Rnordman

By now, most people are familiar with Account Based Selling. There’s been plenty of great articles on it with all the recent hype so I thought I’d change it up a bit and rather than write a long blog post about why you should go to an ABS model, I thought I’d talk about an effective sales process to use with Account Based Selling and the top 3 types of tools to have to help accelerate your team’s efforts.

1) Prospector

Make it easy for your reps to 1-click import prospects into your CRM from any type of social network that brings in their email and phone number. (Real email and phone number edited out of example below)

Account Based Selling is ALL about personalization or the WYWYN (why you, why you now methodology). Make your message relevant, personal, and helpful to stand out in the clutter. Notice how easy it is to add a few pieces of personalization while I’m adding the prospect into Salesforce:

That ‘Prospect Notes’ section is a field in Salesforce and is going to save me time later with having to do research when it comes to my outreach process.

2) Data Enrichment

Make sure all of your named accounts that you’re assigning to your team have accurate and real-time data. Here at DigitalOcean we know everything about any company in our pipeline from how fast they are growing, funding, monthly uniques, and even what types of hosting technologies they are using.

3) Sales Automation Acceleration Platform

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve been down the dark hole of sales automation. Make sure that you’re balancing automation and personalization so you’re reaching out in a smarter fashion, rather than just spamming your prospect’s inbox with white noise.

Utilizing a more strategic process by knowing everything about a company you are reaching out to, recent news updates, etc. – we’ve been able to achieve open rates of 75%+ and 40%+ reply rates.

The one piece of advice I can give anyone before selecting your platform, is to think about your ICP (ideal customer profile). What is the most effective channel to reach out to them? Is it social networks, is it phone, is it email, or is it a combination of them all?

Examples:

1. You’re a SMB SaaS solution selling into mom & pop shops in the restaurant/foods vertical. Utilizing a sales tool that focuses on email automation isn’t going to be the most effective because the highest conversion channel for them is probably not LinkedIn or email and more than likely using the phone number that is found directly on their website or Yelp page is going to be far more effective.
2. You’re selling into the engineering department at startups with less than 50 employees. Making high volume cold calls might not be the most effective for you because it’s not like you’re selling into the sales or recruiting department that has some sort of a phone system put in place early due to pure necessity: sales folks are using the phone for calls with prospective buyers and recruiters are using the phone for phone screens, etc. Using a platform that focuses on accelerating email efforts is going to be a more effective use case of your time.

With that being said, the platform that we use at DigitalOcean is Outreach.io – their new ‘360 Everywhere’ functionality is incredible and saves my team countless hours every week. It allows you to use the platform where ever you spend most of your time.

Whether it’s Gmail, LinkedIn, or Salesforce – you’re able to directly send messages to your prospect right from that page without having to go to directly to Outreach’s web app. There are lots of different applications in the market which all of have their own competitive advantage depending on your workflow so be sure to check out Yesware, ToutApp, or Salesloft as well.

Here’s an example of an effective outreach process:

Step 1) Do your research on the company prior. Here’s a snapshot below getting a holistic perspective on ‘DigitalOcean’ with a description of the company name, location, funding, technologies used by the company, and recent updates.

Utilizing this information in tandem with personalization research on your prospect is going to drastically increase the chance of them responding positively.

Step 2) Personalize the LinkedIn connection. (Shoutout to Jason Vargas at Datanyze for showing me how effective this channel can be). With a tool like Sales Navigator, you’re able to do that directly from Salesforce without even having to open up a new tab and logging into LinkedIn.

The reason you want to personalize the invitation is because it stands out from all of the other ‘connections’ from people that you likely have never even met before. See how Abdul below catches my attention with a personalized note in the invitation request. LinkedIn realizes that this is an effective way to communicate with prospects now so they even allow you to reply directly to the invitation.

Connecting with prospects also really helps to get the right contact info if you find yourself with a bounced email. After the connection has been established, you’re able to see their work email (sometimes a personal one) by clicking the ‘Contact Info’ tab.

Step 3) Reach out to the prospect with a personalized note. A great rule of thumb is the 10/80/10 rule. The first 10% of your email should be personalized with content that is relevant to the prospect, with 80% of it being a template, and the last 10% being a personalized call-to-action or a P.S. note.

As you can hopefully see, Account Based Selling isn’t just about selling smarter or selling faster. It’s about selling smarter AND selling faster. By reaching out to your prospects with personalized outreach, a clear/concise value proposition, timing your touch points, and following up persistently – the results will come.

I recently came across a great post from someone in my network who quotes Keith Krach (CEO of DocuSign) – “Speed is the new currency in business today. It’s not the big that will eat the small, but the fast that will eat the slow.” By having an effective & highly-efficient ABS sales process, you’ll outperform your competitors.

The post Tools & Tactics for Implementing an Effective Account Based Sales Process appeared first on Sales Hacker.

It’s not always clear when a company is about to run out of money—but there are some red flags that can signal trouble. Do any of these statements sound familiar?

1. Running low

We’re currently operating with less than three times our monthly expenditures available as cash in the bank.

2. Running late

More than half of our receivables are unpaid 90 days after the date of invoice, despite our best efforts to politely request remittance.

3. Mystery clients

We have no formal processes in place to gauge core clients’ ability to pay us. We don’t ask for credit applications before
we start work for them and have no way of checking their credit ratings.

4. More for less

One of our long-term clients has suddenly started paying us much more slowly than it used to but is ordering more than ever before.

5. Buck-passing

Our clients often ask us for extensions on their invoices while they’re waiting to receive money from their own clients. (The business equivalent of, “Don’t worry, buddy, I swear I’ll get you for this pizza later.”)

6. Arrested development

We’ve been in business for more than five years—well past the startup stress zone—but our operating expenses routinely eclipse our gross sales.

7. Flying blind

We can’t create a rolling budget because we don’t have a system in place to accurately collect financial operating data.

8. Maxing out

We’re very reliant on our line of credit for cash flow, and we’ve already had to go to the bank to ask for a limit increase more than once.

9. Fingers crossed

A major client has told us they don’t care what the cost is, they just want the job done; moreover, they won’t even discuss the expected tally, telling us “we can talk money at the end.”

10. Radio silence

There is little to no communication between our sales and finance departments.

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MORE ABOUT SMALL BUSINESS:

• Five simple ways to get paid faster
• What to do when your company’s growth stalls
• Five sources of financing every small business needs to know
• Why Canadian companies need access to higher-risk financing
• For craft beer–makers Collective Arts, two heads proved better than one
• How direct sales companies reach customers, no store required
• Why the future of global trade deals could be small businesses
• Business New Year’s Resolutions: Focus on small data, not big data
• Four ways to make tax time less painful for small business

The post 10 signs your cash flow is in trouble appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

At an almost paperless NDP convention where smartphone apps replaced paper agendas, Harry Kopyto stood out as a pamphleteer. Before proceedings began on Saturday morning, the 69-year-old former Toronto lawyer (disbarred) placed hundreds of legal-sized printouts urging full adoption of the Leap Manifesto on empty folding chairs.

A pair of convention volunteers went row by row and collected the pages before anyone could sit down.

One day earlier, Kopyto had pressed a similar three-page document in the faces of as many New Democrat delegates as he could. Its headline: Make the NDP the climate justice party now!

“I struggle to make an activist party, a party that is involved in building a movement, and not just an election machine. You can do both,” said Kopyto, sweat quickly accumulating at his brow. He referred to stopping the “tar sands” when most NDPers had fallen in with the “oil sands” conventional phrasing, and demanded a full embrace of Avi Lewis’s manifesto to stop new pipelines and rapidly shift away from fossil fuels, while the party was set to instead consider a major two-year debate on its wide-ranging elements.

Kopyto didn’t get his way at the Edmonton convention, as he’s grown accustomed to—he blasted Ontario’s NDP premier Bob Rae in the 1990s for being too right-wing, and has lost many battles at the Law Society of Upper Canada. But he feels a lot less lonely after his party voted to place a deep-green manifesto at the heart of its new soul-searching exercise.

“The wind is in our sails,” he said after the convention. “The same forces that are shaping [Jeremy] Corbyn’s victory in the British Labour Party, and that are attracting young activists to [Bernie] Sanders are playing out in Canada as well. The NDP has a potential of being transformed.”

When a guy like Kopyto feels wind in his sails, others will feel shortness of breath. Alberta’s NDP made its own leap last year from perennial obscurity to government majority, and sees political survival linked to approved pipelines and a robust oil sands economy—and to blasting the “so-called manifesto” as “naïve” and “thoughtless,” in Premier Rachel Notley’s words. Federal party MPs want little to do with Leap and its authors, either. NDP leadership for years under Jack Layton and Tom Mulcair had proven effective at keeping the party’s more extreme wings either mollified or at bay, and will repeatedly assert that Corbyn and Sanders have split their parties and have so far won precisely nothing.

That era is over now, with a surprisingly clear denouncement of Mulcair—the unprecedented 52 per cent Yes vote for a leadership review—and an even clearer embrace of Leap, or at least a major study of it. Two things have shown the ability to fire up New Democrats. One is success, which Layton brought in 2011 but Mulcair saw peak in 2015, two months before the election. (The Liberals, with Justin Trudeau and a decidedly leftward shift, easily snuffed out those chances, reducing the 95-member caucus to 44). But that other fire flared up last weekend: a brassy and bold unifying idea, the likes of which Canadian politics haven’t really given much oxygen since the Stéphane Dion Liberals’ Green Shift. Call them the party radicals or the grassroots, depending on your perspective: NDPers who like to wave signs or wear buttons often prefer to brandish a slogan, rather than some leader’s name. The party’s internal campaign review said it sorely lacked a “strong, simple narrative.” Intertwined in the NDP’s search for a leader will be the quest for a narrative to convey on those buttons. A bowl of “No pipelines” will get snapped up faster than the “More effective consultation on energy infrastructure” buttons.

Related: Avi Lewis defends the Leap Manifesto in a Q&A

It wasn’t that the NDP was without distinct policy last fall. Members wore those catchy supermarket checkout clerk-like badges: $15 child care (ask me for details)! Do you want our $15 minimum* wage! (*offer valid for federally regulated employees only)! Mulcair’s balanced-budget promise sought to reassure NDP-wary voters but also curtailed the party’s ambition, while the Liberals peeled off progressive support with its own abandonment of a budget-balance pledge, plus its exciting flash of radicalism—a vague plan to legalize marijuana. Abacus Data polling last month said Canadians are more likely to think the NDP will “promise anything to win votes” than the Liberals are, an unusual spot for a party so rooted in principle and ideology. Several members are privately resigned to the Liberals winning another term or two—the thinking goes that if power is elusive, protest is livening, and could form a longer-term party push to NDP victory.

Another big idea could have captured party passions, if Leap’s deep-green agenda wasn’t dangling there for the hungry. The party did pass resolutions backing safe injection sites, and letting 16-year-olds vote. If those aren’t broadly ambitious enough, there was one available on loan from the Sanders campaign: free tuition. New party president Marit Stiles said although tuition is normally deemed a provincial matter, it’s “something we’ll have to talk about” that could fight inequality and has excited youth delegates. After his corker of a convention speech, NDP elder statesman Stephen Lewis said members need something intellectual to chew on after the type of “vacuity of policy” that left-wing parties occasionally find themselves in. “And maybe we’ve had a certain hollow moment,” he told reporters.

Dan Darrah caught himself praising the “adoption of Leap” and quickly softens his words when telling Maclean’s how much better he feels post-convention than he did mid-convention. “Up until [this] convention, I was very much of the idea I was in the minority,” said the Ryerson University student from Ajax, Ont. “We’ve got a bit of a power vacuum, and a lot of people will be vying for power. This will be the time, if there ever was a time, that activists will be in the fold of electoral politics.”

Ali Chatur told the convention Leap got overwhelming support in the youth caucus, and a tougher climate policy can reinvigorate campus wings. “I can’t stress how important this debate is for youth,” said the Young New Democrats co-chair as his group flanked him, including one teen in a tightly fitting Bernie Sanders for President T-shirt.

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Aside from organized labour, few groups readily ally themselves with the NDP these days. An ambitious cri de coeur is easier to get behind. Leap had among its initial signatories Idle No More, Toronto’s Black Lives Matter and Maude Barlow’s Council of Canadians. “Social movements are surging in Canada, racking up progressive victories and building new alliances across traditional divides,” Avi Lewis told the convention before the Leap resolution passed. “These are the people behind the Leap. Send a message that the party wants to join them.”

Some former MPs helped bring Lewis’s manifesto to the convention floor: Vancouver veteran Libby Davies and Craig Scott of Layton’s former seat of Toronto–Danforth, which he lost in last fall’s Liberal sweep of Toronto. Remaining parliamentarians were among the quickest to shrug off Leap, noting that Lewis has had little to do with the party, and his co-author and wife, Naomi Klein, even less (she didn’t attend the convention). Kennedy Stewart, MP for Burnaby South, said he and the party already agree with much of Leap’s platitudes on matters like child care and green jobs, but his party doesn’t need a platform written on a coffee table. “For somebody who said ‘no logo,’ Leap is kind of a logo,” Stewart said, referring to Klein’s anti-consumerism 1999 bestseller.

Related: How Klein became Canada’s only voice for angry socialism

Having proven unable to tamp down the Leap debate at the convention, MPs, Alberta members and party professionals will try to tame its radical edges in the riding-by-riding discussions now pledged to occur before the 2018 party convention. “If the New Democrats are serious about their policy book, I don’t think they’re going to hand them over to Avi Lewis and Naomi Klein, just ’cause,” says former party official Ian Capstick, who identifies himself with what exists of a right flank of the NDP. To Capstick, his party is “entering the existential crisis phase.” As that begins, he can’t stop thinking of friends in the Netherlands, where the Socialist Party’s logo is a red tomato (which members like to hurl at opponents). “People who wear those buttons are really comfortable being in an opposition role, and therein lies the single-largest schism you’re going to see in the next year and a half.”

It was novel for the New Democrats to come as close to power as it did recently, taking official Opposition status and then briefly flirting with a national lead in the polls. Schisms with its left flank are more familiar. The Waffle movement of the 1960s and 1970s was the party’s last manifesto insurgence, with a Manifesto for an Independent Socialist Canada and plans to nationalize industry. The Waffle was rejected by federal leader David Lewis and Ontario leader Stephen Lewis, respectively Avi’s grandfather and father. In 2001, some MPs and activists formed the hard-left New Politics Initiative to bring in the then-thriving anti-globalization movement that helped make Klein’s No Logo an international success. The NPI feared the NDP’s struggles under leader Alexa McDonough were because of her centrism. That faction’s leaders, like Davies and Rabble.ca founder Judy Rebick, got behind the leadership campaign of a Toronto city councillor named Jack Layton and the group disbanded in 2004. The rest is history, of course: Layton eschewed radicalism; as his appeal grew nationally, so did the NDP caucus. The 2011 Orange Wave came with a platform whose placid title could have belonged to any party’s book: Giving Your Family a Break—Practical First Steps.

However, Layton was better able to unify the moderates and policy hawks—“Jack had the aura of being an activist,” Kopyto said—than was Mulcair, who came to the NDP fold after quitting the Quebec Liberal cabinet.

While it’s true that Notley won with the Alberta Tory dynasty and other opposition parties crumbling all around her, the Alberta NDP platform for 2015 had blanched out many past pledges to slash university tuition fees, regulate the electricity network or tightly control the pace of oil sands expansions. She’s brought in comprehensive climate reforms and a carbon tax, but she is using those commitments to try and secure national support for the Energy East and Trans Mountain pipelines, references that received only tepid applause in a convention speech that otherwise had NDP delegates overjoyed by her enthusiasm and winning ways.

The public campaigns for and against Leap wound up rivalling the volume of the weekend’s leadership chatter, and showed how the Alberta NDP’s pragmatism can extend to bashing close political friends. Environment Minister Shannon Phillips’ declaration that Leap was a “betrayal” by Torontonians was a direct hit on Lewis, whose work she had helped produce while working at CBC and Al-Jazeera. More quietly, Alberta backbencher Heather Sweet led a successful bid to quash a convention resolution to ban tankers off British Columbia’s north coast, promoted by the riding association of MP Nathan Cullen, a past NDP leadership contender and a western power broker.

While promoters of Leap insisted all they were asking for was a debate, it was a debate Albertans knew would be spun by opponents. Before one rival to Notley could compare Leap to the 1980s National Energy Program—which made the Liberal brand toxic in Alberta for a generation—Alberta labour leader Gil McGowan warned there could be NEP-level political damage. McGowan was so irked at the resolution’s support he urged reporters to give him a few minutes to gather his thoughts; later, he wound up to a CBC microphone. “These downtown Toronto political dilettantes come to Alberta and track their garbage across our front lawn,” he said. Avi Lewis may have been the popular scion on the Leap file, but speaking against it was Joe Barrett, son of another NDP icon: Dave Barrett, who was B.C. premier while Avi’s father led an Ontario opposition party. Joe Barrett warned that the NDP shouldn’t be seen as against building anything anywhere, and said this political setback of a manifesto could help lead to more oil-by-train activity instead. “We’re a green party,” Barrett said. “We don’t need to be attacked by the self-righteous on the other side. We know where we stand.”

While the compromisers and idealists wage battle, both sides are aware how Canada’s left has drifted toward the Liberals. An Abacus poll last month showed the Liberals led the NDP by 51 per cent to 26 among those who identify as centre-left, and 47 to 23 among leftists. An embrace of Leap stands to help the NDP reclaim those supporters, but those are small prizes: seven per cent of respondents told Abacus they consider themselves to be on the left and 20 per cent centre-left. In the centre sit 54 per cent of Canadians, and even under the more centrist Mulcair, NDP found themselves a distant third with that larger group.

“Don’t let this very divided vote divide us,” Mulcair said in his concession speech after the leadership review. New Democrats showed little eagerness to heed his pleas before the leadership vote, and will feel less compelled to afterwards. MPs from Quebec and B.C. may feel more liberated now to launch regional anti-pipeline campaigns of their own, while the pro-Palestinian faction that perennially bubbles beneath the party’s surface—some advocates were barred as candidates—will try to insert itself into the party’s new vision quest.

Giving such movements oxygen can bring scorn from rivals, but the establishment should make them somehow feel included, Capstick said. “They’ve been afraid of conflict. They’ve been afraid of listening to people who want to ride in a flotilla to Palestine, people who are animal rights activists,” he said. “We haven’t embraced the climate change activists to the degree we probably should have. That’s because the professionals, of course, are afraid of those who bring their own branded sign.”

Of course, Capstick’s in the camp that worries that pursuing Corbyn-ism is a black hole. Solidarity is a traditional watchword of the left, but it won’t be easy to forge it within the NDP for the next couple years.

—with John Geddes

The post The NDP’s hard left turn into an existential crisis appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Is everything really content? Well, yeah, kinda! It depends a bit on your definition, of course, but if you choose to believe what ad-man and creative director Dave Trott has observed as the new world order of content marketing, every medium via which you communicate with your clients or customers could be a potential opportunity to deliver a content marketing message.

Let’s talk a little bit about the opportunities you might not yet be taking to package and publish content. Mind you, these items don’t have to be filled to the brim with content — that’s just distracting, and dilutes your main message — but a sprinkle here and a dash there of well-thought-out content can pack a punch.

Here are eight concrete opportunities to publish thoughtful content you might be overlooking — places where it might make sense to wrap in some of your company’s messaging since (1) you’re creating and “publishing” them anyway and (2) because they aren’t already packed full of content marketing “stuff.” A caveat: I’m not suggesting that you use all of these avenues to push out your message, but incorporating a few into your content marketing strategy can help differentiate you from your competitors — and get your messaging the maximum possible exposure.

• Invoices: They have to get sent out every month, anyway. Why not use them do more than just collect? Is your company running a campaign to promote new service line? Add a sentence to the header or footer of all of your invoices for the next few months announcing the addition. Of course, follow up with your phone number and/or email address…which, by the way, should be added to your invoices ASAP if they aren’t appearing there already! Make sure whatever content you share here stands out graphically from everything else on the invoice so your message doesn’t get lost.

• Email signatures: Ah, the email signature. We’ve all seen those that seem to go on forever, with their recycling symbols and “save the earth, don’t print this email” messages — as though that would deter anyone with their heart set on having a hard copy — and those that are just plain ugly, unwieldy, and uncommunicative of anything meaningful. In some cases, the poorly constructed email signature can even have negative implications on your client relationships. Then there are those that include messaging but are just ham-handed in their execution. Use your email signature to link to content on your website, or announce something new, or invite people to an event. But don’t try to do 14 things at once, and remember that sometimes less is more. One simple message, presented well, can often be most effective.

• Job postings/recruiting websites: If you aren’t using the position descriptions you send out to Glass Door, Monster, Indeed, and other job sites to include some exciting and differentiating information about who your company really is, what you’re up to, or what it’s like to work for you, you’re missing a big opportunity to capture the attention of great, discerning candidates, and honestly, potential customers, too.

• Customer questions/FAQs: A really good answer to a customer question posted on your website, or an FAQ response, is an ideal place offer more information that’s relevant to a particular concern even if that information hasn’t been asked for expressly. Why? Because the person asking the question is inherently interested in getting help. Why not offer a little extra? It’s really the essence of content marketing. Offer useful and educational information. They’ll come back for more.

• Media Advisories/Press Releases: Usually, these bad boys are used to simply let the press know what’s coming or what’s just happened, so they tend to be super bare-bones and include just the 5 Ws (who, what, when, where, why). But as long as that critical content is present and easy to locate, you can add some ancillary resources at the end. You’re making the journalist’s job even easier by pointing them to other relevant stuff about your company and its mission or goals.

• Proposals: If you regularly bid for business and send out proposals, you’re likely used to making sure your appendix is packed with useful information about past work in a given client’s industry or, lacking that, about your company’s work in general. But don’t just copy and paste the same appendix content over and over. How long has it really been since you dusted off what’s in there? It might be time to do some updating.

• Packaging: Whether you’re selling a product or a service or both, you have some kind of packaging. Engage a skilled designer to help you determine a tasteful and eye-catching way to incorporate messaging into whatever packaging you use.

• Pricing sheets: The same deal goes here as with invoices. There’s potential to be informative and create a sense of goodwill with your customers, as in “here are some other useful tidbits in addition to the information you asked for specifically.”

Overall, with any of the above suggestions, you’ll want to make sure the content that is supposed to be front and center remains that way. Don’t get too carried away, and don’t allow ancillary messaging to take the spotlight away from the primary information the piece is supposed to convey. An invoice should clearly tell the reader how much they owe you. It will only cause frustration if you “bury the lead.”

Oh, and one more cool thing about these examples: they illustrate how design can play a role in content marketing and brand perception even in the most seemingly mundane and administrative communiques. For these items, the “look” and not just the words themselves can feel important, too. After all, who wouldn’t rather receive a delightful-looking invoice (especially if it softens the blow of a high bill).

In the end, the importance of the type of medium you’re using ends where the quality of the content itself begins. As I’ve written before, the medium and the message share importance. I’ll keep saying that as long as people keep publishing pretty-to-look-at but otherwise crappy stuff on the internet.

When it comes to starting a business, it all begins with a plan. And that plan can’t stay in your head, it must be written down.

Not only does a well-crafted business plan guide your venture, it also helps secure the financing you need to launch and scale your business.

You know you can’t just wing it when it comes to business—you need a roadmap. And not just any roadmap, but an effective one. Not sure if your plan passes the test? Check out these seven tips for developing a successful business plan.

1. Know Your Audience

Create your business plan with your audience in mind. Though some experts feel that you should have different versions of your business plan for individual investors, venture capitalist, bankers, and any other group you may submit it to, that isn’t necessary.

If you develop a strong and compelling plan that clearly explains your purpose, goals, and capabilities, any audience will grasp it. If you’re giving an oral presentation, then you can customize it for the specific audience.

2. Know Your Competition

While you’ll probably have no problem explaining your products and services, you must show that you have a thorough understanding of your industry and competition.

Investors will want to know what sets you apart from the competition, and how you will grab a market share. Make sure you point out how your competitors fall short and explain how your products or services will meet needs.

3. Be Simple and Concise

Let’s face it, no one wants to read a business plan that’s as long as a Stephen King novel. You can cover everything you need in 20-25 pages.

Having a difficult time keeping it to that length? Then you’re probably too wordy or too detailed. Your business’ potential investors or partners are looking for specific information and aren’t going to read every word of the document.

Keep it concise in order to keep it compelling.

4. Make Realistic Projections

A key element of your plan is financial projections, which is what investors home in on. Don’t try to impress them with the numbers. Investors know that it’s impossible to accurately predict sales.

Your best bet is to get an accountant to help you make projections and lean toward conservative numbers. Instead of trying to boast about potential market share, focus on why the numbers you included are relevant and realistic based on your research.

As the Small Business Administration mentions, you should include both historical financial data—if you’re an established business—and projected earnings in your plan.

5. Choose Substance over Style

You may have an incredible graphic designer on your team who can create dynamic charts and graphics to explain your financial data and growth strategy. But you won’t get funded because of artistic expression.

It’s fine to include some design elements and images of products, but your plan isn’t about the presentation as much is it’s about what’s in it. Make sure your graphic elements add value to the plan, not just art.

6. Answer Objections

Put yourself in an investor’s shoes. Read your plan with an objective mind, and think of what questions and objections someone would have before parting with his or her money.

Dig deep to poke holes in your plan and question everything. Once you do that, make sure your plan answers every objection. You won’t think of every question an investor will have, but your increased scrutiny will still make it a better document.

7. Have Someone Review Your Plan

After scrutinizing your work, there’s nothing better than having someone else read it to give you feedback.

Make sure you give it to a few people, especially those who don’t know about your business. Does it make sense to them? Do they clearly understand how your business will be competitive? Fresh eyes can give you an invaluable perspective on your plan.

Final Thoughts

Developing your business plan can be stressful. You want to make sure you get it right so investors buy into your vision. But a business plan is an evolving document. You’ll constantly update it and improve it. As you write your plan, make sure you apply the above tips to increase your chances of success.

If you’re ready to get started on an effective business plan, download LegalNature’s business plan form to create a comprehensive and industry-specific plan for your business.

Predictive technology is not new—tools are improving quickly and solutions are becoming increasingly powerful—but adoption among B2B marketers is still lagging. Organizations are reluctant to commit to predictive solutions, despite the promise of better performance through the pipeline. Matt Heinz, president of agency Heinz Marketing, spoke to eMarketer’s Maria Minsker about the value of predictive technology.

I have been in sales for many years, well before joining Richardson last August. I have heard my share of objections from prospects and clients, and I thought it worthwhile to share some of the most common objections to sales training.

• I don’t have the budget. There is an investment component to training, and if prospects don’t have money in the budget, that’s a valid objection. If I’m talking with the right person, they certainly have a budget to run their business, but they may not have set aside money for training in that fiscal year. If they agree in the importance of getting people to do things differently to get better results, then the objection really isn’t about budget, but about timing. Even so, it is worth having a conversation around what the investment might look like, and whether there might be more value in exploring a sales development initiative versus another effort they currently have allocated money for. The framework for this conversation is to develop a mutual understanding of what it takes to get sales professionals to do something different to achieve better results.
• I don’t have the time. Sales leaders are extremely busy, trying to juggle competing priorities in managing their teams while achieving their financial targets. I understand their time constraints, while knowing they could achieve more if they invested the time to get their middle performers to act like top performers. If they agree their people need to work differently, then I offer to discuss ways that Richardson has worked with other time-constrained clients to show them how they can manage it all and still move a lever in behavior change. I talk about how taking the time for training can produce dividends many times over what their people would have achieved spending those days on the job. And with new skills and behaviors, sales professionals will begin operating differently – and that will lead to better results.

• I don’t know whether it will have any impact. The question of whether training will work is a valid concern. Prospects will say they did training before, or they invested money with another company, and it didn’t have any lasting impact. That may well be; one statistic reveals that within 30 days of a training event, 79% of what people have been taught is forgotten. The difference at Richardson is we don’t treat training as an event. We understand that true change and transformation requires a thoughtful approach, discipline, buy-in, and a regular cadence of communication and training reinforcement to achieve results. Training reinforcement, knowledge sustainment activities, and behavior adoption efforts are all part of our planning, and we focus on change and accountability across the organization in a way that drives productivity gains and outcomes.
• I don’t know whether to invest in training or technology. There are a number of relatively inexpensive options for training, including online courses that people can take whenever they have the time. This might be fine, depending on the objective of the training. But when the desired outcome is skill development and sales activities, I have two considerations. One, will busy sales professionals really take the time and attention to fully commit to a course of online study? Second, will their people have the opportunity to practice the learned skills? Any kind of behavioral or performance skill needs to be practiced to be mastered. Watching a video might impart a little knowledge, but to get good at a skill takes repetition. Just like basketball players shoot endless baskets, and baseball players take batting practice, perfecting a skill takes doing it over and over again. It also takes a coach who can observe, give feedback, and tweak performance. The reality in any sport or business field is that high performers are those who have mastered the skills that matter most.

The one objection I never hear is this: “I don’t know whether my sales professionals need to do anything differently.” Sales leaders know that change is needed to achieve better results in today’s increasingly difficult sales environment. They just need to understand that the way to achieve change is through a thoughtfully planned training initiative that ensures sustained behavior change and drives increased sales performance.

The post 4 Objections to Sales Training appeared first on Richardson Sales Enablement Blog.

So you want to blog. Why?

Do you own an ecommerce business and need a site-based blog to bring in more traffic?

Do you want to start a standalone blog and make money?

Or do you want to freelance blog for other blogs?

Whatever your purpose, if you are going to be a success at this blogging business, you will have to follow some key steps – 11 of them in all.

1. The Writing Part – Re-live Your Youth

You may have gotten all A’s in your English courses, and your instructors may have told you that you really write well. That’s great – it means that your grammar and composition skills are nailed. Now you just have to work on style, one of the biggest factors in successful blogging.

You will not be writing an analysis of the themes in Moby Dick, so you will have to lose that academic style and replace it with a much more casual tone and simpler structure and vocabulary. The best bloggers write with a 7^th grader in mind.

Here are the “rules:”

• Shorter, simpler sentences, with fewer descriptive words – this is known as a “punchy” writing style. Reduce the adjectives and adverbs that made your academic style so worthy. You are on a different “ballfield” now. (Re-read Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea – this is what you are aiming for).
• Remember those long paragraphs in your essays and papers? Those are gone. Now you have to think in terms bolded sub-headings and bullet points – points are made quickly, and the reader should be able to scan down your piece and decide if it is worthy of a full read.
• Study samples from the big name blogs to get a feel for writing style – Lifehack, Lifehacker, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post – you’ll get the idea. Pick a topic and try writing in the same style. It takes practice but you’ll get better at it.

Don’t start a blog; don’t freelance yourself out; don’t publish a blog anywhere until you are pretty certain you have style nailed.

2. The Niche

Isn’t this a great term? In the biological world it means “the environment in which an animal or plant exists that lets it survive and reproduce”.

I think that’s a great analogy. Your niche might be one of several:

• If you are a business, your niche is the product or service you sell. Neil Patel is a prime example. His business is content marketing and his blog QuickSprout is dedicated to helping others market their content.
• If you are a standalone blog, your niche might be far-reaching. Look at Buzzfeed or Huffington Post and see the the variety of topics – anything that might interest some humans on this planet.
• If you are a freelancer, you don’t have a niche – your topics are determined by your clients. Your niche is just “blogging.” Be prepared for lots of research and a few long nights. You can’t write about that which you do not understand. If you have a contract with a home décor website, then you’d best learn all that you can about home décor.

A niche of expertise is always good. If you are a freelancer, but you have a specific area of expertise, then write on it and submit your blogs (for pay of course) to other blogs in your niche area. Or start your own blog dedicated to that niche.

3. Nailing the Purpose

 

Whether you have your own business blog or you write for others, every post must have a purpose:

• You are solving a problem for others, lending your expertise on the topic
• You are educating others – you are the expert and you are giving information, data or advice
• You are entertaining others
• You are inspiring others

Not one word until you have defined your purpose for the post.

4. Finding Your Audience on Social Media

You have to develop a persona that comprises your audience. Who is your typical customer (or reader)? Identify that individual fully, give him/her a name, and then write directly to him/her.

The other part of “finding” your audience is knowing when and where that persona “hangs out.” 99% of all people on social media, for example, use Facebook and Twitter; the next two largest uses are YouTube and Pinterest; then comes LinkedIn. But you want to fine tune this even more, so you learn things like:

• Millennials are primarily on Facebook and Twitter with YouTube trailing behind
• Career professionals hang out on Facebook, Twitter but also on LinkedIn
• Women hang out on Facebook and Twitter but also Pinterest

There is a wealth of research on times of days and days of the week that are best for publishing your content on various sites – do this research and don’t “waste your breath” posting when and where no one will find you.

5. SEO Strategies

There is a bit of a learning curve here, but if you are going to be successful, for yourself or others, you have to learn and implement those strategies that will get you found and ranked by search engines.

 

Even if you are freelancing, your post should reflect those strategies, so that it will be found when generic searches are conducted in the niche. There are a number of sites and blogs that address this, and you should master the basics first before moving into more sophisticated tactics and strategies. Here are just a few basics to get you started:

• Links Back to Yourself: Every post should have links back to pages on your site (if an ecommerce site) or back to archives in your blog. The more clicks back to you, the higher you are ranked. Word of caution: don’t be excessive about this – that’s annoying. Even when you post on Facebook, get a link in there. If you guest post on several other blogs, get links in (as many as are allowed). Even if they are not allowed in the post itself, get one in your bio.
• Keywords: These are critical for SEO. You need a focus keyword/phrase that will appear in your title, 3 times in your content, and once in your meta-description. Secondary keywords can be placed throughout the content.

Finding the best focus keyword will involve some research, but it is easy.

• Check out Google AdWords, io, or other keyword planner sites.
• You can also just search Google using a keyword related to your topic and go down to the bottom of the page – there you will find long-tail keyword phrases which tell you the terms others have used to search your topic.
• Word of Warning: Keyword-stuffing used to be a primary way of improving SEO – no more – don’t stuff – you’ll get punished.
• Have a SiteMap: While this doesn’t relate to blogging per se, if you are an ecommerce site – take a hint. Having a site map helps spiders crawl around and find pages easily.
• Quality Content: Nothing takes the place of high-quality useful content that is always new and fresh. When that content is promoted correctly and readers see the value of what you write, then they will share with others and return themselves. The more clicks to your post, the better your SEO rankings are.
• Set Up Reciprocal Arrangements: Contact blog and site owners in related niches. Set up arrangements for reciprocal linking to one another.

The goal is increasing links to your content – the more links, the higher your ranking. There are plenty of more sophisticated methods for SEO – learn these first and the move on.

6. Consistency – Keep to Your Schedule!

Audiences are built slowly over time. You become popular with a small group of followers first, and that gradually expands as that small group decides that you are trustworthy and provide great content. Once you have won that small group over, they share with their communities, and your audience grows. But this ever-increasing audience also must be able to rely on you for regular postings. So set a schedule and stick to it – no exceptions. You will lose followers, whether they are yours personally or for an ecommerce business, if you become sporadic and unreliable. Even if you cannot find fresh content yourself, post a great piece of content from someone else (with permission of course).

7. Cultivate Influencers and Other Bloggers

Who are the big names in your niche? Where are the other blogs that are not competitors but are related in some way to your niche? Find them, follow them on Facebook and Twitter, and engage them in conversations. Develop relationships with these people.

• Ask if you can re-post something they have published – they will be truly flattered
• Mention them in your posts, and then tell them you have done so, providing a link to that post.
• Submit your posts to them and ask if they will post – then their audiences become your audiences too. And get a couple of backlinks in to your archived posts that are related.
• Ask them to guest post for you. You look like an even better expert to your audience when you do this.

8. Promotion

While social media is clearly critical to your promotional efforts, there are other things you need to do as well.

• Cultivating others as described above is a biggie.
• Posting at the right times on social media (covered above)
• Get yourself published on other blogs with backlinks
• Offer things in return for an email address/subscription to your blog. Build that email list consistently, because every post you create needs to go out to your subscribers, either in entirety or with a link to it. And put social sharing buttons in your emails too.
• Don’t be shy. Ask your readers to share your content. You don’t have to be annoying about it. Simply say, “If you enjoyed this post, please share it with your friends” and have the buttons for doing so right there. Think about scrolling buttons on your posts, so that readers can easily share at any point in their reading, without having to go search for those buttons.

9. Titles

This really deserves a separate category of learning to be a successful blogger, because it is just too important. A title is what entices people to read a piece of content. Your title and probably your first sentence are probably the most critical parts of any content you produce. There are a number of tools for generating catchy titles – use them if you are not a creative person yourself. Many are free. Check out some of the possibilities here. In general, you are looking for titles that:

• Incite curiosity
• Bring some shock value
• Appeal to emotions – awe, excitement, uncertainty, pain points, humor
• Provide lists – people love lists – just ask Buzzfeed of Lifehack.

10. Types of Content

Posts must be far more than just text. Unless you can keep your reader with you, you have failed. So, incorporate all different types of content and learn how to do it yourself – it takes too long to find someone else, and then you have to pay them. Technology today has brought you to a point where you can create virtually any type of content you want:

• Infographics – These are great visuals to provide a lot of content in a compact way. Just don’t crowd them up with too much stuff.
• Photos/Images – Always makes a piece of writing more appealing
• Videos – 3-4 minutes tops, but they are great for “how to” or telling stories
• Surveys, Quizzes, Polls – Audience participation is always a good thing and plenty shareable.
• Lists (already discussed)

Find the tools to create these content types and you will have posts that do get shared – a lot.

11. Post Length

Research does show that longer posts are more read and more shared than short ones. Certainly this is true when you are providing educational content. And if you format your post correctly, this is the way to go:

• Each point deserves its own bold sub-heading, so that a reader may scan it easily.
• A reader may not be interested in certain parts of your post, but as s/he scans down all of your sub-headings, there will something that piques an interest and s/he will stop and read that one point, and then perhaps share it because of that point.
• Other posts may be shorter, however. If, for example, your purpose is to establish a relationship with your readers and you want tell your story or the story of a customer, then that post may be shorter and involve photos, a video, etc.
• If your post is all about a survey or a poll, of course it will be shorter.

Use your judgment on this.

What makes a successful blogger involves a wide range of talents, abilities, and insights. You may have other thoughts on this topic. Please share them!

Leona Henryson is a graphic designer and social media specialist with a deep passion for blogging on all topics related to her educational and career backgrounds. Follow@LeonaHenryson and read more of her posts at LeonaHenryson+.

The post 11 Steps to Growth Hack Your Way to Blogging Success appeared first on ProBlogger.

When it comes to traffic acquisition, the money is in the headline.

But testing content headlines comes with a unique set of problems.

The Challenges With A/B Testing Content Headlines

There can be great value in testing content titles. Clearly.

Look at Upworthy, BuzzFeed, or Huffington Post. They’ve made fortunes on publishing must-click headlines (good for them, bad for humanity I say). And of course they test them.

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When you test an element of a landing page – say you’re testing a few different hero images – you can, through a brief period of ‘exploration’ (A/B testing), exploit the winning variation afterwards to great reward (greater future revenue).

A headline, however, usually has a limited lifespan in terms of its value. That’s to say an article today won’t have as much value tomorrow and will have even less the next day – especially on a media site that puts out a lot of timely content.

So an A/B test that takes 4 weeks to reach significance and validity doesn’t really let you ‘exploit’ your winning variation.

And even if you’re telling yourself that you’re ‘learning’ which types of headlines generally work better, well that too is a narrative fallacy – you can never really pinpoint the causality when testing headlines.

In addition, there are many confounding variable inherent in content headline tests (which is why they’re so tricky compared to other on-site elements), like:

• The content of the article.
• Any images you use.
• Time of day, week, year.

Sometimes, too, a headline test can win on engagement (more people click through to the article), but people spend less time on page (for media sites this is usually a bad sign) or they don’t complete desired actions (like clicking on CTAs on the site).

There are many blog posts out there that talk about A/B testing content titles, but what they’re performing aren’t really A/B tests – at least not proper/valid ones. Here are a few of the approaches I’ve seen and some reasons they may not be as illuminating as you think.

Social Media as a Testing Proxy

The most common solution to testing content titles I’ve seen is to test different variation via social media, usually on Twitter. This approach was made popular by Buffer, who summed up their process like this:

“Our specific headline process looks like this:

-For each post, we brainstorm five to 10 headlines and decide among the marketing team which ones we like best.

-The winners from step one become our test candidates. We take three headline variations and post them as updates to our Buffer Twitter account. Ideally, the closer together we can post them (e.g., all in the morning or all in the afternoon), the more reliable data we can expect to receive.

-We track the results in Buffer analytics to see which headline performed best. The winner becomes the new headline on the post (or stays the same, depending on what we started with).”

It’s not hard to spot the problems in this.

First – and this isn’t easy to solve – the audiences aren’t randomized. I could see, and click, both variations.

Second, if they’re sending the tweets at different times – say the first at 9am and the second at 11am – the results are skewed because of the time variable. Maybe more people are reading your tweets at 11am. Maybe they’re more engaged at that time. No one knows. The point of an A/B test is to control external variables such as time, and doing this leaves that variable on the table.

Third, they aren’t looking for a single metric and are instead eyeballing which one is better based on multiple metrics. Retweets, favorites, mentions, etc.

This was their first version:

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And the second (what they declared as the winner):

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Because there were more mentions and retweets, they ruled the second one the winner. Clicks and potential, however, were higher on the ‘losing’ variation. I’m not saying they made the wrong decision with the winner, but I’m saying if you don’t have a clear definition of a ‘winning’ test, you’re opening yourself to confirmation bias, where you look for evidence that confirms your existing beliefs. You’ll surely be able to argue a point for your favorite variation.

In addition, it might be the same people retweeting and favoriting both (especially with all those auto-retweeting bots on Twitter).

In fairness, they do acknowledge some of these shortcomings:

“Of course, it might also be best to point out that A/B tests on social media are not perfect. The varying times of day that we use in our testing can make for significant variables, as can the images we use to share along with the headlines. In the end, we’re just interested in gaining any edge we can to make a headline more meaningful for our audience, and this Twitter test has been a useful indicator so far.”

Using Facebook Ads to Test Titles

As a way to control some of these variables, Pizza SEO uses Facebook ads to test content audiences on a more controlled sample.

What they do, essentially, is set up Facebook custom audiences based on interest. While you can’t split age evenly, they ensure very little overlap by splitting their test groups like this:

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So 21-22 is in group A, 23-24 in group B, etc.

Then they make two ads with only the headline different (of course, they could also test other elements this way like the photo as well):

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This way, they were able to calculate an adequate sample size and let the test run to significance based on CTR. More than that, they also set up UTM parameters to track each variation’s on-site behavior:

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This version of testing on social media is superior to the Twitter version above, but still suffers from a few drawbacks.

One, there’s the cost of advertising (which probably isn’t all too much, but still, it adds up). Then two, and more importantly, is the time cost of implementing a test for each article. If you publish a lot, you could be spending quite a bit of time testing insignificant changes while you could be doing more important things.

Testing Content Titles via Email

Campaign Monitor says they A/B test their headlines using email:

“Campaign Monitor will send one version of the email to one part of the list (we choose to send each version to 10 percent of our list), and the other version to another part. It’ll then measure the results and automatically send the best performing email to the rest of the list.

Aside from adding in the additional subject line, there is literally no extra work in sending a subject line test in comparison to sending a normal email campaign.”

If you have a big enough list, you can send the test out to a small portion of your list (say 10%). Then, once you’ve deemed a ‘winner,’ revise the title on your site and send with that title to the rest of the list, too.

This is idea of only testing on a portion of your traffic can be extended to the actual article itself (if you have enough traffic).

Testing on a Small Portion of Traffic

Similar to what you can do with email subject lines. Send to 10% of your list and then decide based on that data which version to send to the rest. Apparently the Huffington Post does this (or at least used to according to this 2009 Nieman Lab article):

“So here’s something devilishly brilliant: The Huffington Post applies A/B testing to some of its headlines. Readers are randomly shown one of two headlines for the same story. After five minutes, which is enough time for such a high-traffic site, the version with the most clicks becomes the wood that everyone sees.”

If you’ve got the traffic, this is something can be done easily using whatever testing tool you like best.

If you don’t have millions of visitors a month, or even if you do and want a more automatic solution, look into bandit algorithms.

Multi-Armed Bandit Testing

Image you’re in a casino.

There are many different slot machines (known as ‘one-armed bandits’, as they’re known for robbing you), each with a lever (and arm, if you will). You think that some slot machines payout more frequently than others do, so you’d like to maximize this. You only have a limited amount of resources – if you pull one arm, then you’re not pulling another arm. Of course, the goal is to walk out of the casino with the most money. Question is, how do you learn which slot machine is the best and get the most money in the shortest amount of time?

That, in essence, is the multi-armed-bandit problem. And they’re great for short term testing, which includes promotions and, of course, content headlines.

Chris Stucchio, data scientist at VWO, wrote about bayesian bandit algorithms a while ago, using a historical editorial example to show how they work:

Chris Stucchio:

“Great news! A murder victim has been found. No slow news day today! The story is already written, now a title needs to be selected. The clever reporter who wrote the story has come up with two potential titles – “Murder victim found in adult entertainment venue” and “Headless Body found in Topless Bar”. (The latter title is one I’ve shamelessly stolen from the NY Daily News.) Once upon a time, deciding which title to run was a matter for a news editor to decide. Those days are now over – the geeks now rule the earth. Title selection is now primarily an algorithmic problem, not an editorial one.

One common approach is to display both potential versions of the title on the homepage or news feed, and measure the Click Through Rate (CTR) of each version of the title. At some point, when the measured CTR for one title exceeds that of the other title, you’ll switch to the one with the highest for all users. Algorithms for solving this problem are called bandit algorithms.”

Bandits are a great way to balance earning with learning. Essentially, they attempt to minimize regret by exploiting learnings in real time, and shifting favor to higher performing variations gradually.

Image via Matt Gershoff/Conductrics

Here’s Matt Gershoff, CEO of Conductrics, explaining why bandits may be the best option for headline testing:

Matt Gershoff:

“If you think about it, assuming you really just want to optimize, there are three main reasons to prefer a bandit approach for experimentation:

1. Perishability – if the value of any information you gleaned from the experiment degrades fairly quickly;
2. Scale – if you need to run 10’s or even 100’s of a certain type of experiment, it might be more efficient to just let the application self-tune;
3. Complexity/Targeting – often you want to learn and assign the best experience for each customer, rather than just picking one experience for every customer. A bandit approach can learn and apply the more obvious customer assignments (rules) first while it is still experimenting to find other less obvious targeting rules.

The reason Headline Testing makes sense to treat as a bandit problem because it has at least one of these conditions, and often all three: it is perishable; often is at scale; and in some cases different headlines may appeal to different users.

Second, there really isn’t a true default/control that we have to worry about doing worse than. With many A/B testing approaches, there is an implicit ‘first, do no harm’, built into the testing logic. In this case, there is no existing headline, so we are more free to pick whichever headline appears to be performing best.”

The Washington Post uses multi-armed bandits to optimize their site’s content – headlines, photo thumbnails, video thumbnails, recommended articles, and much more. They explain the benefits of using bandits for headlines as opposed to A/B tests:

“The bandit first explores all the arms of a test and monitors user feedback for each arm. The feedback for each arm (the number of times each variant was served and clicked) is used to calculate the degree of user engagement with that arm. This real-time user feedback is used to increase the confidence about the performance of each arm until the bandit converges to just serving the best performing arm.

This is a completely automated test experience since there is no explicit requirement to end the test to stop the worst performing variants from being displayed.

In contrast to another popular testing paradigm called A/B testing, MAB tests are more flexible in nature since new variants can be added and old and underperforming variants can be deleted even while the test is running. This is not possible in a traditional A/B testing paradigm. Also an A/B test needs to be stopped explicitly since worse performing variants of a traditional A/B test are served in the same proportion as the best performing variant..”

And though they won’t say they use them, I’m fairly certain Upworthy employs bandit algorithms as well (their editor calls their tool a ‘magical unicorn box’).

Here are a few tools you can use that employ bandit algorithms:

• Conductrics
• Dynamic Yield
• KingSumo Headlines

Conclusion

Content title testing is hard because:

• It’s difficult to perform a truly controlled experiment.
• The window of value for exploitation is small.
• External validity factors are rampant.

Therefore, many of the blog posts you’ve read that claim to have solutions are idyllic. They make claims that don’t actually have scientific grounding.

The way that most of your favorite sites test content titles is through sophisticated bandit algorithms. If you can execute bandit tests, go for it. If not, don’t think that posting two different tweets will give you a strong or scalable answer.

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Strategic thinking is a natural inclination – something I think you’re born with. In many business schools you can learn the principles of strategic thinking, but like learning to play the piano, you won’t be very good at it unless you have the innate talent to see things strategically. Are you a strategic thinking marketer? Here are six characteristics.

1. Strategic thinkers see through the clutter.
They have an extraordinary perspective on how the world works. They “see” pathways hidden inside complexity. These pathways or insights often result in uncanny and creative solutions rich in their obvious simplicity.

2. Strategic thinkers are naturally curious and always asking “what-if” questions.
They link “what if “scenarios together like pearls in a necklace. They are always a few moves ahead of where their competitors happen to be on the chessboard of the brandscape. They’re relentless in their questions, which usually enables them to spot trends that have lucrative opportunities embedded within them.

3. Strategic thinkers think about the important and not so much on the urgent.
While others focus on navel gazing their immediate circumstances, strategic thinkers find it incredibly obvious that if you look down the road and decide what you want to have happen when you get there, you won’t be a victim of your current circumstances anymore.

4. Strategic thinkers evaluate risks and obstacles.
They see repercussions more clearly than others. They don’t pursue any course of action without careful consideration of the downside. Then they systematically assess “if this or that happens, can we live with that outcome?” They are usually more prepared and ready for where events may lead them.

5. Strategic thinkers are not attached to their own preconceived ideas.
They use their insight and intuition to cull through and discard the potential pathways that lead to resistance and confusion. In groups they are always open to consider the crazy ideas out of left field.

6. Strategic thinkers take determined action.
They don’t procrastinate and wring their hands in worry and fret. They strike forward confidently armed with their strategy. Through their action they keep their vivid vision from becoming a pipe dream.

At The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World, senior B2C and B2B marketers work together with brand strategy experts through the lens of brand leadership and strategic thinking to solve today’s complex marketing challenges. Branding Strategy Insider’s and The Blake Project’s fourth, fun, ‘Competitive-Learning’ event is about taking a deep dive into the how and why that results in strong brands. It’s an experience designed to help you develop strategies that will propel your brand to a leadership position or to assist you in maintaining the leadership position you have worked so hard to achieve. It’s the marketing world’s most unique event.

No Attendees. Only Participants.
The best pathway for learning is through participation, not observation. The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World will challenge your thinking about brands and brand management. To do that, we’ll put you on a team of 10 and offer you opportunities to compete, lead and learn alongside other marketers from around the world in a unique environment. The challenges you’ll tackle are based on and influenced by the actual issues that you and other participants are facing.

This year we are focused on: Building Emotional Connections, Brand Purpose, Brand Storytelling, Brand Architecture, Brand Leadership, Brand Publishing/Digital Strategy, Customer Experience, B2B Brand Strategy and more.

It all takes place at the new and trendy Renaissance Hotel in San Diego, California May 2 – 4, 2016. Once again we have partnered with professional baseball’s San Diego Padres for a private team-building dinner as well as a game. It’s all included in your registration.

Our agenda…

Monday, May 2nd – Kickoff Mixer: 7- 9pm at the Renaissance Hotel

Tuesday, May 3rd – Day 1: 8am – 5pm, at the Renaissance Hotel – 6:30pm – ? Team building and dinner at the San Diego Padres baseball game.

Wednesday, May 4th – Day 2: 8am – 5pm, at the Renaissance Hotel

Who Should Participate?
We have reserved these two days (and a kickoff mixer on the evening of the 2nd) for 50 senior B2C and B2B marketers who see growth as a way of life and who seek a learning experience superior to last century’s format of marketing conferences:

-Marketing oriented leaders;
-Marketing professionals (brand managers, product managers, directors, vice presidents, CMO’s, brand strategists etc.);
-Advertising agency professionals (account executives, planners, agency heads)
-Marketers facing brand strategy issues;
-Marketers seeking a competitive advantage;
-Professionals in charge of brand building, brand management, human resources;
-Marketers who prefer participation over observation and action over reaction; and
-Marketers who don’t believe that last century’s format of marketing conferences advances them as leaders.

This year brands joining us include AAA, Bayer, Bloomberg, Humana, Land O’ Lakes, Liberty Mutual, Pilot/Flying J, RJ Reynolds, TD Ameritrade, Wounded Warrior Project and many more.

To secure a spot for you or your group at The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World call me directly in Los Angeles at 813-842-2260. Or simply email me.

Special pricing for MENG / Marketing Executives Group and American Marketing Association Members.

I do hope you can join us.

Sincerely,

Derrick Daye
Managing Partner
The Blake Project

“You can generate an income without having to be totally involved in your business.”

That’s one of the biggest advantages to passive income, according to Pat Flynn, owner of Smart Passive Income.

If you’ve read the Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferris, you’re familiar with the concept. It’s fairly simple. If you sell any type of product via your website, such as an ebook, course or anything other than a service requiring your time, you have the potential to earn money while you sleep. This is called passive income.

Passive income is one of the best income streams you can have. It gives you the ability to earn money while you sleep, which let’s face it, is every business owner’s ultimate dream.

But having something to sell is only the first step. If you have products but aren’t seeing the type of revenue you’d like from your passive income stream, the problem might lie with your marketing.

Boosting Passive Income

Because the bulk of businesses generate passive income by selling online, it makes sense to start your marketing with proven digital marketing strategies. We specifically recommend using inbound marketing strategies.

Inbound marketing techniques are much more effective than outbound. Inbound strategies attract potential customers, giving you the ability to collect data. Outbound is based more on interrupting potential buyers and asking for their attention.

Check out the Digital Marketing Predictions For 2016 post we put together back in December. You’ll notice that many of these strategies are specifically inbound strategies. For example:

1. Being more strategic about your content will help it work smarter and ultimately harder for you. This will bring more customers to your doorstep.
2. Building a complete consumer experience for your buyers, rather than focusing on different channels as silos, will help you personalize your marketing better.
3. Getting to know your customers by gathering the right data will help you reach your customers at a time when they are most likely to buy.
4. Taking advantage of automation tools will mean you can market to your customers without you having to be planted in front of your computer.

Notice how each of these has taken an old marketing philosophy and updated it to become more modern?

Let’s dig a little deeper. Passive income requires a slightly more fine tuned approach. There isn’t someone sitting in front of the computer or by the phone waiting for a customer’s call to come in. Instead, you need to make sure you’re speaking to your customer at all hours of the with strong marketing.

Here are the top 3 components of a marketing strategy we recommend you finesse in order to boost your passive income.

1.Content Marketing

Content marketing is a great way to boost passive income. Why? Because producing engaging content brings customers to you by helping you rank higher on search engines, get people talking about you on social media and generating interest about what you’re selling. No cold calls or door knocking required.

Passive income relies on you offering your knowledge to potential buyers, even when you’re not able to answer requests or questions. The content you put on your website serves their needs on a silver platter. Your buyers are able to find what they need faster and easier, making them more likely to buy.

High touch services and industries tend to take a more hands-on approach. People expect that from these companies. But when a customer buys a product off your website, they want less direct involvement and more information to guide their purchase decision.

Content marketing serves that purpose.

There are many types of content you can produce that will help drive traffic to your site such as:

• Blogging
• Infographics
• Memes
• Videos
• Guides
• Book reviews

The list goes on and on.

One example of someone who nails content marketing on a consistent basis is Neil Patel. He wrote an article to help you find the perfect style of content for your brand and buyer. It’s called the 15 Types of Content That Will Drive You More Traffic.

In this article Neil talks about a video by Crazy Egg (of which he is the co-founder) that helped to bring in $21k for them every month. The video is simple to understand. The imagery he uses speak a thousand words, while the audio helps hit his point home.

By incorporating more and better content throughout your website, you’ll have the bait you need to lure in potential customers for your products.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The first step to selling more via your website is to get people to your website. Search engine optimization is the essential first step to making that happen. Without it, it becomes a lot harder for people to find you.

The process isn’t easy. After all, think of the thousands of other websites you’re competing with for the top spot on the search engine results page (SERP). But, done well, it can help you get free traffic to your website, making it easier for you sell more of your products while you sleep.

The most important thing to do when you are thinking about your SEO strategy is to ensure you pick the right keywords. Don’t pick keywords that you can’t compete on. For example, those that have an exceptionally high search popularity, or those with high ranking domain authorities on the first page. It’ll take you years to outrank those websites, so they’re not worth your effort.

We advise our clients to choose longtail keywords. These typically have five to seven words in the search term.

The best tool to help you search for your top keywords is Google AdWords.

In Google AdWords, you can enter a range of keywords to find search popularity and other keyword ideas. This shows you exactly what your customers are typing into the search bar so you know what your buyers are looking for.

This example shows the keyword ‘marketing strategy’ has been used in a search 74,000 times. It’s a hard one to compete on. The longtail keyword ‘components of a marketing strategy’ has only been searched on 90 times. This is much easier to compete on. It will also mean that the people who visit your site will be highly targeted due to the very specific keywords they have entered.

Once you’ve identified your keywords make sure you build them into your website, landing pages and any other content. You’ll get brownie points with Google if other websites link to yours using those keywords too. Over time, you will rise up in the ranks and attract a larger base of visitors, helping you sell more without lifting a finger.

3. Email Marketing

Today’s buyers expect instant gratification. When we buy something, we expect it to be delivered as soon as possible. That’s why Amazon Prime’s shipping model is so popular. It’s why Netflix has started to take over cable.

When a customer wants something, they don’t want to have to wait.

Email marketing allows you to meet that need without having to manually send messages to each of your customers. By setting up an automated email funnel, you can deliver your products faster, keeping your customers happier.

Better yet, you can boost your passive income over time by continuing to nurture the already interested buyers and luring them into buying more from you.

Automation tools, such as Infusionsoft, are your best friends in this arena. They offer an email solution to engage your customers based on their past interactions with your business. These tools are much smarter than they used to be. They respond based on what your customer does or does not do. The experience feels personal, but it’s faster and doesn’t require you to constantly be at the helm ready to react to their every move.

By setting up automated email campaigns, you will save yourself a lot of time. The email automation software does the hard work for you.

The first step to automating your emails effectively (and giving your passive income stream a healthy boost) is to understand your customers. Anticipate what they are going to do. Conduct some research and build your buyer personas. Think about the experience you want your buyers to have. Then, build your email marketing funnel around this experience.

It’s not easy, but if you skip this step, automating your emails won’t bring you the passive income you want.

Takeaways

Creating a healthy passive income stream requires more than just putting products for sale on your website. It requires you to be actively involved in your marketing so you can sell more at all hours of the day (or night).

Organize these three components – content, SEO and email – to work together so that you are targeting your buyers at a time when they are most willing to purchase.

Want to know how to wow buyers?

Are you sure? Because chances are good that you’ve heard and rejected this advice before. It’s surprisingly simple. It all starts with this important rule:

They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

The post How to Wow Buyers (Hint: It’s Not about Your Product!) appeared first on People First.

Whether we like it or not, markets are reshaping our lives. This time they’re made not of trade agreements — but of bits. Some call them platforms; I’ll call them micromarkets. It’s a truer description of what they are.

As micromarkets reshape our lives, they’re also introducing new, or heightening very old , tensions. Here’s how leaders can manage these tensions and set up their micromarkets for long-term success.

Make it a market, not just a marketplace. Marketplaces are platforms where buyers can display and list their offerings, much like a bazaar. True markets are different. Supply and demand dictates pricing, which is dynamic. Uber’s “surge pricing” is a simple example — and also an illuminating one. Uber isn’t quite a true market because algorithms are calculating prices based on predicted supply and demand. True markets create maximum efficiency; they offer buyers the lowest price and sellers the greatest demand , but they also slash search costs for everyone in the process. And that’s really the point of markets: efficiency gains for all.

Make it a network, not just a market. Markets aren’t always the right answer. They work best for interchangeable commodities — soybeans, bonds, car rides. When it comes to hiring an accountant, lawyer, or doctor, price competition probably isn’t the only factor, because high-value services aren’t commodities. So in these industries, don’t build markets. Build networks, ones where people can compare and contrast similar, but not the same , services along multiple dimensions of quality. Networks, too, can create search economies like markets  — and they’re more efficient at it when things aren’t the same. Think friends on Facebook, or new hires on LinkedIn.

Insight Center

Put fairness over short-term profit. As micromarkets ignite and spark into sudden success, there’s a natural tendency to misuse their newfound power. Many of today’s micromarkets are already tomorrow’s monopolies. And in some cases they’re behaving like it: Witness Uber’s constant PR mishaps. One benefit of being fair to both sides of your micromarket is that people are more likely to love, respect, and adore you — not just see you as a necessary evil that they grudgingly do business with. In other words, “brand.” But the truer benefit is a more viable, thriving ecosystem. Platforms that starve their buyers and suppliers for this quarter’s profit are simply consuming tomorrow’s growth, begging for rivals, and thus ensuring their own downfall — or at least anger, mistrust, and stunted potential.

Manage risk. Creating a thriving micromarket isn’t just about connecting buyers and sellers; it’s about minimizing what I’ll call “social risk”: doing business with perfect strangers. When you buy a bond from an anonymous seller, it’s one thing , but when they’re coming over to your house or you’re getting in their car, it’s another. And so the great innovations of micromarkets aren’t just about relationships — they’re about risk. They must find ways to minimize the novel risks inherent in fragmented transactional commerce , in doing business with perfect strangers who just might turn out to be freaks (or worse). They can provide information, quality indicators, and so on to help offset stranger risk.

Create relationships. The best and most enduring way of minimizing risk is also the oldest and simplest one: Do business with people you’ve come to trust. I found a handyman on TaskRabbit — and while I could book someone else when my plumbing breaks, I’d rather choose Maz again because I already know I can trust him. So the most prosperous and viable micromarkets will probably be those that can leverage natural social dynamics to manage risk, lower search costs, and create a better deal for everyone. Relationships beat transactions every time; they’re simply more economical.

Don’t let algorithms replace leadership. In the brave new world of micromarkets, the algorithm is the boss. It issues the orders, tracks performance, and guarantees delivery, quality, and reliability. But let’s admit it: Algorithms don’t make very good bosses. The tensions are visible, from Uber drivers trying to unionize, to constant horror stories about Airbnb, and so on. The point isn’t just that micromarkets need to learn from social media’s mistakes and invest in QA (though they do). It’s that algorithms, too, need to be managed — by humans (remember them?). Not because they make mistakes. Because they don’t.

When an algorithm’s been programmed for brutal efficiency, it’s the job of the wise leader to know when efficiency’s not the right goal. We often think that algorithms can replace leaders. But the truth is the opposite. Algorithms make leaders more necessary. Micromarkets need leaders who can make sure that the algorithm is not only a machine that grinds up human potential  but also a ladder that offers people ways up.

And that’s exactly where micromarkets are most failing today. If you’re a TaskRabbit worker or an Uber driver, what are your chances of becoming a manager? Without ladders up, organizations never truly grow. They might profit today, sure. But the long-term prognosis? After all, there were short-term profits to be had with the workhouse, child labor, and the seven-day workweek. But we decided to get rid of those.

Humans choose to give our work meaning. We want leaders who inspire, elevate, and expand our potential. And if micromarkets fail to meet that standard, the simple truth is this: They’ll be seen more as the dull, digital equivalent of a big-box store and less as the exciting harbingers of a new, more flexible economy.

It happens all the time. You call a prospect at the scheduled time and the line rings and rings and rings. No answer. You send a short follow-up email to set up another call. Still nothing.

You’ve made good on your promise to connect, but you’re being met with radio silence.

So what’s a sales rep to do when the deal rests on a prospect’s responsiveness?

Don’t panic. And don’t give up.

There are ways to effectively nudge your no-show prospect without feeling like you’re shouting into a void. Here are the best practices for crafting a response to this situation:

1. Default to the idea that there are many reasons a prospect could have missed a call.

It’s easy to assume a no-show is the result of a flaky or ultra-busy prospect, then let that belief color the rest of your interactions with them. But the only assumption you can confidently make is that you can’t be 100% sure about what happened.

This mindset will help you avoid making inaccurate assumptions or jumping to conclusions.

2. Respond with an even tone. 

You might be feeling negative feelings about the time you invested in the meeting only to have them show up. This is completely normal. At the same time, while this situation is an inconvenience, it's best not to let these negative feelings creep into your email. 

We're all human, and we all make mistakes. Without knowing the circumstances (as described in the previous tip), it's not advisable to chastise the prospect. Plus, it's always best to keep things professional.

3. Don’t guilt trip the prospect.

Guilt-tripping makes people feel terrible, pushes them to do something they might not want to do, and doesn’t reflect well on you or the company you represent. The last thing you want to do is associate your outreach with a negative feeling where one didn't exist before.

Friendly nudges are fine. Sending out emotional sob stories meant to guilt a prospect aren’t.

4. Definitely don’t harass a prospect.

This seems like an incredibly obvious point to make, but you’d be surprised at the lengths some sales reps go to get ahold of a prospect. This includes calling alternative numbers found on LinkedIn profiles or emailing a prospect’s personal account.

While those might not seem like hugely offensive acts, consider how you feel when a sales reps takes an alternative route to reach you. Usually not all that great.

Creative forms of outreach are okay -- up to a certain point. Beyond that, they become frustrating for prospects and flirt with the line between persistence and harassment.

5. Be honest about what happened on your end.

If you weren’t able to reach a prospect by phone, tell them you weren’t able to reach them. If they never showed up to your Zoom, WebEx, or GoToMeeting, tell them.

Stating what happened outright helps you establish the facts from your perspective and avoid making “assumption” statements that aren’t all that motivating (e.g. “I assume you’ve got a really busy schedule, so I’d like to figure out a time we can reschedule.”)

6. Add the value you anticipated covering during the call in your follow-up email.

Any email you send to a prospect is an opportunity to provide value to your prospect.

Even when they don’t show up, take a minute and pretend they did. What information would you have covered? What types of materials or resources would have been helpful partner pieces to that conversation?

Share it. Sending resources gives your prospect an opportunity to educate themselves on why they should choose your product or service, as well as get up to speed on missed information without slowing down the process too much.

7. Propose a reschedule.

Unless your prospect tells you otherwise, it's likely they intended to attend the meeting but couldn't because something came up. Propose rescheduling the meeting so you can preserve the momentum of your previous calls, and use a scheduling app to reduce the number of unnecessary back-and-forth emails.

8. Be realistic if this happens more than once.

Your prospect's time is valuable -- but so is yours. If they reschedule or are a no-show three or more times, have an honest conversation with them about whether it's worth either party's time to continue.

A simple note saying, "Hey, we've tried to reschedule this meeting three times now. Usually when this happens, it means this isn't a priority for your company at the moment. Is this fair for me to assume in this case?"

You'll force an answer and a final move. Your prospect will either say, "No! Not at all. I've just had a really busy quarter." or "Actually, this isn't a priority right now. It's probably best to shelve this for the moment."

You'll get the answer you need to move forward either way.

Reschedule Meeting Email

Most sales reps have a basic follow-up email template to send to no-shows. It's usually something along the lines of, “We missed each other! Just following up to reschedule.”

While it’s not a bad thing to have, I wouldn’t rely on one short email exclusively. Templated, generic emails are easy to spot.

Here’s an email template you can use as a starting point. I highly suggest tweaking it to make it your own and adapting based on each situation:

In the above email, you've effectively:

• Stated the facts from your side
• Added value by providing resources
• Offered an opportunity to reschedule

Alternatively, if you have an already established and less formal relationship with a prospect, you might consider having fun with your follow-up:

Your prospect made a mistake, and this may cause them some embarrassment. The above email takes that into account and actively works to release some of that negativity with humor while keeping the goal in mind.

Here’s another script you can send before making a call. It takes preventative measures against no-shows:

Sending a friendly reminder an hour or so before a call prepares a prospect and sets expectations. That can often help prevent no-shows from happening in the first place.

A final note –- never stop thinking critically about how your process could be improved.

It’s 100% worth it to analyze why a prospect may not have shown up. For example, did they know the date and time but not have an easy way to add the meeting invitation to their calendar? Were the prospects poor fits or too early in their buyer's journey to begin with, making a phone call at that stage unwarranted? These are things that will inform your approach the next time and the time after that, and adding them to your playbook will make you a stronger sales rep.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Whether you’re an experienced marketer or just getting started, guest blogging is a great way to build an organic presence on the web.

Getting your article published on big-names like Hubspot or Forbes is bound to get you some quality traffic back to your website. If your blog is optimized for lead generation, you can convert these visitors into prospects and potential customers.

Before you start writing for prominent websites in your niche, you’ll want to make sure that it’s worth your time and effort. Any guest blogging opportunity should benefit both the writer and website owner. It’s your duty to create valuable content for their readers. In return, they should provide quality backlinks and traffic to one of your personal web properties.

Below are 7 tips you can use to maximize your conversion rates with guest blogging.

1 – Create a Captivating “Boilerplate”

If you create and write valuable content, people will gravitate toward the host’s site by way of organic search and word of mouth; however, that doesn’t always mean they’ll take the time to research your brand on their own time.

One way you can encourage readers to visit your website is by writing an awesome boilerplate.

A boilerplate is a short, 3 to 4 sentence biography that should address the following:

• Who are you?
• What do you do?
• Who do you help?
• What’s the explicit call to action?

Let’s assume that you are writing for an authority website like BusinessInsider. Here is an example of a boilerplate that you can use to entice readers to go back to your website:

“This is a guest article by Your Name, lead marketing expert at YourWebsite.com. Your Name specializes in Facebook marketing strategies for small eCommerce businesses. Grab his/her free report on the ‘Top 10 Facebook Tips For Beginners’ today.”

Notice that everything is geared towards the audience’s needs. In addition, a free course is offered (i.e. the call to action) that will help potential buyers with a specific problem.

2 – Create a Landing Page Specifically for the Audience

If you send traffic directly to your blog from the guest site, you are missing out on a plethora of qualified leads.

If you want to build your email list through guest blogging, create a high converting landing page that addresses the theme of the website for which you’re writing.

Landing pages should narrow the focus of your visitor and limit potential distractions. It should include short, succinct language that entices them to take action.

Furthermore, your landing page should have a similar feel to the article you wrote. If you wrote an article about email marketing, your offer should be centered on that particular topic. You could create a free report that educates your prospects about autoresponders, broadcast messaging, or email segmentation. The body copy of the landing page should outline the immediate benefits to the customer.

Your specific area of expertise might vary from some of the websites for which you guest post, and it’s clear you should refrain from guest posting on sites that have absolutely no relevance to your niche. But as long as you lead with value in relation to the specific audience’s goals (find this out by doing some research, which can include asking the site owner or editor), you won’t have a problem generating new opt-ins and backlinks to your website.

3 – Write a Captivating Headline

No matter how good your offer, visitors will leave your landing page if the headline doesn’t leave them wondering about or wanting to know more about your product or service. In fact, the headline is arguably the single most important factor in any type of marketing advertisement.

When linking to your landing page from a guest blog, make sure you have headlines that will capture the attention of their audience. One of the best resources I’ve found for writing headlines is the “10 Commandment” approach. Here’s a handful of tips that you can use to optimize your headlines:

• Big and bold, at least 50% larger than the text in your body copy
• Make it unique and phrase your offer in a way that separates your product/service from others on the web
• Speak directly to the core desires and interests of your prospects
• Be specific (will it help men lose 20 pounds of fat in three weeks? Does it only take 7 minutes to complete? Will it increase ROI by 32%?)
• Avoid using your brand name; use language that reflects direct benefits to the audience

4 – Write Killer Body Copy

Once you’ve garnered the attention of your prospect with a great headline, you’ll need strong body copy to engage and convert them. More often than not, you should use clear and concise language that highlights the unique aspects of your offer.

Avoid using words like “I” and “we” and instead focus your attention on the prospect. Body copy should identify the obstacles or issues that prospects are looking to address, and this language should tie into the call to action. Refrain from using arbitrary phrases such as, “Sign Me Up.” Instead, use benefit driven language that entices your prospects to opt-in. An example of a good call-to-action would be, “Yes, Send Me My Video Now.”

Your offer should be presented as the solution to their problem. If you have successfully hooked them in your body copy, they will often take the next step without hesitation.

5 – Include an Image on the Landing Page

Whether you’re giving away a digital or physical product, you want to provide a visual representation of your offer. The human brain likes visuals, and the right image will increase the perceived value of your content and eliminate ambiguity on your landing page. Making your offer more obvious with visual mediums is almost guaranteed to increase your opt-in conversion rates.

6 – Put A Direct Call To Action In The Button Copy

High converting landing pages will include an explicit call to action in the body copy. For optimal results, your call to action and headline should be positioned “above the fold” of your landing page. Another strategy is placing your call to action in the copy of your button (i.e. replace a button that reads “Submit” with one that says “Get FREE Guidebook Now!”) Direct, yes; but your audience will get the idea fast and be able to “take action” by pressing that button.

7 – Test, Test, Test!

If you want to maximize lead conversions, you’ll need to test your landing pages to better understand the needs and desires of your potential customers.

There are a variety of ways to test landing pages, but a few best-practice strategies include:

• Create several headlines that emphasize different benefits and implement A/B testing to determine the best converting headline.
• Rotate different calls to action on your button copy. You’ll be surprised on how much of a difference a few words can make!
• Test different images of yourself, your brand, and your offer.
• Try putting a short but educational video on your landing page.
• Though design is not everyone’s strong suit, color matters. Test varying color contrasts in your headlines, body copy, images, and buttons and see what attracts.

In truth, every aspect of your marketing should be tested for success. Winning landing-page elements can be incorporated into your sales pages, emails, and social media campaigns. The more you test, the better your overall marketing campaigns long term.

Closing Thoughts

Whether guest blogging or writing your own articles, remember that you should always direct your visitors to a landing page, a launching pad for building profitable email autoresponder campaigns and converting more leads into recurring customers.

What other guest blogging strategies do you use to build your email list?

Every B2B marketer walks a lead qualification tightrope, and to fall to either side imperils the reputation and success of their entire department. On one side lies the Void of Over-Qualification, where marketing sets interest thresholds too high and leads never qualify. Sales begins to ask, “what marketing even does,” and marketing struggles to provide an answer grounded in financial results. This is a terrible place to be, and many companies overcompensate by over-correcting, and plunging in the opposite direction only to land in The Chasm of Trash Leads, where the bar is so low that anyone with a pulse and an email address is passed to sales. In this scenario, sales knows exactly what marketing does: waste their time.

How does a marketer stay balanced?

• Recognize that marketing is more than just technology-
  Many companies over-correct lead qualification issues by trying to fix the problem with looser lead scoring in their marketing automation system, when the real issue is unappealing content. Technology connects your content to your customers. Content is what connects your customers to your company.

• Know your buyer-
  Companies often have two kinds of content;fluffy thought-leadership pieces and salesy product-centric pieces. It should come as no surprise when someone who engages with a blog post on industry trends fails to continue through the pipeline after receiving a heavily-branded data sheet (yes, even if you send it at 2 PM on a Tuesday, which is definitively the BEST time for buyers in your space).Chart out the cognitive steps a buyer takes, and align your content to the challenges they face in each step. If someone comes in at one step, send them content that will appeal to them in the next step of the buying process you have taken the time to document. Each piece is important and where the buyer consumes the content it important too. Allow them to binge on content as well – give them the opportunity to consume content when they want it.
• Give your prospects time-
  Many marketers have lead quotas they need to hit. Email brings in a lot of leads, and running a fast email cadence can be a dangerous temptation. Before you send someone two emails a week (every week) until they unsubscribe, take a step back and remember that buyers could care less about your metrics. Make your nurture cadence dynamic, based on engagement, so that buyers who respond to content can receive nurturing more rapidly than those who have not shown interest.

In the face of technology that allows marketers to score and nurture prospects on an individualized basis, it is easy to lose site of the other elements that make marketing and demand generation effective. Lowering lead scoring thresholds is a seductive way to ignore problems with your content. Walking the B2B tightrope requires balance between content and technology, and the understanding of your buyer to know which part is unbalanced. It also requires the strength to fix it so that the People, Process, Content, Technology and Data are always about the buyer, no matter what.

In 2007, I showed up for my first day at HubSpot as an Inbound Marketing Specialist (i.e. Account Executive) and quickly realized we had very little figured out. Fast forward to the end of 2015 when HubSpot publicly reported 18,166 customers.

Clearly, we figured a few things out between 2008 and 2015. The smartest thing we did that launched us forward? We documented and consistently improved our sales process.

Our overarching sales process has probably been updated and revised more than 20 times. Additionally, we have several specialized groups selling to different markets, each of which has their own unique sales process. In the early days, when we referred to anything process-related, it was pretty common to hear us say, "If it's not documented, it doesn't exist."

We started pretty humbly, though. In 2008, there was little sales process defined, uncertainty about how we'd generate enough leads for the quickly growing sales team, and not much of a clue about how we’d train salespeople. As the fourth salesperson to join the company, my interview process involved listening to Brian Halligan give one of his first-ever pitches for inbound marketing (our other co-founder, Dharmesh Shah, was there too, telling his part of the story).

Brian and Dharmesh didn't know I was already sold since I (and my partners) had decided to shut down our business and I was already practicing elements of inbound marketing with hustle and a bunch of homegrown, hacked-together software. But long story short, the pitch really resonated with me. While I had a hunch, I had no idea it would resonate with millions more people as we scaled the company over the last decade.

None of this success was by accident, and it wasn't simply due to the fact that inbound was a good idea at the "right" time. Process was key. In fact, there was a documented sales process (albeit a fairly thin one) from day one. On my first day, Mark Roberge handed me a phone, pointed me to my desk, set up a login to our CRM, and handed me a script. While I don't have the original document digitally, I did manage to find a paper version. (I am a pack rat.)

Granted, the process wasn't all that fleshed out yet. The prospecting process was to be determined. There was no call outline for exploring fit or qualifying a buyer (and there wasn't even an acknowledgment that qualification was necessary as a separate step). As you can see from the image, we would at least try and squeeze a few qualification questions in before demoing our product. But the majority of the then-documented sales process involved pitching the same "inbound marketing" vision that Brian pitched me in my "interview," and then showing marketers and small business owners how they could attract more website visitors and turn them into customers.

You’re probably thinking, “That’s more than we have documented.” That’s right. We weren’t much different than most small and mid-market businesses are today, the majority of which don’t have much of their sales process figured out, let alone documented.

In fact, when I started HubSpot's Agency partner program program in 2009, I realized most marketing agencies wing every deal as if sales success is 100% art, luck, or completely dependent on the innate skill of the genetically-bred hunter-closer. Because sales suckiness was so prevalent among agencies, I realized if I wanted to grow HubSpot's sales through marketing agencies, I first needed to teach them how to sell. I needed to give them a sales process.

So that’s what we did. We launched our first sales training program for our partners in mid-2009. And guess what -- it worked! Today, HubSpot generates 40% of our net new customer additions from the agency partner program. More importantly, we've helped partner after partner go from small agency to multi-million dollar enterprise, at least partially due to the sales process, sales training, and sales coaching we've given them.

Now that HubSpot’s rapid-growth story is well known among SaaS companies, I receive requests to join startup advisory boards on an almost weekly basis. Once I start digging in, I usually see the same problem: There's no documented, repeatable sales process.

I discover the same thing when I talk to customers. In fact, we recently surveyed our free CRM users and found that fewer than half have a sales process. We didn't explicitly ask, but I bet that even less than 50% have a documented sales process that reps follow consistently.

However, simply having a sales process won’t magically get the deals rolling in. You have to have an excellent sales process that focuses on the buyer’s needs above all else. That’s what we built over the years as our product got broader, and we started selling to bigger companies (as well as small ones). We first added an “exploratory conversation” into our process before the demo. As we continued to pioneer inbound lead generation, we developed best practices for connecting with leads as well. As we scaled the team up, we expanded our lead sources to include proactive prospecting methods incorporating world-class lead scoring and prospect research processes. We trained our teams to give customized presentations to prospects based on their needs, and to develop implementation plans pre-sale so buyers felt they could safely move forward. These plans were focused on how we could help them achieve their goals, within their timeline, and budget -- not just our product.  

Lo and behold, over the years of consistent and continuous sales process improvement, we inadvertently created our Inbound Sales Methodology:

In the beginning of 2016 when Mark Roberge and Brian Halligan pitched me on the idea of building and launching a free sales training and certification program for any company in any  industry, I was instantly sold -- once again. (Brian is a good salesman, especially when teamed up with Mark.)

Over the last four months, a large team of HubSpotters have worked to build this sales training and certification course. Fifty thousand words and 50 hours of video shooting later, the Inbound Sales certification is launched: A five-hour video course complete with worksheets you can use to customize the process to your buyer and your solution. We shared the training with our top partners and the early feedback is excellent. You can sign up to take the course here. 

The free Inbound Sales certification is available to any enterprising salesperson who would like to learn or get a refresher on modern, buyer-focused, consultative selling. If you're a sales manager or sales leader, you can use it to create a better process or to reinforce good selling principles to your reps.

Having read many sales books and taken a handful of sales training courses, I believe that this course and sales methodology is as complete as many others (of which there are several great ones), yet simpler, more modern, and more immediately applicable.

But I’ll let you decide for yourself. Just like our own sales processes, we plan to continuously improve and update the training based on your feedback. Criticism and suggestions are more appreciated than praise and thank-you’s.

You may be asking yourself at this point: Why is HubSpot offering this training for free? Well, in order to take our profession to the next level, we believe it has to be free. Currently, the sales training industry uses their not-so-differentiated proprietary sales methodologies to generate billions of dollars of revenue mostly by serving large corporations. We’re taking a different approach. In order to be accessible to small businesses, students, new sales professionals drowning in college debt, and salespeople who want to take the initiative to improve regardless of whether their company is investing in them or not, we’re making it free. Free, Free, Free -- 100%.

Further, we believe that sales is something every professional should master in order to develop their career. To make sales a more universal skill, we hope our training is used to teach sales in more schools just like marketing, finance, and management is. Our free inbound marketing course and certification has been used as course material at hundreds of colleges and universities. We hope our free sales training gets used similarly.

We also hope that the millions of sales managers and the thousands of independent sales consultants out there take the material and treat it like their own. In fact, we aspire to partner with many of them to take the training to the next level as they apply and improve upon it. In working together, we hope that we can shift the industry away from “training” and more towards “coaching” -- the only activity really proven to improve performance of salespeople. Currently, the sales training industry sells way too many one-time workshops and seminars, and not enough of the front-line, deal-level, skill-improvement coaching needed to develop our salespeople into top performers. We hope this material can become the basis of a coaching framework for many sales managers and independent sales consultants, just like it has for our sales management team and our partners.

Big or small company, team or individual, B2B or B2C, top-performing salesperson or aspiring rep, customer or prospect or competitor, we hope this training helps you. Get learning. 

Happy selling!

Yasir was one of these hard nosed leaders. He delivered amazing results and was the ‘blue-eyed’ boy of the boss. He worked very hard and expected the same from his team. He drove them to the edge but doubled the brands market share in just 12 months. Based on his achievements he was promoted to a senior level position in which he was responsible for a number of brands and became a manager of managers. Soon into his new job, he started losing his shine and his magic seemed to have deserted him.

I was asked to coach Yasir and as part of this assignment I requested to meet his direct reports and a number of other people in his team first. Soon it became quite evident that Yasir was a tough boss. He put a lot of pressure on people and sometimes lost his cool when they weren’t able to step up their game. Sana, one of his brand managers, shared that Yasir often threatened to replace them if they failed to deliver. Furthermore, whenever she was under pressure from the sales team Yasir added on to it by attacking her for not doing her job well. Nigel, another brand manager on Yasir’s team, proclaimed that Yasir was never available to guide him and was frequently reminded that he wasn’t supposed to do Nigel’s job.

Clearly Yasir has been unable to create a conducive environment where his team was engaged and supported to deliver the demanding needs of the targets ahead of them.

Simon Sinek in his latest book Leaders Eat Last makes a strong case that the first and foremost role of a leader is to make sure they protect their team from external dangers. That they feel safe enough to push hard, collaborate and take risks.

In my coaching work I have found these concepts to be very true and I have dubbed it the ‘Circle of Trust’. Before leaders can expect their team members to deliver they have to create an environment in which people feel trusted, safe and encouraged to put in their best efforts towards a common purpose.

To create a ‘Circle of Trust’ leaders have to make sure that their team members feel that their leader:

• Respects me
• Knows Me
• Protects Me, and
• Supports Me

Lets look at all the elements that go into each of these.

Respects Me

Central to creating a Circle of Trust is the way a leader treats team members. Whether they are courteous and polite, treats them fairly, is open enough to tell them how it is or trusts them to do the right thing. It’s all about whether a leader treats subordinates as human beings with their individual idiosyncrasies or as a cog in the machine, i.e. a resource that just needs to be used to the maximum.

Knows Me

Although I know that people across the world could see this differently, I personally believe that you can’t build significant levels of trust if you don’t know each other at a deeper personal level. How can I trust my boss if he doesn’t know what drives or motivates me, what my aspirations are, what I’m good at or enjoy doing, or even, for that matter, knows what frustrates me. If he knows only the “office” me and not the “real” me, I won’t fully trust him with helping me achieve personal success.

Protects Me

I don’t know many leaders who can say they don’t know their team members or that they don’t respect them. Leaders often find it difficult to create an umbrella of safety for their team members. An umbrella that protects them from internal politics and heavy handed co-workers or bosses. An umbrella which allows the leader to stand up for their team when they need it and prevents them from speaking negatively in their absence. Of course the idea is to steer them clear from potential pitfalls.

Supports Me

Last but not least, team members would expect their bosses to have their best interest at heart and to guide them when they are stuck. They would like their leaders to involve them in making decisions about them. Along with this they want their opinions heard and decisions that impact them explained by their leader. And of course, finally their leader should explain what is expected of them, provide them with the required resources to do their job and give suggestions on how they can improve themselves.

Only if a boss is able to create this ‘Circle of Trust’ and team members feel safe enough to take risks will they give their absolute best. This means working without the fear of failure, collaborating without being afraid of getting stabbed in the back and trusting their colleagues to do what’s right. People want to be looked after when the ‘going gets tough’, and if you take care of them they’ll take care of the business.

Drug trafficking has been the primary focus of Mexican cartels, providing most of their obscene profits and motivating much of the bloodshed they've caused.

But as cartels have expanded into other areas of operations, and as law-enforcement efforts have forced them to seek new moneymaking ventures, those cartels have started kidnapping and extorting Mexicans with more frequency.

And social-media sites like Facebook and Twitter have been a boon to these new criminal endeavors.

"Well, the extortion business is a profitable one for organized crime. And in countries like Mexico, it's sadly pretty common that people get these threats," Tom Wainwright, the author of "Narconomics" and the Economist's former reporter in Mexico City, told Business Insider.

"And the new way of doing this, of course, is by social media."

"People get messages though Facebook or through Twitter. And the thing about Facebook is that of course the people who are extorting you know about your family," Wainwright said. "They've seen pictures of them, and they can intimidate you with these details. And so what we're seeing is an increase in that kind of extortion."

Some criminal organizations have proven to be more enthusiastic about extortion and kidnapping than others.

"The cartels that are most effective at this are ones like the Zetas, which have a very well-known brand, which allows them to intimidate people with the sort of fame of their brand," Wainwright told Business Insider.

As social-media use, and thus social-media sharing, have grown more popular, kidnappers and extortionists have seized on resources like Facebook and Twitter to identify new targets.

"All of the information that you leave behind on the social media is valuable to the cartels in just the same way that that information is useful for marketing purposes to regular companies," Wainwright explained, adding:

For companies, it's really useful to know what consumers like and what they're doing, and for cartels that are in the extortion business, it's more useful still. If they know where you are, if they know where you've been, if they know who your family are, then this is all information that they can use against you to try to extort more money.

'Freedom to commit crime'

Kidnapping and extortion aren't only the purview of cartels. According to a Mexican federal deputy, police officers have been involved in 80% of kidnappings in recent months, sometimes as part of "police cartels" dedicated to kidnapping.

One such cartel consisted of more than 6,500 officers and operated throughout the country.

Local police forces have been implicated in the abduction and suspected killing of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa teacher-training school in Guerrero in late 2014, a crime that still roils Mexico.

"To have such [police] elements involved in cases of kidnapping, it causes the victims to not dare report it for fear of reprisals, which generates impunity for the kidnappers and gives them the freedom to commit crime," deputy Germán Ernesto Ralis Cumplido, of the Citizen Movement party, said in late March.

More recently, there has been a growth in "express" kidnapping, where victims are seized, their families are contacted with a relatively modest ransom demand, and, if the money is paid, the victim is released within hours.

A Mexican nongovernmental organization has reported that there are 600 express kidnappings a day, for which the ransom varies around $400 in cash, jewelry, or electronics.

Kidnapping in Mexico amounts to a $30.8 billion industry, with 88 cases a day averaging payments of $9,706.

The scale of kidnapping and extortion in Mexico has grown so much that now people of modest means, who would not have been appealing targets for extortion in the past, are getting targeted.

"Now even street vendors, such as taco stands, are extorted in zones where the cartels hold sway," Andrew Chesnut, the Bishop Walter Sullivan Chair in Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who has done fieldwork in some hotspots for cartel activity in Mexico, told Business Insider. 

"Some of my relatives in Michoacan receive so many extortion calls that they must change their phone numbers every few months," Chesnut said, "and these are middle-class professionals, who are far from affluent."

SEE ALSO: There's a reason some gang members cover their bodies in tattoos, and it makes good business sense

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: There's a terrifying reason why people are warned to stay inside at 5:45 p.m. in parts of Mexico

A sales process that maximizes the productivity of sales reps is the goal of every sales leader. To achieve that goal, the most successful sales leaders have turned to data – harnessing the power of analytics to get the insights and know-how to engage with prospects more effectively, improve processes, and increase rep efficiency.

Research shows that 57% of high-performance sales teams rely on sales analytics, compared to 16% of their underperforming counterparts. Further, Aberdeen Group reports that organizations using sales engagement analytics have a 36% higher lead conversion rate, as well as an 18% shorter sales cycle.

Analytics deliver integrated visibility across the sales cycle giving you a complete view into every stage. Every metric, from prospecting to lead acceptance to customer retention, increases when intelligent sales analytics are deployed.

Here are four key ways that data helps supercharge the sales process:

1. Identifying the most interested prospects

Data can show you which prospects are the most engaged, so that you can quickly identify the best opportunities. Because the first seller to fulfill the buyer’s vision has a 65% greater chance of getting a deal, this capability is critical for your team.

Also, it’s just as important to ‘get to a no’ quickly. It’s estimated that up to half of a sales team’s selling time is wasted on unproductive prospecting. As Sally Duby, recognized sales expert and GM for The Bridge Group, points out, “The faster that you can move on from someone who isn’t going to do business with you, the better.”

By quickly filtering poor leads from the good ones, engagement analytics help prioritize prospects – so your reps can prioritize their time, focus on the most promising opportunities, and simplify their follow-up. This infographic shows the difference that engagement analytics can make in a sales team’s follow-up.

2. Understanding the best approach to take

According to the Harvard Business Review, managers who make decisions using best practices achieve their expected result 90% of the time.

Prescriptive analytics help you identify the best practices and understand the right course of action. Data can show, for example, which email templates are getting the highest open and response rates and which pieces of content or collateral resonate the most with prospects.

With insight into what type of activities and what activity levels work best, you can scale best practices across your organization.

3. Measuring and monitoring to manage opportunities

The next key to productivity involves continuously seeking new ways to measure, manage, and improve how your team manages leads and opportunities. Consider the flow of touch points your sales reps rely upon to reel in their prospects. Email. Call. Email Again. Or should it be call, email, call again? Because it can take an average of nine touch points to engage with a prospect, the volume of such outreach, and the order of interactions, can have a dramatic impact on whether prospects actually become customers. And today, those analytics are available with the click of a cursor.

Tracking, measuring, and reporting on every conversion helps sales leaders ensure the team is optimizing interactions at every stage. Data also helps you identify how much prospecting is required to meet your goals. How many leads does it take to close a single deal? Ten deals? 100 deals? In politics, they call such intricate calculations a ground game. The ground game of your sales team is driven by data. Only by measuring data can you see what’s working and what’s not.

Engagement analytics can show:

• How much time reps spent emailing to prospects
• Which rep has the highest – and lowest – number of responses
• Which campaign got the highest engagement

Analytics also show you the likelihood of reps making their number – before the end of the quarter. If a rep says a deal is going to close, but you can see that the customer engagement data isn’t there to support that claim, it’s a red flag. By seeing your reps’ engagement, you can also identify areas where adjustments to their selling approach need to be made before it’s too late to make a difference.

4. Improving team performance

Data is also a powerful ally when it comes to maximizing the performance of new members of the sales team. Think about it, how much faster would talent onboarding be if managers had access to data that highlighted what onboarding techniques were most likely to reduce rep ramp-up time? Every aspect of training reps for maximum success starts with data flow. With a firm grasp on the tactical nuances of prospecting, engaging and closing, sales leaders can efficiently lay out the path to success—even providing proven scripts that new salespeople can use.

The time-savings enjoyed by sales leaders right from the start of training in turn fuels better coaching at every stage. No longer are leaders managing based on a hunch or by simply observing the body language of their reps. Instead, actual data provides sales managers a detailed roadmap that highlights where reps need to improve and where their strengths may lay.

More than ever, information is power.

Today, salespeople must engage deeply with current customers, leverage a variety of touch points, provide insightful follow-up based on insights, all while prospecting for new customers. In other words, productivity requires doing the highest-quality work at the fastest possible pace—or risking losing the sale.

Having access to powerful data gives sales leaders the hard facts and helps illuminate the right path to follow. With data, your team can know where their time is worth spending, and how to effectively sell to the top prospects.

If you’d like to quantify matters in potential hours saved and dollars earned, LiveHive offers a complimentary ROI calculator that prompts you for specifics about your organization and calculates the time-savings and increased revenue possible with an open, extensible sales acceleration platform. Answer the questions. Crunch the numbers. Then formulate your own strategy to power your pipeline. Data will undoubtedly provide the rocket fuel.

Salesforce.com estimates that the use of sales engagement tools will see a 65 percent growth rate in the coming year. Don’t fall behind. Leverage analytics now to power productivity and build the sales team of your dreams.

 

Suresh Balasubramanian is CEO for LiveHive, Inc.,  whose open, extensible sales acceleration platform empowers sales leaders with insights into the effectiveness of their team’s sales efforts. Suresh is a seasoned software industry executive with more than 20 years of operations and senior management experience. Before LiveHive, Suresh served as CEO for Armor5, and GM worldwide at Adobe Software. You can reach Suresh at ceo@livehive.com and follow @LiveHive.

The post Using Data to Power Sales Team Productivity appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is experiencing a bit of a renaissance right now. Events and technologies focused on ABM are springing up, and my feeds and inbox are peppered with success stories, blog posts and sales pitches. It has lead to a lot of spirited debate at here at ANNUITAS and in my professional circles — and not everyone is a fan. I have long been a supporter of Account-Based Marketing, but I cannot deny the validity of some of the arguments I have heard against it. A lot of very smart people are still on the fence about ABM, but I think that much of the backlash is due to the fact that many marketers are still not thinking strategically about ABM, and are simply utilizing account-based tactics. And that is where the trouble lies.

Here are the four most commonly cited criticisms I have heard about Account-Based Marketing, and my take on how these are tactical issues rather than strategic ones.

Account-Based Marketing Only Supports Outbound
When I was at the Flip My Funnel conference in San Francisco, I was shocked by the fact that Account-Based Marketing seems to have reinvigorated the direct-mail marketing industry. It seemed as if most of the case studies involved tales of some sort of direct mail-based outreach to executives at targeted accounts that resulted in impressive returns and engagement within those accounts. What I didn’t hear much about was leveraging an account-based strategy with inbound tactics. As a result, it may lead some to believe that ABM doesn’t play well with inbound or a content strategy — and that is far from the truth. Truly strategic Account-Based Marketing folds account-based considerations into the development of a content strategy, which is what will best fuel your inbound marketing efforts.

The outbound content most tactical account-based marketers are using is typically product-focused and does not serve to educate and establish trust with buyers. The result? Lots of impressions, but low engagement.

Consider the foundation of a good content strategy — the development of personas for all of your buyers, including influencers as well as decision makers across the buying committee. Adding an ABM layer to this means that you need to figure out what types of companies are in your sweet spot, zero in on the specific needs of buyers from those types of companies, and prioritize the development of personas from “premium” account types. Creating the content that speaks to the needs of buyers from target accounts, across the entire span of their buyer’s journey, will create the complimentary inbound component to the obvious outbound tactics that can be applied to ABM.

Account-Based Marketing Alienates Prospects and Customers
Maria Pergolino from Apptus recently posted a few articles that shared some stories of targeted, account-based campaigns that that were unsuccessful (hereand here). The campaigns left some potential buyers and existing customers feeling either left out or unappreciated as they were excluded from opportunities that they felt they should have been a part of. The mistakes made were largely tactical in nature:

• Existing customers were largely excluded in favor of landing new logos

As Justin Gray said in the comments of Maria’s post, “Customers should always be the first VIP’s.” It is much easier (and less expensive) to support an existing customer than to land a new one. In fact,the origins of Account-Based Marketing are often traced back to expanding your presence across key accounts that are already customers. Recent applications, however, seem to be exclusively focused on new logo acquisition. Ignore existing customers at your own peril. Excluding them from your marketing strategy means you will lose market share, strategy or not.

• Targeted campaigns focused on specific accounts left buyers feeling underserved and excluded

If these efforts are extreme and visible, such as at an event or on social media, you run the risk of losing potential buyers due to insensitive messaging or “elitist” tactics. Tread lightly and consider carefully how your marketing efforts will be perceived. Never alienate a viable buyer simply because they are not “on the list.” Truly strategic ABM accounts for buyers that might fall outside the parameters of your target list, while still focusing on the companies that are the most likely to buy.

Account-Based Marketing Puts Sales In Control of the Marketing Process
Marketing has come a long way over the past decade, largely due to the rise of marketing technologies that allow us to better measure the return on our efforts and investments. Marketers are now able to prove what is working, what drives leads, which leads turn into opportunities, and which marketing programs drove the most revenue. However, poor visibility into turn-backs (marketing “qualified” leads rejected by sales) and perceived problems with lead scoring and closed-loop reporting still hurt us when it comes to establishing value and measuring performance.

Account-Based Marketing proponents (like myself) often cite that highly scored leads get ignored by sales because they are coming from companies that they don’t feel that they can sell to. The establishment of a target account list and adoption of an Account-Based Marketing strategy that leverages that list can serve to solve that problem. However, there is a tendency to take this too far — giving sales control of the list and a license to reject qualified leads that are not “target accounts.”

To remedy this, marketing needs to work with sales to compile the list, but needs to own the list and the strategies and tactics used to market to that list. These tactics need to be both inbound and outbound. We also need to account for qualified buyers coming from outside “the list,” establish clear and precise lead scoring and lead management practices, maintain service-level agreements with sales detailing responsibilities that account for qualified leads coming from both inside and outside the list, and build our Demand Process to focus on supporting a buyer’s journey and engage buyers with the tactics that drive revenue.

It is Difficult to Measure and Monitor Account-Based Activity
As I have written before, there are some inherent limitations in the technologies we are using that do not support an Account-Based Marketing strategy. “The problem though is that most (if not all) marketing automation platforms don’t offer … visibility into account-based activity … Why can’t marketing automation offer the ability/option to operate the same way, providing visibility into account-level interest and activity in our programs?”

Some new technologies have come to the fore seeking to address these difficulties. Engagio, for example, works to supplement your existing marketing automation platform with an account-based view into engagement and activity. And Demandbase has long offered tools that work within your web analytics to monitor account-based activity across your web properties (among other account-based outbound marketing offerings). As popular interest in ABM has grown, technology vendors are rising to the challenge with some impressive technologies to add to the stack.

Technology is not a silver bullet, however. It seems too easy to lose sight of the simple fact that incorporating account-based considerations into content strategy and lead management process are what will best serve to bolster any Account-Based Marketing strategy and drive revenue. The best technologies fail without a solid Demand Process strategy to drive them.

The most effective Account-Based Marketing programs take a strong demand generation strategy and build upon it by folding account-based considerations into the tactics that drive the best returns for your company. And the truth is, a strategic Demand Process that incorporates content strategy, inbound and outbound engagement tactics, and lead management process can trump any sort of Account-Based Marketing strategy. This is not to say I am not still a proponent of Account-Based Marketing. I’m just saying that you need to master the fundamentals first. Once that is done, adding some strategic account-based components is what will take you the next level.

*This post first ran March 31, 2016 in LinkedIn.

Author: Jason Stewart @jstewart_1 is Vice President, Strategic Content, ANNUITAS

The post Four Problems with Account-Based Marketing appeared first on ANNUITAS.

Companies have decreased their IT spending for the last couple of years, and the slump is expected to continue through 2016, according to Gartner.

Gartner notes that the slight dip this year is mostly due to currency fluctuations — most IT providers are based in the U.S., and foreign currency has weakened compared with 2014. Adjusting for that, though, spending is still relatively flat, up about 1.6% in constant currency terms.

As this chart from Statista shows, Gartner expects a recovery through 2020, with software spending growing 27% and IT services spending growing 19% over the next four years. Other parts of the market will grow more slowly.

SEE ALSO: Netflix now has better programs than HBO

Join the conversation about this story »

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When most people think of email marketing, they think of unwanted and irritating spam messages to be deleted. What most don’t realize is that there’s a right and wrong approach to email marketing; the right approach will make it into a very effective promotional tool. By building a list of target customers who are interested in your company’s latest news, you can easily turn these customers into long-time loyal buyers who will recommend your brand to others on a consistent basis. While email marketing may not seem as trendy as other types of digital marketing, it is an established promotional practice with a great deal of versatility.

How Email Marketing Can Work For You

One main advantage of email marketing is that it can reach a large number of subscribed readers quickly without the need for you to invest in expensive new software or other technologies. Automated software for organizing, scheduling, and bulk-sending your email newsletters and campaigns can be purchased for a reasonable price, and these programs also have tools to help you grow and track your subscriber list.

Depending on your target audience and their demographics, your email marketing campaigns will be effective if the content is meaningful to those customers. Your messages in those emails can be as simple as the announcement of a new product or service. They can alternately be more complex, with multiple eye-catching articles directly related to your brand. Some of the most popular content gives a persuasive demonstration how purchasing from you will help solve a specific problem for your customers. This tactic will help you build up a long-term relationship with your subscribers.

The Importance of Subscriber Lists

Before you can send your email newsletters to your business’s target audience, you need their permission to do so. Hence, the importance of the subscriber list they need to join in order to receive those marketing emails. One of your crucial and often most challenging tasks as a chief marketing officer is to give them incentives and good reasons to sign up.

Once those customers have signed up, they’re signing an agreement to receive these updates regarding your business. Not using an email marketing subscriber list is also known as spamming, and there are fewer quicker ways to harm your company’s reputation. Building a solid subscriber list of good sales leads takes time and patience, but the effort pays off in the long run.

Managing the Subscriber Lists Churn Rate

Every 12 months, 30% of your contact data becomes unusable. Unless you keep it current and up to date, you will end up sending coupons, gift cards, and news to the wrong people or wrong addresses. Alternatively, you will be wasting money connecting with the same person more than once, thinking that you actually have more than one person in front of you. Beyond the inefficiency cost involved in such operation, you are risking being penalized for spam.

In contrast, verifying, cleaning and consolidating your data using Data Operations tools such as RingLead will save you time and money chasing customers who will never respond. The key is to manage the email lists’ churn rate carefully by level setting your data once and continuously protecting it from invalidity and decay.

Creating Relevant and Timely Email Marketing Messages

Once you’ve researched your target audience and successfully added a healthy number of them to your subscriber list, now’s the time to decide on the content to include in your marketing emails. Successful email marketing messages set up your readers’ expectations and then meets them. Influential email newsletters contain a strong call to action that prompts your subscribers to take some additional step, such as clicking through to your company website.

Email marketing campaign management software includes tools to help you keep track of how many subscribers follow through. Lower percentages of this action indicate you may need to make some changes to your marketing messages. The next important decision to make is how often to schedule sending your email newsletters to your subscribers. A good thumb rule is, at least, one several times a week, but no more than one email sent per day.

Despite the perception of spam, email marketing can have the opposite effect as a tool for building your customer base and therefore your company’s profit margin over time. Provided you have the right approach and the dedication to growing a good subscriber list, you will end up seeing excellent returns on your relatively small investment in adding email marketing to your overall promotional efforts. As a CMO, formulating a solid email marketing campaign is well worth the time, work, and even the temporary setbacks that are common with this type of marketing effort.