Rnordman

Many times when I tell someone that I’m a “ghostblogger” and write blogs for other people’s small businesses, their initial reaction is, “You can do that?”

I actually had a fellow small biz owner tell me that outsourcing her blogging and other content creation felt like cheating…

But guess what?

This is an industry secret, that people may not want you to know, but many of the Internet’s biggest names outsource at least some of their content. Neil Patel does it. Jon Morrow, Copyblogger, and many other big names in my industry do it — whether they post it under their own name or not.

And, my clients, who run 6 and 7-figure online businesses, do it (I’d tell you who some of them are, but then I’d have to kill you — because it’s their decision whether or not to reveal that info, not mine).

In other words, outsourcing some or all of your content production, especially as you grow, is a common industry practice.

But how do you do it well?

What can you outsource content writing for?

There are different kinds of content writers based on the kind of content you want written.

There are people who generalize and will write any kind of content you like, but more often, writers tend to specialize in one or a few kinds of copywriting.

P.S. Copy is anything written in your business. Like, anything — from your tweets to your sales pages.

Specialties I know of include:

• website copy
• sales page copy
• email autoresponder sequences
• blog posts
• guest blog posts (posts that go on other people’s sites)
• social media posts (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
• ad copy
• ebooks, lead magnets, and whitepapers
• course materials
• scripts for videos, webinars, presentations, etc.
• full-length books (digital or print)
• press releases
• conversion optimization (testing and tweaking your text to convert better)

And those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

The point is, there are as many specialty copywriters as there are kinds of copy, and that’s because it takes different skills to be really good at each. Someone who writes killer long-form blog posts and articles may have trouble writing short, compelling Facebook ads or tweets — and vice versa.

So, depending on what you want to outsource, you may need more than one writer. (If you find someone who can do it all — expect to pay accordingly!)

Which leads me to my next point:

How to outsource content writing — that sounds like you

The first thing to remember is that I believe it is a copywriter’s job to sound like you (or, like you dialed up to 11). If they can’t do that job, it doesn’t matter how nice they are, how cheap they are, or how much you like their style — they’re not a good fit.

The last thing you want is to work with a writer who creates a bunch of copy for you in their own voice and then (for whatever reasons) disappears and isn’t available the next time you need something!

When that happens, you end up with a very disjointed voice and brand, because you can’t mimic what they were writing for you on your own.

I’ve seen this happen where someone hires a copywriter to write their website copy — but then their blogs are obviously a completely different style or voice. And this isn’t just what happens with small businesses or small copywriters, either; I have seen extremely well known (and friggin expensive) copywriters who write everything in their own voice; and their clients end up sounding like everyone else who has hired them!

To ensure that never happens to you:

• Start by creating a brand voice style guide for your business. It should include things like: acceptable variations of your business name and tagline(s), a description of your tone, words you love to use, words you NEVER use, etc.
• Ask some biz buddies to help you define your voice if you’re not totally sure. Ask them how they would describe your tone of voice for your brand.
• Identify what you like — and DON’T like — about your writing voice. Some clients come to me and feel like they sound too corporate for their niche; so they don’t necessarily want me to sound just like they do, but rather as they would like to sound. Just be wary of this; if you change your entire brand voice by working with a copywriter, you may be stuck always working with a copywriter from here on out.
• Think about your ideal customer when you’re trying to define your voice. Would they relate more to friendly, conversational language, or businessy-corporate language?
• Shop around to find a good copywriter. If you love the way their website is written, and it sounds similar to your tone, that’s a good place to start, but ask for examples (called “clips” in the writing world) that show off how they can take on different voices. Pro tip: If all of their examples sound pretty much the same, move on. You want someone who can sound different in different situations. And by the way, there are copywriters charging $10,000 or more for website copy that all sounds the same, to me, so this isn’t a matter of cost or experience, but the writer’s style and ability.
• Do they offer a process for helping find or define your brand voice? If you are uncertain about how to define it yourself, this could be a good investment.
• Ask about the writer’s process. How do they get to know your business and your voice? Do they interview you or have you fill out some kind of intake form? It would be a BIG red flag for me if they just dive in without knowing much about you or your biz.
• Ask if you can do a “test” before you jump into a big project — or at least understand when/how/if you can back out of the contract. It’s a big leap of faith to sign on with a writer, especially for a long-term project. So I always offer a “test” post to my ghostblogging clients. We do the intake interview, and then craft one post for them; if the client is happy, it rolls into their first month’s fee; if they’re not happy, we just charge for the hours spent and go on our merry way. Pro tip: Don’t expect to get a “test” for free — the point is not to get freebies, but to make sure you’re a good fit before you sign a contract.

In short, you want to make sure your copywriter is a good fit before you fork over a huge bunch of cash for a big project. But you also need to do your own due diligence as well. Take the time to create a voice style guide, and I promise you, whoever you hire will be thrilled to work with you.

OK, cool. But what does it cost??

Like most things in life, you get what you pay for when it comes to copywriting.

I assume you know that you could go over to Fiverr and pay someone five bucks to write you 1,000 tweets or something—

—but I assume you also know that the quality of what you get for $5 is going to be marginal, at best.

Think of it this way: you can buy a pair of pants at Wal-Mart or at Nordstrom and pay very different prices. But the quality you get will be just as different.

Here’s what you need to know about pricing:

• Copywriters may price themselves differently depending on what they do and what their background is. Journalists are used to getting paid by the word (expect $0.25—$1.00 per word) whereas people from other backgrounds might charge by the hour (expect anywhere from $30/hr—$150/hr and up). Lots of writers are moving towards package rates, which is usually better for everyone involved; just know exactly what you get in the package, including how many rounds of revisions it includes.
• A lot of different factors go into their prices, from experience to availability. (If they can only take two projects a month, they’re going to have to charge more.) Also, if you’re getting more than just writing — like strategy, branding advice, etc. — expect to pay more.
• Editing is usually less expensive than writing, so if you just need someone to help you polish, this is a budget-friendly way to go.
• A good VA can write tweets and Facebook updates from your blog posts or other content. Expect to pay $20/hr and up for a qualified VA. (Pro tip: A VA from overseas, like the Philippines, might be awesome for other tasks, but I wouldn’t ask them to write for you.)
• Prices for blog posts really vary. There are services out there that charge as little as $89 for 4 posts per month. Personally, I would never pay less than $100 a post for a short post.
• Generally speaking, the longer the content, the more you will pay. A 2,000-word blog post with tons of research will cost you more than a quick 500-word blog post. Kapost suggests budgeting at least $2,000 for a long-form article or blog post.
• Likewise, the more important the copy, the more you will pay. Sales copy is more important to your business — and hopefully has a higher ROI — and therefore tends to cost more.
• If you sign a contract or agree to a large project of some sort, you can usually expect some kind of package discount. It’s perfectly fine to say something like, “I see that you normally charge $150 per blog post; what can you do for me if I agree to getting four posts a month for the next six months?”

Finally, remember that content is an investment in your business just like any other investment. If you cheap out on content creation, it’s just as bad for biz as cheaping out on the source materials you use to create your product, or the equipment you use to run your business.

That said, it’s perfectly fine to start slowly! Identify what tasks will free up the most time for you, and then run some numbers to see if it makes sense for you to outsource those particular tasks. Maybe you love tweeting but hate the hours it takes you to write a blog post — or vice versa.

A potential client came to me recently wanting to outsource some of her blog tasks, and after I gave her my estimate, she said she wanted to run the numbers. She emailed me just a couple of hours later and said, “You know what? If this frees me up to work with even one more 1:1 client each week, it’s worth it. Let’s do it.”

And that’s REALLY what it comes down to: Will outsourcing some of your content creation free you up to work on the things that only you can do in your business, most specifically, those things that make you money?

If so, I believe it’s worth your time to find a writer who can put on your voice and create some content that sounds just like you.

And the first step is defining your voice. I have an affordable DIY workbook to help you do just that — click here for more information.

Leaders have a unique talent for rallying people together and getting them passionate about working towards something amazing.

This is no easy task, being a good leader is very tough.

So much to do, so much to think about, so much responsibility. It’s a lot of pressure to know that so many people are counting on you.

Leadership development is one of the most important topics to focus on when looking at how we can have more successful organizations.

In this post, I want to look at how most leaders are chosen, what makes a good leader, and how you can improve your leadership skills.

Before we dive deep into all of that, I want to highlight something very important.

Leadership has nothing to do with your job title.

Just because you’re a senior executive, doesn’t make you a leader.

Leadership has nothing to do with your level on the hierarchy. Leaders can be anywhere, at any level in an organization.

Also, just because you’re the manager of a team, doesn’t make you a leader. Many people confuse management with leadership, but they’re different.

Managing a team is about hiring, firing, planning, measuring, etc. Leading is all about people.

The key to being a good leader is understanding how to deal with people.

This is why I write so much about the importance of emotional intelligence.

Leading people is all about understanding how to motivate them, empathizing with them, caring for them so that you can make them better, listening to your employees, etc.

And this is backed up by research. There are numerous studies¹ that show that emotionally intelligent leaders have teams with higher employee engagement.

But most of the people that are in leadership positions frankly don’t belong there.

Why is that?

The problem is, most companies promote the wrong people into leadership positions based on their technical skills, even when they don’t have the necessary “soft skills” to motivate their team.How We Find Leaders Is Flawed

When we think about leaders, we might envision a big, tall, loud, handsome, charismatic person (likely a male), wearing a suit, commanding a room.

These biases are natural, but we’re making a huge mistake when we think like this, because we’re only feeding into the problem of having the wrong people in leadership positions.

Some things that our biases look for when choosing leaders:

• Age
• Sex
• Race
• Attractiveness

In fact, researchers have found² that 30% of leaders that get into those positions are due to genetic factors. But there’s plenty of research to show that none of these things matter when it comes to being an effective leader.

One study³ found that almost everywhere in the world people perceive men as “more leader-like”, but there is actually no difference at all.

Research has found⁴ that extroverts are more likely to get leadership positions, even though introverts are likely better leaders.

Introverts are usually better at listening (a key trait for leaders), they spend more time preparing, and do more self-reflection, all important qualities of a good leader.

Psychologist Tim Judge found⁵ that altruistic, empathetic, and sociable people tend to make better leaders but are chosen to lead less frequently.

So what actually makes a good leader?

Skills That Good Leaders Have

Good leaders have a very high emotional intelligence.

They understand and use their strengths, they’re always looking to improve, and are always learning. These are the skills that make a good leader.

1. They Focus On Their Strengths

   Good leaders are always taking stock of themselves and figuring out what their strengths and weaknesses are.

   Understanding where their weaknesses are helps them delegate that work to people better skilled, giving them time to focus on what they do well.

2. They’re Great Listeners

   Good leaders know the power of listening. When you speak, you’re only saying what you already know. When you listen, you can learn something new.

   One of the greatest tricks that smart leaders use is waiting five seconds before responding to an employee when they bring something up.

   People will inherently want to fill that awkward silence so they’ll most likely keep talking, giving leaders more information to work with.

3. They’re Excellent Communicators

   Communication is key. Good leaders know how to take complex things and make them sound simple. They know how to get everyone passionate about something through their communication.

   Their communication is clear, concise, and passionate.

4. They’re Well-Respected

   Respect is earned and built over time, but leaders need to be respected in order to be listened to.

   Good leaders actively work on building up that respect by giving that respect back to their employees by including them and listening to them.

5. They Collect Lots Of Feedback

   Good leaders are always looking to improve, and they’re not scared of what people will say about them. They see it as an opportunity to get better.

   Good leaders will collect a ton of feedback and actively seek that feedback from their team.

6. They’re Accountable

   At the end of the day, the buck stops with them. While good leaders will delegate and give autonomy to their team, they’ll get the blame if anything goes wrong.

   Good leaders know this, and hold their team accountable to make sure everyone shares the workload.

7. They Recognize Good Work

   Good leaders understand the value of a “thank you” and are not afraid to use it.

   They recognize all of the hard work from their team and are giving praise to their team very, very often.

   They’ll also build a culture of recognition, encouraging everyone to praise each other, creating those stronger bonds within the team.

Things To Do To Become A Better Leader

So now that you know how valuable emotional intelligence is to leadership and some of the skills that the best leaders have, what can you do to become a better leader?

1. Be Humble

   Being humble makes you more human and creates a safe environment for your employees. Humility will make your employees more comfortable coming to you for anything.

   How to practice humility:

   • Give credit to other people for work you both did
   • Try taking blame even if it wasn’t your fault
   • If you make a mistake, own it

2. Collect Feedback

   Leaders are always getting better and growing as people. You want to be the best you can be for your team, so you’ll want to constantly ask employees how you can improve.

   How to practice collecting feedback:

   • Tell your team you want to improve and you’re counting on them
   • Use the feedback to grow and improve
   • Show employees that you actually listen to their feedback

3. Be More Self-Aware

   It’s important that you’re able to have a great understanding of who you are, your emotions, and how you’re affecting others.

   Being self-aware and doing a constant “check-in” of yourself will help you develop that emotional intelligence.

   How to practice self-awareness:

   • Monitor your self-talk (look for negative self-talk)
   • Pay attention to your body language
   • Meditate

4. Find A Mentor

   Having a mentor is one of the most powerful ways to become a good leader. No need to reinvent the wheel, find someone to help you who has been through the trenches.

   How to find a mentor:

   • Make a list of people you respect (in or out of work)
   • Discover how you can help them before they help you
   • Don’t be shy and ask for help

What Do You Think Makes A Good Leader?

Let us know in the comments below!

What’s the point of offering internships? To many employers, interns are just an easy source of utility personnel, dealing with minor day-to-day duties, administrative tasks, and the occasional coffee run.

But this approach wastes talented individuals and loses sight of the original purpose of an internship — to give students and soon-to-be-hires a chance to gain practical experience. Interns aren’t mindless grunts, and they can’t gain experience if they aren’t performing relevant tasks.

Common Intern Complaints

So why are so many employers reluctant to give their interns proper experience? One common complaint is that interns can lack focus or certain skill sets. That said, the hope is that interns will work just as hard as full-time employees, if not harder, with the goal of perhaps one day landing full-time positions in their space. However, although we want interns to exceed our expectations, we can’t demand 100 percent commitment every day of the week.

Interns can’t be expected to be as knowledgeable as permanent staff, yet many employers complain that their interns aren’t skilled enough to handle projects on their own. It’s irrational to hold an intern to the same standard as permanent staff members with years of experience. If an intern has lied about his or her skills, this complaint is justified, but the point of an internship is to provide an opportunity to gain those exact skills.

What Interns Want

Universum polled more than 65,500 students to find out what aspects of an internship they valued most highly. Full-time employment was the top priority, but digging deeper revealed much more: 42 percent wanted exposure and experience, 29 percent wanted great references, and 19 percent wanted flexible working schedules.

Companies should reflect these desires in their internship programs for one clear reason — retention. The study also shows that employees who interned at companies before joining have higher retention rates than those who didn’t. In the end, internships are long-term investments in talent acquisition, and they need to be structured accordingly.

What Interns Need

I’ve seen poor internship opportunities, and I’ve seen great ones, too. I’ve seen banking and finance interns tackle appropriate-sized projects, and I’ve seen interns at engineering firms performing mundane office tasks without ever getting a look at a design. But whatever the industry, there are two things that interns need:

1. Real-world exposure: Some employers might consider it risky, but I’ve brought interns along on business luncheons so they can watch me negotiate. It’s important for interns to gain exposure to the day-to-day running of a business, and giving them the chance to see negotiations taking place or details being finalized is an invaluable opportunity for them to see how business works.

Interns should be given the chance to see the measurable results of their own work, too. If they’re working under a marketing team, they should be shown how their contributions to a project grew the number of sessions on the platform. This kind of approach helps an intern take pride in his or her work and feel like a part of the company.

2. B2B and B2C communication: Interns can learn a great deal about how an industry works by learning how businesses interact with each other and with their customers. For example, a sales intern can learn a lot by shadowing a sales associate. He or she doesn’t need to close sales directly to gain experience; it’s more important just to be involved.

And marketing interns can learn how businesses reach their target audiences by working with marketing professionals to address customers through various channels. Witnessing these kinds of transactions gives interns a real opportunity to understand the business, and if they understand it, they will be more likely to succeed in the long run.

How to Structure Your Internships

We’ve hired many of our interns to join us on a full-time basis. Most of them are still with us today. During their internships, we focused on building a sound structure to provide experience and help them appreciate our company culture. Here’s how we structure our internships:

• Create a calendar together. Outline the due dates of important tasks and projects. These dates should reflect recurring events and not minor day-to-day tasks. If an intern is tackling one large project, break it down into several stages and give each stage a due date. This calendar should be set in stone so the intern understands the importance of structure.
• Have interns create to-do lists. These don’t need to be planned as far in advance as the calendar, and they shouldn’t be as structured, either. To-do lists should be flexible, changing by the day and even by the hour. Interns must be solely responsible for these to help them gain independence and avoid accidental micromanagement.
• Teach time-management skills. If an intern is in college, time-management skills should be a given. But it’s important to teach interns how to prioritize in response to the fast-paced environment of a startup. This lesson will stay with an intern for a lifetime and help him or her understand how others meet deadlines and tackle the fires around the office.
• Set and track key performance indicators. Data is everything in business today, and it should drive personal decisions, too. Work with interns to establish and track their own key performance indicators, and use these KPIs to structure performance reviews. They could be learning-based, project-based, or a mixture of the two depending on the intern and his or her role. These KPIs make it easier to review an intern’s strengths and weaknesses, providing value to both the intern and the company.

Internships are meant to provide practical experience through exposure. While interns themselves have plenty to worry about outside the walls of the office, it’s an employer’s responsibility to teach and establish a pattern of experience during the workday, even if he or she isn’t planning on hiring the intern for a full-time position. The right structure is essential to this process.

More so than other jobs, sales success hinges on personality. In fact, research from Ideal found that 85% of a rep's success can be attributed to their personality, and 15% to their brains. In a study of more than 46,000 salespeople, "intelligence was correlated with sales volume but only for salespeople who are also high in people skills," Ideal's Ji-A Min explained. 

With this in mind, hiring salespeople with the right character traits might even be more important than hiring those with the right smarts. So what are sales leaders looking for in candidates?

InsideSales.com's recently-released Business Growth Index report revealed the top personality trait sales leaders value in their best reps: resilience. Empathy and ambition took second and third place, respectively. So if you're looking for a new sales job this year, you might consider recounting a few anecdotes that demonstrate your resilience in the face of obstacles. 

The survey also revealed that sales leaders plan to diversify their teams this year by hiring more women and ethnic minorities. To dig into more sales predictions and plans for 2016, check out the infographic below, or download the full report here.

Click the image to enlarge:

As in U.S. presidential elections, price wars tend to be filled with empty words about value – and ultimately leave many listeners disappointed. How can you communicate value to your customers without making it all about who has the lowest price?

Is your organization creating buyer personas? If not, you’re skipping a fundamental step in your marketing approach. But, perhaps the only thing worse than that is failing to use buyer personas effectively despite having them. And that’s exactly what’s happening with most B2B organizations. According to a recent ITSMA survey, 85% of firms that have created buyer personas aren’t using them.

Why? Because most B2B firms are short-cutting the process to create personas. As a result, they end up with a generic buyer profile that doesn’t answer the critical questions the firm needs to understand in order to be effective.

Challenges in Creating Buyer Personas

A major roadblock in the way of implementing buyer personas is that many marketers aren’t doing enough qualitative research on their buyers. They are sourcing their customer intelligence from their sales teams, which may offer some insight but, rarely ever the complete view of their buyers.

On the flip side, many marketers are spending inordinate amounts of time figuring out too many unnecessary details that are frankly, useless in the complex B2B sales situations. For example, when developing a buyer persona for your B2B solution, does the knowledge that your buyer loves chocolate chip ice-cream apply? While this information could help on the relationship-building side, it definitely won’t be a deciding factor when it comes to your selling your solution. The main problem here is a basic lack of understanding of what type of information to process and what to leave out.

However, these are not the only challenges organizations face with buyer personas. A recent B2B marketers’ survey from Cintell found that most respondents struggle with:

• Getting their organization to value personas
• Validating persona insights with qualitative measurement
• Training teams to use personas in their everyday work
• Finding third-party data to support persona creation

Let’s quickly go over a few reasons why you should invest your time and effort into creating buyer personas.

Why You Can’t (and Shouldn’t) Ignore Buyer Personas

Consider this: you’re creating top-drawer content and yet, it fails to grab the eyeballs and impact you’d hoped it would. You wait for weeks or probably months, and after seeing no results, declare content marketing is not for you. Sound familiar? Well, that’s because your content doesn’t resonate with your audience. And, it all boils down to buyer personas (or lack thereof).

With personalization becoming key to effective marketing, it’s more important than ever to focus on knowing your buyers better by researching their needs and motivations to buy. Here are more reasons why buyer personas are important for your business.

• They steer your marketing and sales strategies
• They help develop a uniform view of the buyers across all silos in your organization
• They tell you what triggers activate your audience, so you can engage them better at all stages of the purchase process
• They help segment your audience effectively for better targeting
• They allow you to create content that strikes a chord with your audience

Data from the Cintell report also shows that organizations creating detailed buyer personas based on the buyers’ motivations, pain points, and specific roles in the buying process are likely to exceed their annual revenue goals, while low-performing organizations are the ones that simply use demographic data in their buyer personas. This means the quality of buyer personas an organization creates reflects in its bottom line.

How to Create Buyer Personas that Move the Needle

Buyer personas are not just a nice template to present internally. In order to work properly, they have to be founded on rigorous customer research combined with relevant sales inputs. They have to provide insights into what motivates your buyer, what their goals and drivers are, what their pain-points are —and not whether he owns a Boston terrier or lives in an opulent condo. Simply put, it’s not just the plain demographics or hobbies that count, what matters most is data or information that will enable better product development, better sales strategy, and better adjustment of the brand message in relation to your B2B buyers’ needs.

Here are some ways you can find out more relevant customer information:

Level 1: Interview your customer-facing personnel such as sales, customer service, and product management. This will help you understand the common triggers and/or factors that prompt customer response across all touchpoints.

Level 2: Conduct online customer surveys to better understand buying behavior, reach out to ask questions on Q&A platforms like Quora and your brand’s social media pages. This will help you develop a solid content strategy that resonates and engages with each profile, at each stage of sale.

Level 3: Conduct 1:1 interviews with your prospects and customers to deepen your knowledge of their motivations, needs, and buying criteria. Unless you have a skilled and neutral interviewer on staff, this approach may work best conducted by a third party.

Level 4 (Gold Star): Incorporate Ethnographic study– which is, basically, observing your customers and prospects in their natural environment, with the aim of identifying the otherwise hidden buying motivations and contexts in which customers may use a new product. This may be a bit more intensive than other market research methodologies, but it’s especially helpful for companies engaged in complex B2B marketing and long sales cycles.

To sum it up, properly-defined buyer personas help you shape your marketing efforts according to what’s most relevant and essential for your target audience. Without this knowledge, you’ll simply be shooting in the dark.

Lead nurturing is nothing new. Sales people have to constantly follow up with their leads, engage in conversation, show them the benefits of their product/service, and try to close deal after deal. This used to be a very manual, hands-on experience. Now, with automation and the amount of data we have at our fingertips, marketers are able to map content to fit every buyer’s needs at any point in the sales cycle. In fact, this is something that we all should be doing if we want to generate a higher response rate and guide our prospects down the funnel.

So, the question remains for many, “How do I develop content for each stage of the funnel?” There is no easy answer, but there is a way to make it more strategic.

First, you have to understand the sales funnel. There are four main stages to any funnel: Awareness, Evaluation/Consideration, Purchase, and Evangelism or Customer Retention. At each of these stages the buyer requires different information about your product or service. Let’s evaluate the types of content needed at each phase. Use this as a guide for your own lead nurturing campaigns.

I am going to break down each stage into 4 different areas: User Behavior, Research, Content Types, and Key Terms.

Buyer Stages	Awareness	Consideration	Decision
User Behavior	Have realized and expressed the potential problem/opportunity	Have a clearly defined problem and opportunity – considering how to address said issue	Have defined the solution and strategy
Research	Research is vendor neutral. Simply looking at 3rd party information about their realized problem/opportunity	Started researching all available solutions to solving defined prob/opp	Reviewing how-tos, case studies, select vendors, etc. to make final decision and aid in implementation
Content Types	Analyst reports, eBooks, editorial content, educational content, landing pages, social media posts, contributed articles (thought leadership pieces)	Comparison charts, expert guides, webinars, interactions with sales/support, Case studies, reviews, drip campaigns, educational vendor specific blog posts	Vendor comparisons, free trial documentation, educational drip campaigns, live demos, product documentation, how-tos, implementation guides
Key Terms	Improve, optimize, prevent, solve, streamline, organize, empower, increase revenue, integrate	Tool, software, application, success, easy-to-use, custom, customer service	Pros and cons, reviews, comparisons, customer support,

Before you start strumming up all of this content, ask yourself, “Do I know who my buyers are?” Have you already established your buyer personas?

Buyer personas are specific illustrations of the different types of people considering and purchasing your product. For example, if you sell website development and social media marketing services, chances are you are not going to give them the same types of content. Establish your buyer personas first so you can accurately target those that are interested in your product/service.

Let’s look at a real-life example of lead nurturing at each stage of the funnel.

Brent is a small business owner looking for a small business operating system. He wants an integrated platform that his whole team can use. He does not want his team having to move back and forth between systems.

He starts to Google small business operating systems, sales and marketing systems, how to integrate sales and marketing, and a few other key search terms. In his search, he comes across an interesting eBook from a CRM and marketing automation vendor. They are offering an eBook. “The Small Business Owner’s Guide to Sales and Marketing Software.” He thinks this might be a helpful educational eBook, so he gives his contact information and downloads the eBook.

He confirms he wants to opt-in to Company A’s communication and is dropped into a drip campaign with his eBook download, as well as a series of helpful emails about selecting marketing software as well as marketing tips and tricks.

In these emails, there are calls-to-action for a free demo of the software.

Finally, after the third email, he clicks the link for a live demo. The sales team is notified and he is contacted to schedule a meeting.

Once Brent has seen a live demo, he wants a trial. Brent sets up his trial and is immediately dropped into a Welcome drip campaign that goes into all the features of the system and how he can use them specifically for his business.

In the meantime, his sales rep occasionally follows up to inquire if Brent has questions. Towards the end of his trial, Brent is sent an email with a free month promo. Brent subscribes.

Of course, this is just one simple example of how lead nurturing can turn a marketing qualified lead into a paying customer.

Once you have established your flow and your content for each stage, never forget to test and test again.

Use the data from your campaigns to make changes to your strategy so you can effectively optimize your conversion and engagement rates with your leads.

Scott Brinker recently released the 2016 Martech landscape supergraphic, and it’s overwhelming to say the least. The more than 3,800 included technologies exist to solve marketing problems and make a marketer’s life easier and more organized.

Within the data header on the supergraphic is a section that includes marketing attribution. But with all of the technologies available, why choose attribution as an addition to your marketing stack?

Below is a list of obstacles that marketers have to navigate on a daily basis. If you’re facing any number of these marketing problems, it’s time for attribution.

Tying Marketing Efforts to Revenue

Marketers have traditionally relied on vanity metrics, such as lead numbers, page views, and socials shares, as measures of success. But, it’s increasingly being asked that marketers report on revenue as well. Sales teams are tied to revenue goals, as are most departments, so the C-Suite also wants to know what marketing has done to impact the bottom line.

Marketing attribution tracks all touchpoints on a customer journey and assigns revenue credit to the major conversions after the sale is made. How much credit is given to each will vary based on which attribution model is used at your company, but at Bizible, we think a w-shaped model is best. With w-shaped, 30% of total revenue is assigned to the three major conversions (first touch, lead creation touch, and opportunity creation touch) with the remaining 10% credit given to the touchpoints in between.

Say a blog post brings a lead to your website for the first time. A week later, they fill out a form for a webinar. A month later, the sales team closes the deal on the phone. Marketing would be assigned 30% of revenue for the blog post and 30% revenue for the webinar form fill.

This allows marketers and the C-Suite to see the true business value created by marketing efforts. Additionally, the channels and campaigns having the most impact will now be visible, meaning the team can optimize what is working and reduce effort and spending on what is not.

Model/Channel Bias

Model or channel bias occurs even if you already have an attribution solution in place. When organizations begin thinking about marketing attribution, they often start in the most basic form: single-touch attribution. Single-touch attribution includes both a first-touch, lead-creation touch or last-touch attribution model.

However, the problem here is that too much credit will be given to a single touchpoint, creating model bias. In B2B, the sales cycle is often long and includes multiple touchpoints that influence the buyer’s journey. With so many factors in play that each contribute to the success of the sale, how can you determine which single one gets all the credit?

As Lauren Frye recently wrote in a post that considers if single-touch attribution is unethical in B2B, assigning all the credit to a single touch point is like only giving a gold medal to the relay runner who crossed the finish line. What about all the other runners on the team?

Lastly, without an attribution model in place, you’re relying on vanity metrics to determine what is working or not, making channel optimization a guessing game. The blog may be driving lots of visitors to your website, but it isn’t worthwhile to spend more time and money on the blog if none of those visitors turn into customers.

Deciding Where Budget Should be Allocated

When budget decisions come around, money is going to be allocated to areas that provide a positive return. The only way to show marketing as a revenue center instead of a cost center is through attribution.

With attribution, the marketing department can say, “We played a role in driving X amount of revenue this quarter, and we also learned that our e-book leads convert to customers at a much higher rate than our webinar leads. With additional budget, we can focus on more content development and do more tests to discover which other channels are driving quality leads, while scaling back the ones that aren’t.” And that is a much stronger strategy than, “We drove X leads this quarter and increased page views by X percent.”

Increased budget is a much easier ask when there is an outlined, detailed plan of what the marketing department will do with additional funds and how much revenue they will drive through their efforts. Attribution makes that plan come to life.

High Cost Per Lead (CPL)

Most marketers rely on a single CPL figure. When the budget is planned, teams set a ceiling for the most they are willing to pay for a lead. But it’s clear that not all leads are created equally — some convert at a much higher rate than others. So, it makes sense to be willing to pay more for high-quality leads and less for those that don’t convert as frequently.

This is why CPL limits should vary by channel. The only way to accurately reveal which channels are driving the most valuable leads, is through attribution. Attribution data can create a lead report, opportunity report and revenue report, all broken out by marketing channel. This will show which leads convert to opportunities at a high rate and which leads bring in the most revenue. Making it easy to determine the CPL ceiling for each channel.

Measuring the Impact of Brand Marketing

Brand may be the most important part of running a business. It is the face of the company and directly impacts whether prospects and customers have a positive, neutral or negative opinion of your organization. And each of those impact company revenue.

But how do you know if your brand marketing efforts are worth it? Brand surveys are great. They’ll give you a general idea of brand recognition and growth, but without attribution, you’d be missing the true impact. How is brand marketing driving revenue?

Measuring metrics like deal velocity, direct traffic and organic search will give a good view of the actual impact of your brand marketing. Attribution provides channel data at every stage of the funnel, from first click to closed deal, which means your marketing efforts can be measured through every stage as well. Using that information and tying it to revenue from organic search, or revenue from direct traffic, allows you to definitively say whether brand marketing efforts are working.

Forecasting

Attribution is not only useful for looking at the past, it can help you predict the future as well. When you know how leads from particular channels have historically flowed through the funnel or how many touchpoints they have before becoming a customer, you can, with general certainty, predict how leads of the future will behave as well.

Once you set an end-of-year revenue goal, you can use attribution data to work backward and determine what it will take to get there. How many new customers do you need to gain to hit your revenue goal? How many opportunities do you need to convert to hit that customer number? How many leads do you need to produce to hit that opportunity number?

The full-funnel, granular data provided by attribution gives marketers the information they need to forecast with confidence and accuracy.

Measuring Offline Channels

Events, conferences, sales dinners, phone calls, direct mailers… a lot of today’s marketing occurs offline, and these interactions are just as valuable as those that occur online. But how are you tracking these touchpoints? How do you know if it’s worth it to sponsor that event next month, or send a direct mailer to high-prospect CEOs?

If you’re guessing at these answers, then it’s time for attribution. Attribution tracks both online and offline interactions, making it possible to see how each and every channel is impacting revenue.

If you spend $10,000 to have a sponsor booth and you book tons of demos during the event, it may seem like the event was a success. But if no one you talked to during the event eventually turned into a customer, the event ROI was zero. It may not be beneficial to attend again in the future.

The marketing landscape is constantly changing, creating new challenges for marketers every day. And although there are thousands martech solutions available, it’s impossible to research them all to decide which provides the most benefit.

But attribution doesn’t just solve one marketing problem, it solves many. The money you’ll save from an accurate CPL, properly allocated budget, and optimized channels, will more than pay for the cost of implementing an attribution solution.

He’s the hardest working person I know, yet he has no special skill or talent. What my father does have, however, is a gift with people.

Since I was a kid, I’ve watched him win people over to his ideas and suggestions. This is more than just a matter of persuasion. It’s deeper than that. I’m talking about building strong, genuine relationships that are mutually beneficial.

Whether it’s business or friendships; relationships are an essential part of success. If you can’t win with people, you won’t get very far.

Even those few entrepreneurs who’ve managed to achieve some success while not being great with people have only achieved a fraction of what they could, if they knew how to inspire, lead, and win people to their side.

So how do you win people over?

While there are many ways to achieve this, I’ve outlined 14 key ways that will help you yield better results right away.

1. Get Yourself Together.

It all starts with you. If you’re a mess, your influence will be greatly limited. You have to take care of yourself and have your act together. No one wants to be friends with someone who is always needing help and is incapable of helping someone else. Put yourself in a position of strength by having your life together (as much as possible…no one has it ALL together)

2. Make Everyone Feel Important.

Pretend that every person you meet and come in contact with has a sign above their head that says “MAKE ME FEEL IMPORTANT”. Everyone wants to be acknowledged. Everyone wants to feel like they matter. Even a quick encounter with a stranger can impact them in positive ways if you make them feel important. You’ll never get everyone to like you, but if you make everyone feel important, you’ll have a much easier time achieving your goals.

3. Encourage Them & Their Dreams

There’s an abundance of people spouting off negativity. People who are waiting to knock someone down a peg by telling them not to dream too high. Don’t be one those people. Be an encourager and supporter of people. Your opinion on whether or not someone can achieve their dream doesn’t matter. You’re not in charge of their potential. Be the person who lifts people up rather than drags them down.

4. Compliment Them In Front Of Others.

My wife is quite possibly the most humble person on the planet. She doesn’t seek compliments. She’s the opposite of me. Sometimes I feel like I spend my day fishing for compliments. And by “sometimes” I mean “all the time”. Regardless of whether or not a person is seeking that type of recognition or not, they appreciate it when it happens. Complimenting someone is always a good thing. Doing it publicly increases its effectiveness by 100.

5. Help Them.

Want to make friends with someone and win them over to your side? Help them. Ideally, help them with something they can’t do themselves. Here’s the key that can be easily missed…volunteer your help, don’t wait to be asked. It shows you’re thinking of the person and that you care. Even if they don’t accept your offer, they’ll appreciate that you thought of them and were willing to help.

6. Don’t Just Hear Them, Listen.

Why is listening so hard? I’m not complaining about how listening has become a lost art. I’m not the best listener myself. Don’t just hear what someone is saying. Listen. Then show them that you’ve listened. A simple test that you can do to see if you listened to someone or just heard them is to see if you can remember and repeat their story.

7. Let Them Know You Need Them.

Everyone wants to be needed. Your friends want to be great friends. You need to be vulnerable and let people know when you need them. I’m the worst at this. Asking for help isn’t easy. But when you do, you’re giving someone the chance to be the hero. They’ll love you for that. It makes them feel good to be of assistance. Never be so macho that you can’t tell someone you need them.

8. Openly Give Credit.

Give credit, take blame. All great leaders do this. If you want to win people over, give them credit whenever it’s due. Do it publicly and do it often. No one is going to get tired of you giving them credit for their contributions and achievements.

9. Treat Them Better Than They Treat You.

Friendship 101: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Perhaps there’s a relationship that you feel could be more beneficial than it is currently. For example, a business acquaintance that isn’t sending you as many referrals as they could. How do you handle this? Easily, make it a habit of treating people better than they treat you.

10. Enthusiasm & Positivity Are Contagious.

There is so much negativity, fear, and scarcity-based attitudes in the world. Stand out by being a positive person. Enthusiasm is like a magnet. People can’t help but be attracted to it. The world follows enthusiastic leaders. It’s a key element of getting people on board with your vision. Don’t hide it.

11. Keep Their Story In Mind.

Everyone you meet has a story. When someone shares their struggles, secrets, or parts of their story, never forget it. Some people share openly but most don’t. Never take for granted the trust someone places in you.

12. Give 10x More Than You Ask.

You know that person who is always asking for favors but is nowhere to be found when you need one? Don’t be that guy. I think I can speak on behalf of the world when I see no one likes that person. Make it a habit of giving more than you take. Just as important, give without the expectation of receiving. Give and help because it’s the right thing to do. Don’t do it just because it earn you favor with someone.

13. Add Value To Their Life.

Want someone to appreciate you and support your goals? Make their life easier. If someone’s life is better because you’re in it, then they will bend over backward to help you achieve your goals. If you’re wondering if you add value to people’s lives, here’s a quick test: if you’re doing all of the things on this list, you are.

14. Be There When They Fail AND When They Succeed.

Good friends are there for you when you’re down. That’s not a surprise. But great friends are there for you when you succeed. Don’t be jealous of someone’s achievements. Support them in the good times and bad. Don’t be there for someone part-time.

Business and life are all about relationships. As Zig Ziglar once said, “You can have everything in life you want, if you’ll just help enough other people get what they want.“. Want to win people over to your vision, ideas, and leadership? Listen to Zig.

The post 14 Ways To Win With People appeared first on John Michael Morgan - Income Improvement Follows Self Improvement.

Great salespeople do more than just consistently drive profitable revenue for their employers. They inspire confidence in customers and partners, increase brand trust, and contribute positively to company culture. And these salespeople are rare, representing only 10-15% of the sales population, so when a company has great salespeople, it’s in its best interest to get them to stay. However, a study by Compensation Resources, Inc. (CRI) found that the voluntary turnover rate for salespeople is 15.9 percent, whereas the average rate for other types of employees is 14.3 percent. This study underscores a reality that all executives need to beware of: when salespeople aren’t happy in their organization, they are more willing than other employees to leave.

A high churn rate for a sales team is expensive, and it can negatively affect a sales team’s culture. Great salespeople leave their employers for a reason, and any company that suffers from a high churn rate in the sales department needs to take a deep look at why their talent is departing in order to improve retention rates.

In this article we examine the most important reasons why top sales talent decides to leave their current employer and how corporate leaders can mitigate the risks of losing their top performers.

Here are the top 25 reasons great salespeople are leaving your company:

1. Low compensation

In our experience, one of the biggest factors influencing a sales rep’s decision to leave an employer is the feeling that they should be receiving higher compensation for their results. If a salesperson don’t see opportunities for increased bonuses, promotions, or raises after being successful year-after-year, then they are likely to move on to a company that can offer a better compensation plan with more room for growth.

“When I look back on the various strategies I used to grow our sales force from zero to several hundred people, I realize that one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned involves the power of a compensation plan to motivate salespeople not only to sell more but to act in ways that support a start-up’s evolving business model and overall strategy,” said Mark Roberge, the fourth employee at HubSpot who built the sales team from the ground up, in an article for the Harvard Business Review. 

2. Lack of confidence in offerings

Salespeople who lack confidence in a business’ offerings are unlikely to stay with the company. Anaplan, an enterprise software company, and SiriusDecisions surveyed 400 sales executives to learn why they would leave a company, and found that confidence in the offering portfolio was the top reason that sales executives decided to leave for a new opportunity.

3. Changing compensation plans

Compensation plans vary from company to company, though the standard is to provide reps a plan comprised of a 50% base salary and a 50% commission. However, when executives decide to change compensation plans, it must be done extremely strategically and in consultation with the rep(s) these changes affect. Failing to involve the affected reps and communicate why the changes are happening sends a confusing message to the sales team and can undermine the trust built between reps and their managers.

“Sudden changes in compensation is one of the biggest red flags a top salesperson can get that their company does not appreciate their contributions or thinks they are making too much money regardless of the beneficial new revenue they are bringing in,” wrote Denise M. Barry, a seasoned sales executive, in an article on LinkedIn Pulse. “This can take the form of a sudden lower salary / higher commission arrangement, or even a surprise doubling of quota.”

4.  Reducing the commission rate when reps start close large deals

Salespeople should be rewarded for making more sales, not punished if they’re doing their jobs well. If salespeople are able to close large deals and consistently achieve quota, then they should not see a reduced commission rate because of their success. It may make sense for a sales leader to raise a salesperson’s quota and agree on new sales goals, but reducing the commission rate will frustrate salespeople, and encourage them to explore more financially-rewarding opportunities with other employers.

5. Too much time spent on non-sales activities

It’s estimated that, on average, 32% of a salesperson’s time is spent searching for missing data and entering it into CRMs. This leaves reps to spend only 41% of their time selling, while the remaining 59% of their time is spent on other non-sales activities, such as internal meetings and other administrative tasks. Great salespeople want to sell, and they are likely to leave if they spend most of their time engaged in non-sales activities that limit their sales productivity.

6. Unrealistic quota assignments

Although it would seem that salespeople might leave because of their overall earning potential, they are actually more likely to leave because of unrealistic quota assignments, according to research by Anaplan and SiriusDecisions.

If salespeople find their quota assignment unreasonable, expect them to become frustrated and start exploring opportunities elsewhere.

7. Changes in organizational structure without explanation

One of the top five reasons employees resist change is because they ‘fear the unknown’. When organizations overhaul their corporate structure without communicating to the sales force why the change is happening and how it is going to affect their ability to perform, feelings of mistrust and uneasiness can arise among the sales team and cause members to explore new opportunities.

According to Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, “The best tool for leaders of change is to understand the predictable, universal sources of resistance in each situation and then strategize around them.”

Executive coach and organizational development expert Lisa Quast recommends that prior to making a major organizational change, managers to carefully think through: 1) what the specific changes include, 2) who the changes will impact, 3) how it will impact them, and 4) how they might react (understanding reasons why people might resist the changes). Knowing this information makes it easier to create a plan of action for a smooth implementation of the changes.

8. Better opportunities elsewhere

Sometimes salespeople leave for reasons that are somewhat beyond an organization’s control. They leave because there are better opportunities elsewhere.

What makes these opportunities more appealing to salespeople who are progressing well in their career? It depends on the salesperson. Some want more autonomy, while others want to substantially increase their compensation plan. Some salespeople may have much more confidence in another organization’s leadership team, or be interested in joining a high growth company with a disruptive offering. And sometimes, salespeople may leave for practical reasons, such as a reduction in their daily commute, or less time spent traveling. 

9. Lack of administrative support

If your sales team is spending all of their time in spreadsheets and booking their own flights, then they’re spending less time selling. If they’re not receiving adequate administrative support, and not able to focus their energy on the activities that generate them money, sales leaders should expect their best reps to move on to another company that can offer them the necessary support to excel in their job.

10. Concern about company stability

Great salespeople want to work for a stable organization. Red flags are raised when there are substantial layoffs, issues with investors and key stakeholders, or constant changes in leadership. Salespeople want to be at a company that’s not only stable, but also has a clearly defined future. When a company can’t offer that, it should expect its top sellers to move on.

11. Lack of confidence in leadership

When a CEO, VP of Sales, or other leaders at the top of the organization do not inspire confidence that they will lead the company to achieve its growth targets, then salespeople will be more receptive to hear offers from competing employers. When salespeople see mismanagement and an un-unified vision from their leadership team, they begin to worry about the stability and future of the company, and look for opportunities elsewhere.

“Top salespeople will always struggle with the the sales manager who demands performance verbally, but fails to act in a way that is consistent with those demands. When managers fail to train, or fail to weed out marginal performers, strong players tend to lose trust in leadership.” – Sales Strategist, Leadership Coach, Author, & Speaker, Kelly Riggs

12. Little recognition of performance

Salespeople care about recognition more than any other type of employee, and it’s not just in the form of compensation. These salespeople work day in and day out to help the company succeed, and they want to be recognized and appreciated by peers, managers, and company leaders.

TinyPulse conducted a study on employee retention, and found that employees who didn’t get a lot of recognition and appreciation from their managers were 11% less likely to remain at the company. If your sales team doesn’t get recognized, great salespeople will look for an opportunity where leadership is more likely to express how much they are valued.

13. Lack of promotion opportunities

Great salespeople want more than just a job– they want a career that will provide them with the opportunities to land larger accounts, take over larger territories, and have the opportunity to manage when the time is right. These kinds of opportunities are essential for employee retention and are key considerations top salespeople make when evaluating prospective employers.

14. Little coaching and instruction from sales managers

The best salespeople are always looking for ways to better themselves. Sales managers must take the time to provide reps concrete feedback and coaching on the selling activities and behaviors that lead to better results. If managers don’t provide feedback and coaching, they should expect their best and most promising sellers to start looking at other companies that have better sales leaders.

15. Delays and late payments

Salespeople are motivated by commissions, and if they don’t see their hard work reflected in their bank accounts when they expect it, it will be difficult for them to connect their work to the reward.

“When salespeople succeed, they should see it reflected in their paychecks immediately. When they fail, they should feel the pain in their paychecks immediately,” said Mark Roberge, who built the sales team at HubSpot. “Any delay between good (or bad) behavior and the related financial outcome will decrease the impact of the plan.”

16. Keeping poor performers on board

Poor performers consistently miss their sales targets, aren’t interested in improving their selling abilities, and rely on excuses to mask their underperformance. When sales managers avoid dealing with, or firing, poor performing sales reps, sales culture suffers and the morale of the sales force is eroded. Top sales talent is interested in being part of a sales team that is committed to achieving their sales goals – not one where they are burdened with trying to compensate for their underperforming team members.

17. Inadequate long-term incentives

It’s one thing to give quarterly incentives, but are you providing your sales team with adequate long-term incentives that will make them want to stay around?

Often, salespeople stay with an employer because of the opportunity for yearly bonuses, or the prospect of higher future commissions, or general promotion opportunities. Great salespeople want rewards for the here and now, but they need to know that there will be more incentives in the future. When an executive team cannot clearly define how their the top members of their sales team will be have the opportunity to significantly advance their career, they should expect those top performers to start listening to offers from competing employers.  

18. Burnout and overwork

Burnout gets to all employees, and salespeople are perhaps more susceptible to burnout than others. With pressure to meet quotas and long hours at the office and on the road, salespeople can easily get overworked.

Long hours may seem as though they are par for the course, but employees who are tired, burned out, and overworked are 31% more likely to think about looking for a new job than their colleagues who feel comfortable with their workload.  

19. Professional development opportunities

Professional development opportunities are some of the most powerful ways employers can retain their top talent. Providing salespeople access to executive coaches, conferences, and educational courses can make them feel that they’ve found a home at their current company, making them unlikely to move on.

According to TinyPulse’s study, employees with opportunities for professional development were “more than 10% more likely to stay with their current employer.” Many companies offer in-house professional development opportunities along with a budget for educational initiatives.

20. Dysfunctional company culture

According to one study, 75% of people who voluntarily leave their jobs are doing so because of poor culture or poor management. A dysfunctional company culture is one where leadership is constantly changing, negativity defines the office environment, and managers play favorites and promote their friends instead of those who can do the jobs well.

Specifically in sales, an anti-sales culture, or one where corporate leaders have poor views of salespeople, lack empathy, or have inconsistent managerial approach, can significantly impact the desire for a top performer to remain with their employer. Great salespeople will only stick around if they’re apart of a high performing team, and in order to produce high results, it is essential to maintain a pro-sales culture.

21. Poor inter-departmental relationships

Relationships of all kinds have a serious impact on retention, and that is especially true for salespeople, who thrive on social relationships. A salesperson’s relationship with managers, coworkers, those they manage, other corporate leaders, and everyone else in the organization can affect whether they choose to stay at the company or leave for another opportunity.

22. Hiring and promoting of the wrong people

Salespeople are happy when friends and colleagues get promoted, but not when it’s unclear why. When a top salesperson sees a peer that hasn’t had superior sales results get promoted, they’re going to question why and lose respect for their managers and organization as a whole.

23. Too much complexity in the sales process

According to Bain, sales processes in large companies have become more complex and less efficient, resulting in added pressure on profit margins. The study indicates that when B2B companies increase the complexity of their sales models, they typically experience a 40-60% turnover of salespeople.

24. Lack of independence and autonomy

Micromanagement can be defined as a management style which exhibits “a high degree of control with constant attention to small and insignificant details.” TinyPulse’s study found a strong connection between employee job satisfaction and “freedom to make decisions about how to do their jobs.” Employees “whose hands are regularly tied” were found to be 28% more likely to think about leaving their current employer for another.  

25. Lack of helpful tools to do the job

Modern salespeople rely on powerful tools like Salesforce to get their jobs done effectively. If the organization isn’t willing to invest in the tools required to help them sell, than salespeople won’t feel valued, and they’ll look to find a better opportunity elsewhere. Salespeople, like any other employee, want to feel valued and appreciated, and having an adequate tool kit at their disposal will show them that their work is important.

Want to mitigate the risk of losing your best salespeople and learn the secrets on how to hire top sales talent? Join the @Peak Executive Email Series:

The post The Top 25 Reasons Why Great Salespeople Are Leaving Your Company appeared first on Peak Sales Recruiting.

I’ve become increasingly interested in job titles over the last few years, especially as roles like “Brand Evangelist” (aka brand advocate) or “Director of First Impressions” (aka receptionist) have become commonplace. Are these trendy new names a product of the millennial takeover? Are companies simply trying to find new ways to inject more creativity into… Read More

Silence makes a lot of people uncomfortable, especially when they’re negotiating a deal. Here’s a simple trick you can use to make your opponent sweat.

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The first question I almost always get asked about Email Marketing is “how do I get more subscribers?”.

And the best place to start when it comes to getting more targeted, high value email subscribers is with a “lead magnet”. Some kind of report, checklist, template, “swipe file”, video or other free resource that will motivate your ideal clients to sign up for your regular emails.

But what makes a good lead magnet? Watch the video to find out…
 

Video Transcript

Welcome back to another five minute marketing tip. For the next few weeks I'm going to be looking at email marketing and, in particular, the first question I usually get asked about email marketing which is, “How do I get more email subscribers?” In the next few five minute marketing tips we're going to be looking at some best practices for getting more targeted ideal clients as your email subscribers. This first video is going to be about seven characteristics of the perfect lead magnet. In other words, an incentive you offer to people to subscribe to get your emails. See you after the break.

Welcome back. These days, it's no longer good enough just to throw a form on your website saying sign up for my newsletter and expect that you'll get a ton of subscribers. Unless you're already famous and you're Tom Peters or Richard Branson or someone like that. The only people you'll get signing up are the people who are already your fans, who already love you and want everything that you're going to produce. What you really want is people signing up who you can then build a relationship with, so people who don't know yet you can build a relationship with so that they do love you and they do want to buy from you.

A great way of doing that is to have some kind of incentive. A lead magnet, a report, a video, a checklist, some kind of copy and paste template that they really will want to get and so they sign up to get it and to get your emails at the same time. Now, in my experience with lead magnets, I've found there are seven characteristics of really effective lead magnets. I'm going to go through them with you one by one.

The first characteristic, and I hope this goes without saying, is that your lead magnet has to be of real value to your ideal clients. I'm sure you've been through this situation where you've seen something that looks really good, you've downloaded it, you've looked at it and you've thought, “Uh … Now that wasn't what I was expecting,” and it's not really been particularly valuable to you. Now, in that case the person who used that lead magnet may have got your email address but of course they've lost your trust and you don't want to do that. You want your lead magnet to not only help you get the email address of someone so you can follow-up with them, but also to build your credibility and trust and to give them a real wow factor so they're looking forward to hearing from you.

Giving real value means your lead magnet needs to solve a problem that your ideal client has or help them achieve a goal. Give them some real results quickly. My best lead magnet has always been my “21 word email that can get you more clients” because that does indeed help people get more calls and meetings with potential clients. Now, if you're in one of those fields where it takes a really long time to get end results then either you can focus on interim results so they can see some movement in the right direction or as long as you're giving them new insight and new ideas and a new perspective on their problem or their challenge or their goal, as long as they're reading it and going, “Oh yeah, that all seems much clearer to me now, that's great.” As long as they feel they've got value from it then you're good to go. Always sanity check any lead magnet you produce with examples of your ideal client to see that they really do get value from it.

The second thing you need, the second characteristic is that that value has to be obvious to your ideal client in advance of them actually using the lead magnet. Of course, most of the people that are going to come across your lead magnet are going to be casually browsing the web, looking at social media, maybe Googling. If they come across your lead magnet it needs to instantly grab their attention and divert them away from what they were doing to go and get your lead magnet. It has to be obvious to them what the value is going to be without them having to read paragraphs of text or multiple bullet points, et cetera. Ideally, the value would be obvious just from the name of the lead magnet itself. That's why my lead magnet has quite a long name, “The 21 Word Email That Can Get You More Clients”. It's obvious from that that it's short, it's easy to use, and it's got good end results, it can get you more clients.

The third thing is that your lead magnet, the value it gets, has to deal with a top of mind problem for your ideal client. Your lead magnet might solve a problem for your ideal client but if it's their number five problem or their number eight problem or their 12th priority, then again, when they're casually surfing the web or looking around for things it's not going to click. If it's not something they're thinking about all the time they're not even going to notice your lead magnet, it's not going to stand out. It has to be dealing the number one, number two, number three priority or problem that they have. It has to be really obvious to them.

Fourthly, it needs to give them new information about that problem or that goal. If someone downloads your lead magnet and it's the same old information they've seen on 100 blogs, you've got to have a vision to be a great leader, work smarter not harder, all that kind of stuff. If it's something they've seen a million times before they're not going to be impressed, it's not going to build credibility and they're going to feel let down. You need your lead magnet to be something new. Specifically focus it on all the things you could write your lead magnet about as it relates to problems that you can solve for your clients. Do something that's unexpected, that's surprising, that you do that other people don't do.

Now, if the real value you give your clients is you help them achieve things that's kind of accepted wisdom, it's already known, they just need to get on and do it and they're not doing it right now, then the best way of doing a lead magnet isn't just to tell them the stuff they already know but they're not doing, it's to show them now they can achieve what they know they should be doing but they're not right now. It's to put a different spin on it, to get them to actually take action. Make sure you're giving them something different that they can't get from other sources.

Number five, is that your lead magnet needs to build your credibility, not someone else's. What I mean by that is if you're using case studies or examples to help prove your point, to give more depth for the lead magnet. Make sure that your case studies and examples are from your clients so that someone reading the lead magnet is going to think not only, “Oh, that's a great idea,” but also, “Oh, they've done this. They've actually done this in the real world. Therefore, they're going to be a good person to want to work with to help achieve it for me.” If it's obvious that you've got a good idea there but you've just searched the web and copied and pasted from someone else's website and someone else's examples are commonly used examples, then it's not going to build as much credibility for you as if you're using your own or your client's examples.

Number six, choose the format dependent on the type of client you're going for. The most common format for a lead magnet is for when you're going for lots of people signing up and you're aiming for an audience that's browsing the web, looking at social media, doing searches, maybe coming from Facebook or Google Ads, and you want a large number of them. In that case, you're kind of interrupting what they're doing, they're in browsing mode so they need instant gratification. It can't be an 84 page War and Peace type tome. It needs to be something that's short and punchy and gives them value very quickly. The best things for that are check lists, they're templates, they're things they can copy and paste. My 21 Word Email is kind of like a hybrid between a copy and paste template of 21 words and a very short report that goes behind it that shows you how to use it. It's something they can get value from and consume very quickly.

Now, on the other hand, if you're going for a small number of, let's say, really high value corporate clients and you're not finding them because they're browsing the web. You're maybe writing to them directly or getting an introduction or a referral to them. Then, in that case it needs to be something more substantial to really build your credibility with them. Now we're talking about a much more in depth report, a benchmarking study, maybe even a copy of your book, but something substantial to build your credibility. Choose the format you use depending on the type of client you're going after.

Number seven, your lead magnet needs to logically lead to engaging with you more deeply. If someone goes through your lead magnet and it solves a problem for them, that problem should be the first step in their overall journey and you're the person who can help them best with the rest of the journey, either from a product they can buy from you, they're engaging more with your emails and your blog posts or maybe they could call you and talk about working together to solve the rest of those problems. Ideally, the problem you solve and what you show them in the lead magnet also opens their eyes to the other things they need to do to achieve their final goal, their final destination. That lead magnet itself really should be the first step in their journey, and the rest of the journey is the thing they do with you.

Okay, so that's it for now. Those are the seven characteristics of the ideal or the perfect lead magnet. Now, if you're a member of Momentum Club you'll recognize those because they're part of the training, The Master Class videos I've done on creating a lead magnet really quickly. With it goes this workbook. Now, if you're not a member of Momentum Club and you want a copy of the workbook you can sign up for that below. It's got the check list and then it's got a whole series of detailed instructions on how to go about building a lead magnet that meets those criteria very quickly. You can download that and get going with it. That's it for this week. See you next week with more tips on building your list, getting more of your ideal clients as email subscribers. See you then.

Want a Copy of My Lead Magnet Workbook and Checklist?

I've created a checklist and workbook to create your perfect Lead Magnet. You can download a free copy below:

The post The 7 Characteristics of a Perfect Lead Magnet appeared first on Ian Brodie.

Too many sales and marketing people struggle with value propositions.  For some–the value proposition is still internally focused, basically an advanced form of Features – Advantages – Benefits.  Others think of the value proposition – the elevator pitch that, when stated in a compelling manner, the customer will melt and immediately issue a purchase order. […]

You’re in the middle of a heated debate with your colleague. You want to come across as confident, but inside you feel like Bambi. During these difficult situations, there are actually two conversations happening at the same time. One is obvious: It’s the conversation out there in the world that we typically focus on — with our colleague, client, boss, subordinate, or friend. And the other is the equally important conversation — or, more typically, the negotiation — we’re conducting inside ourselves about the extent to which we’re willing and able to stretch beyond our comfort zones. The interesting thing is that you can apply some of the very same strategies you’d use for difficult conversations with someone else to the negotiations occurring within yourself.

Strategy #1: Question your position.

With someone else: One of the most common pieces of advice for negotiating with another person is to dig beneath the surface of your “stated” position — as well as that of your colleague — to find interests you may have in common, which can lead to a mutually beneficial solution.

Within yourself: You can apply this exact same strategy within yourself as well, especially to situations where you experience internal resistance to stepping outside your comfort zone. For example, your “position” might be that you’re unwilling to consider being more assertive, but could you dig a little deeper to ask yourself why? Is it an emotional challenge? Are you afraid of being assertive? Or is it a skill-based challenge? Do you not actually know how to be more assertive? Getting to the bottom of why you’re unwilling to step outside your comfort zone is the first step.

Strategy #2: Keep your cool.

With someone else: One of the biggest challenges of negotiation is keeping your cool. When you get angry or frustrated and lash out at the other person, it’s unlikely the negotiation will end up going very well.

Within yourself: Again, this very same advice works internally as well. If you don’t regulate your emotions internally, it will be very hard externally to achieve a solution that meets your interests. For example, if your feelings of sympathy get out of whack, you might end up caving in when you don’t need to, or you might have a difficult time delivering a negative message that might be critical for standing up to your interests. If your anxiety gets out of control, that, too, might make it difficult to stand your ground, or even to have the flexibility to consider creative solutions to a win-win type of agreement. When we are very anxious, psychology research says we end up “narrowing” instead of broadening. That makes it hard to be creative in our negotiation strategy and difficult to have a positive outlook on the negotiation itself, which research has shown to be important for effectively handling these situations.

Strategy #3: Search for win-win solutions.

With someone else: When negotiating with someone else, we’re often looking for “win-win” solutions. The agreement is more likely to stick when both sides get something of value from it.

Within yourself: This same idea of win-win can also apply to negotiations you have with yourself. Is there a way for you to step outside your comfort zone, act in a way that you know is necessary but feels uncomfortable for you — and (this is the key) do it on your own terms? In other words, create that win-win inside yourself. For example, you might know you need to lay down the law and be tough, but you might only feel comfortable doing it if you first praise the other person or preface your remark with a genuinely felt, “I’m really sorry about this, but…” The point is that there are a myriad of ways you can personalize or adjust your style to get the job done on your terms. And by creating this win-win inside yourself, you’ll have an even better chance of finding that middle ground with the other person you’re dealing with.

In the end, we all want to stand up for what we believe in and get what we deserve in any difficult conversation. But it’s critical to realize that in most situations there are really two difficult conversations happening at the same time. Unless you recognize and manage both effectively, you’ll have a challenging time achieving your ultimate goals.

The rise of messaging for business communication has taken the world by storm, and your contact center needs to be ready to respond. But first, you need to make sure you’re responding on the right channels.

Research done by Harris Poll and commissioned by OneReach found that over 60% of customers would rather text than call your business for support. With texting, customers can get a faster, more efficient response to their questions. This value can be seen within customer communications, as well as internal workforce communications.

Contact Centers

In our experience, texting has been shown to reduce call volume by 40% and decrease phone costs from $6-20 per call to $2-5 per interaction per text chat. By offering the option to pivot to text messaging within your call center’s IVR, your company can deflect calls to a less costly channel, reduce wait times and improve self-service options. In fact, over 40% of customers would prefer to text with an agent than wait on hold.

There are a number of ways texting can have a positive impact on your organization and make it more efficient. Organizations can use messaging to:

• Respond more with fewer agents. With text chat, agents can respond to multiple chats at once, lowering the number of agents needed to respond to customer inquiries. Bringing less agents in can help reduce costs but also improve quality of service, since managers can devote more attention to each individual agent. Contact centers can also use texting to send out alerts to customers on system updates or outages to help mitigate inbound call volume.
• Review transcripts. Text conversations, much like web chat, have an easily accessible transcript that can be reviewed and learned from through data mining and analysis of textual conversations. This is better than voice, where you cannot easily monitor quality or track recurring patterns. Contact center managers as well as agents can take a look at the conversations to see if agents were brand compliant, how long the conversation took, what and more. They can also review agent performance across channels and per agent. A solution that uses text analytics can help agents more easily track what customers are texting in about and track “hot terms” to help identify support issues.
• Guide the conversation. Most contact centers use scripts to help agents control the flow of the conversation and stay brand compliant. Your call center can take this to the next level with canned responses. Canned responses are answered recorded ahead of time that can help agents respond more quickly and make sure that answers provide the appropriate information. Canned responses can also be used to help train agents on how they should answer. Your contact center can also use artificial intelligence to autoselect an appropriate response based on a customer query.
• Send out automated surveys. In our experience, text surveys have been shown to get a 20% response rate, higher than the 15% average of email surveys and 9% response rate of phone surveys. With texting, you can set up automation to send an outbound survey as soon as they finish their conversation and have them rate their interaction on the same channel they responded on. It is natural to answer a survey after the text chat sessions because it is in the same thread. This helps ensure more accurate responses, as texters will better recall the content of a conversation closer to when the interaction happens. Your call center can then review these responses and adjust how customer service is delivered.

Corporate Communication Using Text Messaging

While the value of the text channel for consumers is starting to be realized by the enterprise, most organizations still do not understand the opportunity for improvement that text messaging can have on their internal workforce communications. Text messaging is a great technology to drive desired employee behavior and improve internal communications between distributed teams.

One great example is to use text messaging to improve communication within a field services organization. Text messages can be sent to field personnel to provide appointment reminders and ensure improved show rates on booked appointments. Text reminders can also include appointment details and ensure a field service person has what they need when they show up on the job. From the customer perspective they can receive a reminder of the appointment and include a picture of the field service representative, creating a sense of trust and familiarity before the field personnel even arrives.

Companies can also use SMS internally for tasks such as reminding project team members to enter project hours or provide project status updates. The value of this channel is that the message can link directly to a mobile app or mobile web site and help improve employee adherence to internal processes using a channel they appreciate.

Conclusion

The ultimate value of using text messaging within an organization does not stop at the customer. Using text messaging for corporate communication helps drive more efficient communication within the organization and improves task efficiency in the workforce. By interacting with customers and employees on a channel that’s proven to improve collaboration, reduce costs and get results, companies can ensure that they’re getting the most out of their communication technologies.

Image of male business tablet courtesy of Pixabay. CC0 License.

Perhaps your most fundamental career choice is whether you will work in someone else’s company or for yourself. But for most people, “working for yourself” sounds a lot like “starting your own business,” which feels risky and formless and also requires a really good business idea — which most of us don’t carry around in our back pocket.

But there is a third choice: You can buy an existing business, right now, and run it as CEO. We call this entrepreneurship through acquisition, and we’ve been studying it with our students at the Harvard Business School.

The most successful entrepreneurs through acquisition we’ve seen look for businesses we call enduringly profitable, businesses that are more likely to have a stable income over time. They also are attractive to the lenders and equity investors who provide funds for your acquisition. Rather than flashy, fast-growth tech companies, these are firms that share two characteristics which on the face make them seem dull — but that actually make them enduringly profitable:

• Recurring customers. The essential characteristic of enduringly profitable smaller businesses is not that they have a rapidly expanding customer base; it’s that they have recurring customers. These companies are able to attract and keep the right customers, those who value its product or service and will purchase year after year. For example, in 2015, Jennifer Braus bought Systems Design West, which serves hundreds of municipal firehouses in the Pacific Northwest by handling billing to insurance companies for their emergency ambulance transports. Her systems and the firehouses’ quickly became intertwined, and they naturally fell into a smooth working relationship month after month. As a result, Systems Design West retains virtually 100% of its customers year in and year out.
• Slow growth. Although high growth might seem like a wonderful characteristic of a business, it comes with high risk. High growth means that your new customers will quickly outnumber your existing ones. New customers are, well, new — they have no loyalty to the company and no history, and they may very well bring new demands. A rapidly growing firm also attracts competitors, which see the expanding market and the opportunity to attract new customers. Low growth, in contrast, means low risk, and low risk is great because it is your money at stake. Things just move slower in an established business that is growing slowly; you’ll have time to build lasting relationships with your customers. You’ll learn what they value, and you’ll adapt to find products and services they appreciate. Greg Ambrosia bought the leading commercial window washing business in Dallas, which grows slowly because new high-rise buildings are added to the Dallas skyline slowly. His existing customers appreciate his superb safety record and excellent service and use his company year after year, generating a stream of predictable, recurring revenue. Meanwhile, he steadily adds additional services and customization that serves his customers’ needs ever better.

If you’re considering entrepreneurship by startup, that path involves building a company from scratch, without knowing whether the product or service is something that can be the basis for a profitable business. When you start a company, before you make any money, you need to develop a product or service, identify potential customers, figure out how to deliver the product or service to the customers, hire all your workers, market to customers, build a management system, and then hope the product or service is something customers want to buy at a price high enough for you to make a profit. Buying an existing, enduringly profitable business is less risky — not riskless, but much safer because the product or service is already established and, if you buy the kind of company, likely to produce steady cash flows while you focus on improvements and growth.

Running your own company offers a radically different career path and career lifestyle from working in a traditional large corporation. It allows you to lead an organization, make decisions that matter, and have the flexibility to work in a way that suits you best. By buying an enduringly profitable, slowly growing firm, you can marry the opportunity for professional independence with the stability of buying an established, enduringly profitable smaller business.

Learning management systems (LMS) provide a fast and cost-effective way for companies to train and manage their employees. And as this rapidly expanding market evolves, it’s moving increasingly toward mobile LMS.

A mobile LMS helps your workforce get and stay knowledgeable, so you can react faster to new market trends and make your business more competitive. As with all new technologies or innovative ways of doing things, mobile e-learning has great potential to streamline employee training, but businesses are still figuring out how to implement it effectively.

Here, we take a closer look at the benefits and challenges of implementing a mobile LMS and what mobile learning can do for your company.

What are the benefits of mobile LMS?

LMS applications facilitate all aspects of e-learning such as administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, and delivery of courses or training programs. This can benefit organizations of all kinds, from educational institutions wanting to deliver courses online, to corporations needing to train, retrain, or maintain employee records and registrations.

While mobile learning has become increasingly popular in the educational sector, companies are just beginning to realize the possibilities of mobile in the workplace. A mobile LMS can deliver training or instructions wherever employees are, which decreases—or eliminates entirely—the need for expensive off-site training and travel.

Additionally, it can be used by employees on their own schedules, so downtime can easily become training time. In terms of access to information, a mobile LMS can connect learners to as much knowledge or as many learning opportunities as your training department can create. So when it comes to flexibility, an LMS beats traditional, face-to-face training methods.

Best practices for implementing a mobile LMS within a corporate environment, however, are still evolving. According to Troy Anderson, director of talent management for the team that built Bridge LMS, “Usability and functionality are two of the biggest challenges companies face when implementing a mobile LMS. It’s also difficult for employees and managers to find, assign, and connect meaningful learning to career development, growth, and role-specific needs.”

Anderson says companies are becoming more aware of this issue as they hire and attempt to train new generations of employees.

Catering to a new generation

As more millennials enter the workforce, Anderson says companies are beginning to look for technologies that can meet this generation’s preference for how and where they seek and consume information. For most, that means online and on their mobile devices.

“A mobile LMS should meet the needs and expectations of employees,” says Anderson. “Not having a mobile LMS may decrease engagement and increase worker turnover as employees seek companies where they can learn, grow, and advance in their career objectives. Most importantly, e-learning should be delivered in a way that’s easily consumable by learners.”

A company that can’t meet employees’ needs and expectations for quality training may struggle to attract and retain top talent. As LMS goes mobile, the next logical step will be peer-to-peer learning—and any mobile e-learning platform that ignores this shift will get left behind.

Connecting learners

Anderson notes that learning doesn’t happen in isolation, so any LMS that can’t connect learners in a virtual way—through sharing, validating, giving feedback, or providing insights and perspectives—won’t hold its value.

Still, while mobile e-learning will become increasingly important, Anderson believes it will never be a replacement for a web-based solution. He says, “In order to deliver the most robust learning solutions, companies would be wise to implement an LMS that enables employees to access training program via mobile and the web.”

We do our best to keep you up to date on all the newest releases, but we have a relatively small staff here at 800-CEO-READ and we can't cover everything. While not a complete list (and you may see some of these elsewhere on the site this month), these are some of the books we have our eye on in April.

The 10% Entrepreneur : Live Your Startup Dream Without Quitting Your Day Job by Patrick Mc Ginnis, Portfolio

Conventional thinking says that entrepreneurship is all about excitement and big bets, while traditional career paths are all about stability. You can have either a stable paycheck or independence—not both. But now that technology makes it cheaper and easier than ever to start and manage a business, that trade-off no longer applies. You can now manage, advise, or invest in businesses by using your smarts, your network, and your smartphone, and you don’t need to quit your day job to do it.

Venture capitalist Patrick McGinnis offers a pragmatic new approach to entrepreneurship. Despite its rewards, full-time entrepreneurship is not for everyone. Not everyone can afford to forgo a regular income and risk everything for a new venture. But almost everyone can afford to risk a little. If you’ve an entrepreneurial itch to scratch but aren’t sure you have the means, McGinnis shows you the way forward. By dedicating at least 10% of your time and, if possible, 10% of your capital to invest, advise, and start new businesses, you will forge a path to greater autonomy and personal satisfaction. Rather than watching full-time entrepreneurs from the sidelines, you can join them—all without leaving your day job.

Drawing on the stories of successful 10% entrepreneurs from all industries, McGinnis shows how to figure out what your resources are, outlines strategies for employing those resources, and provides practical tips on keeping all of the plates spinning. By following him, you’ll learn how to build a portfolio of investments, activities, and relationships that lessen your reliance on your day job while allowing you to finally build something for yourself.

Everydata: The Misinformation Hidden in the Little Data You Consume Every Day by John H. Johnson & Mike Gluck, Bibliomotion

While everyone is talking about “big data,” the truth is that understanding the “little data”—the stats that underlie newspaper headlines, stock reports, weather forecasts, and so on—is what helps you make smarter decisions at work, at home, and in every aspect of your life. The average person consumes approximately 30 gigabytes of data every single day, but has no idea how to interpret it correctly. Everydata explains, through the eyes of an expert economist and statistician, how to decipher the small bytes of data we consume in a day.

Everydata is filled with countless examples of people misconstruing data—with results that range from merely frustrating to catastrophic:

• The space shuttle Challenger exploded in part because the engineers were reviewing a limited sample set.
• Millions of women avoid caffeine during pregnancy because they interpret correlation as causation.
• Attorneys faced a $1 billion jury verdict because of outlier data.

Each chapter highlights one commonly misunderstood data concept, using both realworld and hypothetical examples from a wide range of topics, including business, politics, advertising, law, engineering, retail, parenting, and more. You’ll find the answer to the question—“Now what?”—along with concrete ways you can use this information to immediately start making smarter decisions, today and every day.

Callings: The Purpose and Passion of Work by Dave Isay, Penguin Press 

In Callings, StoryCorps founder Dave Isay presents unforgettable stories from people doing what they love. Some found their paths at a very young age, others later in life; some overcame great odds or upturned their lives in order to pursue what matters to them. Many of their stories have never been broadcast or published by StoryCorps until now.

We meet a man from the barrios of Texas whose harrowing experiences in a family of migrant farmers inspired him to become a public defender. We meet a longtime waitress who takes pride in making regulars and newcomers alike feel at home in her Nashville diner. We meet a young man on the South Side of Chicago who became a teacher in order to help at-risk teenagers like the ones who killed his father get on the right track. We meet a woman from Little Rock who volunteers to help former inmates gain the skills and confidence they need to rejoin the workforce. Together they demonstrate how work can be about much more than just making a living, that chasing dreams and finding inspiration in unexpected places can transform a vocation into a calling. Their shared sense of passion, honor, and commitment brings deeper meaning and satisfaction to every aspect of their lives.

An essential contribution to the beloved StoryCorps collection, Callings is an inspiring tribute to rewarding work and the American pursuit of happiness.

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna, Random House

Imagine a map of the world in your mind. Now erase all the borderlines. Now replace those borderlines with new lines connecting regions. Those new lines represent highways, railways, canals, Internet cables and electricity grids—in a word, connectivity. We’re hurtling into a future shaped less by countries than by supply chains—a world in which the most connected powers, and people, will win.

Connectography is a bracing and authoritative guide to what Parag Khanna terms our “global network civilization.” Khanna blasts away today’s conventional wisdom. The world craves China’s infrastructure, not American hegemony. The new arms race of the 21st century is to connect to the most markets—a race China is winning as it has become the top trade partner of twice as many countries as America.

This book is both an intellectual and a boots-on-the-ground journey. Khanna goes from Ukraine to Iran, Mongolia to North Korea, and the Arctic Circle to the South China Sea to show how tug-of-war over pipelines, railways and Internet cables is what conflict looks like today. But Connectography is also a hopeful book, as the increase in connectivity heralds an era of competition but also stability like never before. Khanna argues that new energy discoveries and technologies have eliminated the need for resource wars; ambitious new railways and electricity grids are unscrambling Africa’s fraught colonial borders; even the Arab world is evolving a more peaceful map as it builds resource infrastructures across its war-torn landscape. Beneath the chaos of a world that appears to be falling apart is a new foundation of connectivity pulling it together.

Parag’s book provides a blueprint for winning in this new, post-national age. Places that invest in world-class airports, real estate and schools, and attract the best and brightest—places like New York, Dubai and Singapore—will lead our global network civilization. Areas that remain isolated from global flows of investment and knowledge inevitably decay—unless they transform themselves into thriving nodes along the lines set down in this book.

China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® by Arthur Kroeber, Oxford University Press

China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® is a concise introduction to the most astonishing economic growth story of the last three decades. In the 1980s China was an impoverished backwater, struggling to escape the political turmoil and economic mismanagement of the Mao era. Today it is the world's second biggest economy, the largest manufacturing and trading nation, the consumer of half the world's steel and coal, the biggest source of international tourists, and one of the most influential investors in developing countries from southeast Asia to Africa to Latin America.

China's growth has lifted 700 million people out of poverty. It has also created a monumental environmental mess, with smog-blanketed cities and carbon emissions that are a leading cause of climate change. Multinational companies make billions of dollars in profits in China each year, but traders around the world shudder at every gyration of the country's unruly stock markets. Most surprising of all, its capitalist economy is governed by an authoritarian Communist Party that shows no sign of loosening its grip.

How did China grow so fast for so long? Can it keep growing and still solve its problems of environmental damage, fast-rising debt and rampant corruption? How long can its vibrant economy co-exist with the repressive one-party state? What do China's changes mean for the rest of the world? China's Economy: What Everyone Needs to Know® answers these questions in straightforward language that you don't need to be an economist to understand, but with a wealth of detail drawn from academic research, interviews with dozens of company executives and policy makers, and a quarter-century of personal experience. Whether you're doing business in China, negotiating with its government officials, or a student trying to navigate the complexities of this fascinating and diverse country, this is the one book that will tell you everything you need to know about how China works, where it came from and where it's going.

Negotiating the Nonnegotiable: How to Resolve Your Most Emotionally Charged Conflicts by Daniel Shapiro, Viking

From the founder and director of The Harvard International Negotiation Program comes a guide to successfully resolving your most emotionally charged conflicts. In this landmark book, world-renowned negotiation expert Daniel Shapiro presents a groundbreaking, practical method to reconcile your most contentious relationships and untangle your toughest conflicts.

Before you get into your next conflict, read Negotiating the Nonnegotiable. It is not just “another book on conflict resolution,” but a crucial step-by-step guide to resolve life’s most emotionally challenging conflicts—whether between spouses, a parent and child, a boss and an employee, or rival communities or nations. These conflicts can feel nonnegotiable because they threaten your identity and trigger what Shapiro calls the Tribes Effect, a divisive mind-set that pits you against the other side. Once you fall prey to this mind-set, even a trivial argument with a family member or colleague can mushroom into an emotional uproar. Shapiro offers a powerful way out, drawing on his pioneering research and global fieldwork in consulting for everyone from heads of state to business leaders, embattled marital couples to families in crisis. And he also shares his insights from 1 with three of the world’s toughest negotiators—his three young sons. This is a must read to improve your professional and personal relationships.

Pivot: The Art and Science of Reinventing Your Career and Life by Adam Markel, Atria

What would you do in your life if you knew you could not fail? That’s the question answered in Pivot, a roadmap for embracing your true potential without abandoning your responsibilities or risking your future. As a transformational teacher and the CEO of Peak Potentials, which has trained more than one million people worldwide, Adam Markel can help you leap out of your comfort zone and into the destiny you’ve always dreamed of.

Whether you are transitioning your career, or have been downsized, or believe that your true potential has yet to be fully tapped, Pivot is a guide to reinvention for anyone, at any age. With clear-eyed compassion and frank assessments, Adam shares the secrets that will guide you away from fear and toward a powerful new vision for your life. The uplifting stories, introspective prompts, clear step-by-step exercises, and energizing calls to action throughout this remarkable book will guide you through the process of personal and career transformation, from creating a vision and clearing space for change to building a supportive environment and establishing daily rituals that will regenerate your soul.

Success and personal fulfillment are within reach! Program your internal GPS to a destination of your wildest imagination—all it takes to change your path is one right turn.

Warren Buffett's Ground Rules: Words of Wisdom from the Partnership Letters of the World's Greatest Investor by Jeremy Miller, HarperBusiness

In the fourteen years between his time in New York with value-investing guru Benjamin Graham and his start as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett managed Buffett Partnership Limited, his first professional investing partnership. Over the course of that time—a period in which he experienced an unprecedented record of success—Buffett wrote semiannual letters to his small but growing group of partners, sharing his thoughts, approaches, and reflections.

Compiled for the first time and with Buffett’s permission, the letters spotlight his contrarian diversification strategy, his almost religious celebration of compounding interest, his preference for conservative rather than conventional decision making, and his goal and tactics for bettering market results by at least 10% annually. Demonstrating Buffett’s intellectual rigor, they provide a framework to the craft of investing that had not existed before: Buffett built upon the quantitative contributions made by his famous teacher, Benjamin Graham, demonstrating how they could be applied and improved.

Jeremy Miller reveals how these letters offer us a rare look into Buffett’s mind and offer accessible lessons in control and discipline—effective in bull and bear markets alike, and in all types of investing climates—that are the bedrock of his success. Warren Buffet’s Ground Rules paints a portrait of the sage as a young investor during a time when he developed the long-term value-oriented strategy that helped him build the foundation of his wealth—rules for success every investor needs today.

 

Finding the Truth in Your Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

From the headline of this post you might expect to find a lengthy manifesto about purpose and passion in business, but the truth in most businesses lies in the numbers. (Sorry if the Zen picture made it worse – I just liked it)

Analytics or metrics or whatever you choose to call how a business performs can not lie – as long as you ask the right questions and track the right things.

A Bain survey of executives at hundreds of companies around the world revealed that only 4% of companies are really good at analytics.

The subtitle of the survey report – How analytics differentiates winners sheds some light on the findings and importance of data. The survey is heavily focused on enterprise firms and leans towards discussion of “big data,” but the lesson is universal.

Three findings in particular stand out – Companies that get good at analytics are:

• Twice as likely to be in the top quartile of financial performance within their industries
• Three times more likely to execute decisions as intended
• Five times more likely to make decisions faster

For any business to have the full picture of the health, growth and status at any given time they need to build dashboards that give them the most up to date information that is tied to their overall objectives.

Because that’s where the truth in your business lies.

Few businesses, regardless of size, obsess over numbers as they should. My guess is that the reason for this is that while it’s one of the most important elements, it’s also one of the hardest to set up and analyze for someone that’s typically answering the phones, going on sales calls, fixing broken links and doing the work for which customers pay you.

Another factor may be that they get overwhelmed by the amount of things you can track. When it comes to analytics what to track is simple – track what matters most.

I’m tempted to scream the Jack Nicholson line from A Few Good Man – “you want answers?” “I want the truth.” “You can’t handle the truth!” – but, of course, I think you can and you must.

Now I know that may seem obvious, but stop for a minute and ask if you could come up with less than six numbers that would tell you everything you need to know about your priority initiatives.

There are things that you need to track over time for reporting, forecasting and goal setting, but there usually only a couple things that matter day to day, week to week, regarding your current highest payoff priorities and those need to go on a dashboard that you can visit daily.

Now, no one can tell you what that handful of metrics should be, but when you discover them and focus on them – you’ll have access to the truth about your business.

Let me give you an example. Most businesses rely on referrals, but few track, analyze or even amplify that fact that they are quite referable. In these businesses we usually develop some systematic approach to referral generation and then we obsess over tracking referral actions.

The key is to get as granular as you can so you are tracking things you can impact with campaigns, tweaks and processes. So in my example above you might start by obsessing over reviews or testimonials as a way to measure the type of satisfaction that leads to more referrals as opposed to simply keeping score of referrals received.

I find it helpful to think in terms of four distinct dashboards. One for marketing, sales, finance, and customer satisfaction.

Marketing – Your marketing dashboard is the place to track the channels you are currently using. You might even consider specific dashboards for more active channels to track your various experiments and test projects. Typical marketing dashboard metrics include:

• Email
• SEO
• Social Media
• Advertising
• Referrals
• Lifetime value of a customer
• Value of a lead

Sales – Your sales dashboard is how you keep track of your sales pipeline elements of the marketing hourglass. You might also add specific conversion metrics discussed in the previous lesson. Typical sales dashboard metrics include:

• Leads
• Pipeline
• Trials
• New customers
• Sales cycle

Finance – Your finance dashboard is where you keep track of the money elements of the business. Most businesses use historical data in financial reports, but keeping up on trends is a great way to get some insight into the health of the business. For example, if your customers start to trend towards late payments, you might have an issue with sales or service. Typical finance dashboard elements include:

• Revenue
• Cash flow
• Expenses
• Profit
• Budget vs. actual
• Cost to acquire a customer
• Accounts receivable aging

Customer satisfaction – Your customer satisfaction dashboard is where you keeps tabs on how happy customers are. Sometimes you have to dig for things that will give you this kind of data, but there’s a sure relationship between complaints going up or down or referrals going up or down that can tell you where you need to put some emphasis. If you measure something like response time, you have the ability to laser in and find ways to improve it. If you don’t, you’ll never have the data you need to know where to focus. Typical customer satisfaction metrics include:

• Complaints
• Support tickets
• Response time
• Reviews
• Testimonials

Tools

The following tools are nice options for creating tracking dashboards and making them available to key staff members or advisors. Most also allow you to create customer elements unique to your business by using Google Sheets spreadsheets.

• Cyfe
• Dasheroo
• ZohoReports
• Klipfolio
• Megalytic

Action Items:

• Determine the metrics you need for each of your four dashboards
• Create a spreadsheet or adopt a tool to compile this data
• Create a process for keeping your data fresh

 

As oil prices plummet, a surprising piece of the economy is taking a huge hit: the market for recycled plastic.

Plastics, after all, are made from petroleum — so as the price of oil drops, so does the cost of making new plastic bottles and other products.

In fact, as Marketplace reported in September, making new plastic has become less expensive than the recycling process, since cleaning and preparing used plastics takes a lot of water, energy, and effort.

The New York times also reports that Waste Management — the country's largest waste hauler — even shut down 20 facilities in 2014 and 2015, due in part to decreased demand and shrinking profit margins.

There are other factors that contributed to the decreasing value of recycling.

Early recycling programs had smaller bins, for example, and required consumers to sort their waste according to type. Now that single-stream recycling — that is, the big blue bin where you toss all your recyclables — is widespread in the US, tons of stuff that can't be recycled gets tossed in with the things that should be by well-meaning recyclers.

This makes the sorting and cleaning process even more labor-intensive and costly.

What's more, freshly produced plastics are more appealing to manufacturers than the recycled stuff because the chemical composition is easier to nail down — improperly mixed plastics can have issues, like rapid degradation or more limited uses.

It pretty much all boils down to this: The reason manufacturers liked buying recycled plastic was because it used to be cheaper than new, so-called "virgin plastic." Now that it's not, the US market has all but dried up.

That doesn't mean we should stop recycling plastic, though.

For one, low oil prices won't last forever. They could get a lot higher if the price tag on petroleum products adjusts to reflect their actual costs — without heavy government subsidies. And at least some the benefit is counteracting an economy based on the disposability of... well, almost everything.

Bill Nye may have said it best in an interview with Business Insider, pointing out that we should get in the habit of conserving resources, even if the economics seem not to work.

"The less we waste, the more we have," he told BI.

Also, adding new plastic products to the mix without maximizing our use of the old ones means more plastic will collect in our waterways and get eaten by or ensnare wildlife.

There are probably better strategies to approach recycling, including clearer instructions for consumers and decoupling the recycling process from the profit motive.

But for now, recyclers are seeing a glut of plastic and nowhere to put it — except a landfill.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Apple just revealed what it does with old iPhones

One of the core attributes of an effective digital team is a focus on creating a “test and learn” culture. And what digital marketing experts mean when talking about a “test and learn” culture is one where you put an emphasis on testing your assumptions about your marketing activities, learning from those tests, then doubling down on the areas that work; in other words, fish where the fishin’s good.

To do this successfully, of course, you need data. And it can seem complicated to understand what data is most critical to your business. But there are really only a small handful of questions you need to answer, that you must have the data for, to ensure you’re well positioned to effectively test your digital marketing activities and learn from those tests.

So what is this data? I’m glad you asked.

It’s fairly straightforward to find out where to focus your efforts. First, you need to answer these five questions:

1. What are your conversions? What are the actions you want your customers to take? Do you want them to buy on your website or mobile app? Or are you in a lead-generation business and want them to provide contact information? Each is equally valid and provides a key building block for creating a test and learn culture.
2. How much are those conversions worth to your business? Exactly what it sounds like. If you’ve got an e-commerce site, how much is a typical transaction worth to you? If you’re using lead generation tactics, what’s a lead worth? (If you don’t know the answer to that, think about what a customer is worth, then multiply by the rate you convert leads to paying customers. If you don’t know the answer to that, start by dividing your new customers added by the number of leads generated each month.)
3. Which pages get the most traffic? Again, pretty much what exactly what it sounds like. Which pages on your site attract the most traffic? Whether your analytics suite calls them landing pages or entry pages or what-have-you, you’re interested in finding out where prospects start their journey on your website or app.
4. How often do customers reach your conversion page from each of your top entry points? You’ll use this data to assign an economic value to each entry page and to determine the potential value each test can deliver.
5. What other pages send customers deeper into your purchase funnel? Most analytics tools can tell you how often any given page leads to a specific conversion action. You’ll use this data to learn which pages contribute to conversions even if they’re not top entry pages.

Armed with the answers to these five questions, you’re immediately positioned to improve your digital marketing activities.

For instance, let’s imagine you run a mid-sized enterprise software company and that one of your top entry pages leads to a conversion – in this case, submission of a lead form – 10% of the time. If we assume that each lead you convert is worth $10,000 annually to your company, each visitor to your site (or app, whatever) starting on that entry page has a potential value of $1,000 ($10,000 * 10% = $1,000). If the page gets a lot of traffic, you may want to work towards improving that 10% “micro-conversion” rate. By contrast, if the page gets very little traffic, that should lead you towards testing how to get more traffic to the page to begin with. The following graphic illustrates how to approach this for your business:

I realize this may almost sound too good to be true. And in part, this is a simplified version of a more in-depth approach. It usually also takes some work to collect and refine the data necessary to answer each of these 5 questions for each of your top entry pages as well as the top pages leading to conversions. However the most successful marketers tend to follow the Pareto principle — that is putting most of your efforts into the areas that will get you 80% of your return. It’s not about following a complicated process; it’s about focusing on the areas with the greatest return.

Creating a test and learn culture starts and ends with data. But in the middle it depends on using that data to ask the right questions about your customer needs and generate the greatest return on your efforts. Of course, if you think I’m wrong, there’s an easy way to find out: test my theory. And learn for yourself.

I find most TV commercials really stupid. I can’t believe that supposedly smart executives actually pay for some of the more ridiculous TV ads. If I see the guy sitting at the kindergarten table asking little kids questions again, my head might explode.

Maybe it’s just me, but I do enjoy golf-related commercials. I recently saw one for Ping, the golf club company. The theme of the commercial was how Ping built its fine reputation by always asking, “How?” How could they make a better putter? How could they make golf more enjoyable with their equipment?

That’s when I dragged my rear out of the chair, grabbed a pen, and started scribbling ways we as salespeople can use “how” with our prospects and customers.

A few points on these questions:

• I’ve grouped these questions into categories, but you’ll see that many of them are interchangeable.
• They’re not in a particular order, although some could be used as good follow-up questions in response to an answer to a previous question.
• Keep in mind that you wouldn’t necessarily use just “how” questions exclusively. Mix in the "who," "what," "where," and "why" questions as well.
• This list is not all-inclusive. Matter of fact, how about you adding one or more of your favorite “how” questions below in the comments?

Oh, and remember, the most important thing about sales questioning is that you listen to your buyer's answers, use the information, and react accordingly.

Fact-Gathering and Qualifying Questions

1. How do you get new business?
2. How could you get more?
3. How could we help you get more?
4. How do you plan on achieving your goals this year?
5. How does the purchasing process work at your business?
6. How are decisions like these typically made?
7. How is money normally budgeted?
8. How did you make the decision last time?
9. How could you use our product/service?
10. How did you select the previous vendor?
11. How do you evaluate new vendors?

Need Identification Questions

1. How did that work last time?
2. How often does that happen?
3. How does that affect other departments?
4. How are you doing it now?
5. How is your situation unique?
6. How could it be done better?
7. How can we help you do it better?
8. How do you see this developing?
9. How could it be improved?
10. How would you describe your present level of service/satisfaction?
11. How are you going to fix the situation?
12. How did you handle it last time?
13. How does that problem impact other departments?
14. How long has it been going on?
15. How much does it cost you?
16. How much time does it take now?
17. How is it being handled now?
18. How will you handle it?
19. How did you/your employees/your customers react?
20. How does that make them feel?
21. How does that make you feel?
22. How did that happen?
23. How will you prevent it from happening again?
24. How would you define "good service"?
25. How would you describe … ?
26. How does poor quality affect the final product?
27. How much do you think you would save if that problem was solved?
28. How would you use it if you had it?

Closing Questions

1. How can we make this work?
2. How can we make this happen?
3. How about starting out with a trial order?
4. How can we get approval?
5. How would you like to proceed?
6. How soon can we get started?
7. How about starting now?
8. How many do you want to start with?
9. How do you see us proceeding?
10. How fast will you need this?
11. How much will you need to start off with?
12. How can we be the ones that you’ll choose?
13. How can we be part of the bidding process?
14. How do you want to pay for this?
15. How do you want this delivered?

Addressing Resistance and Objections

1. How much is “too much”?
2. How could we solve that?
3. How much resistance do you expect internally?
4. How can we both make this work?
5. How much of an issue is that, really?
6. How do we get around this issue?
7. How can you/we find the money?

Customer Service Questions

1. How can I help?
2. How can I be of service?
3. How could we improve?
4. How are we doing?
5. How can we change?
6. How can we do it better?
7. How can I fix it so you’re satisfied?
8. How have we done for you?

Questions to Ask Yourself

1. How can I change?
2. How could I increase my sales and production by X% this quarter?
3. How am I going to reach my goals?
4. How should I start?

What are your "how" questions? Leave them in the comments below.

Editor's note: This post originally appeared on Smart Calling Online and is republished here with permission. 

Not too long ago, we showed you what really (really, really) bad B2B content marketing looks like. We thought it would only be fair to put the spotlight on the really, really bad sales content that greets prospects when they’re further down the sales cycle.

Marketing content is often the first thing a prospect sees about your organization, but as Salesforce.com points out, research shows it’s not what’s associated with closing a deal—sales content is. Not only that, but sales content created by salespeople is what seems to be closing deals, with 61% of content created by reps associated with closed deals as opposed to only 26% of marketing-created content. There could be a couple takeaways from those statistics, but whether salespeople aren’t showing people the content that marketing puts out or prospects aren’t responding to it, marketers seem to be, on the whole, lousy at creating sales content. Start by knowing the commonalities behind the worst sales content and you’ll be on your way to avoiding them to start making the best.

1. Staying All By Yourself

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Sales rep-created content doing so well is another point in favor of sales and marketing alignment. Marketers may have legitimate qualms about salespeople creating their own content: lack of visibility into the content’s effectiveness, rogue content not meeting brand or style standards, and salespeople spending less time selling are just a few potential issues. The counterpoint? If marketers were giving them what they needed, they wouldn’t resort to spending time creating their own content.

To truly be aligned, marketing departments shouldn’t isolate themselves from the valuable feedback that sales reps, who know customers inside and out, provide. That includes:

• What content prospects seem to want but salespeople never have
• The types of content that prospects engage with the most
• The content that never seems to work

And remember, salespeople can help marketers by spending almost no time on content creation.

2. Keeping It Generic

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The days when a prospect would have to wait for a salesperson to share basic and generic information like pricing, features and customer testimonials are behind us. That’s not to say that salespeople shouldn’t be at the ready with the more general, early-stage stuff––especially if they’re reaching out to a passive buyer who might not have heard of your company. But for the most part, sales content needs to be more tailored, catering to the needs and concerns of different industries and types of buyers (e.g., their role in a company).

If it’s finally time for your salespeople to step in front of prospects, marketers cannot afford to give content to salespeople that makes them sound like they’re parroting your website, which prospects have already gone through. Going 1, 2, 3 levels deeper with your sales content won’t just show your prospects your company’s value—it’ll empower the salesperson, and help them prove that they’re more than an order taker—instead, they’ll show that they’re consultants suited to take on the modern buyer.

3. Trying to Be Everything to Everyone

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On the other hand, creating content for all those industries and buyers might sound daunting. The idea, though, isn’t to quickly throw together a new presentation from scratch for every prospect (which is what some salespeople end up doing). And it’s definitely not to create some massive 80-slide presentation in the hope that 3 or 4 of those resonate.

The idea is to have the individual pieces that are too granular or proprietary to make it to your website available to salespeople. Allow them to remix those pieces so that the combination of slides, videos, PDFs, calculators, etc. feels like it was created from scratch. Presentations are set aside in favor of stories, and there’s not a single wasted or irrelevant moment that could leave any doubt as to whether your solution is for them.

4. Forgetting Stakeholders

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One key difference between selling to consumers versus selling to businesses is how many cooks in the kitchen there are. While you might find that there might be two decision-makers for a large consumer product purchase, B2B skews much higher, averaging 5.4 stakeholders in a cycle.

Stakeholders within a company are going to have commonalities including industry and other solutions they’re currently using (and the challenges that come along with those), but there will be major differences too, including:

• Department. If you’re selling software, for example, your appeal is going to be much different to IT who has to implement the software into their broader tech stack who might be concerned about device compatibility and integration than a user or administrator who’s more concerned about how easy it is to use.
• If salespeople can’t convince someone at the lower end of the totem pole, executives who have final say may never hear about the solution. There needs to be sales content that appeals to the day-to-day in the organization as well as the big picture, 10,000 mile view from above.

As mentioned above, this doesn’t mean making whole new presentations for everything. It could mean that after meeting someone in a particular role and salespeople look to connect with the next stakeholder, they offer a slightly different collection of sales content. They can then ask the stakeholder they just met with to share with the other stakeholders (or prepare for when they meet with them).

5. Not Measuring Everything

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Yes, you saw this on the B2B content marketing sins list, but it really does bear repeating: measure everything. We talked there about how you can work backwards and use the numbers behind what content salespeople end up using and what shared collateral prospects engage with to help craft earlier content.

You can, of course, also use those sales content metrics to keep improving your (you guessed it) sales content! Create a feedback loop by paying attention to how sales and prospects are responding to marketing-provided content to constantly improve what you have, add what you don’t, and cut what you do have but shouldn’t. Once you start gathering usage by salespeople, you’ll be able to make better usage of the time that you spend with salespeople (see number 1).

6. What New Content?

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If you’ve avoided all the sins above, you should be getting to a pretty good point with your content. Your prospects and salespeople alike should be in love with your consistent output of quality collateral—if they know that it exists.

Take the following steps to make sure that your new sales content gets seen for as long as it’s relevant to your business.

1. Distribute content only to people who it’s relevant to. If you’re selling a variety of products and only some salespeople are responsible for those products, only give those reps content about those products. Have different content for different territories? Don’t dump every territory’s content on every salesperson’s iPad.
2. Tag sales content with keywords that make it easy for a salesperson to find. (So, you also need to have a search function that does something with those keywords.)
3. Alert salespeople when new content has been released or existing content has been updated. You can do this with a combination of in-app alerts for your sales enablement solution, emails when content’s been added/updated, and announcements during a sales meeting.

7. Ignoring the Channel

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When we talk about B2B sales content, we’re talking about stepping away from the internet and going into the real world, where your salespeople are the connection between your company and prospects. It’s about avoiding repeating your website, but there’s something more.

Salespeople are…people, but they’re also a channel—like Twitter, like your website, like an ad on Google. Like any of those channels, the content that you put across all of those channels looks different. It’s all essentially your brand, but there are subtleties like character count, slightly different demographics as well as visual elements that mean you can’t flood every channel with the same content and expect it to stick.

Some sales content that they leave behind with prospects or send them as follow-up material can act like something you would put on your website (e.g., eBook about an issue they’re facing, extended case study about a similar company), while other content needs to be placed in the context of your salesperson as a channel: The content’s purpose is to support the connection between salesperson and prospect. It shouldn’t hurt that connection, but it also shouldn’t overpower it.

When your marketing-provided content underscores your salespeople’s strength as consultants and helps them carry the baton in that last mile of the sales cycle, that’s when sales reps stop spending time creating their own content and get to doing what they do best.

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It’s become impossible for buyers to sift through the avalanche of marketing information being published today. Unfortunately, these buyers don’t know where to begin their search for a solution. That’s why your content marketing must stand out. It must generate demand (while aligning to your own business objectives), and it has to capture your audience’s attention.

Building an effective content marketing program isn’t easy. Especially since no two organizations or buyers are the same. That’s why it’s critical to start with the basics: Know your buyers and their pain points and know how to implement your solution in a way that works for them. Think about the KPIs you’re going to use to measure the effectiveness of your content.

Once you’ve established this foundation for your content marketing program, supplement your strategy with content based on the four E’s: engage, educate, entertain, empower.

1. Engage

Creating content that engages your audience at the top of the funnel is a non-invasive way to get their attention. Examples of engaging content include webinars and buyer insight surveys, and videos. The latter of which has seen a major influx over the last couple of years.

People appreciate when their time isn’t wasted, so it’s vital your content get to the point sooner rather than later. You can capture a lot in just a one-minute video. And you’d be surprised how much insight a five-question survey can provide. Webinars also allow your audience to engage with you by asking questions and offering comments. Surveys allow you to better understand buyer pain points and open the door for you to do a friendly follow-up (think email nurture).

2. Educate

For your prospects and buyers to believe in your brand, they have to believe you know what you’re doing. The best way to do that is to position your organization as a thought leader, and educate them by using industry benchmarks, data and customer testimonials—they need evidence.

Show them your solution is not only problem solving but also success building. Offer them insight they don’t already have so they can ask the right questions going forward. And give them examples of the success they can expect to see if they use your solutions.

Case studies are a great way to provide examples of how your solutions have worked for others. And though case studies are often used toward the end of the Buyer’s Journey, there’s no rule that says you can’t use them for demand gen. Consider offering your buyers a case study in exchange for taking a buyer insight survey or as a call-to-action at the end of a video.

3. Entertain

Beyond engaging and educating your audience, leverage the opportunity to entertain them, as well. Content in general should be valuable, and people place a high value on entertainment. Not only can entertaining content capture buyer awareness—it can keep it—because people tend to come back for more of what they love.

Our friends at HubSpot also believe in the power of entertainment. In this blog post, they discuss some of the key benefits to using entertainment as a content strategy. For example, this type of content has the ability to quickly go viral online. It also helps humanize your brand and keeps visitors coming back for more.

Visuals like infographics are great ways to implement entertaining content into your strategy. Take this superhero infographic for example; it’s packed with valuable information buyers can read in less than a minute. Not to mention, buyers are probably going to remember the superhero concept—think attention and retention.

If you’re considering infographics, keep these things in mind: accuracy, focus, design, sharing capability and credit (chances are you used information from other sources).

Video marketing is also an effective way to incorporate entertainment into your content. In fact, people who watch videos about products and services are 85 percent more likely to buy.

4. Empower

Before you develop a content marketing program, make sure the strategy and content speaks to your solution and how it empowers buyers. Don’t just try to sell your product or service. Show your buyers how it fits into their business model and how they can leverage it to drive ongoing success.

Showcase what they’re doing right so they feel optimistic about their business future. But keep in mind you want them to believe their marketing budget is necessary and being allocated to the right solutions. So give them specific examples of what needs the most improvement—again—don’t just try to sell your product.

Case studies and customer testimonials can serve as great pieces of empowering content. Because in order for buyers to trust your brand, they need to see how it empowers others to build success. You can write case studies or use videos and infographics to tell the success story. Check out these 15 examples of companies that saw ROI by implementing case studies into their content marketing.

In the End …

By developing content that engages, educates, entertains and empowers your prospects and buyers, you can generate demand and capture leads early on.

Invest your time in getting to know your buyers so you can create content that speaks to them. Stop using your content to sell and start using it to help your buyers solve their problems and build success. And make sure to measure your KPIs, so you know what works and what doesn’t.

Email automation is the key to building a successful digital business. An autoresponder email track is among your most powerful tools. But like any tool, the power lies in how you use it.

When a visitor subscribes to your email list, a degree of trust is transferred to your company. Acknowledging and nurturing this trust is your key to success.

In this guide we’ll show you –

• The fundamentals of writing a strong automated email.
• Examples of how leading e-commerce companies are using email automation.
• How layout, design, copywriting and cadence can be used to increase performance.

What is Email Automation?

As opposed to an email broadcast, Sonia Simone of Copyblogger explains:

“Email automation is a sequence of email marketing messages that gets sent to subscribers in the order and frequency that you decide.”

In other words, it’s a sequence of emails that are automatically triggered based on an action. This may be: Opting into your list, clicking a link, even opening an email.

Keeping a consistent tone and style in your emails is the first thing to remember. Do you want to use email automation to introduce subscribers to your best content? To have them sign up for an online course? Or to engage them with your automated sales funnel? Regardless, be natural and easy going.

We’ll touch on this later in this article.

It’s been studied: email automation increases the quality of leads that get passed to sales by up to 60%. Why is this? Because they have been qualified and nurtured through your engaging, and thoughtful sales process.

One that consistently delivers value to the viewer.

Where does this process begin?

The subject line of the email.

Email Automation Subject Lines

Your readers will come to anticipate your emails. Until then, your subject line is the only way to get them to engage with your company. It is your first opportunity to establish your tone and brand identity.

As you can see, the name of the sender is the only factor more important than the subject line. 35% of readers open based on the subject line alone.

Headlines with the best open rates have been shown to have between 6 -10 words.

Sharing blog posts through email automation? Neil Patel recommends pasting the headline of your post into the subject line of the email. Even repurposing existing content into a email marketing strategy can help keep customers engaged.

But first, you need to send out a welcome email after viewers have subscribed to your email list.

The Welcome Email

The welcome email is like a digital handshake. It’s an opportunity to thank your reader for subscribing. It’s also a great time to lay out what they can expect from you in the emails to come.

Imagine a salesman just arrived at your door. You would want him to introduce himself first. To tell you what makes him an authority on the subject, before you heard anything else, right?

This is that brief interaction, whereafter the salesman walks away, and returns another day.

“Welcome to Casper”

Casper is an online retailer that delivers mail order mattresses. They do it without the complexity and jargon of the typical brick and mortar experience. They believe that sleep should be simple: a mattress, a pillow, a sheet.

They do a great job of greeting customers and introducing them to their business model.

This is the Casper welcome email.

This email arrives within minutes of submitting an email, as it should. And it wastes no time in delivering the value that was alluded to on the website. They remind viewers of their product offering and provide a simple visual aid to show the end result.

The company details the offering that their website provides, but in short form. The copy is simple, direct, and largely visual. Casper removes any sense of anxiety about purchasing their product.

The tone is light, educational and friendly. Friendly doesn’t mean overly familiar – it treats you like an acquaintance, and no more.

“Can I just have a basic mattress like I had?”

‘The Paradox of Choice’ is eliminated for their customers by offering just one product. With a streamlined email automation process, the Casper brand positions itself as the obvious route to bedtime comforts. With free shipping, no less.

By scaling and redelivering the qualities of their website and brand, customers always know what to expect. Unforeseen design, layout, and brand messages are removed. This makes buying with Casper a seamless transition process from the website or email. The visual continuity creates a compelling and nearly invisible user interface.

The layout is crisp. The eye is guided towards a shining testimonial, playing upon the idea of social proof. The website proudly displays an encouraging plethora of positive reviews delivered on a micro-scale.

The psychology of referral marketing cannot be overlooked here. 92% of consumers trust the word of friends and family above all other forms of marketing. The email is finished with contact and social media icons. This gives readers a chance to share their experience with friends.

The ‘unsubscribe’ option helps the reader feel like they are in a pressure-free relationship, able to leave at any time.

How to Frame and Send an Automated Email Track

It’s time to ask yourself how many emails you’ll be sending to prospects. And to consider what those emails will look like. The short answer is this:

There is no set number of emails. Nor is there an exact way to format each email.

When you consider how to format your pages, look to the sparse text examples of Casper. Whether you’ll be using pictures or not, a ‘less is more’ approach is superior. You don’t want to overwhelm the reader.

Robert Bringhurst, typographer and author of The Elements of Typographic Style, has this to say about formatting your page text:

“Anything from 45 to 75 characters is widely regarded as a satisfactory length of line for a single-column page… The 66-character line (counting both letters and spaces) is widely regarded as ideal. For multiple column work, a better average is 40 to 50 characters.”

In this age of of decreased attention spans and punchy internet copy, keeping length short is key.

How Long Should My Autoresponder Be?

Your autoresponder will be as long as it needs to be.

It depends on a few factors:

• Your product or service.
• Your target buyer.
• The price of the product in question.
• What you have in your value ladder.

The rule of thumb is this: the higher priced the item, the longer the email sequence.

Anywhere from 5 – 10 emails in an automation sequence is standard.

What happens at the end of the sequence is up to you. You can push readers to opt-in to a new autoresponder. You can move them automatically based on actions taken. You can prompt them to visit a sales page. Or move in for a soft sell with a trial offer.

This part of the strategy must revolve specifically around your product and your buyers.

For example, say you’re Mercedes Benz. Given the high price tag on this luxury item, you’re never going to make a sales pitch over the internet. What you are going to do is tempt the reader; invite them to experience your product. Provide incentives through your automated email sequences and stay fresh in their mind.

How Often Should I Send Emails?

A brand like Mercedes Benz can let weeks go by between emails. But that’s not you. Nor do you want to hammer away at prospective buyers every day.

You certainly don’t want to come off as ‘that guy’ through your email sequence. How annoying it is to receive your emails is inversely related to how valuable your content is.

For example: If I’m genuinely interested in your thought leadership and your repurposed blog posts, receiving your emails every two days is great.

Or you could send an email every six days so I’m sure never to receive your email twice in one week.

The Answer To This Questions Lies In Email Cadence

According to Jessica Meher of Hubspot:

“Cadence is the ‘pattern’ of email – it includes the number of emails sent, the spacing between emails, the content sent, and the audience receiving the email.”

Understanding what stage of your funnel the reader is in will determine how to reach out to them. Are these readers in the discovery phase, the consideration phases, or the conversion phases?

When you know the answer to these questions, engage in list segmentation. Once your list is divided by interests, you can create separate autoresponders for each. This makes shuttling subscribers along a fluid path towards your final sales much easier.

What makes this a smooth journey? Triggers within the email sequence. Says Elle Woulfe, Director of Marketing at Eloqua:

“You need to use those triggers as often as possible. If somebody shows that something is important to them – a piece of content or an offer – then we want to follow up with something that’s relevant, but perhaps a level deeper.”

How Do I Engage with Readers on This Deeper Level?

First, by speaking to them in a language they appreciate. This means good copywriting. It means driving action from your most engaged readers and segmenting the rest.

Automated email communication is most effective when you target a message to a specific group. By using polarizing language, your company will effectively separate the wheat from the chaff.

Using actionable and emotionally driven language, your message speaks right to what matters:

The needs, wants, desires, and pain points of your audience.

Seth Godin defines marketing as “… the art of telling a story that resonates with your audience and then spreads.”

As in all digital marketing campaigns – copywriting, automation and storytelling are critical to create success. The human brain is wired to soak up stories and derive meaning from them.

So don’t be boring. There’s nothing worse than being caught in a tedious conversation, right?

This means keeping emails just brief enough to share your value. Short, punchy content with great impact is what readers want from you. Do not be presumptive with their time once you have their email. Adopt a ‘get in, get out’ mentality.

Also: map out and storyboard your email sequence. Prior planning will go a long way towards providing crisp emails that never ramble on.

What Does a Good Follow-Up Email Look Like?

With that in mind, let’s take a look at Wayfair. Wayfair is an e-commerce site that’s been taking the wind out of Amazon’s sails. They’re boasting billion dollar figures in the online homewares market.

They provide a nice email marketing example of a follow-up email:

The goal of the follow-up email is to show what makes your company outstanding. Demonstrate your quality by promising, and delivering, great values now and in the future. But be clever about it

Wayfair does an amazing job of re-creating the fun, playful atmosphere of their website. They focus on displaying consumer savings, allowing the reader look forward to great value. It also heightens the anticipation of upcoming summer fun.

The email establishes a sense of value through hyperbolic discounting, it then establishes scarcity. Not only is summer fast approaching, but the sale will end in April!

By telling readers that the sale will close, Wayfair creates a deadline. The open loop of the “Spring Into Summer Sale” visual storyline now seems fleeting. The reader knows they must take action.

Creating action is one of the fundamental components of the automated email marketing. Action might be bringing an on-the-fence Benz buyer into the showroom for a test drive. It might be to have the reader download a qualifying lead magnet. Email automation templates are great assets for pushing prospects to qualify themselves within your marketing funnel. Regardless if they’re saleable now or later.

It’s important to note that Wayfair cites their retail brand affiliates at the bottom of the page. This is another smart application of social proof. By reminding readers that the products are brand name, Wayfair invokes brand loyalty. This speaks to a direct string of associations consumers have to brand identities. A great example of persuading subscribers with a combination of price and consumer psychology.

The Takeaway

You can easily create a powerful B2C email marketing strategy. Understanding the way readers will interact with your email automation is the key. Your first goal is always to deliver consistent value by way of great copy and a branded message.

Understand the mindset of your subscribers within each stage of your marketing funnel. Targeting readers with ideas relevant to them keeps them engaged. More importantly, it keeps them excited for the next email in your series.

Also ensure your email layout and visual design make reading and buying effortless. As we’ve seen, a welcoming flow of text and images promote an easygoing user experience. A firm grasp of consumer psychology will make your CRM and automated email sequence the powerhouse tool you can bank on. Once your readers trust you to provide what they want, you can trust your autoresponder to do the rest.

Most companies claim to support entrepreneurial behavior — but their employees are not so sure. The research speaks volumes: Only 20% of employees in an Accenture study said their managers encourage entrepreneurial ideas. Another survey showed that 70% of successful entrepreneurs developed their big idea while working at an established organization and then left to commercialize it on their own.

According to Vijay Anand, senior vice president at Inuit, it’s not a lack of desire that blocks companies from supporting entrepreneurship; it’s just the way they are wired. According to Anand, “Large organizations are necessarily focused on running the business and managing for continuity. That’s not always a bad thing, but it seldom leaves much space for new ways of working.”

That aligns with what I’ve seen. A number of the companies I advise are still in the beginning stages of developing support systems to nurture the entrepreneurs within their walls. Organizations struggle with two things in particular. First, they have a hard time supporting the risk-taking that is so fundamental to learning, and ultimately to innovation. Second, corporate culture and structural barriers disincent intrapreneurs from “owning” their ideas (e.g., time to experiment is not protected, decisions about whether to move forward with an experiment are dictated by managers rather than those who initiate the idea).

I would argue that the key is to create an organizational design that is flexible enough to enable creativity and build momentum yet firm enough to keep intrapreneurs on track. Not surprisingly, Intuit has this one down to a science in a number of ways:

Make it easy to conduct the first experiment. When an Intuit employee steps forward with a product or business idea, they are encouraged to create a prototype to test their hypothesis — with just one customer. Not just any one customer, but one who is hypothesized to be well served by the solution. If that single customer uses the solution and recommends it to others, then the sponsor is guided to scale it up to a larger cohort of customers in order to collect more data.

One example of this approach in action is a product idea called Shop Owner, launched by an Intuit employee in Bangalore. He observed that rural-area store clerks were losing track of sales by relying on their memory to quote prices and create handwritten sales slips. Most did not have on-site computers or cash registers with integrated accounting features, but nearly all had smart phones. His simple solution: an app that bundled point of sale accounting, simple inventory management, and printed receipts. Based on that plan, he and his team not only created a prototype but also tested it — in less than a week. Their first customer? The café located within Intuit’s own Bangalore office. It was a hit. After that, the prototype was deemed good enough to scale-up for further testing and discovery.

According to Anand, this “unit of one” approach enables a great many ideas, like this one, to be tested quickly and on the cheap. In addition, collecting data using existing customers provides Intuit with insights that can be leveraged beyond the first experiment, and keeps collaboration front of mind for intrapreneurs.

Add structure to unstructured time. Like many companies, Intuit encourages employees to use a percentage of their on-the-clock time to develop relevant side projects. Yet oftentimes that mindset isn’t enough to coax people away from their everyday work. According to Intuit’s Jeff Zias, Unstructured Time and Grassroots Innovation Leader, the company needed to go further and “inject some structure into that unstructured time.”

One way it achieves this is through periodic multiday hackathons where teams of developers present pet projects and compete to tackle specific challenges aligned with the company’s broader strategy (e.g., easy, fast tax return completion) in exchange for prizes and recognition. Adding this measure of structure not only cultivates a powerful ecosystem by bringing intrapreneurs together in one place, allowing for cross-functional interaction, but also allows the organization to keep innovation aimed at themes that Intuit wants to investigate.

Support, don’t control. Another way to encourage intrapreneurs is by empowering them to make some of the big decisions on their own. At Intuit, it’s up to the individual sponsor to decide if and when to pull the plug on a project or prototype. And if they do decide to back off? They’re encouraged to keep learning and pivot to another hypothesized solution, as opposed to giving up entirely. (Intuit founder Scott Cook calls this “falling in love with the problem, not the solution.” ) Allowing individuals, not management,, to develop the data driving the decisions as to whether to cut or continue, removes the stigma from failure. And pivoting presents people with another chance to solve the problem they are passionate about while the sense of autonomy increases engagement.

Value “Return on Intelligence.” Science is a crucial component in guiding any entrepreneurial effort. Intuit looks at a number of metrics including customer satisfaction, gross margin, and net promoter score. But another metric I suggest companies consider is return on intelligence. Every idea tested with customers helps fine tune the solution – or indicate what not to do next time. Every new attempt at change delivers data about how to become better. In addition, looking at learning as a kind of currency creates a corporate culture that doesn’t fear failure. And when these insights are shared across the organization (rather than swept under the carpet), others can benefit from this learning – helping to build a corporate culture willing to test ideas and take smart risks.

Many companies now are rewarding employees for failures that leads to learning: Both Google’s lab X and at WPP’s Grey Group in New York incentivize failures that provide insight. This ethos resonates with Zias, who says, “I don’t think of it as failing. It’s more like you’ve quickly disproven your own hypothesis — which is awesome.”

Create supporting stakeholders. At Intuit, intrapreneurs are not left alone to sink or swim. The company has multiple stakeholders who support project sponsors. First, they have a number of individuals whose exclusive job is coaching and encouraging innovation (Zias is one of them). Next, the organization’s innovation catalysts are trained volunteers who spend 10% of their time guiding other employees to use design principles to create products that improve customers’ lives. Finally, managers across Intiut are expressly incentivized to recognize and support entrepreneurial behavior and experimentation.

All of this organizational support, cultural reinforcement, and bottom up encouragement for intrapreneurship is more than just interesting, it’s also instructive. The beauty of Intuit’s approach is that it puts intrapreneurs and their particular passions at the center of the equation. Yet, Intuit’s model is but one in many. The bottom line? If you build the right sandbox, intrapreneurs will dive into it: create space and structure for entrepreneurship and you will keep many of your most creative people engaged in forging the future of the company.