationships, the moment you succeed is when your content resonates with a distinct audience.

Starting To Round Up

Creating considered content is a huge part of your jigsaw puzzle, but it cannot stand-alone. There is a huge battle for attention that will become ever more dense in 2016.

Your role is to connect and create genuine value for others. If you can do this, then they are on board, no matter who else is fighting to be heard.

When Jim Koch left a comfortable career at Boston Consulting Group in 1984 to start the Boston Beer Company, his father told him he was making a terrible mistake.

The Kochs are a family of brewers, but Koch's dad thought the idea of trying to enter an industry dominated by brands like Budweiser and Coors was destined for failure.

Koch, however, started by aiming at a niche market. Today craft breweries produce 10% of all the beer in the United States, and Sam Adams is at the head of the pack, accounting for a full 1% of that slice, and bringing in more than a billion dollars in annual revenue.

In his new book "Quench Your Own Thirst," Koch shares 10 books he finds have had the most impact on his success. He previously explained the value of the first two selections in an interview with Business Insider last year, saying they helped him develop a philosophy of prioritizing customers over shareholders and using constant innovation as an advantage.

These are the titles he recommends you pick up if you're an aspiring entrepreneur or leader.

SEE ALSO: Anthony Bourdain discusses the new season of 'Parts Unknown,' his favorite restaurants, and how he went from outsider chef to the top of the food world

'Out of the Crisis' by W. Edward Deming

Deming was an American statistician who spent a decade in Japan after World War II. His lectures, consultation, and training contributed significantly to the country's postwar economic boom and the emergence of fine Japanese products on the global market.

In 1951, the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers created the Deming Prize for exceptional achievement in industry, but Deming didn't gain notoriety in the US until the '80s.

His 1986 book "Out of the Crisis," which Koch said is written in charming colloquial language, outlines 14 management points that advocate for the need to forecast, stay innovative, and empower employees.

"Long-term commitment to new learning and new philosophy is required of any management that seeks transformation," Deming wrote. "The timid and the fainthearted, and the people that expect quick results, are doomed to disappointment."

Koch said he takes this approach to his business, ignoring the daily ups and downs of the Boston Beer Company's stock price and prioritizing long-term growth over short-term results.

"So I'm worried about, where are we in two years? In five years? How do I make this the best, strongest, healthiest company I can?" Koch told us.

Find it here »

'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions' by Thomas S. Kuhn

The late physicist's book has become "one of the most cited academic books of all time" since its initial publication in 1962, establishing Kuhn as "perhaps the most influential" philosopher of science in the 20th century, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Kuhn's book is best remembered for introducing the phrase "paradigm shift," representing instances in scientific history when a perspective was fundamentally shifted, like when quantum physics replaced Newtonian mechanics.

The paradigm shift theory can be applied to aspects of business as well, such as the way Americans expanded their beer consumption past huge brands like Budweiser and Heineken over the past two decades.

"The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" helped Koch "think about removing the blinders and not think within constraints," Koch told us.

"To be able to say, 'I know this is the way the world is, but why can't it be different and better?'"

Find it here »

'Accidents in North American Mountaineering' by the American Alpine Club

Before returning to Harvard to finish the dual MBA/JD program in 1978, Koch took a break and spent a few years as an Outward Bound instructor. Outward Bound is organization dedicated to fostering personal development through team building exercises outdoors.

In his book, Koch writes that his Harvard classmates may have turned up their noses at his decision, but he considers it pivotal to his success as an entrepreneur. "I found it invigorating to have no real responsibilities except to myself — life was now a blank canvas, every day a new choice."

One of the guides he came across during this time was the annual safety guide from the American Alpine Club, which uses the year's worst mountain climbing accidents to explain how such mistakes can be avoided. Koch later internalized it as a metaphor for business.

"Most fatalities begin as small mistakes that get compounded by unexpected conditions and bad judgment," he wrote. "There is usually a point where the right decision needs to be made and, if not made, fatality can only be avoided with unusually good luck (which rarely happens)."

Find it here »

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Email is one of the oldest forms of marketing, dating back the inception of the Internet. Its ability to get results and stimulate brand interest have made it a staple in any business’ marketing arsenal. That said, most business owners remain oblivious as to how to write an effective email campaign. They usually drill down in the wrong areas thus failing to strike oil.

Be a Face They Can Trust

When given a choice, most people would likely open a friend’s email message rather than one sent by a faceless, revenue-driven corporation. Sure, there are exceptions, like if the recipient isn’t on good terms with that friend or if they are completely naive to the seemingly perfect promotions offered by these brands. However, again, these are just exceptions.

Personalize Your Message

Talk in a personal way rather than in a promotional way. Make it appear as if you’re sending the email message personally and not as a mass marketing campaign. Use truthful details like your real name. Your recipients will likely trust you better if you put your name and reputation on the line. On the same note, don’t overdo it – repeating names too often or saying something inappropriate.

Timing is Everything

Only send out emails when you have something really important to say or offer. You don’t want to be wasting people’s time by making them click your email messages, and they find nothing of real value. This will quickly trim down your subscriber list faster than you can grow it back.

Simplify the Content

Large paragraph chunks can land your email in the trash even if it has really useful content and attractive deals. Simplify it by breaking down the content into smaller paragraphs and quickly getting down to the point. Also, use numbers like 5 or 30 to describe certain elements. Wording the numbers just makes it harder on the eyes to focus. Editing and proofreading are habits that help to construct the perfect email campaign.

Know When to Sell

Launching your first email campaign with an offer to buy a product or service seldom works. You will have to engage readers first and make them trust you before they can become a customer. Send out emails that teach the recipient something about your industry first. For instance, if you are selling a brand of cologne, share tips on how to find the right cologne or give tidbits about the raw materials used for different fragrances.

Talk About Advantages Rather Than Features

Going into the technical specifications of a product or service is boring even if there is a huge demand and value from it. Instead, talk about the reasons why your recipients would want to purchase the product or service. What good does it do for them? How will their lives change if they buy it?

Make it Easier For Them To Buy

Simply telling them to buy now won’t do any good if you fail to include an outbound link to your online store or business website. Make the process simple, so they are enticed to purchase again and again without having to fill out long forms or navigate through dead-end links.

Writing an effective email campaign is an art form in its own right. Have the right team for the job – people who will be able to combine the right amount of technical information with a personalized touch.

Similar to most SaaS businesses, our company used to be broken up into two factions: the Business team and the Product team. It remained that way until I had a conversation with Brenda Van Camp, CMO-turned-entrepreneur, who shared her observation that many young companies (especially in Silicon Valley) have a myopic focus on their product but fail to build a larger brand. What this helped me to understand is that perception is a part of the product.

It was then that we decided we needed to re-define what it means to be on the Pixlee Product team. The goal of any business is to add value for its customers, to make their lives a little bit better or a little bit easier. But your product isn’t just defined as the final output—an app, a piece of merchandise, or a backend platform. Your product is the sum of every experience and touch point that a customer has with your company. As a result, “every person at our company is a product person.”

On one hand, clients expect that the Pixlee backend dashboard works well and that they are easily able to display customer photos on their marketing channels. But that’s only a small part of our product and overall customer experience. Clients also expect responsive follow-up from our sales team, helpful onboarding and assistance from our customer success team, useful educational materials and email notifications from our marketing team, and timely and succinct invoices from our operations team. For example, the quality of our product would be degraded if clients regularly received outdated educational materials on how to use the platform—regardless of how well our actual platform functions. It is these interactions and experiences as a whole that encompass the Pixlee product.

For consumer brands, companies can cast an even wider net to define their products. The product of a luxury handbag brand, for example, is not only the customer experience and the material bag itself, but also the community and prestige that the bag offers the buyer post-purchase. When selling this handbag, the brand will need to showcase the entire experience of owning one of their luxury products, and not just market and sell with the tangible product itself. If the customer experience suffers, as it might if an order’s shipping is delayed, the perception of your product will also suffer.

To boil it down, customers are not making purchasing decisions solely based on product superiority, but the entire customer experience. That experience impacts the brand, and ultimately the perception of the quality your product. So much so, that I consider the Business team as a part of the Product team. To deliver a better customer experience, our company couldn’t operate in silos. It requires departments to work together and to take pride in the complete product that we deliver.

A great product is consistent, and consistency is a team effort.

This piece was originally published on Forbes.

We all make mistakes. Some mistakes are more egregious than others. Most errors endemic to PR can be avoided pretty easily.

These are the top PR shortfalls to shun. These mistakes can cause journalists to quickly delete your story pitch and become reluctant to respond to your future emails. They can place your company in controversy, decrease management’s confidence in PR, and endanger your career.

Robo-pitching. Even if written in personable style, mass emails to large numbers of reporters on an editorial list demonstrate that the sender is unfamiliar with the publication. It’s clear that the sender has not bothered to visit the publication’s website. “There’s no hook, no story, but simply a nervy request: ‘Can I please schedule an interview with our CEO?’ or ‘Will you please feature our CEO in one of your upcoming posts?’” frets Forbes contributor Cheryl Conner.

Too many follow ups. Multiple follow-ups is sure to irritate a journalist, writes Forbes contributor Seth Porges. Crowding their inbox will hurt your chances for your current pitch in addition to future pitches. Send a reminder email several days after the pitch, and if there’s still no response, let it be. If a writer doesn’t respond to a story idea, it means it’s not the right time or topic for the publication.

Pitching past deadline. It’s crucial for PR to understand lead times and deadlines of publications. Writers for monthly and weekly publications don’t want to cover a product that will be old news when their issue hits the stands. Porges suggests giving advance scoops to publications with long lead times, or scheduling a product launch so it matches the publication dates of news outlets.

UFOs (unintentionally funny occurrences). This category covers a range of unintentional mistakes caused by lack of thinking it through. A Krispy Kreme licensee decided to launch the “Krispy Kreme Klub” (KKK), Connor notes.

Ethical stumbles. These include lying to or misleading the press and releasing confidential information. The category can include adding journalists to marketing lists in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act.

Failing to check press releases and other communications before sending them. That shortfall results in misspelled names, spelling and grammatical errors, and erroneous facts. Pitches or news releases containing errors face quick rejection, regardless of content.

Not planning for crises. Preparation is probably the most important part of responding to PR crises. Although planning for unexpected events is difficult, there’s no good reason why organizations cannot plan for common crises, such as disaster recovery, security threats, and problems that are typical in their industries (such as oil spill or electrical outage).

Not establishing goals – or setting general, amorphous goals. Identifying objectives and key performance indicators, such as revenue, awareness, leads, links or website traffic, is essential for measuring the success of PR campaigns. “Before anything else, think hard about what you wish your PR campaign to achieve, and put down key performance indicators in writing so you can share it with your communications team,” urges marketing consultant Jennifer Hakim.

Lack of monitoring and measurement. Measuring PR activities related to both news outlets and social media is imperative to prove PR’s value and to determine successful strategies. Comprehensive media monitoring and measurement is an essential component of managing your online reputation and tracking key influencers, such as mainstream journalists and leading bloggers in your niche. With advanced PR measurement tools now available that offer customizable dashboards and the ability to integrate myriad data streams, PR can more easily perform in-depth analysis.

Bottom Line: Avoiding these serious yet surprisingly common PR mistakes will improve your effectiveness. You can increase the likelihood that your press releases will be published, better protect your brand’s reputation and prove PR’s value to executive leadership by shunning these errors.

This article was originally published on the CyberAlert blog.

Madrid (AFP) - A wind of change is blowing on Spain's renewables: companies and investment funds have been on a buying spree, taking advantage of the know-how and growth prospects of a sector still limping out of a crisis.

In 2015 "total transactions reached 5 billion euros ($5.7 billion)", says Joao Saint-Aubyn, a Madrid-based energy expert at global consultancy Roland Berger.

The biggest by far were the acquisition last year by US private equity firm Cerberus of renewables specialist Renovalia for about one billion euros, and investment group KKR's buy-out of solar group Gestamp Solar for a similar amount.

And the spending frenzy is unlikely to die down, as German giant Siemens eyes up wind power group Gamesa, and Cerberus is thought to be considering joining forces with US billionaire George Soros to devour T-Solar and its solar farms.

- Crisis-hit sector -

"Spain's renewable energy sector is one of the biggest in the world," says Saint-Aubyn.

Last year, Spain was in fifth position worldwide for wind power, with installed capacity of 23 gigawatts -- the equivalent of 23 nuclear reactors -- and in eighth place for solar power after China, the United States and Germany.

This high ranking came despite near-zero investment in the sector over the past few years as the economic crisis hit.

Sun aplenty and wind-swept regions make the country an ideal candidate for renewables, but generous subsidies doled out by the former Socialist government of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero really helped get the 70,000-strong sector going, until the financial crisis hit in 2008.

The Socialists were forced to implement spending cuts as the country teetered on the edge of bankruptcy, and the conservatives continued this policy after they came to power in 2011.

Potential investors had balked at the cut in subsidies, and had generally been wary of the general state of the Spanish economy.

No longer, though.

- Why Spain? Why now? -

Spain's return to growth -- its economy expanded 3.2 percent last year -- and pledges by authorities to stop changing the sector's regulations have attracted investors back to the country.

The fact that renewable companies can no longer count on as many subsidies as they once could have reduced the value of their assets, making them more attractive for buyers, says Luis Polo, head of the AEE Spanish Wind Energy Association.

And Spanish companies are "on the cutting-edge internationally," says Borja Rubio, an analyst for brokers XTB.

Spain has long been associated with windmills thanks to Miguel de Cervantes's famous novel "Don Quixote", but it now boasts leading research centres such as the giant Almeria Solar Platform in a deserted, arid region in the south of the country.

The country's engineers also continue to innovate, and have for instance developed the prototype for a bladeless wind turbine.

Polo adds that another strong point of Spain's wind energy sector is that companies involved in the entire production line are present in the country.

The know-how of companies has allowed them "to win projects elsewhere in the world," says Rubio.

Gamesa for instance is among the world's five biggest wind turbine manufacturers and is well established in several emerging countries like India, Brazil and China -- of high interest to Siemens.

In order to keep growing, however, they need money.

"But many (wind farm) owners are struggling to cope with their debt," says the AEE, after the sharp drop in public subsidies.

The situation is hardly any better in the solar sector. 

T-Solar for instance is heavily indebted and renewables giant Abengoa is on the verge of bankruptcy.

In comparison, private equity firms have a lot of cash for acquisitions.

And ultimately, the renewables sector has good prospects, particularly after 175 countries agreed to slow down global warming in a historic deal signed in December in Paris.

Join the conversation about this story »

Content marketing has dramatically changed over the past five years. It has gone way beyond merely creating and publishing content, to a full-fledged and full-funnel marketing program.

Companies and marketers are looking to feed prospects in different funnel stages as per their unique needs, demands, and requirements with a dedicated content marketing strategy.

Despite the fact that 89% of marketers employ content marketing for their business goals, the average ‘success’ rate of content marketing efforts is still not encouraging.

In this article, we discuss some of the best practices that can help you (as a content marketer) learn to be a better and more effective at content marketing.

Moreover, I would encourage you to read the latest releases by Content Marketing Institute and LinkedIn’s “The Sophisticated Marketer’s Guide to Content Marketing.”

These resources will guide you with respect to top business trends of 2016 and provide fresh insight into various aspects of digital and content marketing.

Having said that, here are my 7 best practices that you need to follow, in order to increase your ability to be an effective content marketer.

1. Have a Strategic Map – Written Not Verbal:

We all have a vivid idea of our goals: life goals, business goals, marketing goals, and campaign goals. If they are not written down in specific terms on how they will be achieved, they look like plain, ordinary wishes.

Successful content marketers understand the importance of a documented strategic map that sets and then guides them towards their goals.

CMI’s Study (“Content Marketing in UK 2016”) finds that 54 percent of the most effective marketers have documented their content marketing strategy. So, the first rule or best practice is to have a clear and written strategy.

2. Design a Content Calendar – Clearly Divided:

As we noted earlier, content marketing is now more than just the practice of publishing articles and books.

Instead, it has penetrated across the sales funnel, where you need to feed the prospect as per their unique needs, desires, and characteristics. Nothing can help you plan this better than a smart and highly organized content calendar.

It’s hard enough to keep track of a few content projects, particularly when you’re taking an integrated approach to content and working closely with colleagues in different roles.

A well designed and customized editorial calendar ensures smoothness of the process, keeping everyone on the same page and tracking the content production schedule.

In addition, it also facilitates team management by dividing the roles between the team members.

There are many other tools that you can use for designing a content calendar: Google docs, Microsoft Office (Excel in particular), Skyword and other collaboration tools can all prove to be very handy.

3. Create an Intelligent Content Mix:

Content mix is as important as marketing mix. While designing your content calendar, it’s a good idea to divide your content assets into types as well.

Plan an intelligent content mix that not only contains articles and blogs but also videos, infographics, eBooks, newsletters, and user guides. One of the projected top business trends of 2016 is brands’ conscious efforts to balance their content mix to cater varying needs/tastes of different segments. Businesses that fail to address this may not enjoy an attractive conversion rate.

Therefore, divide your mix into authority pieces, light and viral content, how to and user-guides, and creative content. Moreover, pick up your channels wisely and go with the ones that suit your industry, business type, available resources and budget. The best match of channels and content mix is the key to success in driving revenue and accelerating return on investment.

4. Think Outside of the Box – Sometimes:

Sometimes, going outside of the box works wonders. It can be done in numerous ways: from selection of the content type, its topic, or how you express your point of view.

Here’s an example: Jon Gibson’s brilliant piece of promo (a whole article, in fact) on Gumtree attracted more 100,000 views within days. It was picked up by major news sites and went viral on social media as well.

He did not write about specs and technicalities of the truck he had for sale, but adopted a whole new approach to pitch. Read his piece on the Gumtree Blog and see if you can figure out what he did differently.

Broadly speaking, this piece went viral for two fundamental reasons. He was able to develop a real conversation by not focusing on boring stuff, and added a personal touch that attracted people’s attention.

Hence, the key take away is to think out of the box to find a way that could add a personal touch and develop a conversation with key prospects. Content is all about developing a conversation with prospects and selling your idea to them. But don’t go outside the box too often; it can be risky.

5. Write for People – Not Search Engines:

If you were to name one big change in content marketing over the past five years, it would be this shift of focus.

Previously, people used to write unique content to meet search engines’ requirements. The purpose was to gain maximum visibility and better rank. However, the focus has shifted from quality SEO content to engaging content. Search engines value content that drives engagement and shares.

Moreover, when you write with a people-centric approach, you won’t want to bombard them with information overload.

The best way is to provide occasional bites of food for thought that address their pain points and provide remedies. Content that has real empathy for the readers and prospects matters a whole lot more than articles that aim for search rank only.

If your pieces are engaging people and satisfying them, search engines will automatically pick this up too.

6. Focus on Lead Nurturing:

Lead nurturing is usually associated with email marketing and marketing automation, where you run drips to nurture prospects. The idea is no longer restricted to email platforms though.

Instead, the concept equally applies to content marketing. Since the ultimate goal is to first reach and then nurture prospects to convert, content marketers need to think of the prospects’ purchase decision-making process.

“We know that modern customers are very much educated and usually control the research process. Therefore, it’s important to penetrate across the buyer’s journey with engaging content so you can engage them through multiple digital marketing touch points.” Says Leon Rice; digital strategist at Content Mart; a content production agency. “In early stages of marketing, focus more on the education and this can be done by integrating your content assets with email and automation. This will allow you to send out your educational drips to prospects and educate them about the product, service or idea”; he continues.

The last piece of advice is to remember that this is a long-term process. Many prospects might not convert in the early stages but your efforts will not be in vain as they will enable you to engage with them on another touch point and have the background in mind.

7. Measure Success – Platform-wise & Asset-wise:

Finally, successful marketers never forget to measure their performance. Performance measurement enables them to find out:

• Which channel is most useful?
• What type of content has been most successful?
• What content category can be eliminated?
• Which channels need improvement?
• What are the areas for improvement?
• Which content assets performed well against set metrics?
• What is the total return on investment?

In this regard, you need to do the following:

1. Set the right KPIs (clicks, views, shares, conversion, downloads)
2. Set the right metrics against each campaign/content type
3. Cross-check platform performance
4. Measure individual content assets’ performance
5. Identify the performance boosters

It’s true that performance measurement can be very tricky. This is because perception of type of return on investment varies from person to person and department to department.

However, there are some agreed upon metrics that you can set. The number of clicks, content assets’ downloads, uploads of content details, newer subscriptions, email clicks, open rates, social shares, and number of leads generated are some of the KPIs that you can employ.

Finally, when we discuss the best practices for any given type of marketing, we are talking about ‘what is working today’.

As a content marketer, you need to keep a close eye on the industry trends, research, industry publications, and survey reports. They guide you on what is hot and what isn’t.

Content Marketing Institute, eMarketer, and Pew Internet Research are some sources that frequently share valuable insights for marketers and decision-makers. Subscribe to their newsletters and updates to ensure that you don’t miss any.

I hope these best practices help you be a better content marketer and achieve your content goals.

If your goal is to lose weight and you want to measure your progress, you use a scale to track pounds or a tape measure to track inches. You would never measure your weight loss by tracking your height.

If you did that, you’d never know how far you’ve come — how many pounds or inches you’ve lost — and you wouldn’t be able to objectively see whether something you’re doing to lose weight is working. It’d be nearly impossible to hold yourself accountable, and it would be a waste of your time, energy, and resources.

It’s common sense. You wouldn’t record your height to measure how much weight you’ve lost. Unfortunately, some content marketers lose that common sense when it comes to tracking the success of their content efforts.

Some marketers aren’t clear from the beginning about what their goals are or what success looks like, and others mistakenly track the wrong metrics. Too often, we hear fellow marketers set lead generation as the No. 1 goal of content, yet they can’t seem to look past the number of social shares a piece of content earns to measure its effectiveness.

And it’s that confusion that leads to ineffective content marketing and other challenges that keep you from achieving your organization’s content marketing goals. In fact, in its 2016 B2B content marketing research, Content Marketing Institute found that only 30% of marketers say their organizations are effective at content marketing.

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Only 30% of marketers say their organizations are effective at #contentmarketing via @cmicontent #research
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Now, this goal-tracking confusion could very well be a simple misunderstanding on the part of marketers – after all, many factors play into content’s success, and just as many metrics exist to measure it. But this misunderstanding, as simple as it is, has serious consequences for your content efforts.

The trick is uncovering your team’s key performance indicators and matching those goals with specific, measurable metrics to ensure that the content you’re creating and distributing is effective. The following guide will help you match metrics to goals, measure success, and become a better, more effective content marketer.

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Uncover KPIs & match goals to measurable metrics for effective #contentmarketing via @Kelsey_M_Meyer
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If your goal is lead generation

When lead generation is your most important organizational goal (85% of marketers say it is), measuring social shares isn’t enough. To appropriately measure how your content is working for lead generation, you need to head to the bottom of the funnel to check out these metrics:

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85% of marketers say that lead generation is their most important organizational goal says @Kelsey_M_Meyer
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• Click-throughs: Every article should include a clear call to action. If your content is published elsewhere as a guest contribution, the desired action could be a click-through to your site or blog. If it’s a blog post on your platform, the desired action could be a download of gated content. Either way, the action should be clear and compelling, and measuring the click-through rates on those links is critical to understanding how your content is generating and converting leads.

• Conversions: Take this a step further by comparing how many of those leads are qualified and can be converted into clients. We have a team member whose job involves combining information from our marketing automation system with her own individual research to learn more about each lead who comes through our site. She looks at everything from a lead’s LinkedIn account to his company website and even his Twitter account to determine whether he would be a good prospective customer. From there, she reaches out to the most qualified ones to advance the sales process, and our marketing team compares leads generated to qualified leads generated to better understand our progress toward achieving our goal.

If your goal is sales enablement

While lead generation is a fantastic goal – one that my team sets for itself each month – it isn’t complete without sales. Using content in the sales process is incredibly valuable, and to track how your content is affecting your sales enablement, you should monitor sales for leads who receive your content versus those who don’t. In particular, consider:

• Sales conversion rate: Ideally, you’ll find that sending content to leads builds trust by directly addressing their objections, pain points, and questions. As a result, they should convert at a higher rate.

• Sales cycle length: If your content is working, it should help your team decrease the length of your average sales cycle. If leads who receive content continue to close at a faster rate than those who don’t, you’ll know your content is effective.

• Contract size: Because each piece of content should help overcome or minimize a barrier, it should be easier to sell more to the lead. Compare the contract size of clients who were nurtured with content against the contract size of clients who weren’t.

If your goal is brand awareness

Despite a 7% decrease since last year, brand awareness remains a top-level organizational goal for 77% of marketers. While I wouldn’t consider brand awareness a KPI (it’s difficult to accurately measure without performing an expensive brand-lift analysis), it is a goal that content marketing can help achieve. To measure your progress toward this goal, track the following:

• Social shares and following: Measure your social following and average shares per article by benchmarking where you are and tracking your progress. Our marketing team uses HubSpot to schedule and track social media engagement and consistently reviews it to see what types of content, formats, times of day, days of the week, etc., work best for us and our audience.

• Article views: This is easier to measure if you only focus on owned media because you can access your own analytics. It becomes a bit more difficult when you contribute content to external media, especially if the publisher doesn’t list the number of views on the page itself. The more people are viewing your content, the more they are aware of your brand.

If your goal is audience engagement

Beyond awareness, though, lies engagement. Many marketers — my team included — lean more toward genuine engagement and interaction than general brand awareness. To track your progress toward your goal of audience engagement, monitor these metrics:

• Social shares: Look beyond the number of social shares, and closely examine who is sharing your content. It’s great when a piece of content goes viral or earns lots of shares, but if no one in your target audience or no one who influences your audience is engaging, those numbers aren’t as meaningful.

• Comments: Ignore trolls and spam messages. Identify the individuals who are contributing to your content and who care about your industry, and look for the types of content that engage them most. You can reach out to them personally or on social media to continue the conversation and engagement.

• Click-through rates: Sharing and commenting are solid metrics, but when your content prompts a reader to click, you can find out more about how and why he or she is engaging. By tracking the number of people who click and what kinds of content they’re clicking to see, you can learn even more about your audience members and how to engage them.

We know that 79% of marketers with the most effective content marketing know what success looks like for them. But we should also recognize that content’s effectiveness doesn’t rely on the clarity of our content goals alone.

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79% of marketers w/the most effective #contentmarketing know what success looks like says @Kelsey_M_Meyer
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Part of the effectiveness of our content depends on our ability to identify the correct metrics and measure our progress toward achieving those goals. It’s not enough to simply set those content goals. Without a system to track and measure them, you’ll never know whether you achieve the goals you set. Or worse, you’ll never be able to improve ineffective efforts because you won’t know what works and what doesn’t.

As content marketers and consumers, we all benefit from better, more effective content, and it all starts with clear goals and effective measurement.

Want to ensure that you’re measuring what matters? Stay updated with the latest tips, trends, and insights in Content Marketing Institute’s free daily or weekly blog.

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

The post How to Match Key Metrics With Your Content Goals appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

A well-defined sales process makes it easy for reps to execute and for managers to evaluate performance.

Knowing the value of a defined process, here are three tips for defining or strengthening the definition of your organization’s process.

Assess Your Current Process

The starting point to defining your company’s process is to evaluate the current strategies and tactics your reps use to sell. As a leader, you need to fully understand what’s working well and what isn’t. Here are some questions to help you analyze your current sales strategy:

How do your sales activities align with the typical buying process of your customers?

How do your reps use CRM to enhance the selling process?

How do your sales activities correlate with other important functions, such as inside sales and distribution?

How well do we leverage strengths in our sales process and in what areas can we better use them?

Operate with a Customer-Centric Approach

Your sales process needs to be aligned with how your buyers buy and should be developed with an outside-in, customer-centric approach. A defined sales process is most effective and efficient when each stage correlates with the activities, values and preferences of your customers. Consider what buyers do and what they expect at each stage. Doing so enhances your ability to qualify and nurture leads, communicate value, and manage relationships.

Communicate, Coach and Assess for Consistency

After you outline the best strategies and tactics for your reps at each stage of the sales cycle, take time to communicate and train. Make your reps aware of the criteria you will use to evaluate performance.

The major benefit of a consistent process for your team is the ability to streamline execution with repeatable steps. You can also focus on in-depth opportunity reviews with a consistent management cadence.

The starting point for defining your company’s sales process is an audit of your current situation. Take time to accurately assess what currently works well and what doesn’t. Build a process that aligns with buyer preferences, coach your team for consistent execution and evaluate for opportunities to improve the process.

When marketers set out to create demand generation strategies, a broad perspective is required. This is because demand generation requires a certain (often overlooked) degree of cooperation between the sales and marketing departments.

As a data driven process, the best demand generation tactics locate and nurture key prospects over the long term – from both sides of the cycle – engaging them through multiple platforms and touchpoints.

This post is going to look at how B2B marketers can create a comprehensive demand generation strategy. We’ll break down every phase of the demand generation funnel, with an emphasis on optimization and sales creation.

This means specific touch point tactics such as:

• Lead scoring
• Display re-targeting
• Sponsored research
• Partner webinars

Using successful SaaS companies as examples, we’ll dive into the best practices of an effective B2B demand generation strategy.

What is a Demand Generation Strategy?

Hubspot defines it nicely:

“Demand generation is the marketing system and engine that bridges the gap with your company’s sales and revenue operations. It may include multiple touch points, from blogging, to email list creation, to social media promotion — all inbound marketing tactics that are part of a company’s overall demand generation strategy.”

However, demand generation is not inbound marketing. Demand generation strategies will certainly use inbound marketing, but it is but a single piece to your company’s larger demand funnel.

On that same note, it isn’t lead generation either. While some businesses are indiscriminate about leads, demand generation is about identifying potential prospects. With nurturing processes, you’ll bring only the best qualified leads to the sales department. This is about facilitating higher conversion rates and more sales.

Demand generation is:

• A sponsored white paper
• A weekly newsletter
• A meetup event
• A company sponsored webinar.

It is not a quick fix in the form of a cold email blast or banner ads.

(Source)

Essentially, your best demand generation strategy will find and target the best touchpoints to engage customers with. In this way, strong demand can be manufactured for new or existing prospects and clients.

(Source)

Lead Nurturing for Better Demand Generation

When setting out to find more demand, don’t forget those who have already shown you interest. It’s a much smaller and easier investment to inspire your existing audience to look at you in a new way.

Bottom line: a poor lead nurturing strategy will waste valuable leads.

A demand generation strategy must assess and segment leads that aren’t ready to buy and keep their interest for the future.

Lead nurturing is about organizing leads into segmented lists for more precise and effective email marketing campaigns. This way, you can facilitate demand generation throughout the life of a prospect.

List segmentation assesses these important factors:

• Product line fit
• Company size
• Web behavior
• Email click integration
• Job roles

Likewise, metrics such as web page views, content downloads, and site visits will inform which content will be the strongest choice to approach leads with.

Prioritize these factors and set about to test them. This way your messaging will target segmented leads most effectively.

Take Marketo for example. As a lead nurturing solution, Marketo breaks every email sequence down by time, follow-up, type of content, and frequency. This way, leads are being nurtured in a personalized fashion to ensure a personalized response, every time.

Lead Scoring for Better Demand Generation

To settle upon what defines an MQL, marketing and sales departments should collaborate and determine demographics, activities, and behaviors that make a lead qualified for your company. A lead scoring system you establish will then allow you to rank your leads based upon their scoring.

(Source)

Here we have Pardot’s lead scoring overview. It takes into account metrics such as buying authority, company size, interactions with your company, and companies within your market territory. This shows us how important it is to address the different factors leading to the quality of different leads.

(Source)

Incorporating lead scoring into your demand generation strategy can help you target the best leads already in your funnel. With lead scoring in place, sales teams touch upon the hottest leads for improved sales, increased productivity – and higher morale.

Lead Generation Metrics for a Demand Generation Strategy

Five lead generation metrics are worth tracking, regardless of your lead generation activities. You will always need to know if what you’re doing is effective.

1) Number of MQLs

The sales team will love you for passing along truly qualified leads. To know if your content is reaching the right audience and how effective it’s being is very important. With lead scoring in place, you can discard unqualified leads and get an accurate picture of your performance.

2) Cost Per MQL

Minimize the cost of MQL to maximize results. Tie your marketing data in with a CRM to calculate the price of attaining a qualified lead.

3) Cost per Sales Accepted Opportunity

While cost per MQL is great for indicating the health of your lead generation initiatives, look down the sales funnel to see how effective these programs truly are. Measuring total spending against net gains will provide deep insight into the long-term quality of current programs.

4) First Touch Attribution

As lead generation marketers, the challenge is to determine which programs to run. Which parts of the overall strategy are producing the highest ROI? Which programs are bringing the most MQLs? How much have you been spending to generate this revenue?

5) Multi-Touch Attribution

First touch attribution is not always an accurate way to assess a program. Some programs are influential after lead creation, while others appear most appealing at the first or second point of touch. Taking a wider perspective will often reveal the larger truth about lead generation efforts.

(Source)

8 Techniques for Better Demand Generation

What in your demand generation strategy can you employ to create more MQLs and SQLs?

1) Provide A Free Resource

This is a very effective way to move forward with a lead generation strategy, for both MQLs and SQLs. Not only will it cement your position as a thought leader, but it will engage leads across a diverse spectrum.

Source

Wordstream launched their Adwords Performance Grader to do just this. As a strong demand generation tool, the software also creates deep and lasting value to their target demographics.

While funding such a resource is not cheap, the position gained by being associated with this process pays hugely in terms of advertising and inbound marketing potential.

Hubspot did something similar when it launched their free infographic templates:

Source

By giving away great materials, essentially content upgrades, the company cements a great deal of trust with their leads. While certain assets could be lucrative, giving away resources like this creates heaps of goodwill and brand ambassadorship. Plus, it has huge impacts on sales opportunities later.

2) Go the Extra Mile with Sponsored Research

Have you ever sponsored research? Think about it: your name could be attached to a smart ebook or PDF that’s getting downloaded by eager eyes all over the industry. How much more positively could you be perceived?

WIth 2,000,000 plus blog posts written each day and content upgrades galore, it’s becoming more difficult to raise your brand awareness with typical content. But sponsored research pays, even if it takes years to return the results you need.

(Source)

This infographic from Bright Talk is a great example of demand generation marketing done right. After their own Demand Generation Benchmark Report, Bright Talk is able to share and be shared as a credible source worth knowing.

3) Creating Partner Webinars

Two heads are better than one, right? So why not put your head together with industry leaders? This is especially true when generating interest with lead generation strategies. Compare this to social proof, the backbone of referral marketing.

Like the powerful aspects of referral marketing, partner webinars tap into the appeal of both affiliates. Simply associating your company with an icon of industry is a tacit endorsement.

(Source)

This partner webinar between Wordstream and Moz is candy to any marketer or savvy industry individual.

When you go all the way in partnering for a webinar, it increases your standing in the industry, creates valuable connections with key influencers, and elevates your brand visibility. All of which are great for demand generation strategies.

Forging a relationship with industry leaders won’t be as simple as an email. But after time and effort establishing a relationship, your webinar will be able to create lots of value for your viewers – and lots of demand for you, as a result.

4) Use Display Retargeting

Remarketing not only increases conversions but is also a powerful brand awareness tool. At Wordstream, they noticed that while attracting new traffic was going well, converting them was the problem. So they experimented with a display retargeting program and the graphic below highlights their results after implementing the campaign:

(Source)

Using their AdWords Performance Grader mentioned above, they saw an increase in repeat visitors by 50%, increased conversion rates by 51%, and a time-on-site increase of 300%.

Talk about boosting brand awareness in the right way.

5) Press Play with Video Advertising

Video format web content is a great way to quickly (and with high rates of retention) share why prospects should care about your company.

Linda Crowe, VP of Digital Marketing at Brightcove shares her thoughts:

“Video positively impacts demand generation, eCommerce, brand awareness, and social media engagement, still, some companies are reluctant to pursue a video strategy because leadership may not be fully aware of the benefits of video”

Benefits of video include:

• SEO improvement
• Longer time on site: the longer the time on your site, the more likely they are to remember your brand and respond to your efforts
• Expanded reach with mobile and social
• Improved landing page conversions

6) Content Syndication

Content syndication, or CPL, is the exchange of content for a lead of sales contacts. This can be a great way to get your content in front of a new demographic of prospects.

Here are a couple points to remember when starting a content syndication program:

7) Check that marketers are aligned with your metrics

Marketer metrics (the number of raw leads provided) and your closed loop marketing metrics (MQL, SAL, SQL, opportunity impact) are not the same.

Take steps so that your goals are understood and met.

Before running into lead quality issues, be sure that the publisher knows that your continuing business will be based upon how they perform relative to your goals.

8) Align topics with prospects entering your buying process

All leads are not created equal, yet the publisher charges a flat rate. The best way to drive the highest number of late-stage quality leads (possible of becoming MQLs) is to feature late-stage content in your syndication – buyer guides, webinar registrations, case studies, etc.

The publisher may say this will return fewer leads, but that’s good. This means you’ll acquire only the leads worth engaging.

Key Takeaways

Your demand generation strategy needs to have campaigns finely tuned to acquire new leads and nurture existing leads. We must look at lead generation, lead scoring, and lead nurturing throughout the entire marketing funnel. This means prioritizing specific techniques like video, webinars, free resources and display retargeting to maximize lead engagement. With these techniques in place, you’ll be helping your company fill the funnel with activated MQLs and engaged SQLs which solidifies a profitable demand generation program.

Don’t Leave Without Your Free Demand Generation Metrics Guide!

 

We’re happy to announce a new integration with Plecto, a sales and motivation dashboard platform. With this integration, Plecto can now automatically pull data from Close.io to allow users to create virtual dashboards that visualize sales data.

Plecto aims to motivate sales teams by using virtual dashboards. Here are three ways sales teams can use Plecto.

Recognize your team for recent “wins”

With Plecto, you can instantly notify your team of new Close.io opportunities, closed deals or incoming calls.

You control what constitutes a “win” and how you celebrate:  Play a custom sound, display the closer’s headshot, write a custom message or do all of the above.

When a sales rep makes a sale, takes a certain number of calls, or nabs a new lead, their success is broadcast to the entire team.

By allowing you to customize how you recognize successful salespeople, Plecto seeks to create a more engaging and collaborative work environment and keep reps accountable.

Encourage your team to meet milestones

Another feature of Plecto is the ability to set achievements and reward achievers with badges—custom icons that display next to their name on each dashboard.

Set a sales record that reps can compete to surpass, pin a smiley face next to the rep with the highest customer satisfaction score, or display a star icon next to a “Sales Star!”

Setting achievements is one way for sales teams to gamify selling.

Engage your team with competition

One particular Plecto feature is their leaderboard, where teams are ranked based on the criteria of your choosing. If you want to show who on your team is making the most calls or closing the most deals, Plecto can stream call or sales data directly from Close.io.

Plecto wants to create an engaging work environment where teams adopt a play-to-win attitude. This may lead to better productivity, as not making calls or closing deals leads to dropping on the leaderboard.

For the next month, Close.io readers can use Plecto for free for 90 days. Click here to start your free trial.

All Close.io integrations are made possible via the Close.io API—feel free to build your own and let us know!

Although the concept of the sales funnel is not a new one, inbound marketing has improved the sales funnel to help marketers visualize where a customer is in their buyer’s journey as to better meet their needs. In other words, publishing the right content at the right time in the right place. Since this sales funnel is at the heart of a successful inbound marketing strategy, it is important to be able to move leads through the funnel and align your content with the buyer’s journey in order to attract, convert, close, and delight your ideal customers. So without further adieu, here is The Lazy Man’s Guide to The Inbound Marketing Sales Funnel with examples.

*For the purpose of this blog we will be using our own company Leap Clixx for examples as well as one of our buyer personas “Marketer Mary”.

Attract

SEO, Blog, Social Media, Website

Since we want to convert strangers into visitors, we want to attract the people in our target market; our “buyer personas”. The tools we want to use in order to attract these buyer personas, include blogging, social media, search engine optimization, and of course your website! The content you produce during this stage should pique the interest of someone who is aware they have a potential problem you could solve.

Example: Marketer Mary is searching for topics that she can blog about. In doing so she comes across this article: 6 Ways to Generate Interesting Blog Topics (optimized for the keyword “interesting blog topics”). This article helps solve Marketer Mary’s problem when she was searching to solve it (right content, right time!).

Convert

Calls-To-Action, Forms, Landing Page Optimization

Now that we have all of these interested visitors that we have attracted using the aforementioned ways, it’s time to trap them! Just kidding! It’s time to collect their contact information. How do we go about doing this? By encouraging visitors to click a CTA, and fill out a form. The way we encourage this action is by offering something the visitor would benefit from or find value in.

Example: Now that Marketer Mary has read our blog, she sees a CTA at the end for a FREE eBook “How to Use SEO to Boost Your Inbound Marketing Results”. Since Marketer Mary is already actively working on her inbound marketing campaign via blogging, she would probably love to learn more about boosting her Inbound Marketing Results with SEO! She happily clicks on the CTA and fills out a short form to get her free downloadable eBook.

Close

Email Optimization, CRM Synch #, Lead Scoring, Sales Alerts, Personalized Email+Web+Social Nurturing

This is when the fun really begins! We now have Marketer Mary’s contact information! So we should spam her with calls and emails right? WRONG! Now that she is a lead we want to continue to nurture that lead until she is ready to become a customer (keep in mind that being there at the right time is key and this could take a while!).

Example: A great way to show Marketer Mary that you are there to help is with a personalized email workflow. Since we already know she has downloaded our eBook, why not start the workflow with a personalized email that includes the link to the eBook she downloaded to ensure she received it? See how helpful we are? With a well-built workflow we can continue to reach out with emails until, wait for it, she decided she NEEDS your services. Cue the music, Marketer Mary is now a client!

Delight

Feedback Forms, Email+Web+Social Engagement

Now that Marketer Mary is a client of Leap Clixx we want her to become a promoter who will tell others of her great experience with our company. In order for her to become a promoter, we want to encourage Mary to fill out a feedback form or share our content with her own email contacts, and social media network.

Example: Engaging followers on social media and encouraging shares, likes, comments, retweets etc. Remember to include social sharing icons on your website and in the content you are creating to help promote engagement.

As you can see, when done correctly, the inbound marketing sales funnel is a great process to nurture your leads and ensure you are reaching them at the right time, right place, and with the right content. For more on inbound marketing strategy, download our FREE eBook “A Guide to Inbound Marketing Best Practices”:

This article originally appeared on the Leap Clixx Blog and has been republished with permission.

Could your sales process use a little fine-tuning?

From poor follow-up to limited lead nurturing, numerous problems in the sales process may be destroying your conversion rate. The leading cause of a broken process is the lack of access to your data.

These four simple data-driven strategies will significantly boost your bottom line by simplifying, automating, and optimizing your sales and marketing process.

1. Attract better leads

Many businesses set their sights on getting as many leads as possible, but it’s not worth sacrificing quality for quantity, as a great deal of time and energy can easily be wasted on cold leads that never had any promise in the first place. Instead, aim for those targeted niche leads that actually have a chance of becoming hot prospects.

Start by surveying your customers to drill down to why your best customers love your product or service and compare them to your detractors. It’s important to get an what people don’t like for a full picture. Build out your buyer personas based on this data.

Once you have locked in on your buyer personas, you can create more targeted content and marketing campaigns to bring in more quality leads. Attract these leads by focusing in on SEO, PPC, and social media. These three channels are fueled by content but are refined by looking at your data for optimization.

2. Quick — and repeated — follow-ups

One of the biggest and most devastating mistakes businesses make is neglecting to follow up with leads soon after capturing their contact information. Your leads are craving personal attention and need to hear back from you soon after you’ve made contact; otherwise, they’ll forget why they were so interested in the first place. The sooner you follow up with leads, the sooner you’ll get them in the sales funnel and on the way to becoming promising prospects.

Gathering data to send targeted follow-up emails is simple. Through your SEO efforts, you should have at least 3 main keywords you are working on improving. Create targeted landing pages for each of these keywords with a call to action to attract your leads. To increase your open rates and responses to your triggered follow-up campaigns, tailor them for each of these landing pages. That way, the contact remembers exactly why they gave you their information.

As you can see, hooking your email marketing up to your CRM is crucial to starting a successful data-driven sales process.

3. Nurture leads — and determine when they become prospects

Cold leads may express mild interest in your company’s products or services, but they are by no means ready to make a big investment. In fact, 50% of leads are qualified but not ready to buy. Pushing for a sale when an early lead still has no intention of purchasing will only result in the complete loss of that important lead. Instead, it is important to nurture your leads and monitor them to determine how close to purchasing they really are. Marketing automation software can prove quite useful in this regard, as it gives you a good idea of where in the sales process your leads and prospects are located and whether they’re ready for a serious sales discussion.

Producing content with each stage of your sales funnel is key to funnel movement. Utilize contact scores to get a glimpse of how your contacts are interacting with your content in your marketing automation strategy. Based on these scores, contacts can move themselves down your sales funnel. Impersonal email blasts won’t give you the same results as an email nurturing strategy.

4. Analyze sales data — and optimize

As you nurture leads, you should know exactly how many make that essential transition from cold lead to hot prospect — and how many stall at the very beginning of the sales pipeline. Through extensive tracking of conversions, you can determine which aspects of your sales process are working — and which are causing leads to stall.

Track the lead source for each of your contacts to see the number of leads generated from each marketing channel as well as which marketing channels have the highest conversion rate of lead into customer. So, when you identify a marketing channel with high conversion rate, you can accelerate your spend with that channel, netting out more customers.

Sales and marketing software can also help you track the performance of your sales team and identify bottlenecks in your process – who’s performing well and who could use some help.

A good sales process begins with high-quality leads and continues with an efficient and effective sales pipeline. Through careful strategizing and use of an all-in-one sales and marketing tool at all stages of the sales funnel, you can significantly streamline your sales process and improve conversion rates.

China has agreed to provide a 400 billion-ruble ($ 6.2 billion) loan for Russia's Moscow-Kazan High-Speed ​​Rail Project, the Russian Railways company said Friday.

In late March, Russian Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich attended the Boao Forum for Asia (BFA), where he invited Chinese business to take part in the implementation of high-speed rail projects in Russia, including the Moscow-Kazan railway and a high- speed railway between Samara and Tolyatti.

The project is initial stage of a high speed rail line connecting Moscow and Beijing and later one of lines connecting China to Europe.





China is discussions with India on several High Speed rail projects

India has tied up with Japan for its first high-speed train to run on a 505-km track between Mumbai and Ahmedabad. China is keen to work on other proposed routes. It is carrying out feasibility studies for high-speed lines on the 2,200-km Chennai-New Delhi route and the 1,200-km long New Delhi-Mumbai corridor.

The proposed Chennai-New Delhi corridor could be the second-largest in the world, after the 2,298 km-long Beijing-Guangzhou line, which was launched three years ago.

Comparing the pricing of tickets of various modes of transport, the Chinese railway chief said the fare for a regular passenger train is 10 cents per kilometer, while second class on HSR costs 48 cents per kilometer and first class costs 80 cents. An air ticket, on average, came to about 1 RMB (100 china cents) per km. This was after airlines had been forced to lower their rates since they were losing out to High Speed Rail.

Read more »

Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have often argued that it's smart to "invest in a business any fool can run, because someday a fool will."

Or, as Buffett explained it in more detail back in 2010 in an interview with the FCIC:

"If you've got a good enough business, if you have a monopoly newspaper, if you have a network television station — I'm talking of the past — you know, your idiot nephew could run it. And if you've got a really good business, it doesn't make any difference."

Basically, the thinking here is that is if ten years ago someone owned the only newspaper in town, then they're the person with the pricing power — and that's a good business. It almost doesn't matter who's running it, because the townspeople are still going to buy the paper.

But, as with every rule, this one, too, has an exception.

In Saturday's annual Berkshire Hathaway meeting, streamed live on Yahoo Finance, Munger and Buffett emphasized that the world has changed, and now the duo has become just as good at finding businesses with good management as they once were at finding businesses that didn't require great management to succeed.

Specifically, Buffett noted that Mark Donegan, the CEO of Precision Castparts, is "one of a kind," in part because he can concentrate on what's important for the businesses and he doesn't have to come to Omaha to make a presentation for Buffett to justify a move.

And Munger added that Precision Castparts, which became a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway in January 2016, requires superior management. 

For what it's worth, several other CEOs and managers have become almost synonymous with their companies as well. Perhaps most notably nowadays: Jeff Bezos. And in cases like this, it's interesting to think about what the company would be like without the same leadership and/or with different leadership.

In any case, the bottom line is that although it's obviously a great idea to invest in a business that any fool can run, there are some differences when it comes to management — and it may be worth taking that into consideration.

SEE ALSO: LIVE! Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting ...

Join the conversation about this story »

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We have all had them. Especially when working in the service industry. There are some clients that you can’t charge enough to make it worth the stress, headaches, and frustration they create.

I had heard someone say once, “sometimes the cost of a dollar is too high”. Indeed. When you recognize that a client is more trouble than they are worth, it’s time to let them go.

But how do you know when enough is enough?

As a business owner, it goes against all instincts to turn away business and making money, but what happens at an energetic level is not something to ignore.

When things go sour, often our entrepreneurial instincts kick into high gear and we work harder at making the client happy, focus more on them to help turn things around, and then lose sleep over it anyway.

All of that expended energy results in complete frustration that nothing seems to work and you have lost other business because you couldn’t focus on other clients as much as they needed or have time to get new business with your ideal client.

Energetically, when you focus on a negative situation, it keeps your business stuck in that negativity causing your business to have no opportunity for expansion.

When Should You Let a Client Go?

Has your once dream client turned into your worst nightmare? At first, some clients might seem like “the bomb” but after working together on a closer basis you may notice some signs to make you think again about keeping them as a client.

Here are 11 possible client types you might be encountering that should make you question if they are worth holding onto in your business:

1. The Non-Pleasers. There are some super picky clients where no matter how hard you try to please them will never be happy.Often it’s because they don’t know what they want; sometimes they keep changing their mind, or maybe they have a colleague or assistant giving them ill-fitted advice.

   But for whatever the reason, you end up putting forth a lot of extra effort to make them happy. And often at no charge, adversely affecting your bottom line.

2. The Blamers. When you offer a service, you can’t guarantee the success of the client. No matter what you’ve been asked to do, the role of the client is paramount to a successful outcome.You can’t work miracles if they are not following your instructions, thwarting your efforts with them second-guessing you (and themselves) or not doing their part to make the project successful.

   These people tend to jump from one resource to another, thinking their failures are always someone else’s fault instead of looking at what they are doing (or not doing) to create these situations.

   You’re in a no-win situation with this type of client.

3. The Slow-Payers. Everyone’s favourite client is the one who pays an invoice immediately upon receipt. But when a client is continually late in paying their invoices or worst yet, gets behind in payments, it’s hard to give them your best service.It’s much more satisfying to spend time working with clients who pay promptly. Keeping them on as a client is enabling their bad behaviours and telling them it’s OK not to pay you on time.
4. The Cost-Complainers. You know the kind, when they constantly complain about how much this is costing them, asking for discounts and feeling they deserve price breaks.‘Frugal Fred’s are a pain in the butt to work for. They keep trying to get you to do everything for nothing. More keeps getting added to your plate with the assumption it should all be included in the original cost.

   Sometimes they try to make you feel guilty by sharing their ‘temporary’ financial problems with you and promise they’ll pay you once they get the big break that’s ‘just around the corner’. Don’t fall for their story.

   Greatness doesn’t go on sale. When a client doesn’t value the quality of service you provide, then you’re not being valued. Period.

   Your ideal client will gladly pay what you are worth without complaint.

5. The Panicked-Insisters. These types of clients want everything done quickly and at the last minute, causing you to set aside other, just as important work, so they can be made happy.Their lack of planning does not make an emergency on your part. If they insist on giving you projects with no notice, charge a hefty rush fee. If these quick turnaround demands continue, you may consider dropping them as a client.

   Ideal clients will respect the time needed and allow a deadline that lets you do your best work for them.

6. The Non-Listeners. Nothing makes me more frustrated than when someone hires an expert, asks for what you think, pauses, and then says “I think we should do it this way instead.”Or they will get your opinion and then go ask their friends, assistants and others in related industries to see if your suggestion is what they should do or not.

   Everyone has an opinion and many times the other people asked are not at all qualified to provide expert advice. This second-guessing only wastes time and effort and is a sure sign of the clients’ self-uncertainty on being able to make clear decisions.

   And of course, when you do what they ask and they don’t get results, they blame you (see #2 client type above.)

   If they want to hire an expert, they should be “coachable” and ready to implement your advice and strategies with confidence in your abilities. If that confidence is not there, they need to find someone else they can be confident with.

7. The Abusers. I had a client years ago who literally threatened me when his email wasn’t working the way he thought it should. His misunderstanding of how email works resulted in him blaming me for his frustrations, treating me with disrespect and bullying me terribly. I was truly afraid.Some clients are downright abusive. They talk down to you and push you around. When a client starts to be a bully, prepare to divorce them right away! No one deserves that kind of treatment.
8. The Stress-Causers. A prime indicator of this type of client is when you see they are calling on the phone and your heart sinks, anxiety kicks in and you don’t want to answer.We had a client once who was a husband/wife team. The husband was so personable, warm and pleasant. But when they wife called, she was demanding, abrupt, and even intimidating. It made it very difficult to answer the phone, knowing I was about to have a difficult conversation with her.

   Working with clients that cause you undue stress and anxiety while trying your best to make them happy are simply not worth the effort. Spend that energy on finding your ideal client instead.

9. The Personality-Clashers. Sometimes personalities don’t mesh. It happens. Respect yourself enough not to put up with clients that aren’t a JOY to serve.
10. The Energy-Vampires. Some clients are literally energy black holes. They are demanding and need all your time. They suck up all your joy and energy and you are literally exhausted after working with them.What’s worse is they are taking up space for a perfect client you could be working with. Don’t settle for clients that drain you. Choose clients that energize you.
11. The Unreasonable-Demanders. When clients want you to be an expert in something you’re not and demand you do the work anyway is setting you up for failure.If you succumb to them, you’ll wind up in a world of trouble spending hours trying to do something, making mistakes, and not getting the desired results.Just say ‘no’ to jobs that aren’t in your area of expertise. Instead, refer them to someone else who is much better equipped for that particular request.

After many years in the business, we’ve had all kinds of crazy situations that clearly taught me what we don’t want in a client.

The best advice I can give is to be very clear about who your ideal client is and how you want to be treated. Remind clients of boundaries as needed and be firm with maintaining them. Life is too short to just work for the dollar.

As business owners, we have a right to work with clients who bring us extreme joy and satisfaction. That way we can do our best work.

Here’s to finding high-end ideal clients who are ready to work with you, have the money to hire you, understand the value of your work.

Have you ever experienced any of these 11 client types? If so, how did you handle them?

You know you have valuable intel to share with your target audience. However, many of them might end up falling asleep before they get to the essence of your content.

You can prevent this by turning your ideas into more vivid and easy-to-understand visual concepts. Here’s how to revamp your complex data into awesome infographics.

The Challenges of Complex Data

Complex data can easily turn off even the most attentive and educated readers. In order to avoid scaring away your dedicated audience, it is crucial to know about the most critical challenges that complex data poses for your reader:

• Boredom. Reading and pondering over complex data is a tiresome process. If you don’t opt for the most appropriate tone of voice, or if you go too heavy on industry terminology, your readers could easily get bored. Chances are that they will either lose interest in your content, or lose interest in your company altogether, both of which are definitely not what you’d want.
• Confusion. If you don’t succeed in presenting your data clearly, you risk discouraging your readers. As a result, they might feel ignorant or awkward for not comprehending your message, and they might send them looking for the same info elsewhere. Worse still, they might draw the wrong conclusion about what you have to offer — the one thing worse than your clients failing to understand your message.
• Lower recollection rates. The more complex the data you try to convey, the harder it will be to understand. Accordingly, the less successfully it would be retained in your readers’ memory.
• Low social shares. Given that complex data could likely only be interpreted and appreciated by a smaller pool of people, the virility of your content could find serious obstacles.

Why Infographics?

Because they overcome all of the above-mentioned challenges!

According to statistics, infographics are the cure for:

• Attention loss. “With detailed images, you can get the attention of up to 67% of your targeted audiences,” according to HubSpot.
• Inability to process complex data. “The brain processes visual information 60,000 faster than text,” says 3M Corporation on Visual Teaching Alliance.
• Forgetfulness. People remember about 80% of what they see and do, 10% of what they hear and 20% of what they read, reveals Paul Martin Lester in Syntactic Theory of Visual Communication.
• Social sharing stillness: “Visual content is more than 40 times more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content,” according to Buffer.

Are you still hesitating to do a total makeover of your complex-data representations?

Would you feel more inclined to do so if you saw how others have managed to revamp their content without compromising its essence and usefulness?

Great! Let’s go over some awesome infographics that are packed with complex data while still excelling at engaging the reader. They offer valuable insights and keep a fun note to the overall reader’s experience.

Read also: 24 Awesome Infographic Ideas to Inspire Your Next Beautiful Creation

A Look at Some Examples

Industry-specific Terminology

One way to explain complex industry-specific terminology is by borrowing a story that you know your target audience is familiar with and really enjoys.

It could be a movie script, a comic storyline, song lyrics, or an emblematic fairytale or anecdote that your customers often tend to refer to.

• The Local SEO Wars reveals how a local SEO company educates its audience about complex concepts like local business citations. Given that SEO is a rather technical realm, the infographic has a geeky setting: The Star Wars universe, which is specifically chosen to appeal to a particular audience. In this case, much-adored characters like Yoda, C-3PO and the revolutionary Stormtrooper Finn help explain intricate relationships between concepts and entities:

• Social Is Coming is another online marketing project that relies on a world-renowned TV series, Game of Thrones, to represent a comparison between six social networks. The infographics takes a character from the epic drama and draws a parallel between him/her and a specific social media channel. Thus, otherwise dull and repetitive data is conveyed in an entertaining and easy-to follow way.

Connections Between Concepts and/or People

Interconnectivity between concepts, different entities, and humans is the essence of many studies. Whether they are commissioned by pharmaceutical corporations, governmental social welfare departments, or insurance companies, they all list data that may not be easy to follow.

The way two events are connected is often easier shown than explained, like in the following examples:

• How Music Affects Your Driving is a fascinating piece explaining the impact of music on one’s driving performance. The effects of variables like music volume, speed, and genre of music are illustrated for different driving situations. If this data had been compiled into a whitepaper format, it almost certainly would have turned out quite wearisome, bordering on condescending.

• Who Is Fighting Whom in Syria is another great example of an infographic that traces down the relationships between different people. only this particular design has more of a political focus. With a total of 13 interested parties, it could be hard to see the big picture plain and clear. Not with an infographic, though:

Timeline of Events

Timeline articles tend to remind us of history textbooks that we once opened in college as a prelude to our afternoon nap. It is a challenge to turn such a third-person narration into an entertaining read, especially if you do not support your story with great visual material.

• History of The Businessmen. An evolution process can be illustrated quite ingeniously, if you simply put some creativity into it.

Cause and Effect

Research papers that explain cause-and-effect topics make for intriguing reads. However, there is a thin line between an educational piece and a dry exposé.

How to avoid the latter? Draw wisdom from the next infographic:

• Fume Leads to Death is an impressive, data-packed infographic. And even if it offers some overwhelming info, it does not discourage the reader from investigating the document. It is the ease with which you could skim through the content and skip from one pie chart to another, from the single unifying cause (the habit of smoking), to the multiple effects that result from it, that grabs your attention and inspires you to want to learn more.

Geographical Distribution

Many find geography rather confusing. Comparing countries whose names people know only in theory is unsettling to say the least.

Map visualization could come in handy when trying to present a geographical study. On the other hand, country comparisons in terms of population, economy, religion, internet speed, and even beer consumption are also topics well-covered by this infographic format. Check out the two examples below:

• What Each Country Leads The World In is a pretty straightforward topic. Where’s the complex data here, you’d ask? Well, it is one thing to actually read about the advantage or the “sigil” of each country, but it is an entirely different story to actually visualize where that country is located, what size is it, which are its neighboring countries and how are they different or similar to it.

• Global Carbon Footprint by Nation is a more complicated concept that has been visualized so masterfully, you simply need to scroll to the end, looking either for every country you know, wish to visit, have travelled to, or you simply have read about lately and are curious to compare with your own.

Intangible Concepts

Intangible concepts like emotions, health, fortune, and politics are sometimes hard to explore and speculate about.

In this regard, comparing the value of money or assessing the cost of a feeling like love are contests which infographics excel at.

• The Cost of Love. Can you put a price tag on a feeling? Obviously you can — at least, according to this infographic below:

Examples of Perfection

What is the secret ingredient to perfection? That’s always been a tough question to answer.

Describing perfection can be a challenge: whether we’re talking about creating the perfect story, tweet, password, or how to brew the perfect coffee, it all boils down to how to perfectly structure our tips to keep the attention of our readers as long as possible.

Here’s a “perfect” example for you:

• How to Watch Every Marvel Property in Perfect Order is far from being a flashy and color-rich infographic, but this is exactly what makes it perfect! Following Marvel’s storyline is a feat for even a dedicated geeky fan. Among the countless movies and TV series released for the given Universe, it is impossible to keep track of the intricate chronology of events. This infographic offers a simple take on a spectacularly complex mess of information. It truly helps the reader reach the Aha! Moment.

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Have you ever tried to make your own complex data more reader-friendly through infographics? Share your experience in the comments below!

There is a whole new batch of business books that are coming out in the next few months.

My book reading pace has slowed. Dramatically. Not because of Netflix (but, let's be honest, have you seen the latest seasons of Daredevil and House of Lies?), but because there really wasn't all that much that was moving me in the non-fiction book space. I've been neck-deep in some great long-form reads online (special thanks to Pocket for making it all so accessible), but a great business book? It has been some time. With that, I often get asked to interview authors for Six Pixels of Separation - The Mirum Podcast. In the past few weeks the stack of books building up to the left of this Macbook Air has got me pretty excited. All of these books are not yet available, but look super-fascinating. So, get your credit card ready and let's do this...

6 Business books that are coming (that you better get)... in alphabetical order:

• TED Talks - The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking by Chris Anderson. "For anyone who has ever been inspired by a TED talk, this is an insider's guide to creating talks that are unforgettable. Since taking over TED in the early 2000s, Chris Anderson has shown how carefully crafted short talks can be the key to unlocking empathy, stirring excitement, spreading knowledge, and promoting a shared dream. Done right, a talk can electrify a room and transform an audience's worldview. Done right, a talk is more powerful than anything in written form.        This book explains how the miracle of powerful public speaking is achieved, and equips you to give it your best shot. There is no set formula; no two talks should be the same. The goal is for you to give the talk that only you can give. But don't be intimidated. You may find it more natural than you think. This is the 21st-century's new manual for truly effective communication and it is a must-read for anyone who is ready to create impact with their ideas." This book will be published on May 3rd, 2016.
• Invisible Influence - The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior by Jonah Berger. "Berger explores the subtle, secret influences that affect the decisions we make -- from what we buy, to the careers we choose, to what we eat--in this fascinating and groundbreaking work. If you're like most people, you think that your choices and behaviors are driven by your individual, personal tastes, and opinions. You wear a certain jacket because you liked the way it looked. You picked a particular career because you found it interesting. The notion that our choices are driven by our own personal thoughts and opinions is patently obvious. Right? Wrong. Without our realizing it, other people's behavior has a huge influence on everything we do at every moment of our lives, from the mundane to the momentous occasion. Even strangers have a startling impact on our judgments and decisions: our attitudes toward a welfare policy shift if we're told it is supported by Democrats versus Republicans (even though the policy is the same in both cases). But social influence doesn't just lead us to do the same things as others. In some cases we conform, or imitate others around us. But in other cases we diverge, or avoid particular choices or behaviors because other people are doing them. We stop listening to a band because they go mainstream. We skip buying the minivan because we don't want to look like a soccer mom. In his surprising and compelling Invisible Influence, Jonah Berger integrates research and thinking from business, psychology, and social science to focus on the subtle, invisible influences behind our choices as individuals. By understanding how social influence works, we can decide when to resist and when to embrace it -- and how we can use this knowledge to make better-informed decisions and exercise more control over our own behavior." This book will be published on June 14th, 2016.
• Ego Is The Enemy by Ryan Holiday. "Many of us insist the main impediment to a full, successful life is the outside world. In fact, the most common enemy lies within: our ego. Early in our careers, it impedes learning and the cultivation of talent. With success, it can blind us to our faults and sow future problems. In failure, it magnifies each blow and makes recovery more difficult. At every stage, ego holds us back.  Ego Is the Enemy draws on a vast array of stories and examples, from literature to philosophy to his­tory. We meet fascinating figures who all reached the highest levels of power and success by con­quering their own egos. Their strategies and tactics can be ours as well.  In an era that glorifies social media, reality TV, and other forms of shameless self-promotion, the battle against ego must be fought on many fronts. Armed with the lessons in this book, as Holiday writes, 'you will be less invested in the story you tell about your own specialness, and as a result, you will be liberated to accomplish the world-changing work you've set out to achieve.'" This book will be published on June 14th, 2016.
• The Inevitable - Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly. "Much of what will happen in the next thirty years is inevitable, driven by technological trends that are already in motion. In this fascinating, provocative new book, Kevin Kelly provides an optimistic road map for the future, showing how the coming changes in our lives -- from virtual reality in the home to an on-demand economy to artificial intelligence embedded in everything we manufacture -- can be understood as the result of a few long-term, accelerating forces. Kelly both describes these deep trends -- flowing, screening, accessing, sharing, filtering, remixing, tracking, and questioning -- and demonstrates how they overlap and are codependent on one another. These larger forces will completely revolutionize the way we buy, work, learn, and communicate with each other. By understanding and embracing them, says Kelly, it will be easier for us to remain on top of the coming wave of changes and to arrange our day-to-day relationships with technology in ways that bring forth maximum benefits. Kelly's bright, hopeful book will be indispensable to anyone who seeks guidance on where their business, industry, or life is heading -- what to invent, where to work, in what to invest, how to better reach customers, and what to begin to put into place -- as this new world emerges." This book will be published on June 7th, 2016.
• Unmistakable - Why Only Is Better Than Best by Srinivas Rao. "After getting rejected from many business schools and fired from several sales jobs, Srinivas Rao decided to stop doing what he thought he was supposed to do and start working in a way that felt honest. He launched the Unmistakable Creative Podcast to interview some of the greatest minds in business finding a surprisingly big audience. This book distills the lessons, anecdotes, and insights of the 500+ people he has interviewed. Unmistakable art needs no signature. As soon as it's in front of you, you know exactly who created it, like Banksy's street art or Tim Burton's films. Whether you're a business owner, artist, or anything in between, when your work is unmistakable, your competition becomes irrelevant. They can't copy you.  The key to being unmistakable is to stop trying to be the best - because that would mean you're sticking to plans and rules that have already been set for you, choosing what's safe and reliable. Rao argues that your most meaningful, impactful, and joyful work exists outside the 'being the best' mindset, if you can strip away the expectations and pressure that you've internalized - to lead you to be the only." This book will be published on August 2nd, 2016.
• Blockchain Revolution - How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Alex Tapscott and Don Tapscott. "The first generation of the digital revolution brought us the Internet of information. The second genera­tion -- powered by blockchain technology -- is bringing us the Internet of value: a new, distributed platform that can help us reshape the world of business and transform the old order of human affairs for the better.  Blockchain is the ingeniously simple, revolution­ary protocol that allows transactions to be simul­taneously anonymous and secure by maintaining a tamperproof public ledger of value. Though it's the technology that drives bitcoin and other digital cur­rencies, the underlying framework has the potential to go far beyond these and record virtually everything of value to humankind, from birth and death certifi­cates to insurance claims and even votes. Why should you care? Maybe you're a music lover who wants artists to make a living off their art. Or a consumer who wants to know where that hamburger meat really came from. Perhaps you're an immigrant who's sick of paying big fees to send money home to loved ones. Or an entrepreneur looking for a new platform to build a business.  And those examples are barely the tip of the ice­berg. This technology is public, encrypted, and readily available for anyone to use. It's already seeing wide­spread adoption in a number of areas. As with major paradigm shifts that preceded it, the blockchain will create winners and losers. And while opportunities abound, the risks of disruption and dislocation must not be ignored." This book will be published on May 10th, 2016.

Happy reading!

Tags: alex tapscott artificial intelligence artist banksy behavior bitcoin blockchain blockchain revolution book brand business blog business book business psychology business school chris anderson communication daredevil decision digital currency digital marketing digital marketing agency digital marketing blog digital revolution distributed platform don tapscott ego ego is the enemy entrepreneur house of lies influence internet of value invisible influence j walter thompson jonah berger jwt kevin kelly literature macbook air marketing marketing blog mirum mirum agency mirum agency blog mirum blog mitch joel mitchjoel netflix non fiction philosophy pocket podcast power presentation presentation skills public speaking reading reality tv ryan holiday self promotion social influence social media social science srinivas rao success ted ted talks the inevitable tim burton unmissable creative podcast unmistakable virtual reality wpp writing

Need help deciding what to do with your marketing this year? Read on…

With another half of the year to go, it’s time for a recap of the strongest marketing trends in 2016. Most businesses have already put a marketing strategy in place in January (be it a quarterly or yearly one), and we now can start drawing first conclusions on which marketing trends proved to be the most effective so far, and why they’re here to stay.

1) Mobile optimisation

Since April 2015, mobile optimisation has become a priority for all marketers, with Google’s Mobile Friendly Update (#Mobilegeddon) designed to boost mobile-friendly websites on Google’s mobile search results. Simply put, pages failing the mobile-friendly test (you can take it here) have started dropping in rankings since April. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly to avoid the same SEO curse.

2) Human relationships

It seems obvious, but keeping in mind your target audience is a real person should be marketing’s golden rule at all times. In 2016, customers expect to be addressed like human beings and not just a number, and your marketing communications can only benefit from a genuine, personal message. Building a personal relationship with your audience not only encourages brand loyalty and long-term customer engagement, it also provides you with invaluable feedback for improvement.

3) Online reviews

Allow your customers to leave online reviews and place them on your website for total transparency. Show both good and bad reviews, as consumers tend to trust companies with both, over websites with only good reviews (giving a fake representation). Review software is not reserved for travel websites. Ecommerce owners can win new customers by showing their existing customers’ experience, and by displaying the quality of their customer service (through personal answers).

4) Social media storytelling

Storytelling is a strong marketing trend in 2016, and one that can make you even closer to your customers. Building social media campaigns around stories creates a lasting interest from your audience but it needs structure. Divide your ad campaigns into sequences (narratives, or steps towards a reveal) to build interest. Storytelling is also a way to share news locally to a target audience, using what you know of their taste and values. Social media storytelling is in general a fun way to produce creative and original ads (like episodes) showing your unique value proposition.

5) Marketing automation

Besides lead generation, the major benefit coming from marketing automation is the organisation it offers. Automation platforms allow easy scheduling of emails, content management, contacts segmenting and social media posting. Automation allows marketers to locate customers within the sales funnel and adapt the way they engage with them.

6) Virtual reality

This was pending for a while, but virtual reality is now a must for brands, especially for retailers who can allow customers to try on their products virtually. Consumers enjoy the ‘closer to life’ experience, and are asking for more of it in 2016. Virtual reality is also a great tool for storytelling: 360-degree stories engage an audience more than traditional ads, as they offer exclusive personalisation.

There are so many marketing trends in 2016 that it might seem difficult to choose where to allocate budget. Make sure your goals are clear and you know who to target before including one of these in your strategy. Very evidently there are new rules to stick by, such as prioritising content quality and user experience, as well as providing your audience with a more human experience.

Originally posted on the Jennifer Hakim Communications blog.

In today’s connected world, and especially as customer expectations around digital engagements continue to rise, a robust digital presence is essential to business success. Has there been a day in the past year when you or your company didn’t use the internet? Doubtful. And the same can be said for your customer base as well.

Being both digitally savvy and engaging customers through digital proficiency is extremely important and presents the opportunity for growth and transformation.

Digital transformation is less about tacking on new technology and more about how businesses can be fundamentally changed to operate more efficiently with technology. As such, there are five key ways businesses, whether they have digital strategies or not, can move and scale towards transforming digital operations and boosting business productivity and market share.

1. Websites – The first way a business can optimize and move towards digital business operations is through its website’s content and value. Rather than just presenting information to users and prospects, an enterprise’s website needs to generate engagement and do it quickly. From there, the user needs to be guided to a purchase or key takeaway that’s concise, easy and seamless. A good website should also be optimized for mobile users.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Improving your webpage’s ranking will help boost business awareness and the content being disseminated. Not only does this help current customers to see your site more prominently, but it also increases the potential for prospective customers to find your content when searching for similar solutions and vendors.

3. Social Media – Be where your customers are, and engage with them how they prefer to engage. This will increase loyalty and engagement across the board, and also showcases your business as more approachable to key customers. Social media often shows a different side of a company and its real tone and personality can shine through in a more informal environment.

4. Emails – Avoid getting lost in the clutter and onslaught of emails your customer receives daily. While email has most likely (and rightly so) been part of your digital strategy and communication before now, doing it right is imperative to your success. Don’t let customers tune out your messages by ensuring email campaigns are optimized. The more engaging the message, the more results you will have to measure.

5. Content – Don’t just push out content for the sake of pushing out content. It needs to be relevant, educational and grab customers’ attention. Giving customers an experience to remember and relate to will boost sales and credibility.

While digital transformation is a journey, businesses can move towards efficiency in operations and promote change this year armed with these five tips. Being digitally savvy and adaptable to changes in how customer prefer to receive information and do business will go a long way.

As a presentation skills coach I love to talk, although I made a very personal decision many years ago that there are two things I would try my very hardest to avoid speaking about in public.

Those two things are religion and politics.

Given that I’m neither a theologian nor a politician most people respect my decision but occasionally I’m challenged and asked why; my perspective is as simple as it is personal.

In my experience, many people hold such strongly held personal views and beliefs on both topics that when they do, it often results in either an exhaustive and arguably pointless debate or an equally meaningless argument.

If I were a theologian or a politician where it was my job and purpose to speak on either matter that would be different of course, but as I’m neither, I prefer to reserve my beliefs and opinions for where I believe they may offer an opportunity to serve.

In my role as a presentation skills coach that stance does not however stop me from commenting on and offering my personal and professional opinion of the presentation skills of politicians or religious leaders. My passion for helping people to connect with each other through the way they speak in public leads me to share what I believe we can learn from when great orators speak, regardless of their occupation.

Having recently written about Earl Nightingale, Wayne Dyer, Zig Ziglar and even Bruce Lee, another speaker I like to pay attention to is the American preacher, televangelist, author, and Senior Pastor of Lakewood Church in Houston Texas, Joel Osteen.

Do the tens of thousands of people gathering to listen to him each time he speaks and over 4.4M twitter followers, admire and respect him so much purely because of his religious and spiritual beliefs; or could there be something else?

The fact that his weekly sermon is viewed by seven million Americans each week and seen in almost 100 nations around the world suggests to me that whilst many of his followers like and agree with his content, he must be quite an engaging speaker too don’t you think?

If you are interested in either brilliant public speaking, happiness or simply a timeless truth, then regardless of your religious or spiritual beliefs I would urge you to watch Joel Osteen’s video below:

The lessons

Here are my thoughts on what I believe we can all take from this sermon purely in terms of learning to be a high impact public speaker and presenter.

1. Serious doesn’t have to be boring

Despite being the largest congregation in the United States with over 43,000 in attendance each week, Joel Osteen talks about the very serious subject of ‘life’ with an undaunted sense of humour from start to finish.

The last time I went to my church I believe there were probably fewer than 200 people there, and not only do I not recall raising a smile, I can’t actually remember anything.

I believe that Joel often starts a sermon with a joke or a humorous anecdote which some may think is inappropriate and risky in such a setting.

I certainly don’t think it’s inappropriate given that he clearly understands and respects his audience and uses humour in a way that helps him to relax and engage them.

I’m not suggesting that telling jokes is something every speaker should do, because it is definitely risky, but I do like and encourage the idea of taking yourself a little more lightly and helping your audience to smile and relax.

2. If stories can work in church, what power do they have in business?

At Mindful Presenter we are constantly talking about, teaching and promoting the impact of storytelling in presenting. The challenge behind telling a great story and telling a great story really well is finding one that will mean something to the audience.

As Joel demonstrates, once you have the relevance it’s about where you place the story and telling it as though it’s happening in the moment so it feels real to the audience.

3. You really don’t need the lectern

Speaking continuously for a full 30 minutes without frequently referring to your notes or ‘slides’ is not the easiest of tasks. When speakers have notes on top of a lectern you will more often than not see them ‘clinging’ to the lectern in fear of straying from their notes. In this sermon, you will see that Joel stands either in front of the lectern, next to it or completely away from it.

His effectiveness would have been significantly diminished had he stood behind the lectern and read his notes.

The solution is knowing your content inside out, rehearsing and practicing it without a lectern or notes and not being afraid to make a mistake.

4. Make people feel good

This sermon just like every other one of his sermons and speeches I’ve listened to is crafted and delivered in a way to make people feel good. In this case, it is positive and inspiring yet at the same time challenging people to look at ‘happiness’ from a different perspective.

It’s every presenter’s job to make their audience feel something, and that doesn’t necessarily mean making them feel good. I have given many business presentations where my intention has been to make my audience feel uncomfortable to enable me to lead change or action. It is relatively easy however, to make people feel uncomfortable or uncertain but the highly effective speakers know how to also offer hope.

I believe that far too many people are walking around feeling uninspired, demotivated or even unduly complacent so we have an enormous opportunity to help them feel more positive; that would always be my initial preference and starting point.

The point is, a presentation has to make them feel something.

If you are going to take them down first, that’s fine, but be sure to build into your strategy a way of lifting them up again and offering hope.

5. Don’t make it complicated

In this seminar, Joel makes it clear right from the very start what he is going to talk about; “I want to talk to you today about living life happy”.

Having set the theme for the next 30 minutes everyone knows why they are there and whether he then proceeds to tell a story, a joke or quotes scripture everything he says revolves around ‘living life happy’ and being happy.

He is clear, he is consistent and speaks using words, terms and phrases everyone can understand.

No one has to work hard to get his message.

6. Talk about what people can relate to

Happiness is a timeless, universal goal!

It’s one of the few things we all have in common so you can be certain that its something everyone in the audience wants to hear and talk about.

The best presentations are always about the audience, not the speaker.

I recognise that Joel Osteen often triggers a great deal of controversy when he speaks, with some people regarding him as more of a motivational speaker, than a pastor.

Whatever you choose to call him and whether you share his beliefs and sentiments or not It would be hard to dispute that he is an extremely powerful speaker.

I’ve highlighted just 6 of the many lessons we can learn from this speech:

– Serious doesn’t have to be boring

– If stories can work in church, what power do they have in business?

– You really don’t need the lectern

– Make people feel good

– Don’t make it complicated

– Talk about what people can relate to

Each of these in their own right carry incredible value in helping you to connect with your audience in a memorable and engaging way.

I believe It is also worth listening to the speech for an entirely different reason; it holds some very simple but powerful wisdom.

You don’t have to share Joel Osteen’s religious beliefs to understand and be inspired by his message.

It’s definitely worth the 30 minutes.

I really hope you enjoyed this post. If you did, please feel free to share it through your preferred social media channels below and subscribe to our mailing list so you won’t miss any future posts.

Image: Courtesy of flickr.com

Email marketing couldn’t be simpler, right?! You draft a winning email, send it to your subscribers and watch as the click-throughs appear on the stats. Unfortunately, it’s not always this easy. A few minor mistakes in your approach and the results won’t be worthy of the time and resources it took to implement the strategy. It’s a problem faced by many organisations, but thankfully there is a solution.

We’ve put together 10 quick and easy tips to avoid making the common mistakes. Implement some or all of these, to give your emails the best chance of being opened and read.

Stop using the word ‘subscribers’

Unless of course you want to sound like you’re emailing thousands of other individuals. Instead, tailor the email as if you’re contacting them personally. Making reference to your subscriber list may sound professional but it gives an impersonal tone.

Use a reliable ‘from’ address

A user will be more likely to click through if they are convinced by the reliability of the sender. Instead of using a generic company email, use your personal named email as the ‘from’ address.

Add statistics

The recipient may have clicked through but a large chunk of text is all that’s needed for them to hit the ‘trash’ button. It’s surprising the impact a few numbers and statistics can have. It quickly draws the eye and provides some excitement to an otherwise dull email.

Make it conversational

We’re much more likely to open and read an email from a friend than a corporation. Tailor your approach to adopt a conversational tone. Imagine you’re emailing a good friend and always use the word ‘you’. It’s a powerful tool, creating a sense of rapport and approachability.

Keep it brief

Short, emotive sentences pack the most punch. Don’t be tempted to write endless paragraphs on the company and its story. It may sound great, but it will never be read. Be stringent in your editing, cutting all unnecessary words in an effort be as concise as possible.

Avoid automated greetings

‘To whom it may concern’ and ‘yours sincerely’ have no value in today’s email marketing. Opt for a more informal greeting for a less stiff and robotic approach.

Focus on the benefits

If you’re promoting a new product or service, avoid using words and terms that oversell. Place an emphasis on the benefits and why it would bring value to your customers. Letting the product speak for itself is a great way to generate interest without looking too gimmicky.

Don’t forget links

A well-crafted email always includes subtle backlinks to your site throughout. Always include more than one, to give the best chance of converting.

Be unique

In order to set yourself apart from the thousands of other email spam, it’s important to remain unique. Try something experimental and analyse the stats to see what works. The addition of an unusual phrase can be all that’s needed to arouse curiosity.

Subscribe to the best

What marketing emails do you find yourself opening? These have managed to pique your interest and create an urge to read more. Follow any email lists which possess this ability and you can emulate what works.

• Only 18% of companies believe they have the skills necessary to gather and use insights effectively.
• Only 19% of companies are confident that their insights-gathering processes contribute directly to sales effectiveness. (source: McKinsey)

Simply collecting data does not unleash its business effectiveness. Big data is a term for large volumes of data – both structured and unstructured – that inundates a business on a day-to-day basis. But it’s not the amount of data that’s important. It’s what organizations do with the data that matters.

Here are the 15 best Big Data Companies and why they stand out according to sources that rank them highly.

Best Big Data companies with the biggest revenue

PALANTIR

Founded in 20014, Palantir builds software that connects data, technologies, humans and environments. Big Data revenues topped $418 million — with a 50-50 split between software and services. Key customers include the S.E.C., which hired Palantir to help the government analyze data to find terrorists, and to help it uncover illegal trading activity. What does Palantir’s software do? It lets non-technical users visualize reams of data from several databases in a user-friendly way. That way, they can look at specific bits of information and the links among them, so they can find answers to complex questions and find the proverbial needle in a haystack. (Source:Information Management)

PWC

PriceWaterhouseCoopers generated $312 million from Big Data revenues in 2013. All of that revenue involved consulting services. The opportunities should continue to be strong, considering 41% of PWC’s customers are concerned about Big Data overload. PWC is one of the leading companies in the world offering advisory services for financial entities with complex, computerized systems, and massive amounts of data. (Source: Information Management)

IBM

IBM has momentum in the Big Data market — generating $1.37 billion in revenues. Those revenues were split across hardware (31%), software (27%) and services (42%). Eager to potentially accelerate those Big Data revenues, IBM expanded cloud-focused releases of Cognos while also working more closely with Watson-focused software. IBM has a big Big Data play through which it is aiming to be relevant to all market sectors. The company released 20 industry solutions as it targets, getting its analytics embedded into all areas of the maturing Big Data market. (Source:Information Management)

Most well funded Big Data startups

DOMO

Domo isn’t just another business management tool. Rather, we understand that Domo is an intelligent dashboard that displays and analyzes various key business metrics in real-time. Its ability to not only aggregate information that’s typically scattered across different sources (like spreadsheets, social media, or databases) into a single dashboard, but to then also continuously refresh the results, is a transformation for those involved in business operations. Domo also announced that it received $200 million in Series D funding this past April. Domo’s been around since 2010, but that’s still an absurdly large amount of funding for a company that’s just publicly entered the market. (Source: Tech.co)

ROUNDFOREST

Roundforest was named one of 16 Israeli Startups Ready To Take On 2016. Roundforest is a data-driven e-commerce startup that optimizes every step of the consumer’s purchase path. They’ve developed a proprietary automated engine that removes the guesswork out of performance optimization. Its founders previously worked at Google and Intel and are determined to apply their background in machine learning and data analysis to help consumers make better shopping decisions, especially since Roundforest is already reaching more than 10 million users a month. (Source: Tech.co)

SQREAM TECHNOLOGIES

It’s safe to say that 2015 was SQream’s best year yet. This past year, SQream won five major awards (Red Herring Global 100, Red Herring Asia 100, Best in Biz, Stevie, and Tech Trailblazers Regional), launched its second product (GenomeStack), and raised $7.4 million in Series B funding. In 2010, SQream Technologies introduced its GPU-based technology that, through massive parallel computing, boosts analytics performance up to 100x faster than its competitors—meaning Teradata, IBM Netezza, Oracle Exadata, and Amazon Redshift on the Cloud really ought to watch out. SQream is boldly taking on the Goliaths. (source: Tech.co)

Most recommended Big Data Companies by employees to friends

CLOUDERA

Quaero’s data management platform (QDMP) and its AdVantage platform are built upon Cloudera’s Distribution of Hadoop (Cloudera Enterprise). The AdVantage platform is targeted for clients in the media industry to better understand their audience, enhance engagement, create richer experiences, and increase overall audience value. Quaero has deployed the platform across several clients in the media industry (ranging in ingestion volume from ~3MM to ~1.5 Billion records per day). Cloudera Enterprise offers the right mix of components to build a robust data platform which supports both reporting and analytics which can deal with all sorts of data. (Source: DeZyre)

INSIGHTSQUARED

InsightSquared is a sales performance analytics company for fast-growing tech businesses. Unlike spreadsheets, InsightSquared’s visual, maintenance-free reports and dashboards provide a custom lens into real-time sales results. InsightSquared offers robust, powerful data intelligence in a system that is accessible and affordable. InsightSquared is entirely web-based, so setup is quick, painless, and doesn’t require dedicated IT personnel. Pricing is monthly, eliminating costly up-front fees. Features include activity tracking, employee scorecards, sales forecasting, ratios and KPIs, data quality monitoring, and more. With InsightSquared, users have access to dashboards and interactive visualizations that take static data and create charts with dynamic drill-down capabilities, configured to track just about any kind of data critical to business operations. (Source: InsightSquared)

TRIFACTA

Trifacta enables organizations to use data to drive innovation by providing a more productive and accessible method of exploring and experimenting with data of all shapes and sizes. Data wrangling — formatting and cleaning — is a sore spot and stumbling block for many, but you often can’t do much visualization- or analysis-wise until the data is in order. My projects folder is filled with one-off Python scripts written for specific datasets (and steps within steps). Trifacta Wrangler aims to streamline the process with a click interface and automation. The desktop software is free to use and available for PC and Mac. (Source: DeZyre)

Coolest Big Data Start Ups

ARCADIA DATA

An increasing number of businesses are implementing Hadoop systems, using them to collect huge volumes of disparate data from multiple sources. But making use of that data isn’t so easy — most traditional business analytics tools can’t directly access Hadoop data, and IT departments have to step in to prepare the data or move it to another system to make it available for everyday business workers. Arcadia Data is developing visual analytics software that overcomes those hurdles by directly accessing data stored in Hadoop clusters. The technology uses Hadoop as an operating system, allowing it to run directly on Hadoop servers and access data stored in the Hadoop Distributed File System. (Source: CRN)

DATAHERO

San Francisco-based DataHero is focused on developing “self-service” business analytics software. The DataHero cloud-based service collects data from such disparate sources as Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, Excel, Office 365, Marketo, HubSpot, and Eventbrite, and turns it into charts and dashboards. For the business analytics software industry, the challenge has been developing analytical applications that can be used by a broad range of everyday business users without a lot of assistance from the IT department. DataHero is among the few companies that’s close to achieving that. (Source: CRN)

INTERANA

Interana is another big data startup that’s developing technology to help businesses analyze streaming data in realtime. The company’s events-based analytical software works with clickstream data and other “events-based” information to help users answer questions about how customers behave and how products are used. The goal is to provide actionable business intelligence for nontechnical users. No longer do you have to have a department of people who are the high priests of data. Now, the person who needs the data–the person who wants the business answers from the data–can have direct access to it. (Source: Tech.co)

Best Big Data companies to watch

CAZENA

Cazena provides fast and inexpensive processing of big data in an encrypted cloud via what it calls enterprise Big Data-as-a-Service offerings broken down into Data Lake, Data Mart, and Sandbox editions. Cazena aims to greatly simplify big data processing for businesses. Ideally, it should only take three clicks to set up a data processing job with Cazena. The service strips away the complexities by trying to automatically figure out what technology to use to analyze a given set of data. It then automatically provisions, optimizes, and manages that workflow for its customers, no matter whether it’s a Hadoop, Spark, or MPP SQL (think Amazon Redshift) job. The company is led mainly by former movers and shakers at Netezza, a data warehouse company acquired by IBM in 2010 for $1.7 billion. (Source: Network World)

EXPERFY

Experfy is a cloud-based consulting marketplace designed to match up big data and analytics experts with clients who need their services. Experfy provides advisory services, big data readiness assessments, road maps, predictive dashboards, algorithms, and a number of custom analytics solutions. Expert Panels consist of a closely curated group of Big Data leaders within different areas of specialization—from Marketing Analytics, Personalization and Security Analytics to Financial Services, Healthcare and Retail. In addition, Experfy’s proprietary data platform, tools, and processes support repeatable projects and use-cases in specific verticals. Experfy provides a self-service model for smaller companies and a high-touch concierge service with project management for larger enterprises. (Source: Forbes)

TAMR

Tamr uses machine learning and human input to enable customers to make use of data currently silo-ed in disparate databases, spreadsheets, logs, and partner resources. Most companies have many dozens of Oracle instances, hundreds of databases, and many thousands of tables. There is [currently] no way to catalog and know what’s out there. Tamr can create a central catalogue of all these data sources (and spreadsheets and logs) spread out across the company and give greater visibility into what exactly a company has. Tamr’s tech got its start at MIT’s CSAIL. (Source:Network World)

Do these best Big Data companies help you see how to make data an asset at your company? Do you see why these Big Data companies stand out? Does your organization need guidance navigating Big Data?

Losing customers is never something you celebrate. It’s bad for the bottom line, can hurt your reputation and lead to negative word of mouth, to say nothing about the high costs associated with new acquisitions.

Recently I lost a despicable customer. And despite conventional wisdom, I have to admit that I’m almost dancing in the aisles.

As with every churn, however, I did some deep reflection. What could I have done differently? I think my answers may surprise you. They’ve led me to see a bigger problem.

Degradation in the sales profession is emboldening bad buyer behavior. Incompetent, unprofessional sales reps are helping to create our own Frankenstein monster. It’s time we acknowledge our contribution to the problem, take ownership and fix it.

Bullies are Bad for Business

I knew we had a large non-renewal coming. My sales team and I had four recent requests from resellers requesting to sell our data – to the same account. While we allow companies to resell our data on a case-by-case basis, all four were asking to sell to an existing customer. When I pointed this out to a direct customer, they claimed that the buyer was smugly bragging that he was hell-bent on buying our data at as low a cost as possible, hence, working multiple resellers hoping one was desperate and we have a loophole in our reseller policies.

What’s interesting with this particular churn is that I should have known better. Five years earlier ‘Davy Jones’ from ‘Unicorn Networks’ had burned me in a business deal. The guy is smart, hardworking and spends real money. The problem is – he’s also developed a reputation as an abuser of vendors. So when I received his 3:00 a.m. email saying he wanted to buy HG Data, my heart skipped a beat. Here we go again, I thought. But rather than refuse outright, I turned him over to a member of our sales team. “Be careful,” I warned. I fell right into his trap. Damn.

Have We Lost Our Integrity?

When I started selling, I wasn’t buying new audio headphones every few months but rather resoling my shoes. I didn’t prospect by phone or email; I literally walked through buildings. I visited companies and met prospects face to face. Selling was hyper-localized. I ran into my customers and prospects at Stop & Shop. They’d see me at a local bar or restaurant, and our kids played together on the same Little League team. If I didn’t treat them well, I would be a pariah in my community. My clients were my neighbors. My livelihood was contingent upon how my reputation was spread among a very small community.

Today, with sales on a global scale, it’s not always easy to meet face-to-face. We tend to rely on phone calls, email, text and Skype—all of which have brought greater anonymity. When an exchange is nothing more than two voices on other ends of a phone and exchanging emails, it’s easier for buyers and sellers alike to lower their standards and treat one another badly.

While we can’t return to the good old days, we don’t have to throw civility out with our neighbors either. I still conduct myself as though I’m doing business in the old neighborhood, and I don’t consider myself a dinosaur. Rather, I think we’ve lost the checks and balances in our global, anonymous world. And it’s enabling bad behavior.

Sales Must Lead the Way Back to Civility

The fact that I’m disheartened about the dilution of the sales profession is not a new theme. I’ve ranted about this before. This particular churn of “Unicorn Networks”, however, reminds me that while some buyers are bad actors, sales has absolutely contributed to the problem. Although my team hadn’t done so with Unicorn Networks, I did wonder if the culmination of crappy sales interactions with other entities was contributing to Davy Jones feeling justified in being a jerk to everyone. Was he really just a bitter human being or had he been hardened over time the degradation of competence in the sales profession? From a personal perspective, I find it more difficult as a buyer of technology to be tolerant of bad sales reps. Not preparing for calls, not knowing their products, poor listening, inconsistent follow up and similar deficiencies tries my patience and has built up in me a negative bias I take into every call when I’m a buyer.

So whether Davy Jones is a jerk or just exhibiting jerky behavior is no longer of interest to me. I want to focus on what we can control, by upping our game in sales. Although I’m not suggesting today’s generation of sellers start foot-canvassing again, I do think approaching your role as if you were selling with a level of intimacy of bygone years is a huge start. It’s time for us to take ownership and fix our portion of the Unicorn Network problem. Here’s what we need to do:

1) Sell Like Your Mom is Buying
While this may sound altruistic, it’s not far off the mark. If you approach every sale as though you’re selling to someone you care about and who can call you out on any bullshit, you’ll do your best job. Conduct yourself in the field as you expect to be treated. It’s that simple.

2) Be Honest
Stop spinning your story. Stop lying by omission. Be candid and forthright. Give your buyers the information to make educated decisions. Even if you lose a few short-term sales, you definitely win long term because you’re building a relationship and establishing your reputation.

3) Know Your Differentiation
I go nuts when I ask sales reps how their products differ from Company X, and they drop the canned and cagey reply of ‘…I don’t follow the competition.’ That’s the most insulting, side-stepping, bullshit line that a sales person can use. Evah! You’re telling prospects that you’re either incompetent or that the competition has something that you don’t want them to know. In either case, you’re not fooling anyone. With me, all you’ve done is given me the motivation to now look at your competition, and hard. Damn you, but I’m going to figure out what you are trying to hide, and more times than not, that one snarky line causes me to find what you didn’t want me to know…and you’ve lost the sale.

• Know your differentiation: If you work for a company that you believe in passionately, distinctions aren’t a problem. If you don’t have it with your current employer, go find another one.
• Lead with your differentiation: Explain the single most compelling reason why someone should buy from you. Do it early and reinforce it throughout your dialogue with the buyer.
• Reinforce your differentiation: Compare your best feature(s) against those of your top competitors.
• Celebrate your differentiation: If you have a buyer that doesn’t care about your differentiation, graciously let them buy from someone else.

4) Be Competent or Get Out
If you can’t or won’t do these three simple things on every call, you’re just incompetent. Accept it. Even worse, you’re hurting the profession for the rest of us, by emboldening buyers to return their frustration by treating the good ones poorly.

Help me Build a Tinder for Sales

And if you happen to be an engineer reading this post and have some time to moonlight, I’m going to end with a special appeal to you. Let’s build something together that might return some civility to the buying-selling process. Physicians, teachers, service providers , local businesses and many other markets, all have tools that allow participants to be rated online. How about we do the same for b2b buyers and sellers? I know damn well that if my team’s actions in the sales process had the risk of being made public, with buyers literally rating their conduct, they would be on their best behavior. And the same holds true for buyers. Although I don’t have a monetization plan in mind, it would be interesting if this rating community got off the ground. I’ll contribute the design if you’ll contribute the code. Together, we can make the world of selling and buying a better place for all.

This article was first published on the HG Data Blog.

Is the internet ruining the English language? Has the original meaning of "beg the question" been forever lost? Who of all the presidential candidates are closest to being standard speakers of English?

Perhaps the most qualified person to answer these and other questions about English usage is Bryan A. Garner. The 57-year-old Texan has written 25 books, many of them award-winning, and he's the editor-in-chief of "Black's Law Dictionary," said to be the most widely cited law book on the planet.

In his new book, "Garner's Modern English Usage" (Oxford), Garner has made extensive use of big data to write more precisely than anyone ever before about English usage. Google gave him license to delve into its Google Books Ngram Viewer, which displays graphs showing how words have occurred in books over centuries.

In many ways, usage books have always been based on a good deal of guesswork. That's why Garner calls the use of ngrams "absolutely revolutionary" in the field of usage lexicography.

Here's a sample graph showing three terms, or ngrams, used in written English around the world in the past hundred years or so:

Recently, I spoke with Garner about his new book, whether language is really changing much in the age of the internet and social media, his late friend and coauthor Antonin Scalia, and other subjects.

Daniel McMahon: This new fourth edition of your main usage book, "Garner's Modern English Usage," replaces the third-edition "Garner's Modern American Usage." Besides the title, which we'll get to, what's different in the new book?

Bryan A. Garner: The biggest change is the level of empiricism underlying all the judgments. I made extensive use of corpus linguistics, and especially of Google Books and the ngrams, to assess the judgments that I've made in previous editions, and it was a most enlightening process. I've added almost 2,500 ratios of the most current available information about how many times one form — the standard form, let's say — would appear in relation to a variant form. That's enormously useful information for the connoisseur. But even for a less serious aficionado, those ratios can be extremely interesting.

If you want to know how often, for example, "between you and I" occurs in comparison with "between you and me" in print sources or current books, that information is now available to us, whereas previous lexicographers and usage writers simply had to guess. There's a lot of that empirical evidence spread throughout the book, and in some cases my judgments about terms changed. I've added about a thousand new entries, a lot of them for connoisseurs — plural forms, some arcane plurals that weren't in the book before. I've tried to make the book the most comprehensive treatment of English usage ever published. That was the goal anyway.

McMahon: What led you to add so much more empirical evidence? Did you feel challenged on some of your usage preferences?

Garner: Not really. Once the ngrams became available, it took me a little time to start playing with ngrams and realize this is absolutely revolutionary in the field of lexicography. The moment I played with a couple of ngrams, I realized this fundamentally changes the nature of usage lexicography. For a long time, some descriptive linguists have complained that usage books with a prescriptive bent are written by people who just sit back and say, "I like this better than I like that," and I don't think that's ever been so, because the best usage books, even prescriptive ones, have been based on lifetimes of study — when you consider people like H.W. Fowler and Wilson Follet and Theodore Bernstein and others.

But still, they were having to guess. Even the editors of the "Oxford English Dictionary" were having to guess based on the few citation slips in front of them. But now we can apply big data to English usage and find out what was predominant until what year. This is a typical entry — and there are thousands of examples in the book:

merchandise; *merchandize. The first is standard. The second is a misbegotten verb and noun. *Merchandize emerged as a variant of merchandise in both the noun and verb senses during the 17th century and flourished until the mid-19th century. Today, it's an anomaly of either part of speech. … Current ratio: 41:1

Now that is an extraordinary thing to be able to say with confidence that they emerged in the middle of 17th century and flourished until the mid-19th century. But we can now do that because of big data. Let's see if I can give you another example — I'm just flipping through the book. Look at an old entry from "Modern American Usage" and see which words I added and how it changed in the new book. Look at "candidacy":

[before ngrams]

candidacy; candidature. The first is the standard term in AmE, the second in BrE.

[with ngrams]

candidacy; candidature. The first is the standard term in AmE, the second traditionally in BrE. But since the late 1970s, candidacy has become the predominant form in British print sources. Current ratio: 5:1

McMahon: Do you think that's because of the effects of American usage?

Garner: Yes. Let me read to you a little bit from one of the last paragraphs of the new preface. It deals with this very point, and I thought it was kind of interesting:

One recurrent finding bears note. All varieties of English are powerfully influenced by American English. When my late friend Robert W. Burchfield was editor in chief of the Oxford English Dictionary Supplement in the 1970s, he noted that the center of gravity for the English language had shifted to North America. He was right. Again and again, one sees British English and World English following the lead of American usage, often with a lag time of 10 to 50 years. You’ll see this trend noted in many entries throughout the book — but of course it’s hardly a universal rule.

So often there will be entries that say, "This became standard in American English in 1880 and in British English in the early 1920s," or something like that. Again, the editors of the "OED" and the editors of Merriam-Webster — or any lexicographer using traditional forms — would have slips of paper, and let's say you wanted to look up the term "retributive," the adjective for "retribution." You might have seven slips of paper in front of you. One of them has "retributional," but all the others are "retributive," so you guess that "retributive" is the standard term. Now you can find the precise ratio. Some British commentators said this is a horrible Americanism. You can now prove it originated in British English. That's kind of fun. And in a sense, every page of the book got rewritten in that way.

Sometimes it won't even be close. Like “thalamus”:

thalamus (=[1] a part of the brain that relays sensory impulses; or [2] the receptacle of a flower) forms the plural thalami. Though not unknown in AmE, thalamuses is rare. … Current ratio: 431:1

So the ratio of “thalami” to “thalamuses” to is 431-to-1. Sometimes the ratio will be 17,000-to-1. Now you might say, why should I even include something that is 17,000-to-1? The answer is, when you're in a debate with somebody — let's say you're a copy editor — and somebody has used a form that you're quite certain is not the standard form, it's pleasing to be able to say, "Look, that form occurs only once compared to 17,000 times for the other form." It's all for settling debates. I suppose some would say, well, why have a usage book if you can just Google everything? But it does matter. There are a lot of judgment calls involved and some expertise.

Another example — "stated otherwise":

stated otherwise, when used at the beginning of a sentence, is a pompous version of in other words. The phrase emerged in the late 19th century and became widespread during the 20th. It shows no signs of waning.

That would be a very difficult thing to say with any confidence if you couldn't rely on big data, and that's why no other usage book has ever had statements like that — because you would have had to guess.

Here's "movable" without an E in the middle:

movable has been predominantly so spelled in AmE since about 1840 and in BrE since about 1870. Moveable is a variant spelling. Current ratio: 3:1

So it became standard without the middle E in 1840 in AmE and in BrE from 1870. That's amazing — it's new information. Every entry has essentially been rewritten using the information to be gleaned from ngrams.

And I tested. I was a little bit doubtful about how much I could rely on the ngrams. How reliable were they really? I had a couple of interviews with the inventor of ngrams at Google. Google gave me a written license to use the ngrams in my work fully, to the extent that I wanted to, and I cross-checked as much as possible. Everything I did confirmed the reliability of this big-data tool after, let's say, 1750. Before 1750, it's a little bit shaky because there are some anomalous things, and the optical character-recognition program, OCR, is a little bit tricky with a lot of the older text, so I don't trust the stuff from 1500 to 1750 all that much. But from 1750 on — really, from 1700 on — it's very reliable.

McMahon: How has the use of ratios transformed your Language-Change Index?

Garner: The index now has less guesswork in it. There was some guesswork involved in deciding whether something was Stage 4, Stage 3, Stage 2, but by doing the ratios I was able to tell that if something were 2-to-1 or 3-to-1, it might be Stage 4.

If it’s 4-to-10, it might be Stage 3. If it's 10-to-20, it might be Stage 2, and if it's 20 or above, it might be Stage 1. I came up with a whole series of gradations that I was able to verify, based on print sources, what stages we had reached on the Language-Change Index. The index has now become much more scientifically based.

McMahon: Are there words that you once shunned that have now been accepted or are on their way to being accepted?

Garner: "Nauseous" — though I'd call that a skunked term [a word likely to distract some readers]. I call it Stage 4. But interestingly, in 1940, the phrase "felt nauseated" versus "felt nauseous" was 9-to-1 in favor of "felt nauseated." The current ratio is 1, "felt nauseated," to 1.5, "felt nauseous," so usage has flipped in about 75 years. I just don’t use the term — I say "nauseated" or "nauseating." But you’re going to be able to find all kinds of interesting ratios.

There are some words like "nauseous" where the bad form is now in the majority of instances, but it still says Stage 4 — it's not Stage 5 yet. If you take "has drunk" versus "has drank," I call that Stage 2 — "has drank" is Stage 2 — and the ratio of "has drunk" to "has drank" is 12-to-1.

I tried to contextualize all my searches, so if you want to do "home in on" versus "hone in on," you can't do "home in" versus "hone in" because you end up with a lot usages such as "She has a home in Malibu." So you have to use "homed in on" versus "honed in on" and then you get a good read on it. I showed exactly what my searches were so that anybody else can verify the results.

McMahon: Are there any words you’d like to see disappear?

Garner: "Irregardless." All the words I have under "nonwords." I have a list in the book.

irregardless

muchly

seldomly

thusly

uncategorically

doubtlessly

analyzation

Stuff like that. All the nonwords.

McMahon: The title of the third edition reads "American Usage," but the new fourth edition reads "English Usage." Why the change?

Garner: Well, in a way the title "Modern American Usage" was always slightly misleading because the book dealt heavily with British English as well as American English. The reason for it, originally, was some sensitivity about not competing with Burchfield's third edition of Fowler ["Dictionary of Modern English Usage"]. And Burchfield's third edition was really not a third edition of Fowler but his own usage book — but that was "Modern English Usage." Then Oxford added "Garner" to the title, I guess in the second edition, and it became “Garner’s Modern American Usage.” But in the second and third editions I even deepened the treatment of British English, so the name “American” was less and less apt.

With what I was able to do with ngrams and searching World English, British English, and American English, the word "American" was even more misleading to speakers of English around the world. And because "Garner" had already been added to the title — what, 12 years ago — Oxford felt comfortable with making it "English Usage" as opposed to "American."

The other thing is that, because of the dual meaning of "English," when you see "American Usage," people don't know what "usage" is, people don't know what usage books are. But if you see the phrase "English Usage" you know it's about the language. I think there were problems in bricks-and-mortar bookstores, even figuring out where to put the book. And what is a book on "American usage" anyway? Only true connoisseurs know what a usage book is, so the new title is more descriptive as well, to the everyday book person.

And the book now makes all sorts of pronouncements, not only about British English but also about World English, because it's now possible to search that corpus. So it's true; it has its origins in North America, and it has North American sensibilities, but it is very inclusive in terms of treating varieties of English throughout the world.

McMahon: There's going to be an app as well. I'm very happy to know that.

Garner: I think you’re really going to like it. The Kindle format for “Modern American Usage” was not good, and there were complaints about it. I had nothing to do with it. But I’ve had a lot to do with this app, and we’re very excited about it.

McMahon: I have to say this is the most readable and intriguing usage book I’ve ever read.

Garner: It’s the kind of thing that any writer of reference books would like, I think — to create a reference book that is compulsively readable so that you want to look up more things. That’s the idea. And that’s the way the best reference books for a very long time have been. I think the ratios make it even more that way — you want to find out what’s the ratio on this, what’s the ratio on that.

McMahon: How much has the internet changed English?

Garner: The facile answer is that language is changing more rapidly because of the internet and because usage spreads more quickly, people are exposed to new terms, new usages. I think that’s actually overstated. The language — the literary language, anyway — remains very stable. And apart from technological innovations that need new terminology, for the most part, literary English is exceedingly stable and very slow to change. So apart from technological innovations and new media, such as Twitter and Instagram and things of that kind that come into the popular vocabulary, I don’t think the internet is speeding up change all that much.

Now, one thing it’s doing is confirming that a lot of people — maybe a majority of Americans — don’t seem to know the difference between the possessive your and the contraction you’re, and that’s very surprising to many of us. And more and more people are communicating with comma splices — perhaps in text messages and in email messages — and it could be that comma splices will soon be somehow considered standard. I don’t think so — I would say over my dead body. One is seeing more and more of these all the time. I’m sure there are lots of other examples that we could point to. But, on the whole, I think the fundamentals of language remain very much the way they’ve always been.

McMahon: What observations have you made about the presidential candidates?

Garner: [Laughs] There are so many fascinating things. One is, when you listen to Donald Trump, he has this very thumping style in which he repeats sentences almost verbatim the second time. Whenever he wants to underscore something, he repeats the sentence. And of course he has a series of about eight favorite adjectives that he uses again and again.

The more you listen to Donald Trump — even if you kind of like the message the first couple of times — if you're listening critically and you hear the same airy characterizations and adjectives over and over again, and the same speech patterns, it becomes very trying. I think even people who might be drawn to it will end up being repelled by it if they are thinking critically.

I find Bernie Sanders's dialect to be very unpleasant to listen to. I could also understand why so many people in New England considered George W. Bush to be unlistenable, because he overdid the Texas twang. And in fact even to a Texan — it made this Texan cringe. But Bernie Sanders is very difficult to listen to because one doesn't expect an educated American to have that kind of accent.

From the viewpoint of public speaking, Hillary Clinton is interesting to listen to — how often she just sounds cross, as if she’s shouting. But then again, Donald Trump does that, and Bernie Sanders does that as well.

This is a very strange political season, and in terms of presidential contests, a very strange linguistic season as well.

If you were judging based on standard English among the frontrunners, Ted Cruz and Clinton are the closest to being standard speakers of English. With Cruz, the difficult thing about listening to him is the nasality of his delivery, how nasal his voice is. I'm speaking about much more than just grammar and usage now in terms of speaking styles, but the nasality of Cruz makes it difficult for listeners.

Kasich is quite listenable.

McMahon: You were very close to Justice Scalia, and your bond was through language. What was your relationship like?

Garner: I think that had it not been for David Foster Wallace’s review of "Modern American Usage," my collaboration with Justice Scalia would have never come about. He was a fan of that essay in Harper's. Actually he had forgotten by the time we were having breakfast for the first time that Wallace’s essay was about my book. He brought up the essay, and when I told him it was about "Modern American Usage," he said, "Well, your stock has just gone way up in my estimation." And we just hit it off over language.

He was a snoot, and I’m a snoot, according to Wallace’s definition — that was the bond between us. And I think his having a professional snoot to bounce ideas off was very appealing to him. Our ideas about language were very similar. He spent 48 hours here at my house on the way to a trip to Asia, and I showed him the page proofs — we spent about 30 minutes going through the page proofs of "GMEU" together — and he loved the ratios. He was very excited about them. I showed him his name in the front matter, and he was very appreciative of that. It occurred to me last night that I might have to have to add the phrase “the late” before “Antonin Scalia” in the front matter, in the acknowledgments, which was very sad to me. But he cared a great deal about language, and we would frequently look things up, both in my usage books and in Fowler when we were working together in his chambers.

McMahon: Did Justice Scalia have any big pet peeves?

Garner: He thought I was a little too soft on “begging the question.” He was insisting that “begging the question” must always be about circular reasoning, but of course the empirical evidence is that very few people use it that way today. He could not stand it when somebody would say “cite to” — “you cite to a source” — as opposed to “citing a source.” That was a red flag for him. There were quite a few of them.

When we did the audiobook of “Making Your Case” together, we read sections in the book, our first book together. We were at the Supreme Court, in the conference room of the justices, and we were reading into this professional recording equipment, and there was a staff there monitoring the recording. We would frequently stop each other and correct each other’s pronunciation. We'd call for "Webster's Second International Dictionary," or "Webster's Third," and the "Shorter Oxford English Dictionary," and we would have these debates about how do you say this, how do you say that.

And he was surprised a great deal about standard pronunciations, so a word like “gravamen” — I think he said “grah-və-mən” and I persuaded him to say “grə-vay-mən,” only by showing him "Webster's Second." But we loved having these little debates.

He was very competitive — we were both competitive — so we liked trying to prove each other wrong on various things. And that’s a great game for snoots to play, to try to prove each other wrong.

McMahon: Have you been happy with the sales of your books?

Garner: Oh yeah — and thank goodness for online booksellers because it used to be that a book author was dependent on a few book buyers' decisions, the bricks-and-mortar stores. If they didn't carry your book, then it simply had no opportunity to sell.

Now the internet has opened up the marketplace and leveled the playing field so that anyone who writes a good, solid, useful book has a shot at selling it.

There was a time when the first edition of "Modern American Usage" came out, some of the bricks-and-mortar stores were declaring usage books to be a dead category, and they refused to buy any at all. That was very frustrating. But the internet has proved that judgment to be wrong.

McMahon: The internet has been pretty good to you — Google ngrams, online booksellers.

Garner: I can't complain. I'm a big fan.

McMahon: It's cool that you're pretty active on Twitter too.

Garner: It's a fascinating new genre of writing. But it can be very addicting, and you have to try to keep some balance and not just look at it all the time.

McMahon: I like it when you poke fun at news anchors' pronunciations.

Garner: I enjoy tweaking Bill O’Reilly from time to time on his mispronunciations, especially when he mispronounces his "Word of the Day." That is fascinating.

SEE ALSO: 'Garner's Modern English Usage' on Amazon

DON'T MISS: The most listenable presidential candidates, ranked

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The 4 Most Persuasive Words In The English Language

Customers don’t buy… because sellers don’t sell.  Or at least they aren’t selling the right way. How do I know that? Two salespeople called this week and immediately launched into their sales “pitch’ (because it wasn’t a conversation) that went like this:

Salesperson: I’m so and so. You downloaded [X] from our website and I want to tell you more about what we do and how we can help you with your [ABC] efforts. Do you remember getting the [X] item?

Me: Not really.

Salesperson: Oh. Let me tell you what we do. Blah… blah… blah… blah… blah…. Isn’t that something that will help you?

When the rep took a breath I asked what they knew about me and my company… and wasn’t surprised when they said ‘Nothing.’

The sales trainer in me couldn’t resist.

I offered a suggestion and told them to look at my website, and any other person’s site, before picking up the phone and calling.

The rep’s answer was appalling.  It went like this, “I don’t have time to do that. I have 150 calls to make each day and I couldn’t possibly look at each company’s website.”

Wow.  I hope the seller gets paid on meeting the quota of 150 calls rather than what is sold. Now a reminder to all sales managers out there.

Now a reminder to all sales managers out there-

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Marketing is paying top dollar for leads. Don’t let your salespeople waste them.
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Do you really know what’s going on with your sales team as they are calling the golden leads or referrals?

If not, get on it right now with these easy to follow tips to discover what’s really going on in the sales conversation.

3 Tips to Discover What’s Really Going On

1. Set time to listen to each call center and field sales rep in action. That means telephone monitoring and field ride alongs. You are in listen-only mode. Listen to 3-5 conversations and you’ll know the gaps from approach to close. The patterns will emerge and you’ll nail the number one gap to address with skill building sales training and coaching.
2. Require the use of a preparation sales worksheet. I don’t care if they are calling 150 people a day. (BTW, how can someone possibly do that…. 150 calls at 5 minutes a call is 12.5 hours. You do the math on the possibility of closing sales. Slim and none in my calculations.) Mandate to invest 5 minutes of prep time before picking up the phone or getting out of the car.  This includes looking at the prospect’s website, determining the objective of the call, formulating what to say and the questions to ask.  It’s also helpful to state how they will measure their success.
3. Review current ‘hot prospects’ in the pipeline. Use the same preparation worksheet and walk through each portion.  What was the objective of the last conversation?  What need, want, problem or opportunity was discovered?  How important is it to the prospect to fix it?  What isn’t known that is a must need to know to close the deal or advance the sale?  What objections or barriers may be keeping the prospect from buying? Then strategize on next steps for the upcoming conversation.

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Buyers prefer to buy from strategic business partners.
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Get your sellers selling the way buyers prefer to buy and your prospects won’t be frustrated, they’ll be buyers.

More Prospecting Resources:

• 3 Questions to Quickly Qualify Prospects
• The Simple Secret to Prospecting with Twitter
• Prospecting – the Most Hated Part of the Sales Process

The post Are Your Salespeople Guilty of this Prospecting Fail? appeared first on Alice Heiman, LLC.