Equip Your Sales Managers to Coach Effectively I clearly remember my first promotion into sales management; I worked for an enterprise software company at the time. Surely my success in ...

Today, with just a few clicks of a button, consumers can instantly purchase electronics, clothes, and even fresh groceries from just about any retailer around the world. Online shopping is now second nature, and it is expected by consumers everywhere.

Making a one-time B2C purchase is pretty rudimentary when compared to the complexities of B2B transactions. But as more and more manufacturers and wholesale distributors make eCommerce a priority, convenient online shopping experiences are also being offered in the B2B realm. Many B2B eCommerce platforms now provide flexible, reliable experiences that deliver engaging shopping experiences for retailers and other wholesale buyers.

Let’s take a look at four areas in which B2B eCommerce has been catching up to B2C, revolutionizing the ways retailers buy from manufacturers and distributors in the process.

B2B in eCommerce: How B2B is Becoming More Like B2C

1. Features

When it comes to features, B2B eCommerce platforms have been closing the gap between themselves and their B2C counterparts. These solutions are now offering:

• Customer order history and product favorites

• A comprehensive, intuitive search experience
• Ability to duplicate past orders
• Shipment tracking
• Inventory availability

These features give retailers a simple, self-service experience that feels familiar and intuitive. Retailers can make purchases, educate themselves about products and brands, and check on basic account details like order status, just like they do as B2C online consumers.

At the same time, B2B eCommerce solutions also include certain B2B specific features that can accommodate the complexities of the B2B purchasing process, including:

• Seller Review
• Customer-specific pricing and discounting rules
• Ship Dates/Cancel Dates
• Order minimums
• Sales tax exemptions
• Accommodation of complex product variant structures

2. Immersive Product Catalogs

Retailers have long mastered the art of window dressing, making their top products and brand visible and always accessible online. In this area, B2B has historically lagged behind B2C, relying on thick paper catalogs and call centers to handle incoming orders.

New eCommerce solutions now enable manufacturers and distributors to curate an immersive, information-rich online product catalog. With search functions and improved navigation patterns that help users appreciate the breadth of a brand’s offering, B2B buyers can now browse and place orders in the same way they shop personally online.

3. Mobile Migration

As B2B buyers start using tablets and smartphones to research and purchase products, mobile is emerging as an important channel for B2B companies. The newest mobile solutions empower B2B customers to buy from manufacturers and distributors at any time, whether it’s at the shelf or in the stockroom.

Recent numbers from Forrester suggest that demand is growing rapidly for mobile self-service eCommerce capabilities. These figures are only expected to increase. In both B2B and B2C, mobile has asserted itself as a key platform to browse for and buy products.

4. Branding

B2B marketers have realized the value of delivering a branded message across all channels, including eCommerce. Manufacturers and distributors are branding their eCommerce sites with their logos, colors, and imagery in order to provide an online experience consistent with what their sales reps offer in person and what customers can find on their main websites.

Questions about how B2B in eCommerce is becoming more like B2C? Let us know in the comments.

This report originally appeared on Leopard.com

What’s working and what’s not working in B2B sales? Leopard set out to find out in their first B2B Sales Insights Report.

Clearly, existing research shows that the world of sales is in flux. Depending on the purchase, B2B buyers don’t deal with a salesperson until they are 57% to 70% through their buying cycle. Forrester has also reported that one million salespeople will lose their jobs by 2020. The sales landscape is clearly changing, and Leopard wanted to find out how B2B customers feel about the salespeople they work with. Are they as disposable as the research shows? Or are they still a necessary part of the buying cycle?

Leopard surveyed representatives from a range of industries, including software, hardware, healthcare, and financial services. The respondents are B2B buyers who interact with salespeople regularly and are responsible for making major technology purchases within their company.

Turns out, these B2B buyers have a more nuanced relationship with sales than was suspected. For all of buyers’ frustrations, they still need salespeople’s support.

Here are the top 4 takeaways from the 2016 B2B Insights Report:

1. 50% of respondents state that sales people are essential to them.

   When sales takes the time to listen, understand their customers and foster deep and meaningful relationships, sales is crucial.

2. B2B salespeople talk past their customers.

   The research found that sales is spending most of their time talking about their company and services. But customers want sales to prove that they understand THEIR business. Making the conversation about the customer is integral to creating a lasting and productive relationship.

3. Salespeople are reported to often be pushy and rude.

   OK, so some stereotypes of the pushy salesman-type still exist. The good news is that it’s not that hard to engage with customers. Salespeople are considered an asset, as long as they use buyers’ time efficiently and respectfully.

4. 68% of respondents said that listening and understanding their business are VERY important when deciding to work with a salesperson.

   So take note, sales. Your customers have weighed in and they want the conversation to be about THEM, not YOU.

Inevitably, the landscape of B2B selling will continue to change, but the bottom line is that salespeople are not as dreaded as we feared. There is no substitute for personal human connections. B2B customers are human too, and as long as sellers are relating to them on a human level, sales will be here for a long, long time.

View the full report in the player below. If you are having trouble viewing the player, please refresh your browser.

In a world full of choice and ​choice overload​, consumers need guidance in deciding what to buy.

If you want to get them off the fence, and to the checkout, you need a way to intelligently reduce the choices they’re exposed to. As with everything online, this method needs to be engaging or else you’re going to lose their attention.
Simply put, what you need are more ​engaging product advisor tools​. For example, an interactive product advisor aims to replicate what any good salesperson in a store would do:

They put the users needs first, instead of pushing technical product features that may only confuse the user by asking a series of need‐oriented questions to understand what the user really wants and needs, the solution is then able to suggest a list of relevant products based on the answers given.

Here is ​how players from the top 10 different industries use interactive product advisors to tackle choice overload​ and improve shopper satisfaction.

1. Automotive

There are very few decisions bigger than purchasing a car. Alongside buying your own house, a car is a pinnacle part of the average person’s life. With it being such an important decision, many buyers are very hesitant to make it.

Without guidance or expert knowledge, it’s unlikely that the average consumer will commit to purchase. Which is why you often see salesmen trying so hard on the car lot. VW is aware of this and has created an electronic salesperson to guide shoppers through to a decision.

Their car finder​ walks the user through every available configuration option of their potential car.​

All the user needs is a basic understanding of what they like and look for. Based on this information the interactive car finder presents the users with the most relevant car models to their specified criteria.

2. Photography

Canon has a diverse audience. Some are professional photographers, others just want a basic camera to take family pictures. With Canon trying to appeal to such a vast demographic of users, there’s a necessity to guide the user through the camera selection process in many cases.

Canon’s camera selector asks the user a couple of need‐oriented questions to understand how​ and what kind of situations they want to use the camera in before suggesting a suitable product. As opposed to overwhelming users with technical features.

In doing so, Canon educates potential buyers and strengthens their brand recognition. Not only do customers get the best camera for their needs, but they learn how and why it is the best. It really is a win‐win situation.

3. Consumer electronics

Despite how vastly crucial mobile phones are to modern society, most people don’t know what they’re looking for in a phone. Technical specifications read like a foreign language to them, and they have little patience for trying to figure out whether or not it’ll work for them.

That’s why every phone company should aim at selling benefits, not mere features. Google’s innovative minds streamlined this process. They made a list of the most common ways phones are used, let their users pick from it and dynamically display matching phones in an ​interactive mobile advisor​.

Their product advisor is not only entertaining, but it’s really easy to use, too.

4. Telecommunications

Even for experienced users, picking the right mobile and data plan is a complex decision to make. That’s why many people seldomly switch plans or providers, even if others appeared more beneficial. Alternatively, they opt to consult an assistant in a store or over the phone for advice.

Either way, not only do these present telecommunication providers with high service costs, but it also makes choosing a lot less easy for the user. This creates a far greater risk of a dissatisfied customer base, because, quite obviously, users aren’t entirely sure what they’re getting!

Swisscom overcame this issue by implementing a ​virtual tariff advisor​. By answering a few questions circling around the user’s needed tariff benefits, such as preference and expected phone usage, the user gets a tariff catered specifically to their needs.

This reduces choice overload. Makes benefits clear and easy to understand, which drives customer satisfaction up. As well as educating the customer base overall.

5. Furniture

Imagine your dream kitchen. Tough, right? There’s no doubt that some users have an idea in mind. However, having the entirety of the specifics planned out, to the point where they’re ready to purchase, is unlikely. Unless they’re a chef or some kitchen fanatic.

Introducing Obi’s kitchen product advisor​. This advisor walks the user through a series of​ questions pertaining to their desired kitchen design. After establishing a layout, countertop material and any other extra features, the advisor then presents the user with the most relevant kitchens they have.

One of the best features of Obi’s kitchen advisor is the dynamic updating of the relevant kitchen results. Meaning the customer can opt‐out of the advisor process early, if they find a kitchen they like at any stage along the process. (A real customer pleaser!)

6. Apparel

Buying clothing online is often a worrying prospect. The common questions of the customer are along the lines of, “will it fit?” and “will it suit my build?” Seeing as they can’t try it on, you need to ensure these worries are addressed for customers to purchase.

So jeans have a quick and easy jeans advisor​ to fix these worries. They advertise it as “4 easy clicks for the perfect jeans for you.” Which is about right. It asks the user’s gender, weight, height, preferred style and the shoes you’ll be wearing them with. Then displays the perfect pair of jeans.

This advisor is really simple and easy to follow, and inevitably will lead to more purchases due to it.

7. Cosmetics

Hair is very unique. Each colour, texture, volume and style needs a different kind of product to treat it. Sure, you can buy general products that not optimised for your hair features, but that’s not what John Frieda’s customers are looking for.

If you’re going to a specialised company for your haircare needs, you want to ensure that it’s the best for your hair type. Especially with the product line being so extensive. John Frieda​ asks​ customers about their hair type and hair concerns. Then recommends the perfect product for them.

Taking the guesswork out of a product like this, considering how important hair is to the people that’ll buy from John Frieda, is absolutely necessary for customer satisfaction. John Frieda has produced a very effective example of an interactive product advisor with this tool.

8. Children and Baby Products

Not all strollers are made with the same function in mind.

Picking the right stroller, from the vast amount of models available, can easily overwhelm expecting parents. Pish Posh Baby know this. They want their customers to get the most appropriate stroller for their needs. Function, the amount of seats and age of children are all a factor.

With ​Pish Posh Baby’s stroller advisor​, it takes only a few clicks to get the most appropriate stroller for the user’s needs. Overall, the process takes less than a minute and will clearly drive customer satisfaction way up!

9. Pets

Dog Time wants to help people to choose the dog breed that’ll suit their lifestyle. So they designed a dog breed selector​ that determines the personality of the dog owner, the personality and size of​ the dog desired, and suggests the best match with these aspects in mind.

This is more of a 20 question quiz rather than a product advisor. It’s a bit longer and takes a fair bit more commitment than average. However, put simply, choosing a dog is a larger commitment than most things. So the advisor clearly reflects the commitment required for adopting or buying a dog.

10. Foods

Choosing wine can be difficult. There are so many types, brands and vintages of wine that it’s hard to know where to begin. How can you possibly know what you’ll enjoy until you’ve already tried​ it?

Weinvorteil’s wine consultant seems to have solution to this problem. Their Wine Consultant​ helps users select a wine based on tastes they like, certain occasions, and within a specified price range. Once user’s current preferences are determined, they get a number of proposals reflecting their individual needs.

This is obviously a great tool for any wine producer. With tastes varying so dramatically from person to person, ensuring that everyone gets something they enjoy on a certain occasion will do wonders for purchasing and customer satisfaction as a whole.

What do you do currently to alleviate the effects of choice overload?

It might be time to consider how you can also implement an engaging product advisor to narrow down your customer’s choices. The online user is constantly bombarded by choice. Make it easier for them, if you want them to buy.

Begin by thinking about your customer’s needs, correlate them with the technical information and think of how you can provide these choices in an interactive manner.

There’s just one question remaining, are you going to follow through?

To see more examples of product advisors created using SMARTASSISTANT’s Guided Selling examples.

If you have any questions or have seen other great examples for online product advisors, then write your comments below!

“The Challenger Sale” by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson has been one of the most talked-about sales books of the past decade - and has been described by no less an authority than SPIN-Selling author Neil Rackham as “the most important advance in selling for many years”.

Based on an impressive body of research, the book sets out an attractive and seductive formula for achieving sales success - and it’s attracted the attention of a significant number of CEOs who are looking for a way to differentiate their organisation from the competition and accelerate revenue growth.

But as many have discovered, adopting Challenger is neither a miracle cure nor a sure-fire recipe for success. In a number of instances, Challenger Selling has transformed sales performance - but in others, it has failed to achieve the hoped-for results. How can these differences be explained?

The first thing to make clear is that you can’t hope to successfully implement any sales methodology by simply sending people on a training course or (even worse) giving them a book to read, but this is particularly true for Challenger. It requires the full commitment of both sales and marketing if it is to succeed.

THE ESSENCE OF CHALLENGER SELLING

Here’s what the authors have to say: “Instead of bludgeoning customers with endless facts and features about their company and products, Challenger sales people are supposed to approach customers with unique insights about how they can make or save money, and then tailor their sales message to the customer’s specific needs and objectives.”

They go on: “Rather than acquiescing to the customer’s every demand or objection, they are assertive, pushing back when necessary and taking control of the sale”. This mantra is often summarised as teach > tailor > take control. Finally, they confront the traditional idea that sales is primarily about relationships - and conclude that “the best sales people don’t just build relationships with customers - they challenge them”.

Unfortunately, a number of naïve and simplistic summaries of the book have concluded that relationships don’t matter in selling (they do!), and that because the average prospect is 57% through their buying cycle before they want to engage a sales person, that we should not try to get involved any earlier (we must!).

But even for the organisations that have guzzled the Challenger Selling Kool-Aid and avoided these dangerous misinterpretations, there are still a number - maybe even a majority - of Challenger Sales projects that haven’t come close to achieving their potential. Here are a few of the most common reasons…

WHAT IF MARKETING ISN’T UP TO THE TASK?

Challenger Selling is a mind-set that must be adopted and embraced by everyone in marketing as well as everyone in sales, because marketing has to provide the fuel - in the form of compelling insights - that drives the Challenger Selling engine.

One of the most common reasons for failure is that marketing isn’t up to the task: it remains fixated on traditional feature-function-benefit product marketing and simply isn’t close enough to either their customers or the sales people to craft the necessary compelling insights.

Or, even if they do manage to create some insightful pieces, they see the job as being done when the material is published, and do nothing to equip the sales people to conduct the subsequent sales conversation in a way that personalises the problem or dramatises the opportunity for the prospect.

To compound the issue, marketing is often still measured and rewarded by the number of leads they generate and not on the number of qualified opportunities that end up in the sales pipeline. And sometimes - speak it softly - they simply aren’t smart enough to grasp the new realities of marketing.

Any of these factors by themselves can scupper a Challenger Selling initiative, but if they are compounded together, you’ve probably got no chance of pulling the initiative off. A handful of your smartest sales people will find ways of coping without, but the bulk of your sales people are going to struggle.

WHAT IF YOUR SALES PEOPLE AREN’T UP TO THE TASK?

Challenger Selling, by its very nature, requires a level of intelligence, curiosity, cognitive capability and agility that isn’t present in all sales people. Unfortunately, in many organisations, such sales people are in the minority. The research actually concluded that around a quarter of the sales population are natural challengers.

Others might have the potential to be developed to act more like Challengers if given the necessary coaching. But it’s an unfortunate truth that many sales people lack some of the basic attributes to ever adopt a Challenger mentality. It’s better to recognise this and reassign them to other responsibilities than to expect them to make the transition, no matter how much training they are exposed to.

In a way, Challenger is simply a response to increasing customer expectations. Your prospects expect more from every sales interaction. They have become immune to traditional “always be closing” sales tactics. They enjoy having a stimulating conversation with a sales person, and they resent being subjected to yet another ineptly delivered product pitch.

The uncomfortable consequence is that there are a group of sales people who may have been effective in less demanding times, but will increasingly and progressively struggle to cope with a more demanding prospect base. Implementing Challenger simply highlights their shortcomings a little ahead of time and brings forward the inevitable.

WHAT IF YOUR ORGANISATION ISN’T SUFFICIENTLY COMMITTED?

Implementing a Challenger Selling initiative can generate truly transformative rewards, but it requires a non-trivial company-wide commitment to make it work. If you’re prepared to seek out and confront any weaknesses in your marketing and sales organisations, you stand a great chance of reaping the benefits.

Maybe you’re uncomfortable about the consequences. But how much more uncomfortable might it be if a competitor seized the opportunity to build an unbridgeable advantage in their go-to-market strategy? In this, as in so many other matters, great rewards are often founded on tough choices...

Where do you find inspiration for your next website design? If you’re like many business owners and marketers we meet with, it might come from studying the competition.

We regularly meet with people who essentially ask us to re-create other websites they’ve seen, or at least reference their competitors when we want to find out about their design preferences. In a sense, this is completely normal and logical. You probably keep a closer eye on your competitors than anyone else, and since they are in the same industry, their approach could potentially work just as well for your site.

As natural as that line of thinking is, however, I would advise you to look beyond the competition when you’re trying to brainstorm concepts for your next web presence. Here are a few of the most important reasons why…

Inspiration Can Come From Anywhere

When you only look at competitor websites, you can become too locked into a single market or industry. You start getting focused on what you’ve seen, and not what can be accomplished. Sometimes, the best brainstorming comes from taking a look at completely different design inspirations that have nothing to do with your business at all. Once you start looking for new angles, visuals and features that could make a good fit for your business model, the possibilities open up.

Inspiration can come from anywhere, not just inside your own industry. So, when thinking about all the things your website could become, don’t be afraid to open up your search to entirely new and different business types.

Form Should Follow Function

Often, people can become enamoured with a certain look on a favourite website, even though that look might not be a good match for their own company or customers. It doesn’t matter how pretty a website is if it doesn’t end up being useful and meaningful to your most important visitors.

Think about the kinds of customers you want to attract online. Consider what sorts of topics or issues might be on their minds when they arrive on your pages, and what they are hoping to see or discover. Use that as a starting point for figuring out how your new site should look, feel, and act. Let form follow function to get the best long-term results.

You Should Understand Why You Like What You See

In cases where you do really like something you’ve seen from a competitor or business outside of your industry, try to figure out why. What is it about the site that appeals to you? Could it be the colours, the layout of the pages, the white space between elements, or even the fonts you have chosen? It may not be the site at all, but simply how it makes you feel.

By making these kinds of evaluations, you can zero in on your own preferences without creating copies of other sites you’ve seen. You can get the best, without having to worry about carrying over (copying) design elements that might not be a great fit for your topic or audience.

There Are Always Business Considerations

Of course, there are always more pieces you can add to a new website. That’s why it’s important to separate the elements that really increase its functionality or appeal from those that simply fall into the “bells and whistles” category. Getting a great website isn’t just about choosing a “look”, there is also a balancing act to achieve when it comes to complexity.

Each new special item you add to your website could involve an additional cost. That’s especially true for special apps and built-in features which can require software subscriptions, manual coding time, and/or additional maintenance and security testing for your website. All of these add to your schedule, and to the cost.

There’s nothing wrong with looking to your competitors for inspiration on a new website. Nearly everyone does it, and it can make for a good starting point when you’re thinking about what you want to see on your new or upgraded layout. Ask your design partner about current trends, standards, platforms and budget-friendly options before setting anything in stone.

In the end we simply don’t want to get too focused on someone else’s webpages, or narrow your attention to tightly on your own industry or area. In the end, your website has to match your customers and business model. Everything should be put in place with the goal of helping you grow your organization, not incorporated simply because it looked interesting somewhere else.

I have been working with a prospect over the past few weeks, and it has been a wonderful journey. She is not even a confirmed client yet, but I am extremely excited about the possibilities. What makes me so optimistic, either for the short-term opportunity or a future relationship, is how we connected instantly.

There are different ways to build rapport. On a personal level, you can build rapport by developing commonalities: living in the same town, having the same vacation experience, knowing the same people, etc. On a professional level, rapport can be built by simply making a genuine connection. This can be as basic as being sincere in your efforts to get to know prospects, demonstrating that you care about their needs and hope to become a true partner.

In the case of the prospect that I mentioned earlier, we did not have a personal connection at first. She had a clear need. She knew what she wanted to do, and she was doing everything the right way. Her next step was to choose a partner from the outside to come in and train her people.

Our connection came through an open and engaging dialogue. I listened closely to what she was saying, and she felt that I genuinely understood her and wanted to help. I sent her a proposal and checked in at timely intervals. I also found opportunities to supplement our discussion by sending her blog posts and white papers that aligned with her circumstances. Each time, I would write her a short e-mail along these lines: “I ran across the attached and thought you might find it helpful.”

And, each time, she thanked me for being so proactive and for continuing to think about her initiative. She also began to initiate contact with me, sending congratulations when she saw Richardson had again made Training Industry’s list of the 2015 Top 20 Sales Training Companies.

It seems obvious why you would build rapport of this kind; it is invaluable. Still, I will give you a concrete example. The proposal that I submitted to this prospect was somewhat higher than what she expected, coming in above what other vendors proposed. I told her I would be happy to work with her and look for areas to save costs, but I didn’t want to diminish the value of our offering.

Dealing with price objections can be uncomfortable. But, in this case, because we had built such rapport, we were able to easily discuss the value that Richardson brings to the table. She completely agreed with me and understood why the higher price was warranted.

Richardson is now among the finalists being considered for the engagement, and the prospect will be meeting with her boss shortly. The important thing to note is that, at this point, she considers Richardson to be an important collaborator. She has become, in effect, an advocate for Richardson based on our additional thought leadership in this area, regardless of us not being the lower-cost provider. She also sees that we genuinely care about this engagement and want her organization to succeed.

At this point, we have established such a collaborative relationship that, if for some reason Richardson does not get this business, at least I have opened a door. I hope that we do work together on this opportunity, but even if we don’t, I still feel that we have won to a certain degree. If the time is not now, I still see a tremendous opportunity down the road.

Build rapport, it definitely matters. It is not just about the opportunity in front of you. It is about building a relationship that can last over time.

The post Why Building Rapport Matters appeared first on Richardson Sales Enablement Blog.

Since I discovered Google's Earth Engine timelapse tool (thanks, reddit!), I've been playing with it all morning. (The feature debuted in 2013.)

Google has a dozen locations highlighted to show how they've changed from 1984 until 2012, using satellite images.

You can plug any location into the search bar at the top, too. It only works on desktop, but I've put together some GIFs here so you can watch some of the most interesting changes on any device.

These timelapse images are incredible to watch. But they're also a visceral way of capturing the sweeping impact that human beings have on this planet.

See for yourself:

Cape Cod's shoreline morphs over time.

The Aral Sea in between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan dries up.

Saudi Arabia builds massive cities in the sand.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

In July 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, and heroinincre.

The possession of small quantities of those drugs was shifted to a public health — rather than criminal — issue.

Rather than getting arrested for a small amount, you get sent to a "dissuasion commission" where a doctor, lawyer, and social worker prescribe treatment or give you a fine.

Mic's Zeeshan Aleem reports that most of the time, people walk away without a penalty. 

Here's what the data says about Portugal's decriminalization:  

• Drug-related HIV infections have plummeted by over 90% since 2001, according to the drug policy think tank Transform. 

• Drug-related deaths in Portugal are the second-lowest in the European Union. Just 3 in a million people die of overdoses there, compared with the EU average of 17.3 per million. 

• The number of adults who have done drugs in the past year has decreased steadily since 2001. 

• Compared to rest of the EU, young people in Portugal now use the least amount of "legal high" drugs like synthetic marijuana, which are especially dangerous. 

• The percentage of drug-related offenders in Portuguese prisons fell from 44% in 1999 to 21% in 2012. 

• The number of people in drug treatment increased 60% from 1998 to 2011, from 23,600 to 38,000. 

Portugal's decriminalization came about because the country was in crisis. 

In 1974, Portugal's dictatorship fell after a coup that became known as the Carnation Revolution. The country  soon became flooded with drugs. By 1999, a full 1% of the population was actively addicted to heroin, and the country had the highest rate of drug-related AIDS deaths in the EU. 

Shifting drug use from a criminal problem to a public health problem was a bid to reverse that. 

"We figured perhaps this way we would be better able get things under control," drug policy architect João Goulão told the Spiegel in 2013. "Criminalization certainly wasn't working all that well."

Goulão has been careful to say that you can't evaluate decriminalization in isolation — it was all part of Portugal's robust rollout of an expanded welfare state. 

Portugal isn't alone in shifting the war on drugs to something less combative. The Netherlands has a "tolerance policy"  of soft drugs like marijuana, which can be sold in regulated cafes. Uruguay became the first country to fully legalize marijuana in 2013, and marijuana is slated to go on sale in regular pharmacies in the second half of 2016. Four US states have legalized recreational marijuana, with Oregon one raking in tax money from doing so. 

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: What the 'i' in 'iPhone' stands for — as explained by Steve Jobs

Wonder how you can make 200+ calls per day per sales rep without a power dialer?

It's not rocket science, it’s all about having the right CRM and workflow.

One of our customers wanted to increase his calls per day from 30 to 60—but we helped him increase it to 152, a 406% increase in calls!

He couldn’t have been happier: “Thanks for your help before! It changed the way we sell and saved us some money.”

Start saving time and money today by optimizing your workflow using these 3 simple tips.

1. Use Smart Views

First, create Smart Views in Close.io to save common search queries that your team is using to target specific leads. It’s a very simple process:

1. If a search results page hasn’t already been saved as a Smart View, there will be a star icon next to “Search results”.
2. Click on the star and label your new Smart View.

That’s it! Once your Smart  View is saved, it’s easily accessible with one click and can even be shared with specific individuals or your entire organization, thus creating more efficient teams.

You will have different Smart Views for different purposes. One Smart View could be for new leads who signed up for your product in the last 24 hours as you should call every trial signup user. Another one could be a list of leads who opened up your first email, but didn’t reply.

With Smart Views, you will spend less time searching for lists of leads and more time selling to leads.

2. Work quickly through a list of leads

With Smart Views, you now have your list of leads but how can you go through the list as quickly as possible?

In How to quickly work through a list of leads, we cover this in detail. However, the most important advice is to structure your search queries so that after you contact a lead, the lead is automatically removed from your search results, allowing you to only see the leads you haven’t contacted yet.

For instance, if you want to call through a list of new leads, your search in Close.io should include a filter for customers you have never called (calls = 0).

Once the first lead is called, the list will automatically update and remove the first lead since they no longer meet the criteria of having zero calls.

The beauty of using the right filter is that you won’t have to manually remove leads from your lead list and the list will always be up-to-date.

3. Use keyboard shortcuts

The final hack for a higher call volume is to use Close.io’s keyboard shortcuts. If you press the question mark button on your keyboard while Close.io is open, you'll see a modal window listing all of the available keyboard shortcuts.

This is the specific sequence of keys you need to use to boost your call volume to 200+ calls per day.

1. Click on a specific Smart View to open up the list of leads you would like to call now.
2. Use the keyboard shortcut  (Command Shift D) to call your first lead. While Close.io is calling the first lead, it will open up the lead window to provide context. As the phone is ringing, read through the information about the lead. As soon as your prospect picks up the phone, crush it!
3. Use the shortcut  (Command Period) to hang up the call.
4. Save your notes and press  (Command Left) to go back to your list of leads. You will notice that the lead you just called will be gone from the list and you are all set to call the next one.
5. Start with  to repeat the sequence.

Using these keyboard shortcuts, you will break your daily calls record sooner than you think!

Better workflow = better results

With these 3 tips, you are now ready to drastically improve your daily sales workflow and know how to quickly go through a list of leads.

Setting up the right workflow isn't complicated and will immediately pay off, as our sales team at Close.io can vouch for.

Drop us a message and let us know how many sales calls you managed to do today :) Can you beat your own record tomorrow

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Frequent distractions, interruptions or even a sub-optimal workflow can mean the difference between a successful salesperson or even that next, big deal. Here are 6 ways to improve your sales productivity and sales workflow.

10 free new online sales tools for prospecting
Easy-to-use tools that simplify your workday. These free sales tools help reps get more done in less time with less stress.

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One of the biggest time-wasters in sales is scheduling appointments. Here's 13 tools that help simplify scheduling calls and meetings.

EDMONTON – New research suggests that hydraulic fracking of oil and gas wells is behind earthquakes caused by humans in Western Canada.

A study, published Tuesday by a group of top Canadian researchers, says problems in Alberta and British Columbia aren’t being caused by injecting waste water underground. It’s a major step in understanding seismic events that have already led to changed regulations in Alberta and caused public concern in both provinces.

“It’s critical that we get to a complete scientific understanding of the issue,” said David Eaton, a University of Calgary geophysicist and a co-author of the study.

Fracking involves pumping high-pressure fluids underground to create tiny cracks in rock to release natural gas or oil. Scientists had previously concluded that oilpatch activity can cause earthquakes by making it easier for faults in underground rock to slip, but they didn’t know whether the Canadian quakes were caused by fracking or by the disposal of waste water by injecting it back underground.

Public interest has been high, especially after a tremblor in January shook pictures on the walls of homes in Fox Creek, Alta., a community in the centre of the Duvernay oil and gas field. Measuring between 4.2 and 4.8 on the Richter scale, the quake was the largest of hundreds of similar shakers around the community since 2013.

Eaton and his colleagues began with a database of more than 12,000 fracked and disposal wells drilled between 1985 and 2015. They cross-referenced that with another database of seismic events over that time.

A complex statistical analysis pinned the blame convincingly on fracking and not disposal, Eaton said.

“There are more earthquakes in Western Canada that are more related to hydraulic fracturing than waste-water injection by a factor of about two.”

Eaton said the situation is reversed in the United States, where waste-water disposal is considered to be behind most human-caused seismic activity.

That doesn’t mean that a lot of wells cause earthquakes. Eaton calculates that about 0.3 per cent of fracked wells create problems.

But there are enough wells drilled for even that tiny fraction to be a concern.

“Even at 0.3 per cent, because of the very large number of hydraulically fractured wells, it still represents an issue that is of high priority to address scientifically,” said Eaton.

Alberta’s energy regulator has already changed regulations for the industry as a result of the Fox Creek earthquakes. Eaton said regulators in British Columbia are also considering changes.

“The regulators have been quite responsive.”

Eaton suggested his findings raise questions about how well the geology of heavily fracked oilfields in Alberta and British Columbia is understood.

“The occurrences in Canada have come as a surprise — in some cases to industry — because there was a belief that all the potential faults had been identified,” he said. “One of the things we’re actively researching is to find new and better ways to identify these features.

“We’re looking for the signature of critically stressed faults in new and different ways.”

Scientists are aware of the pressure they face getting the issue right, Eaton said.

“There’s a mixture of science and the whole social-political aspect of this.”

The post Fracking, not water disposal, behind earthquakes: study appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Access the Total Value of Your Client List

By Colleen Francis

When it comes to generating sales, there’s one source that tends to get overlooked: the client list. I am constantly amazed at the number of sales professionals and companies that do nothing to encourage repeat sales, up-sales and cross-sales within their own customer list.

As I write this, many of my clients are struggling with what they can do now to ensure they finish their selling year at or above target. My message to you is this: go back to your current client list.

Repeat sales are more profitable than new sales. Why? For starters, repeat sales are faster. Your customers already like you and trust you. That’s why Chapter 10 of my book, Non-Stop Sales Boom, is completely focused on relationship building to ensure you’re capturing as many repeat sales as possible. 

The sales rule of thumb is that a list loses 10 percent of its value each month of absent contact. So, 10 months of no contact with your clients means your list is worth nothing — and you might as well cold call. Relationship neglect results in many sales losses, including seduction by competitors and the loss of referrals, which over time can result in tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses for your business.

Your list is as valuable as the quality of the relationship you have with those clients and their perception of that relationship. To sell more to your current clients you must transition your thinking from "customer list" to "building a relationship with my customer."

You can create a profitable relationship with your customers using the following six components:

1. Ubiquity: Recent studies from the Information Marketing Association show that your current clients can tolerate up to 200 contacts per year before they’ll ask you to go away. But that’s only if you provide a variety of touch points. You can't call a customer 200 times a year without landing on the do-not-call list. You can, however, call, email, mail, use LinkedIn, send them to your web page, pod cast and Youtube channel; make contact at tradeshows, conferences and networking events; do face-to-face sales calls, and use article placements in trade journals. The reason customers can withstand up to 200 touches per year is because smart sales people know it makes a difference to mix up the media types they use to contact customers.

2. Frequency: How often are you in touch with your clients? Regardless of whether 200 touches is specifically appropriate for you, don't let the number cloud the real message: you’re likely not doing enough. In my work, most companies and sales professionals feel that if they reach out four times per year, they are stalking the client. I believe that 26 is the minimum number of touches required per year for a truly profitable relationship. Using the first component, Ubiquity, you can build strong relationships with your clients by delivering valuable information on a regular basis using a variety of media types. Once every two weeks is a good target that won’t be overwhelming to clients.

3. Consistency: All 26 touches should arrive as expected and anticipated on a regular schedule. Consider sending a monthly email, along with a monthly hard copy newsletter, at two-week intervals. You could also advertise a free monthly web or tele-class for your clients on product training or business topics complimentary to your products. Trust is built with consistent behavior over time. If you consistently and reliably deliver your message to your clients it will demonstrate you can be trusted to deliver what you said, when and how you said it. Clients don't like surprises. They like results.

4. Trust: In order to build a trusting relationship with your clients you must maintain constant contact with them without lapse or interruption. What do you think would happen to the relationship with your spouse if you didn't come home one night, didn't call, didn't email or attempt contact, and then arrived home unexpectedly three months later? When you don't call your friends for weeks at a time, does your relationship grow stronger or weaker?

I’ve often thought that sales relationships are similar to dating. In both cases, it takes ongoing communication to build trust. If you don't contact the person you’re seeing at regular intervals, they’ll move on to someone else. Likewise, if you neglect the clients on your list, they’ll build a relationship with someone else instead (i.e. your competitor.)

5. Appeal: Be entertaining and friendly, yet professional. Remember that all selling (B2B and B2C) is about selling to humans. Your clients want to laugh, have fun, and be entertained. (Just don't go too far or you sacrifice your message.)

Which airlines, for example, command the most customer attention during the pre-flight safety announcements? Southwest and WestJet? Or the more traditional airlines such as American, United, Air Canada, and US Air? Southwest and WestJet have the most appeal; they’re more engaging because they make the announcements fun and friendly while still being professional.

Another step for being appealing to clients? Make sure that every contact attempt you send is worth opening, reading, and acting on. For instance, an industrial supply company recently distributed invitations for their annual charity event to all of their customers. The majority of invitees said no but dozens said yes. And many asked for a follow-up appointment to revisit their product mix and to add products.

6. Exceptional: This doesn’t mean using the best paper and the most expensive pen. It means being sure to include information, education, entertainment, and other interesting "stuff" that is relevant and valuable to your clients — delivered from an interesting person: you. Don't just "pitch" your clients each time you reach out to them. Share interesting ideas, your favorite books on business, and your thoughts on articles they might find useful. Remember that you are a human, selling to a human.

Using the six components above as your guide, it’s now time to try the following strategies as part of your 26-touches-per-year plan:

• Thank you card (hand written, personalized, and not on corporate stationary)
• Publishing or sharing an article on LinkedIn
• A case study sent in the mail
• Weekly video tips for using your products
• Invitations to seminars — live or on the web
• Advertising specialties, sent as a thank-you, that your clients will want to use, such as pens, mouse pads, calendars, etc.
• Podcasts or client interviews
• Company anniversary cards
• Invitations to trade shows and conferences
• New product announcements (separately or in a newsletter)
• Market reports or analyst reports
• White papers

How will you know when you’ve succeeded in accessing the total value of your client list? When your customers routinely go to you first instead of to other providers. And when they readily refer you to others. This will, in turn, create more sales, more acceptance of regular communication with them, and more action on your promotions and offers.  

Retaining and growing customer accounts is one of the most important aspects of your SaaS business. It takes a lot of hard work to draw customers into your company in the first place, so it’s important that you work to keep those customers more than satisfied once they actually decide to work with you.

Here are 5 Customer Success secrets you can start to implement into your company’s Customer Success strategy today:

1. Know Your Customer’s Goals & KPIs

Understanding your customers inside and out should be your first step in cultivating a long-term, mutually beneficial partnership. And in order to truly know them, you need to spend time asking important questions of each person that you work with—top to bottom in the organization. You need to go “high and wide” as ClientSuccess Founder/CEO Dave Blake says. This means establishing relationships with every person that’s associated with your business, whether the decision-making level or the influencer-level.

What kind of questions should you ask in order to get to know their goals and KPIs – what should you seek to know about each of these individuals? Here’s a start:

• What are their teams’ goals for your solution within their company?
• What are their personal goals for your solution?
• Did they have a role in choosing your solution and, if so, why did they advocate for or against it?
• How are they personally measured?
• What are their most important KPIs?
• Do they have any alliances or former business relationships with competitors?
• Do you have any connections in common? Could this help you or hurt you?

Spending time to go deep and truly understand your customers is a core foundation of your Customer Success team. And once you find out this information, you then must record this intel and truly understand it: the opportunities, the threats, the dynamics, the preferences, and so on.

Knowing the customer by understanding some of the above data points – what’s important to them and the metrics they care most about – is the right first step. But actually applying those metrics to how you manage and grow the relationship is just as crucial. It’s now your responsibility to tailor the relationship and the solution to what matters most to them and what will make that customer successful.

2. Set Expectations Early On

It’s likely that during the initial sales process, certain expectations were set – either directly or indirectly. It’s important to understand what commitments were made to your customer, what products or services were sold, what timelines were set, and any other promises that were made. It’s not uncommon, especially for quickly growing SaaS companies, to commit to certain new products or features or changes to satisfy the prospective customer. While that in and of itself isn’t a harmful thing, it can quickly escalate into a very bad situation if those promises don’t come into fruition – and on time.

There are several reasons that setting expectations early on with your customers (both what is expected from your company as well as your customer) is crucial to retention:

If your company can follow-through on what was promised weeks or even months before the “due date”, it prove to be impressive to your customer as it will mean you prioritized their relationship.

The element of uncertainty is virtually eliminated. The customer will know what to expect and when to expect it, which will give them peace of mind in the relationship with your company.

Having a clear vision early on can help your company develop KPIs around specific expectations, which will help you and your customer succeed in reaching goals together as a team.

3. Ask for Feedback, and Put it to Use

As we shared in a recent blog post, we love this advice that Entrepreneur magazine gives in a recent article. One one of the best ways you can show your customers you care is by asking them for feedback, really listening to what they have to say, responding to their thoughts and suggestions, and adapting accordingly. Here’s how the article explains it:

• Ask customers what’s on their minds regularly. That includes their satisfaction with their most recent sales or service experience and with your employees, as well as their general impressions of your business. Invite feedback at multiple contact points – via e-mail communications, online surveys, on your website, after online sales and on paper sales receipts. Keeping a finger on your customers’ pulse is good for the heart – and bottom line – of your business.
• Listen to what customers are saying about you in surveys, on Twitter or Yelp, or anywhere else they give feedback. Publish survey results and answers to customer questions in your e-mail newsletter. Create a sense of community around your business based on dialogue with your customers.
• Respond to customers promptly when they contact your business, whether it’s a complaint or a compliment. Show them you’re listening and that you care. If there’s a problem, fix it so they can go away happy to return to your business.
• Adapt your business based on customer feedback to better meet their needs. Communicate the changes you’re making based on what they’ve asked for.

4. Be Proactive Instead of Reactive

As Dave Blake states in a recent blog post, “It drives me crazy when a football team that is winning becomes too cautious too early in the game and changes their focus from an aggressive offense to a prevent defense. Many times this strategy backfires on the winning team and they end up losing the game.”

Sometimes Customer Success teams fall into a similar trap by viewing their role as “preventing defense”. Their mindset and activity is focused purely on retention, rather than growth. The CSMs will conduct a standard onboarding process and then passively manage their customers going forward – scheduling the occasional touch base, reactively addressing issues, and essentially “hoping” they get the renewal at the end of the term. Dave calls this a “maintain and retain” strategy. This type of preventative defense will likely result in the same outcome for Customer Success teams – they may end up losing clients by being too cautious in their approach.

Instead, Dave recommends approaching Customer Success with an offensive mindset, focusing on how to proactively drive value and growth within your accounts. Many Customer Success teams avoid this approach because they feel the CSMs will lose their “trusted advisor” status with clients if they display any focus on sales and growth. Dave respectfully disagrees. In fact, he states, “I’ve seen CSMs increase their trusted advisor status while still significantly growing revenue across their accounts. These offensive-minded CSMs develop deep relationships with their clients, clearly understand their client’s key business objectives, and leverage their trusted advisor status to align solutions and services to meet those objectives. That’s solution selling at its best. These CSMs become the primary lead generation source for the sales team. The result? Retention and growth.”

5. Create a Customer Success Culture

For SaaS companies, creating a culture of customer success means that every department and every role should have a part of customer success and should feel a portion of ownership, above and beyond the CSM role alone – no matter what. For marketing, incentivize the team to capture success stories from customers and to include customers in their marketing campaigns, rather than focusing solely on prospecting new business. Encourage them to capture videos and do interviews with current customers when they’re on the road for events. For product, let them communicate directly with customers to ensure they know what customers love about the product. Give product a seat (or three) at the table for Customer Advisory Board meetings or customer offsites. For finance and administration, give the team insight and communication with customers to make the invoicing or legal process smoother and less painful. And so on, across your entire organization.

The key is to ensure every role and every department has metrics or qualitative goals specific to their impact on customer success. When this starts from the top down and employees see the C-Suite interacting with customers on a daily basis, it will become part of your company’s DNA. This focus will accelerate not only your customers’ likelihood to continue doing business with your SaaS company, but they will likely invest even further if they know they are the priority and the lifeblood of your business.

What Are Your Customer Success Secrets?

Retaining customers while being proactive with customers is the key for Customer Success leaders. How is your company retaining (and growing) customer accounts?

Check out our resources below for more Customer Success best practices and insights for how your organization can put customers first:

eBook:

5 Ways to Surprise & Delight Your Customers

More than 2 billion adults worldwide, in both developed and developing countries, lack adequate access to banking services. Of this group, the majority isn’t excluded by choice; rather, cost, distance, need, and other variables make it challenging or impossible to access banking services.

Historically, banks and financial institutions haven’t seen this population as a lucrative group, because they tend to be low-income, drift in and out of the banking system, and don’t adopt high-value products, like credit. However, these populations are now becoming easier to access and, as a result, more attractive to financial institutions, because if products are scaled appropriately, they could represent a massive revenue stream.

In response, financial institutions, mobile network operators (MNOs), and card networks are using digital technology like mobile phones and payment cards to access these populations in the hopes of building new streams of revenue in an increasingly competitive banking system. By leveraging phones and cards to build out financial ecosystems, hand financial access to broad swaths of people without it, and expand the range of services available to large populations, these firms have the opportunity to profit immensely. 

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we take a close look at who the un- and underbanked are, the way financial institutions are using mobile phones and payment cards to access these populations, and whether there’s a profit opportunity for these stakeholders. 

 

Here are some key takeaways from the report.

• The un- and underbanked provide an important new opportunity for payments companies that can leverage digital technology. Previously, these individuals were not seen as valuable clients because they are typically low income and, therefore, nonlucrative. But with digital technology available that can scale quickly, payments companies can gain significant market share and revenue.
• Mobile phones are a key way of bringing the unbanked into the financial system through services like mobile money. And among the underbanked in developed countries, mobile provides account access in areas underserved by brick-and-mortar branches.
• Multiple players are teaming up to build payment card and point-of-sale (POS) infrastructure in developing countries in order to provide citizens without mobile phones secure, simple access to the banking system. In developed countries, prepaid cards are functioning as checking accounts for the un- and underbanked.
• For financial institutions, a small investment in the un- and underbanked can turn into a major revenue stream. Over time, these populations can build up larger balances or provide banks and card networks with interchange or interest-based fee revenue. In the next several years, digital technology will help make these populations a key competitive market. 

 

In full, the report:

• Details who comprises the un- and underbanked in developed and developing nations.
• Shows the barriers that keep people from accessing banking and financial services worldwide.
• Explains the reasons these populations are becoming increasingly accessible and attractive to financial institutions.
• Provides examples of how mobile phones and payment cards are granting access to un- and underbanked individuals worldwide.
• Examines the ways that mobile phones and payment cards can contribute to building a broader financial ecosystem in countries across the globe.
• Evaluates the revenue opportunity for financial institutions.
• Explains how firms can profit from these populations despite them being inaccessible and nonlucrative in the past.

 

Interested in getting the full report? Here are two ways to access it:

1. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >> Learn More Now
2. Purchase & download the full report from our research store. >> Purchase & Download Now

 

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PS. Did you know...

Our BI Intelligence INSIDER Newsletters are currently read by thousands of business professionals first thing every morning. Fortune 1000 companies, startups, digital agencies, investment firms, and media conglomerates rely on these newsletters to keep atop the key trends shaping their digital landscape — whether it is mobile, digital media, e-commerce, payments, or the Internet of Things.

Our subscribers consider the INSIDER Newsletters a "daily must-read industry snapshot" and "the edge needed to succeed personally and professionally" — just to pick a few highlights from our recent customer survey.

With our full money-back guarantee, we make it easy to find out for yourself how valuable the daily insights are for your business and career.  Click this link to learn all about the INSIDER Newsletters today.

 

Join the conversation about this story »

Blogging is a great way to communicate with your customers and reach new ones. Business owner Phoebe Clare blogs at Sage and Clare, where she documents her exotic trips scouting merchandise for her online home decor store she runs with Jemma Sage. Learn how Phoebe uses her blog to share inspiration for her curated marketplace while generating visits to the Sage and Clare eCommerce website.

Write meaningful content

One of Sage and Clare’s most popular posts was a commentary on a New York Times piece about Loulou Van Damme, a designer with a beautiful home in the hills of India. It spoke to the blog’s design-savvy audience and showcased products similar to the Sage and Clare inventory.

Regardless of your industry, choose topics that offer value or entertainment to your readers. Share how-tos, industry insights, and thoughtful posts. Don’t underestimate the importance of writing an enticing post title that will draw in your reader. On Facebook and Twitter, your post title is front and center, so it’s worth refining.

Optimize your blog post

Did you know other WordPress.com users can discover your content through the WordPress.com Reader? Tagging your blog post with descriptive and on-topic tags will help new readers find your blog.

Phoebe Clare uses categories and a handful of well-chosen tags to organize her posts and help readers find Sage and Clare’s content. Be selective when you assign tags and categories to posts. Five to 15 tags (or a combination of five to 15 tags and categories) is optimum.

Promote your posts

WordPress.com has built-in features designed for easy sharing. Just like Sage and Clare, you can use Publicize to connect your WordPress.com blog to your social media accounts. Next time you press publish, your post will automatically be shared through the Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn accounts you connected.

Make it easy for any visitor to share a link to your post on their social networks, their blog, or through email by adding Sharing buttons to the end of your posts.

BONUS: Help Google find you!

Do you know about the Google Search Console? If your business has a niche, you can tell the Google Search Console to help you position your site to be even more successful in search rankings. We’ll show you how!

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Your online presence begins with your website. Make it count by choosing the best of WordPress.com.

Consider upgrading to WordPress.com Premium or Business to unlock features like advanced customization, more space for your photos and videos, and stellar customer support.

Our Premium and Business plans also include a custom domain and access to premium themes.

Filed under: Better Blogging, Tags

Think of a time when you couldn’t read your email.

Not because you didn’t want to, but because you physically couldn’t do it . Maybe the WiFi was down, your computer was out of juice, your phone was being repaired. Maybe it was while on a flight? During a short camping trip? At your childhood home in the woods?

Offline is the exception. Being constantly connected is the norm.

Despite this new normal, for some reason, we still talk about “ecommerce” as if it is something separate and distinct from “real” commerce. This “ecommerce” thing is the all-powerful, mysterious Oz, pulling levers and working disruptive magic. Every day, another major retailer claims online shopping, showrooming, and free shipping are killing retail. Ecommerce is full of crazy new ideas like omnichannel, B2B2C, ultra-streamlined logistics, social selling and so on.

O RLY?

Let’s pause for the moment.

The 1908 Sears Roebuck catalog had every strategy necessary for a successful retailer today, in the year 2016.

• Omnichannel? Yep. They had a wildly successful catalog and physical presence in their own stores, general stores, at state fairs and pretty much everywhere else.
• B2B2C? Of course. Manufacturers took orders via Sears who brokered the information, transactions and delivery logistics.
• Social? Check! It says right on the cover, “Please Show this Catalogue (sic) to your Friends and Neighbors” — a 1908 version of the “Share This” button.
• Delivery logistics? Are you kidding? There was nothing like it! You could buy a wood stove, clothing, a car, live chickens, or even a house and Sears would get the goods to you by any means necessary — rail car, horse and buggy, hand-carry — whatever could move goods, did.

So why, today, is Sears circling the drain like so many other retailers struggling with ecommerce?

Maybe this is because buying stuff via an internet-connected device is called ecommerce — not simply commerce.

What’s in a name? Maybe more than expected. One of the oldest tropes in mythology is how the act of naming someone or something imparts or removes power. It’s as if the naming of the thing sets the future path, be it good or bad. Calling the act of shopping via an internet connected device ecommerce predetermines its destiny to be limited to only online. Instead of calling it was it really is—commerce—it now has mystery, power and boundaries.

That one letter —e — made finding and buying things online something distinct, something separate, and perhaps a little abstract as compared to the “real” commerce business being done in stores.

For some, ecommerce was a distraction from the bigger picture. The Borders bookstore chain famously outsourced selling books online to Amazon: visitors to borders.com were simply re-directed to Amazon. Though Borders tried to course-correct several years later, the outsourcing was cited as a top reason for their bankruptcy.

Some retailers saw ecommerce as a slightly threatening nuisance, and put into its own “separate business unit” box to protect the “real” business. Often, these retailers would use a rather perplexing strategy of leveraging ecommerce to primarily to “drive in-store visits and sales,” thereby reducing any hope of the “e-business” proving its potential value.

Perhaps the most curious ecommerce strategy is when they want their customers to shop online via in-store kiosks for widely available merchandise they display but don’t stock.

Touted as a way to provide customers with an “omnichannel experience,” these retailers seem to have forgotten why the customer is in their store in the first place: to buy (and take home) their stuff! Retailers have further divided the customer experience; online and offline disparities are now more prevalent than ever.

At what point did retailers lose focus on the customer? Customers don’t stop to think what drove them to a website, what device they’re using to shop, or if they’d prefer to go into a store. They’re simply… shopping.

Much like Voldemort and other villains of folklore, the e-monster has a crucial weakness: its power is limited to a customer experience mediated by the capabilities (or limits) of an ecommerce platform. As it turns out, the core capabilities of any ecommerce platform (FIND-SHOW-BUY) are not magical, they are procedural (and should be treated as such).

Commerce is much bigger than ecommerce. It’s the total customer experience, and retailers are starting to use technology to bridge the gap they’ve helped create.

Think about your last really good customer experience in a physical store.

Chances are, you were greeted by an employee. They might’ve asked you if they can help you find anything, they might’ve recognized you as a frequent customer. They might’ve shown you something that complemented the product you’d been carrying around the store with you, and they might’ve been able to upsell you on that little $10 add-on at the cash register.

Now, think about your last really good online customer experience. Chances are, you were thrilled when you found what you were looking for, got a good price, quick shipping, and an easy checkout.

If we kill the e and get back to the roots of commerce, we can start to think of technology as a customer experience enhancement — as well as a business accelerator. We can blend the best parts of the in-store experience with the best parts of the online experience. We’re seeing hints of this in the marketplace — Lowes and Home Depot have both started to reduce the distinction between “in-store” and “online” — they just seek to create a quality customer experience where they can and have invested heavily in a technology ecosystem to support the always-connected customer.

The way to kill the e-monster is to change its game.

There’s no magic bullet in a slightly better shopping cart, visual commerce or any of the other 10,000 tactics discussed in meeting after meeting. The things that will make the e-monster stand down are to stop naming it, obsessing over it and fearing it, and let it fade into memory as we get back to work on doing “commerce” better than the next company.

Martin Focazio co-authored a modified version of this post published on LinkedIn.

Baidu's FaceYou app lets you add all sorts of spooky effects or animal characteristics to a digital image of your face.



Face You makes use of an AI technique called deep learning to automatically identify key points on a person’s face, so that software can then position and stretch a virtual mask with amazing accuracy.

Deep learning is driving a lot more than just goofy apps at Baidu, though. It is making existing products smarter and helping the company’s engineers dream up many entirely new ideas.

Baidu is China’s most successful Internet business: over 92 percent of the country’s more than 536 million Internet search users employ its portal services and mobile apps. And it continues to grow. In the past year it has moved into new areas, including music streaming, insurance, and banking.



Baidu's AI team created deep-learning platform called Paddle that engineers in other departments could use. And researchers from the institute are often embedded within other departments. As a result, deep learning has been used to improve Baidu’s antivirus filters and to predict when a hard drive in one of the company’s giant server farms will fail, among other things.

Read more »

Research comes in two modes: customer and competitor. Depending on whom you sell to and who your competitors are, one may be more critical for winning than the other, but both are essential, nevertheless.

Research isn’t an event—it’s a process. And that process can only be effective and efficient when it’s supported by a sales rep who has the skills to employ accurate and relevant data. I reviewed Owler. It can provide that data.

Customer Knowledge

When you’re “before the sale,” in the pre-opportunity stage, customer knowledge enables you to determine what’s going on in your customer’s world—outside, and often inside, their company. Understanding your customer’s opportunities and challenges, their markets, their competitors, their goals and objectives, and their strategies and tactics allows you to position yourself, your products and services, and your company in a way that will differentiate you from your competitors. Owler can help you become a student of your customer. You can read a lot more about this in Steve Andersen’s and my new book Beyond the Sales Process.

Competitor Knowledge

Competitive knowledge comes in more than one flavor. The best salespeople I’ve worked with understand their competitors’ companies, including their business strategies, successes and failures, the strengths and weaknesses of their competitors’ products and services, and even how individual sales reps compete against them. They use this information to devise a competitive strategy that underscores the value of their own offerings while diminishing the perceived value of their competitors’. This is a skill. It takes practice, insight, and knowledge. Again, Owler can provide what you need to understand that competitive landscape.

When I was introduced to Owler, I knew they were on to something, and my instinct was correct. Incoming emails alert me to what the companies that impact my practice and me are up to, to what other authors are writing and doing, and to the relevant activities of my clients and their customers. I feel extraordinarily well-informed.

Research is a critical component for winning in today’s hyper-competitive, noisy, and busy markets. To find your clear path through the clamor, I recommend starting with Owler and learning how to put all of the information they can provide to great use.

Tony Robbins is an electric public speaker.

For the past 30 years, people have paid hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of dollars each to attend one of the performance coach's high-energy seminars.

In addition to personally coaching powerful people like investing legend Paul Tudor Jones and President Bill Clinton, celebrities can often be found in his audience.

Oprah Winfrey said that Robbins' Unleash the Power Within event was "one of the most incredible experiences" of her life, and Al Gore was in the front row of Robbins' "Why we do what we do" TED Talk, which has now been viewed more than 25 million times online between TED's site and YouTube.

While public speaking is a skill that can only improve with practice, we asked Robbins what techniques even novices can begin implementing in their next speech. Here are his top three tips.

SEE ALSO: Wharton and Harvard psychologists share the public speaking trick that helped them give successful TED Talks

1. Know and respect your audience.

Robbins said that getting to know your audience and respecting them for who they are "might sound basic and corny, but I don't see it that way. I want to know, just like when I work with an individual, what do they desire, what do they hate, what do they love, what are they hungry for, what's missing?"

"Because the more you understand what somebody wants, needs, and fears, the more you can figure out how to add value," he said. Before he speaks at an event or in front of a company, he does his "homework" and interviews people who will be attending, and has his team fill him in on what the else he needs to know.

2. Add more value than anyone expects.

Robbins said that in order to leave a lasting impression on your audience, you need to surprise them by going deeper than they predicted. The key to doing this is by truly caring about what you're saying.

"Don't ever speak publicly about anything that you're not passionate about and that you don't actually believe you have something truly unique to deliver," he said.

"Don't get roped into talking about something that you don't really have passion for, and don't get roped into something you don't have expertise in. Why should somebody listen to you? If you're going to take somebody's time, you better deliver."

3. Tap your audience's emotions.

"We've all been put to sleep by somebody who's told us all these wonderful facts that didn't matter because information without emotion is not retained," Robbins said. A great presenter draws you in and takes you outside of yourself. That's why you need to transport the audience.

And the way to move an audience is by becoming moved yourself, which can only happen if you're being genuine.

"So if you're just giving some frickin' talk you've memorized over and over again, you're going to have a flat affect," he said. "If you've just got a bunch of visuals on the screen that are leading your talk, hang up your shoes and get the hell out of there." Practice your presentation, but give yourself room to improvise.

"You need to be in the moment and flexible to make it real and raw," Robbins said. "You'll enjoy it, they'll enjoy it, and you'll be memorable."

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

How to Confidently Buy All the New Customers You Can Stand written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

 

While the title of this post may seem a little odd or even off-putting, when it comes right down to it a lot of sales and marketing involves purchasing business.

When you advertise, you invest in the opportunity to generate customers. When a salesperson prospects and goes on a sales call, you’re investing time and salary or commission in the act of acquiring customers.

Here’s what I know – most small business owners invest far too little in marketing, in part, because they don’t fully understand how to do so confidently.

I mean, if you write a check to Facebook or Google and have no sense of what will happen and what it will be worth, it can be a little intimidating.

Let me ask this – if you knew, with complete certainty that for every $2 you spent, you would get $5 back – would you go get all the $2 bills you could find?

To understand how much you can invest or, better yet, should invest in marketing you must understand what a lead and ultimately a customer is worth to your business.

These may seem like rather advanced metrics, but they are critical if you are to grow. Quite often the thing that chokes off growth is the failure to invest properly in marketing.

If you know that a customer is worth, say, $10,000 a year and yet you only invest a few hundred every month in acquiring them, you are effectively suffocating your ability to grow.

Now I’m not suggesting you spend for spend sake, note that I’ve used the word “invest” to describe this activity, but to invest wisely you must understand a few important metrics.

Advanced conversion metrics

I love tracking conversion rate on the whole, but the following three pieces of the puzzle should be considered separately to get a complete picture of conversion in your business.

1) Value of a Lead – This is every visit to your website or subscriber on your email list. For example, if you have 1000 subscribers and your email marketing efforts generate $10,000 a year, you could say that the value of 1 subscriber on your list $10.

Armed with this knowledge you might start to think of some new ways to focus on list growth, not for growth sake, but to generate far greater opportunities for business.

Or if your site had 25,000 visitors last month and you made $25,000 net profit –  that’s an average of $1 per visitor.

I realize that this may be a gross oversimplification of the many moving parts in your business, but the goal here is to narrow your focus on just a handful of things so you can stay focused and hopefully stop wasting time on things that don’t matter.

With this number, you can begin to focus on how much you can spend to generate more traffic or more sign-ups.

Here’s a nice article from FormStack that goes into the factors involved in calculating the value of a lead.

2) Lifetime value of a customer – this is the amount of profit a customer returns over the lifetime of being a customer. This number allows you to think about how much you can invest to land a new customer.

If a customer is potentially worth thousands to your business over a three-year span, for example, you know how much you can spend or are willing to spend to get that customer, knowing that if you keep them happy, it will be money well spent.

The other thing this number allows you to do is think about cost vs. return in your business model. If you can create a product/service mix that allows you to recoup your marketing investment with the first sale, you can then go to work on selling more from a break even point.

One of the most potent ways to grow a business is to spend every dime you can to break even on the first sale and then go to work on selling 20-30% of those customers a far higher priced, higher profit service.

In this model, your customers are paying you to market to them and armed with your increasing lifetime number; you know what you can and should invest every single month.

This kind of turns the % of revenue model for marketing investment on its head, and that’s a good thing.

Here’s a more complex description of the formula that can go into calculating the lifetime value of a customer.

3) Cost to acquire a new customer – this is the marketing spend required on average to acquire a new customer. This can be a moving target for some businesses, but it’s a key factor in creating your marketing budget and understanding the value of your marketing activities.

This is the most important number when it comes to assessing the effectiveness of your marketing channels or traffic sources. For example, if your lifetime value is $100 over a year and your cost to acquire a new customer on average is $25, but the cost to acquire customers in a channel like Google AdWords is $75, you might reconsider that channel.

If you’ve never tried to determine this number, you may have to take a fairly crude approach at first and simply determine how much you spent last year on marketing and divide it by how many new customers you acquired. This will change as you start investing in new approaches and tracking effectiveness.

Here’s another great article from the folks at Kissmetrics on calculating customer acquisition cost.

Initially, you should spend some time and create guestimates for each of this metrics, so you have something with which to start working.

From there you start to refine the inputs that go into each number so you can lay the entire picture out on a dashboard or spreadsheet that allows you to monitor changes and accuracy over time.

When you get the point where this thinking permeates your marketing approach, and you can clearly see what every dollar you invest returns, you’ll be ready to buy all the business you can handle.

Pop quiz: What’s a great way to engage buyers, encourage them to rate or assess their current strategies and connect them to an end goal or potential? The not-so-surprising answer is quizzes and assessments!

Your buyers are gravitating to more snackable, easy-to-digest assets: Up to 84% say they have started to prefer more interactive and visual content that they can access on-demand. But marketers are facing a predicament: Only 33% of buyers said they thought the assessments they engaged with were valuable.

What’s causing this gap?

Quizzes and assessments are relatively new to the B2B marketing mix. As consumers, we’ve engaged with magazine quizzes and even their digital counterparts on social networks and online publications. Very few organizations, though, have been able to translate these fun experiences for more professional audiences.

If you’re looking to craft high-impact quizzes and assessments that engage your buyers and encourage them to take action, here are a few tips and best practices to guide you:

1. Make it quick and easy. There is a place for detailed questions, but a quiz or assessment isn’t one of them. Save those for your research studies and surveys. By design, quizzes and assessments are meant to be quick, easy and actionable for your buyers. They’re supposed to move through the process and receive their results seamlessly. We usually encourage companies to keep their assessments to eight questions or fewer to keep users engaged.

2. Tell them something they don’t know. One way to keep your audience engaged is to include fun facts that align with your questions. While it’s important to design concise questions and responses, supporting factoids educate your audience and add value to their experience.

3. Allow buyers to benchmark against their peers. Nearly all buyers (95%) recommend that marketers provide more benchmarking data in their content — hence the value of surveys. But surveys are typically expensive and require long lead times to collect data, analyze it and aggregate it to tell a comprehensive story. Custom-built assessments and ROI calculators can be custom coded so your buyers not only see their end results, but also the aggregated results of all participants. This allows them to easily benchmark against their peers and determine if and how they should change their current processes or strategies.

4. Provide actionable insights and best practices. I consider assessments a prime example of value exchange between buyer and brand. Your buyers are taking time out of their day to answer your questions and share personal information, so the least you can do is share valuable insights and recommendations to help them do their jobs better. Offer participants a few quick tips and best practices to reward them for their time.

5. Show them how to move forward. All effective content has a compelling call to action, which may differ based on your campaign goals, your target audience and their content preferences. In some cases, it is most effective to promote a more detailed follow-up content asset at the end of the quiz. Other times, offering a free consultation with a subject matter expert to discuss quiz results and recommendations is a powerful way to continue the conversation. Regardless, the goal is to encourage your buyers to take some sort of next step after they complete the quiz. This helps you stay top of mind and gives you a prime opportunity to reconnect and re-engage with them.

6. Make your quiz a part of your content journey. Of course, there’s no point creating a quiz or assessment if you can’t get your buyers to engage with it! Although you should promote your final piece across all promotional channels, we encourage brands to think about the role assessments play in their content journey. Try to package quizzes and assessments with related content on a specific trend or topic. After your target customers collect some background information or research from those initial assets, they may get the urge to see how their company stacks up.

New content consumption trends and preferences tell us that your buyers want interactive and easy-to-digest content. More importantly, they want quick yet detailed feedback on their businesses’ current strategies and how they stack up against their peers.

Quizzes and assessments are powerful content formats that can help you engage your buyers and arm them with new knowledge. With the proper strategy and design, you can also compel your buyers to learn more about your solutions and services. Now, answer our quick quiz by sharing your feedback in the comments section below.

Think you’re prepared for your next sales meeting? Think again: According to IDC, more than half (57%) of B2B buyers feel that sales teams aren’t prepared for their first conversation.

Preparation can mean a lot of things -- product/service knowledge, understanding the issues your product is supposed to solve, or knowledge of the prospect’s history, problems, priorities, and challenges.

In short, preparation means gaining a deep understanding of how what you’re selling aligns with what the customer needs. Preparation may even be as basic as understanding the purpose of the meeting and who the players are.

Here are five tips to prepare you to meet with buyers and have a productive conversation.

1) Do your homework.

This is the single most important factor in having a real business conversation. When Warren Buffett takes a meeting, he never asks about industry, market, competitors or advantages. He already knows them. In fact, he says, asking these questions demonstrates a lack of preparation.

Given that all of this information is at your fingertips today, there is no excuse for a lack of preparation. Understand who your prospect is, where they are coming from, what’s important to them, and what challenges they are facing. If you can show you understand what keeps them up at night and have some possible solutions, you’re in.

2) Target the right person for the meeting.

Find out which individuals in the C-suite are most likely able to make the decision to purchase your product or service. Basic research should help you determine which executive ultimately owns the area having to do with your products and services: e.g., marketing analytics, supply chain solutions, accounting software, etc.

3) Understand key players’ priorities.

Keep track of executive changes within your target accounts. Set up Google Alerts for your customers, regularly check their websites, and -- this is really important -- read their quarterly conference call transcripts if they are public companies.

Management will often announce on these calls new initiatives in which your company could be a player. Taking 10 minutes to read one of these transcripts could provide entry into a deal that you otherwise might not ever have known about.

4) Know whether the buyer wants an order taker or a collaborator.

It’s important before going to a meeting to understand what your buyers expect from salespeople. If they have a sophisticated understanding of what they’re looking for and prefer salespeople to be order takers and you push them too hard to collaborate, you may just turn them off. 

But if they are open to collaboration, identify what collaboration specifically means to them. Are they looking for an advisor or deeper business commitments? Always find out if your organization is equipped to and able to meet their expectations before promising buyers anything. 

This approach requires flexibility. It can even entail tricky financial, legal, and change management issues. If not, figure out what it will take to foster a collaboration that works for both parties. The key is to sell to buyers how they want to be sold to.

5) Ask relevant questions. 

There’s a big difference between a strategic sales pro and a product jockey. Before you start lobbing product details and benefits at a prospect you have to know what they are thinking. 

You’ve done your homework. Take what you’ve learned and use it to get more information. By primarily listening instead of talking, you can get your prospect to open up about what is important to them. Carefully crafted questions will result in illuminating answers that will guide the conversation toward the appropriate product benefits for that particular prospect.

By deepening your understanding of your prospect, their company, their unique business position, and what they are looking for in a vendor, you increase your chance of succeeding in your meeting and winning the business. 

In a survey we recently conducted, 347 SMB salespeople reported that inbound marketing generates their most qualified leads. For this sample of salespeople, inbound generated even more qualified leads than referrals, word of mouth, or networking, and significantly more than cold calling or cold emailing.

It’s great that these salespeople are getting so much value from inbound marketing. But I find that most companies are still missing a few obvious, simple, and inexpensive ways to generate even more inbound leads: anonymous visitor tracking, proactive website chat, and slide-in calls-to-action.

Don't put off implementing these three lead generation methods. You can use them to start more conversations with many hot prospects as quickly as tomorrow. Here’s how to get started.

1) Visitor Tracking

Even on websites well-optimized to convert visitors into leads, only a single-digit percentage of visitors fill out a form to share their contact information and become a lead. That means more than 90% of your visitors are clicking away before you discover their identity -- many, never to return.

With the abundance of freely available information on the web about products and services, today’s buyers wait until later in their sales cycle to contact companies and their salespeople. That doesn't mean that salespeople have to wait to contact them, though. In fact, Forrester reports "the first viable vendor to reach a decision maker and set the buying vision wins 74% of the time."

So, stop squandering this lead source. Install an anonymous visitor tracking service that can detect the companies visiting your site, such as HubSpot's Prospects tool. Prospects automatically detects and presents a list of companies (note: not specific contacts) that have visited your website, but have not yet converted. It also enables salespeople to search, filter, and favorite companies that match their ideal buyer profile, and  set up alerts to get notified when companies fitting a specific profile visit their website. The tool is integrated with HubSpot’s free CRM, which enables reps to quickly associate visitors with company information from our database of 19M companies, and add leads to lists.

Watch this video to learn how to set up anonymous visitor tracking:

Watch this video to learn how to find prospects using anonymous visitor tracking:

Both of the above videos were published by a HubSpot partner, Market Loyal. Read their article for more tricks on using HubSpot Prospects here. 

Since these types of prospects have not requested contact, approach them carefully. Don't start your conversation with, "Someone from your company has been visiting our website" -- that’s borderline creepy. Instead, go to Linkedin and look for contacts that fit your ideal buyer persona and use one or more of these 28 sales email templates to initiate a dialogue. And given the fact that these buyers are potentially looking for what you have, you can't go wrong with picking up the phone and delivering your positioning statement either.

2) Proactive Website Chat

An even easier way to connect with a new lead is by initiating chat sessions with website visitors in real time. Live chat functionality can turn a website into a prospecting machine. It allows salespeople and buyers to skip the landing page, email prospecting, phone calls, and the back anf forth scheduling altogether. When a visitor arrives on a chat-enabled website, they are presented with an invitation to chat. Once a website visitor responds, the chat operator is notified. Voila! Salesperson, meet prospect. That beats sending a bunch of emails and voicemails and hoping you get a few responses, huh?

Many HubSpot customers use SnapEngage chat software integrated with HubSpot's marketing software or our free CRM. These integrations automatically create a new lead after a chat session with a website visitor. They also record and attach transcripts of chat sessions to new or existing leads within the CRM.

To increase the chances of a visitor responding to the chat, the software can even vary the question used to initiate the conversation based on the page the visitor is viewing. Proactive chat software sends automated, targeted chat invitations (on behalf of an online agent) to visitors based on pre-configured rules. For example, check out the image below or visit the page yourself to see how SnapEngage prompts visitors viewing the page about the HubSpot-SnapEngage integration by asking, "Would you like to integrate your HubSpot with SnapEngage?" 

Well, would you? :-) If you’re not convinced yet, read the stats below the image ...

 

Software company Bizible found leads from live chat contributed to approximately 25% of their new monthly revenue each month, making it their second largest sales channel in terms of revenue. In addition, lead to opportunity conversion increased 50% after implementing chat. When we began using proactive chat on HubSpot.com, we increased our overall visitor to lead conversion rate as well. And like Bizible, we found these leads converted at a much higher rate: 2x higher than those requesting a demo through a standard landing page.

The beautiful thing about chat is that it allows salespeople to instantly connect with leads at the exact time the prospect is investigating a solution. The ability of salespeople to connect with leads captured through typical landing page forms diminishes as time goes on. This lead response study concluded that "companies that try to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving queries are nearly seven times as likely to have meaningful conversations with key decision makers as firms that try to contact prospects even an hour later." With website chat, there is absolutely zero delay between the time of inquiry and the buyer-salesperson connection. Therefore, it just makes sense that companies like HubSpot, Bizible, and many others have drastically increased down-funnel conversion rates using proactive website chat. 

The takeaway? Use website chat to serve your prospects at exactly the time they're interested by connecting with them while they are browsing the site. 

If you want to learn from others who have implemented website chat or share your experiences as you get started, join the discussion on Inbound.org.

3) Slide-In Calls-to-Action

Last, but certainly not least, most companies are missing out on inbound leads by not using slide-in calls to action. A call-to-action -- commonly abbreviated as "CTA" -- is an image or line of text that prompts a website visitor to take a specific action. The desired action could be to download an ebook, sign up for a webinar, request a proposal, or book time to talk to a salesperson. Once the visitor takes that action and provides their information, they become a lead. (Here are 30 real CTA examples if you’re interested.)  

While a CTA can be placed anywhere on a website, a slide-in CTA is especially effective. Why? Slide in CTAs, as the name implies, slide into view as a user scrolls down a page. When done well, the movement catches the attention of a website visitor without obscuring the page content.   

See the animated gif below for an example of a slide-in CTA: 

Last year, HubSpot launched a free tool called Leadin. While Leadin offers much more than just the ability to add slide-in CTAs to a website, it does make them very easy to set up. And many new Leadin users report capturing their first leads from slide-in CTAs within hours of setting up the tool.

Need leads tomorrow? Get up from your desk right now and walk over to your webmaster (or call up your web design agency) and demand they implement slide-in calls to action immediately.  

Don’t want to try Leadin? Here’s a tutorial for coding your own CTAs. 

Stop Missing Out on Hot Leads

Marketers and sales professionals work hard to identify, attract, and engage prospects. You’re probably scouring the web for contact information, crafting and sending hundreds of prospecting emails, smiling and dialing only to leave voicemail after voicemail, attending networking events multiple times per month, annoying clients with repeated referral requests, and maybe even blogging to generate leads.

Stop working so hard. Really, stop it. You’re doing all of this ridiculously hard work and meanwhile, there are leads right under your nose. 

There are in-market prospects visiting your website right now that you aren't even trying to connect with. My plea (inspired by the Humpty Dance): Stop what you're doing, cause I'm about to ruin the cold calling rhythm and cold emails that you're used to. Hook up these three methods to connect with more inbound leads today and “yo, you’ll be making money” in no time.

Author: Gareth Goh

Marketers have a well-deserved reputation of being creative types, thinking outside the box and experimenting with new ideas that build brands, reach audiences, and engage customers. However, there is a critical component to marketing –and it’s one that can feel unintuitive to marketers—Data. And I don’t mean just random numbers and records, but accurate, high-quality, and actionable data that informs marketers how they should execute their growth plans.

Marketing responsibilities are becoming increasingly technical in nature, and the task of collecting, analyzing, and making sense of all that data is moving away from the realm of a dedicated operations manager to the entire marketing team.

The typical modern-day marketer works with a full stack of different technology platforms on a daily basis. At the very least, they are working with a marketing automation system and a customer database/CRM as the most basic must-haves. But the average digital marketer likely has several other systems at their disposal, from content management platforms and business intelligence to social media and lead nurturing tools. Needless to say, each of these individual platforms contains reams of valuable marketing data, but none of this data is very helpful if it exists in a silo. The best marketers rely on pieces of this data (from the various platforms) to successfully pull together and execute their marketing campaigns.

But how can you pull together disparate data?

This is where “marketing middleware,” one of the fastest-growing aspects of marketing operations, comes in. Middleware serves as the glue that connects all these different applications, greasing the wheels so they can work together to enable the back-and-forth sharing of data and, subsequently, strategy, insights, and execution.

While marketing middleware has gotten a bad rap over the years, due to its (earned) reputation as being an archaic and complex system to set up and use, there are simply too many benefits that come from having your marketing data fully integrated to be daunted by the admittedly technical aspects of a marketing platforms integration. With middleware, you can drive more effective campaigns using sales team data, more efficiently distribute leads to your sales team, and create a hierarchy of systems to serve as a “single source of truth,” and more.

There are certainly some back-end technical nuances and wiring for marketers to wrap their heads around, but don’t be deterred! There’s a great deal of legwork that marketers can undertake by laying the foundation for a successful data integration before looping in IT or an outsourced data integrations specialist. Follow these three steps to integrate your data and achieve a marketing operations peace of mind:

1. Figure Out Which of Your Platforms Should Be Integrated, and Why

This is a natural place to start your data integration–figuring out what data you want to integrate in the first place. A common place to begin is between your marketing automation system and your customer database/CRM, to further align your sales and marketing data and processes. But consider whether it also make sense to integrate your customer support client with your marketing automation as well. How about your finance and e-commerce platforms too? It ultimately boils down to asking yourself one simple question: How will it benefit you, as a marketer, if this data and these platforms were synched and consistent? Does the answer to that question help you achieve your marketing or organization’s goals? To look at it from another point of view, ask yourself if the inconsistent data currently living across your multiple platforms is preventing you from working effectively.

2. Sort Out Your Field Mappings

Field mappings are probably the most critical part of any data integration project. Different platforms collect data and information through different fields, some of which might not translate across disparate systems. For instance, your marketing automation might ask for “Name” while your CRM might ask for “First Name” and “Last Name” as two distinct fields. When synching this data, you need to make sure those fields with different names, but containing the same information, are mapped to each other.

Go through your key fields to look for any inconsistencies (such as in the above example) and note them down for each platform. Additionally, determine a hierarchy of your systems to figure out which system should “own” certain fields in the case of an inconsistency. When data is overwritten, it should be done so to your specifications. Let’s say a customer named Robert Owen is entered into your CRM as “Bob,” but entered your marketing automation platform as “Robert,” and you have determined that your marketing automation is at the top of your hierarchy. In this case, all Bob Owen’s in this context would be overwritten as Robert Owen.

3. Understand and Plan for Risks

One huge obstacle holding marketers back from diving whole-hog into a data integration project is the crippling fear that their data may get screwed up if they “mess with it.” This can be even more daunting if you decide that you want all your existing data to be synced, rather than having your data synced on a “go forward” basis, with just new data. This is a totally valid and justifiable concern, but there are ways to ensure that your data remains safe and sound.

Whether you’re attempting such a technically challenging project on your own or reaching out to data integration specialists, make sure that you have a master record created before, during, and long after the initial sync. Most data integration platforms should create such a master record for you as a fail-safe anyways, but be sure to clarify this. Typically, your marketing automation system, customer database/CRM, or ERP should be your “System of Record”–the parent database to which all data questions should ultimately be referred to. This should be your single source of truth. Your various other platforms–be it sales, marketing, support, finance, etc.–will be your child records.

Integrating your platforms and the valuable data contained within them is a daunting, but essential element of successful marketing operations. So lay the foundation by determining why your platforms should be integrated, how significant the volume of existing data to be integrated is, which fields should be mapped over and how, what the ensuing workflow will look like, and what the hierarchical structure will be following integration–and you’ll be well on your way to achieving a marketing operations peace of mind.

Have any data integration nightmares? I’d love to hear about your experiences and how you overcame them in the comments below!

 

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How to Integrate Your Data and Achieve a Marketing Operations Peace of Mind was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Many modern psychology researchers have suggested that the human brain has three (figurative) parts:

1. The new brain – thinks (rational data)
2. The middle brain – feels (emotions and gut feeling)
3. The old brain – decides (takes input from both and pulls the trigger)

Until fairly recently, many fields of study (notably economics) believed that our decisions were largely rational. However, neuromarketing as a field has suggested that the old brain, the old primitive “fight or flight” part, makes most of our decisions.

So how do we influence the old brain for greater growth?

Patrick Renvoise and Christophe Morin wrote a book called Neuromarketing about this in 2005.

The book is a gold mine of information, consisting of both academic research and case studies. Many are classic advertising examples, but you can easily apply these to your website.

In the beginning of the book, they offer a sort of framework for marketing to the old brain. It consists of “the only 6 stimuli that speak to the old brain.” We’ll outline those here and show of examples of the triggers in action. The 6 triggers are:

1. Self-centered
2. Contrast
3. Tangible input
4. The beginning and the end
5. Visual stimuli
6. Emotion

You’ll find that these stimuli are used in many of the most effective ads and websites. (Note: quotes on each point come from the Neuromarketing book)

1. Self-Centered

“The old brain is responsive to anything pertaining to self. Why? Because it’s completely self-centered. Think of the old brain as the center of “ME,” with no patience or empathy for anything that does not immediately concern its own well-being and survival. “

So what the authors really mean here is ‘customer-centric’. What kills conversions is being too self-centered about your company and features. People care more about what you can do for them.

As the authors write, “this stimulus explains why 100 percent of your message as a seller should focus on your audience, not on you. If you take a critical look at your typical presentation, website, or even your brochures, you will find that a lot of content relates to your business, your people, your history, your values, and your mission statement – none of which is of any particular interest to the survival brain of your audience.”

There’s a good reason so many copywriters tell you to sell benefits, not features. Features are fairly objective, where benefits fully relate to your audience, and they help solve a problem that they have. They invoke their self-centered desire to solve their problems (not your conversion rate problems).

And also, the greatest ads throughout history have all appealed to our most personal and emotional desires. This ad from the Economist is designed to make the reader smile and revel in their intelligence…

Image Source – bestcopyads.wordpress.com

This old Porsche ad is all about the benefits:

bestcopyads.wordpress.com – source

Online, it’s often a lot more subtle. Customer-centric copy most often says in plain language what the offering can do for the customer. Sometimes it’s as simple as changing a pronoun. Joanna Wiebe from Copyhackers gave the following example. Here’s the first version:

Image Source

And here’s the customer-centric version…

Image Source

2. Contrast

“The old brain is sensitive to clear contrast, such as before/after, risky/safe, with/without, or fast/slow. Contrast allows the old brain to make quick, risk-free decisions. Without it, the old brain enters into a state of confusions leading to delayed decision or no decision at all.”

The contrast principle states that, “We notice difference between things, not absolute measures.”

In conversion optimization, contrast is generally used in the context of design, notably that of call to action buttons. The heuristic is that you should make your CTAs contrast with the dominant design of your page in order for them to stand out. As Unbounce put it, contrast is “Using color to draw attention to an element on your page. A quick rule of thumb is to look for the dominant hue of your page and pick its contrasting color for your call to action.”

But more often, contrast is used in sales to show a stark difference between product offerings or results. This could be implemented in a few ways, such as…

• Showing you a poor quality product alongside the one that they want you to buy.
• Showing you a wonderful product that is way beyond your reach (anchoring).
• Selling add-ons and cross-sells. When you buy an expensive car, the optional extras look so cheap in comparison.

This concept is not at all novel. Direct marketers have been using this for years, especially those in the fitness industry. Insanity does this well:

It doesn’t always have to be before/after fitness photos though. This marketing/design firm shows websites before and after they worked on them:

Marketers will often invoke a comparison with a competitor, usually to show a contrast between a competitor’s weakness and their own strength. Here’s an example from Verizon:

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3. Tangible Input

“Since the old brain is not qualified to process written language, the use of words – especially complicated ones – will slow down the decoding of your message and automatically place the burden of information processing onto the new brain…(The brain) is constantly scanning for what is familiar and friendly, concrete and immutable, and recognizable. The old brain cannot process concepts like “a flexible solution,” “an integrated approach,” or “scalable architecture” without a great deal of effort and skepticism.”

Good user experience can often be summed up in a sentence: Don’t Make Me Think. Too often, groupthink or a HiPPO leads to convoluted, jargon-filled copy that makes no sense to real humans. And yes, real humans are behind B2B purchasing decisions, too.

As Peep wrote, “Even if you sell B2B products, there’s always a person with a name and an identity reading your copy and making decisions.”

So don’t write vague stuff like this…

Write clear, value-based headlines like this…

But of course test it on your own site. Perhaps enterprise software needs some vague language that sounds important to convince a committee…who knows? Point is, the brain likes the simple, the familiar, the tangible.

4. The Beginning and the End

“The old brain enjoys openings and finales and often overlooks what is in between. Such a short attention span has huge implications on how you as a seller should construct and deliver your messages. Placing the most important content at the beginning is a must, as is repeating it at the end. Anything in the middle of your message will be overlooked”

Serial position effect is “the tendency of a person to recall the first and last items in a series best, and the middle items worst.” It’s made of two parts:

1. Primacy effect
2. Recency effect

The primacy effect tells us that our brain views items at the beginning of a sequence as more important or significant than the rest. We’re more likely to remember them, as well.

So if you want something to stand out in your copy, use it at the beginning. Don’t bury the lede in the middle of the page. Repeat the message several times, as well.

The recency effect tells us that our brains also remember things better if they occur at the end of a sequence. Therefore, in sales copy, you should also repeat your most important message towards the end to reiterate what you want to stand out.

Here are some other ways that the serial position effect can be used in marketing:

• Show/demonstrate the products sequentially.
• Placing the product first on a multi-product display.
• Draw visual attention to that product so that it is viewed first.

In addition, the links at the top and bottom of a menu get the most clicks, so use that space wisely to send people where you want them to go.

Recency also suggests the importance of the last customer touch point. I was so thrilled when Chubbies sent me a well-designed and funny packaging with some free gifts and a letter…

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5. Visual Stimuli

“The old brain is visual…Since humans cannot rely on the speed at which the new brain processes information, we are hardwired to make decisions that are mostly based on visual input. By using visual stimuli, you ensure that you tap into the processing bias that the brain has developed over thousands of years.”

Of course visuals matter in advertising. In a noisy world filled with marketing messages, you need to disrupt people’s attention, and good visuals do that. Here’s a famous ad from Volkswagen:

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And online, too, good visual design matters. It’s what creates first impressions, and first impressions are incredibly important. In fact, it’s been shown that it only takes people 50 milliseconds to judge whether or not they like a website. Google research actually showed many decision judgements only took users 17 milliseconds to form.

Even in print, some of the best examples of visual design embody simplicity and clarity, like this Hot Ketchup ad from Heinz…

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So how do you optimize for visual clarity and persuasion online?

Do a Five Second Test. Can people correctly describe your site in 5 seconds? If not, do a heuristic analysis and specifically address clarity issues. Make sure everything is clear, visual, and contextual – starting with your hero shot. Here’s a good example of a contextual hero shot from Juliana Bicycles…

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6. Emotion

“The old brain is only triggered by emotion. Thankfully, the field of neurobiology has brought more clarity to how our emotions work. Scientific studies show that emotions create electrochemical responses in our brain. These reactions directly impact the way we process and memorize information.”

Ahhh emotional persuasion! You’ve probably read so much about it, but it’s still a tough art to master.

Even though we like to believe our analytical minds are on top of things, many time we’re driven by emotions. This has been studied a lot in the last few decades, much of it by a neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio. He studied people with brain damage that prevented them from feeling emotions.

They all behaved in a normal way, except for one thing: they were unable to make decisions. The subjects could describe what they should be doing, logically speaking, but none of them could make even basic decisions like deciding what to eat and where.

As far as emotional persuasion goes, much of it is contextual to your own audience. Inspiring sadness might work for ASPCA but it probably wouldn’t for McDonald’s. One of the greatest companies at emotional advertising throughout the last century has been Coca Cola, with famous ads like this…

Usually, you can apply an emotional persuasion framework to four emotions:

• Anxiety
• Anger
• Awe
• Sadness

Though there are many other emotions you can invoke, such as belonging, fear, happiness, etc. Here’s a great example of a fear appeal here…

Read more about emotional persuasion here.

Conclusion

Our old brain drives decisions. So market to the old brain.

Again, the 6 triggers are:

1. Self-centered
2. Contrast
3. Tangible input
4. The beginning and the end
5. Visual stimuli
6. Emotion

Of course, there are many ways to execute on these triggers – so hopefully the above examples give you some inspiration for things to try on your own site.

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