Rnordman

In 2013, Gallup released their now famous State Of The American Workplace report that showed that 70% of American workers were not engaged at work.

Worldwide, the number of people not engaged was 87%.

Recently, Gallup released some updated engagement numbers and the sad truth is that the numbers have remained relatively unchanged.

The number is now hovering around 32%, which is better than 30%, but still nothing to cheer about.

To make matters worse, these numbers haven’t changed much in 15 years.

So what’s going on?

Do too many companies have old-school thinking leaders? Are the initiatives most companies put in place a waste of time/money/energy? Is there something deeper going on?

Whatever the answer is, it’s clear that things aren’t working.

Most employees are simply not engaged at work. Companies are obviously not creating an environment where employees can really shine.

No one enjoys hating their job.

Employees want to go to work proud of what they do and contribute more and give it their all. The concept of mastery and purpose are very real, employees want to contribute to something bigger than them.

What Are Companies Getting Wrong?

According to Gallup, the biggest issue by far is that companies treat engagement as a one-time program rather an ongoing thing.

Most companies do an annual survey (and we all know the problems with those), only to either be misinformed or misled.

The most surprising part of what these companies do is that they think the act of simply doing an annual survey is enough, as if all of their retention problems will go away if they put together a survey.

Is that a joke?

The survey is only the first step. Once you measure, you need to improve, and you need to act.

A year is way too long of a timeframe to create that feedback loop.

Gallup’s research found that many companies will create surveys that only satisfy what they want to hear (they’re doing great!) instead of uncovering deeper issues.

In Officevibe, our employee survey questions are written by us and are not editable. We do this on purpose to keep things as unbiased and third-party as possible.

The companies that are getting this right are focused and heavily invested in employee engagement. They create a culture based on core values and an exciting vision.

They provide clear development opportunities for their employees and most importantly, they respect their employees. Things like autonomy and flex time are common in these types of environments.

Focus On Your Managers

Here’s something they’ll probably never teach you in business school: The single biggest decision you make in your job – bigger than all of the rest – is who you name manager. When you name the wrong person manager, nothing fixes that bad decision. Not compensation, not benefits – nothing.Gallup CEO Jim Clifton

There are two important things to keep in mind when it comes to the managers that work in your company.

1. Managers account for 70% of the variance in engagement scores
2. Companies with highly engaged employees have opportunities for development

If you wanted to focus on one area to make sure engagement is improved, focusing on developing and training your managers is your best bet.

Understanding how big of an impact managers have on an employee’s engagement level, it’s important that we have the best people in managerial positions.

The problem is, most companies don’t have the right people in management positions. Ever heard of the Peter Principle?

Offering resources to help managers become better and holding them accountable to make sure they use the resources is important to making sure employees can work in a good environment.

Ways To Improve Employee Engagement

In order to seriously improve employee engagement, you need to have the idea of happier employees deeply embedded in your corporate culture.

Things like annual surveys, perks, bonuses, and suggestion boxes are not where the dramatic impact comes in.

Creating a culture where employees can come into work and use their strengths, develop their skills, and work with amazing people is where you’ll get your results.

1. Collect Frequent Feedback

   Collecting frequent feedback, and acting on that feedback, is one of the easiest ways to show employees that you care about them and value their opinion.

   More than simply collecting feedback, it’s important to integrate feedback into your culture.

   Make employees comfortable enough to give their honest feedback, remove any of that fear that exists in most companies, and tell employees that you value their opinion.

2. Offer Development

   Professional growth and personal development is by far the biggest driver of engagement. When an employee stops developing, they become stagnant and demotivated.

   This happens so often and it’s so easy to avoid.

   You just have to let employees have a say in what they work on and help them develop their skills.

   It’s really not as complex as it seems, it just requires you to trust them.

3. Have Meaningful Perks

   The key word is “meaningful”. It has nothing to do with free beer and casual Fridays. The perks that matter are again all about showing employees that you respect them.

   • Unlimited vacations
   • Flex time
   • Work from home
   • Paid Maternal/Paternal leave

   Think about what these perks say to your employees.

   It says we trust you to use good judgement, you’re a grown up so let’s treat you like one.

4. Be Transparent

   Again, this is all about showing employees that you respect them (see a common theme here?).

   When you’re transparent with your employees, especially when things aren’t going great, it makes you a more humble leader. That humility will earn you respect.

5. Communicate Your Vision

   Get employees to believe in what you do and why you do it. Don’t just have them show up for work to collect their paycheck. Make them understand the bigger value that they’re bringing to the world.

   Practice and preach your core values, and help employees connect themselves to those values.

   There is no such thing as too much communication, so feel free to remind everyone of your mission over and over.

6. Set Goals To Align The Team

   You want to set clear goals so that everyone understands their roles and there’s no ambiguity. Ambiguity can lead to confusion which can lead to employees becoming disengaged.

   You’ll want to use a cascading goal-setting system to make sure that everyone from the top-down is aligned and working together towards a shared goal.

How Do You Engage Your Employees?

Share your tips with us in the comments!

When I jump into something new, different or confusing (like LinkedIn), I often wonder how other people are using it and how can it help me improve myself or my business. And that's why I launched my LinkedIn User Survey way back in 2009.

Over the past seven years, I have shared with you, my treasured audience, answers to questions like these (2015 results are in red):
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• What percent of the LinkedIn users are paying for a premium account? (18%)
  .
• How many hours per week are people spending on LinkedIn? (51% spend 0-2 hours per week)
  .
• How many LinkedIn groups do people belong to? (37% are in 1-9 groups)
  .
• What is the top rated feature on LinkedIn? (Who's Viewed Your Profile)
  .
• What are people saying LinkedIn has helped them with? (77% said "Research people and companies")

Over 1,400 people shared their opinions with me last year. If you'd like to see the complete results, click here.
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2016 LinkedIn User Survey

Now it's time to fire up the LinkedIn survey machine again, and I'd be honored if you would take just three minutes (I timed it myself) and complete the survey.

As an additional incentive to participate, three lucky winners will receive full access to my online video-based LinkedIn course Explode Your Revenues Using LinkedIn ($147 value). Also, near the end of the survey, there's a box you can check if you'd like to receive the full results of the survey.

To participate in the survey, click this link or cut and paste it into your browser.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/2016LinkedInSurvey

Thanks for your continued readership and support. The information you share in the survey will ensure that I can continue to provide you with the most relevant information each week.

The post Find Out What Others Are Doing on LinkedIn appeared first on Wayne Breitbarth.

Ken Olisa, the founder of two technology merchant banks and a grandee of British tech, is not impressed by "unicorns" — tech startups with a valuation of more than $1 billion.

"I dismiss it all as hype," Olisa told Business Insider at the launch of VTC Group in London this week. VTC Group is a new startup chaired by Olisa that aims to bridge the gap between startups, academics, and big corporates.

"I'm so old I know that the only value is cash," Olisa says. "If a unicorn can demonstrate that in 3 to 5 years time it can generate enough cash to defend a $1 billion+ valuation, then bring it on. But that's the question, not these backroom deals that give a headline value of $1 billion but actually give investors a get out of jail free card."

2015 was the year of the unicorn, with a boom in startups hitting the valuation. Notable unicorns that joined the club last year include TransferWise, Lyft, Zenefits, SoFi, Hellofresh, Prosper, Oscar, and Farfetch, according to venture capital data tracker CB Insights. There were many more.

Hitting the unicorn mark became a badge of honour in the industry, with businesses clamouring to declare themselves the next unicorn, but Olisa says focusing on unicorn status has come at the expense of actually building strong businesses.

"We've suddenly decided that it's not about business and innovation and market and customers, it's about something else. It's lipstick on the pig. There's a unicorn industry and they can play around with each other but all it will do is end in tears, because it's not about the customer and it's not about adding value to anything."

Olisa has seen the tech industry evolve over almost 40 years, starting at IBM back in the 1970s. He told the crowd at the VTC Group launch: "When I was first in [the tech industry] you had to explain to people what computers were and what they did.

"I remember once being asked the difference between hardware and software, and I realised in a moment of panic I had no idea. I worked for IBM and we just sold them stuff and they were grateful or they lost their job. It was a very different time."

After leaving IBM, Olisa held various positions in the industry before going on to found technology merchant bank Interregnum in 1992 and leading it through the tech boom to float on London's AIM market in 2000 — just as the dotcom bubble was popping. Olisa set up another technology merchant bank in 2006, Restoration Partners, which he currently chairs.

Olisa continued: "The collapse of Powa, tragic though it is, making things seem like they're worth $1 billion — that's financial engineering. Two floors in the Heron Tower says it all."

London-headquartered payments business Powa Technologies was reportedly once valued at $2.7 billion but collapsed into administration last month after running out of cash. The Financial Times has since thrown doubt over whether the company was ever really worth that much.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: JAMES ALTUCHER: College is a waste of time and money

Finance Minister Bill Morneau appears at Commons committee for pre-budget consultations on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Tuesday, Feb. 23, 2016. (Sean Kilpatrick/CP)

When Finance Minister Bill Morneau unveils the Trudeau government’s first budget on Tuesday, economists will be the first in line wanting to learn the details. Not only will this be the first budget from a new government in nearly a decade, but it comes after months of speculation about how Trudeau and his team will follow through on their ambitious election promises, particularly at a time of weak economic growth.

For economists, the questions are many: How big will the deficit be? What will Ottawa’s spending plans look like? What programs or tax measures will be introduced, and which ones will be cut?

So in the countdown to budget day we asked several economists, from Bay Street and academia to think tanks and industry groups, to each share a chart that reflects something they will be watching for come Tuesday, and tell us why.

What’s the plan for direct program spending?
Stephen Gordon, Laval University

“The first chart I will be updating after the budget is released is the first one I’ve been updating for the past three or four budgets: direct program spending as a per cent of GDP. Rigorous control of direct program spending—that is, spending on wages, goods and services, and excluding payments made to individuals and other level of government—was the key to balancing the budget over the last five years. When the path was first laid out, I didn’t have much faith in the Conservatives’ ability to stick to the plan, but they surprised me.

What I will be looking for is what will replace that red line. The Liberals’ platform calls for three years of spending above the 2015 budget projection, followed by a reversion to the baseline in 2019-20. (Whether or not this will balance the budget is another matter, and depends largely on revenues.) Not all of this spending will necessarily show up in this chart; some infrastructure financing may take the form of transfers to the provinces. But I will be paying close attention to where the end point of the Conservatives’ baseline compares to where the Liberals plan to be in five years.”

How will Ottawa respond to provincial fiscal challenges?
Trevor Tombe, University of Calgary

“The federal government’s budget challenges are manageable. When measured as a share of the economy, the federal government will likely end this fiscal year with a stronger budget than all but two provinces (B.C. and Quebec). For the upcoming 2016-17 year, the deficit will grow. Slower economic growth, the Liberal’s “middle-class tax cut,” and planned spending increases all play a role. Overall, the deficit may come in around 1.5 per cent of GDP. This is large (worse than two-thirds of all federal and provincial budgets since 1980), but will likely decline soon after. Compare this situation to some provinces. For Alberta and Newfoundland, there’s no end in sight for their budget challenges. This puts pressure on the federal government to assist, either directly with infrastructure spending to offset provincial outlays or further direct transfers, or indirectly through changes in employment insurance or a host of other policy measures. In our federation, the fiscal challenges of one government can affect the others. Will the feds respond? And if so, how?”

Paying for progressive promises
Jennifer Robson, Carleton University

“The Liberals have staked out a pretty staunchly progressive position—even managing to outflank the NDP in the election. Their narrative in the campaign, repeated again in the Speech from the Throne, argued that “better is possible” and that government has a critical role to play in ensuring “fairness,” especially by “giving more direct help to those who need it.” I’ll be looking to see how the numbers move in a number of federal programs aimed at improving the welfare of vulnerable refugees, children in low income, unemployed youth, homeless persons and low-wage workers. The numbers in the chart are based on the projections already tabled by the government this year. The trend lines (measuring dollars flowing directly to individuals or to the organizations serving them) are pretty clear: mostly flat. Of course, that could change following the budget. On some programs (the Refugee Assistance Plan, the Youth Employment Strategy and the Canada Learning Bond), the government has made specific promises to do more. We’ll see how that shapes up in light of mounting fiscal pressures and far larger promises on infrastructure spending.”

Big deficits with no recession
Doug Porter, BMO Financial Group

“This is something we should be mindful of amid all the calls for the government to crank up the deficit (with some calling for $50 billion!). My chart looks at the year-to-year change in the budget balance, and I am assuming that the deficit will be announced at roughly $30 billion for the coming fiscal year (guessing just below that metric). The point is that this will be a very aggressive increase in the deficit, especially since we are not in a recession. The shaded liens are periods of U.S. recession (which are much better defined than Canadian recession periods).”

A vision for the size and role of government
Armine Yalnizyan, Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives

“Size matters; but no matter how big it is, it’s what you do with it that matters most. Today the federal government plays a smaller role in the Canadian economy than it has in the past 60 years. Federal expenditures, including debt charges, account for only 14.2 per cent of GDP, having peaked at 24.9 per cent in 1982-83, in the midst of a recession.
Within a story of expansion then contraction, every regime change has put different emphasis on where to act: supports for individual Canadians (seniors, children and the unemployed); supports for provinces (for health, education, and social programs, as well as arrangements to equalize fiscal constraints in the federation); and directly delivered programs (from defence to First Nations, and much more). Charges on borrowing are at an all time low.
Budget 2016 represents another regime change, as the Liberals set out their vision for both the size and role of government.”

Keeping an eye on spending
Ted Mallett, Canadian Federation of Independent Business

“I’ll be paying close attention to the revenue numbers. As of February, the feds seem to have them constrained quite a bit below nominal GDP growth—in fact, outright negative. We would like to see a commitment to keep spending at planned levels, so that if revenues come in above target, the benefit shows up as a smaller deficit.”

A food rebate to help with rising prices
Mike Moffatt, Ivey Business School

“Low oil prices have brought down the loonie and caused a substantial increase in the price of imports. Although the rate of inflation has stayed near the Bank of Canada’s two per cent target, the price of fresh fruits and vegetables has shot up considerably as, like most commodities, they are priced in U.S. dollars and traded globally. This has made it difficult for low-income and fixed-income Canadians to maintain a healthy diet, a problem the government should consider addressing via a food rebate.”

A plan to return to a balanced budget
Craig Wright, RBC Economics

“In the interest of transparency, the fiscal narrative has been in a state of evolution, with fiscal numbers being revisited and revised on a couple of occasions.  During the campaign a number of commitments were made with respect to the fiscal position and the outlook for the deficit over the government’s mandate.  The plan articulated the first two years of moderate deficits followed by a plan to get back to balance by fiscal year 2019-20 while keeping the debt-to-GDP ratio on a declining trend. Recent updates and announcements have contributed to a much larger deficit profile over the near-term, potentially in the $25- to $30-billion range, alongside an apparent softening in the commitment to return to balance. An improving economic outlook, alongside an extremely large adjustment for risks, suggests the fiscal plan can include both short-term fiscal stimulus as well as a plan to return to balance over the medium-term.  An explicit or implicit target of balance would restore a much-needed fiscal anchor to the plan.”

Ottawa can manage bigger deficits
Benjamin Tal, CIBC World Markets

“The point here is that you can run a budget deficit of $100 billion a year for a decade before you get to the level of debt-to-GDP we saw in the 1990s … so given this context the difference between a $30- or $40-billion deficit is minor.”

Don’t forget provincial debt
Paul Boothe, Ivey Business School

 

“Here is the chart that I will be watching. It is government debt-to-GDP, but looks at all government debt, not just federal. Lots of the analysis focuses on federal debt/GDP and we look quite good comparatively speaking on that metric. However, this ignores differences between federations and unitary states. I think we should be looking at what the budget says will happen to our total debt in comparison to, say, the U.S., U.K. and Germany. We have some room to borrow, but maybe not as much as some people think when they focus on federal debt-to-GDP.”

A fiscal package to boost growth
Jean-François Perrault, Scotiabank

“The Canadian economy is adjusting to lower commodity prices and is operating well below what the Bank of Canada considers to be its capacity. This suggests that policy support continues to be needed to help smooth this adjustment. Monetary policy has provided critical support to the economy thus far. While there remains scope for more accommodative monetary policy, all this would do is encourage households to borrow further and put downward pressure on the dollar. A properly designed and calibrated fiscal package could raise growth without encouraging households to incur more debt. Doing so could soften the blow to the parts of the country most negatively affected by the decline in commodity prices by facilitating their adjustment, allow the economy to return to its full potential sooner than implied by current forecasts, and provide insurance against the significant downside risks to the global economy.”

Ottawa should move to regulate assisted reproduction
Lindsay Tedds, University of Victoria

“The first babies conceived through in vitro fertilization in Canada were born nearly 34 years ago, on March 25, 1982. Since that time, demand for assisted reproduction treatments has grown as the prevalence of infertility in Canada has risen: from five per cent in 1984 to 16 per cent by 2010. The number of fertility clinics and the number of treatment cycles have increased exponentially over this time period as has the prevalence of multiple births. As shown in the graph, the natural rate of multiple births is about 1 in 89 birth (~1.1 per cent), whereas in the multiple birth rate in Canada is currently about 1 in 30 (3.3 per cent). Further, data from the Canadian Fertility and Andrology society shows that the multiple birth rate from in vitro fertilization treatments in Canada without regulated embryo limits was around 30 per cent. Multiple births are both risky and costly, not only to the parents but also to the health care system and to the babies themselves. The federal government has shown little leadership with respect to infertility, assisted reproduction treatments, and the growing multiple birth rate in Canada. The Canada Health Act remains silent about these treatments and the federal government’s sole attempt to regulate the industry through the passage of the Assisted Human Reproduction Act in 2004 was immensely unsuccessful, being largely struck down by the Supreme Court in 2010. To date only Quebec and more recently Ontario have attempted to partially regulate the industry through embryo transfer limits. The issue of infertility, assisted reproduction treatments, and the growing incidence of multiple births needs a fulsome and national discussion in this country and the longer the federal and provincial governments ignore this significant reproductive issue, the costlier it will become.”

Imbalances in how Ottawa taxes corporate distributions
Kevin Milligan, University of British Columbia

“When companies make a profit, they can either retain the earnings inside the firm to fund investment or return the profits to shareholders. Beyond the ‘distribute or retain’ decision, there are also different ways to distribute the profits (e.g. dividends or share repurchases). Ideally, firms would make these decisions with an eye to maximizing the return on investment and helping to grow the economy. However, since these different options are taxed in different ways, sometimes firms are pushed into making a different decision solely because of the tax consequences. The chart shows how corporate distributions are taxed using three methods, each taxed in different ways. The years shown are 2010 and 2016, using a British Columbia firm and top-tax-bracket investor as an example. The three ways to distribute income are:

• Traditional dividends come are paid after corporate tax is applied, and is taxed for individuals with a special income adjustment (the ‘gross-up’) and dividend tax credit.
• If the organization is an income trust, payments aren’t subject to corporate taxes but are taxed for individuals like interest income.
• If the firm uses the funds to repurchase shares, the value of the remaining outstanding shares are bid up, delivering value to shareholders through a capital gain.

In 2010, the taxation of these three methods was roughly in balance. In 2016 there is a 5.6 percentage point disjoint between dividends and capital gains, as a result of further federal corporate tax cuts and also increases to the high-income tax rate. In Ontario, this gap is now at 9.2 points.

Ten years ago, similar tax gaps metastasized into the income trust fiasco as firms reorganized into income trusts solely to game the taxation of distributions. Canada should nip the problem in the bud this time, either by making the dividend tax credit more generous or by increasing the capital gains inclusion rate.”

Living without the oil boom
Glen Hodgson, Conference Board of Canada

The accompanying chart shows that Canada has lost $56 billion in annual oil export revenues, or about a third of corporate profits. This negative price shock forms the context for the federal budget.

The post What 14 economists will be looking for in the 2016 budget appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Copy is writing that sells, so by definition, it has to be compelling.

Does your copy also have to be concise? Yes. Does it have to be clear? Absolutely. Brevity and clarity will ensure that your message is digestible, which is important if you want your words to be read and understood with ease. That said, the clearest, most concise copy ever written is still a bust if it doesn’t compel its readers to act.

Compelling copy fascinates its target audience and drives them to pull the trigger on a CTA. It does this by capturing their attention, unearthing a pain they're desperate to assuage, and presenting a mutually valuable, solution-driven call-to-action.

If your goal is to write clear, concise copy, then you can train yourself to do that. Just follow a few guidelines and, of course, practice. But if you want to write compelling copy, then you have to do a lot of research and even more critical thinking.

Let’s break it down ...

How to Write Compelling Copy

Before you start that next sales email or landing page, try some of the tips below. Working through them will take some time and thought, but the effort will be worth it when you walk away knowing exactly how to frame your message to achieve the best response.

1) Get to know your target prospect.

The most effective fishermen vary their bait depending on the fish they aim to catch. They know that bass, for example, go after earthworms. Carp love corn. Crappie respond well to rubber lures. Fishermen also adjust their technique depending on the time of day, the water conditions, and the season. They soak up as much information as possible about the fish and it’s environment, ultimately using their learnings to attract and, hopefully, hook.

As it happens, marketers operate similarly, learning as much as they can about their target prospects before casting them their message. Doing so makes it easier to highlight irresistible benefits throughout their copy. Benefits that relieve ultra-specific pain points, making the offer all the more compelling to the right audience.

To accurately and efficiently isolate your target prospect's problems (which will illuminate the benefits most fascinating to them) start by answering a series of questions about their personal background, their company and the position they hold, and their challenges, goals, and shopping preferences. In other words, create a buyer persona. As a result, you’ll amass an abundance of invaluable information that you can then use to attract attention and inspire action.

2) Exploit the psychology of exclusivity.

If you want more buzz than you can handle, make your prospects feel special. Tell them they’ve been “hand-selected” or “randomly picked” to receive your offer. Isolate them ... but in a good way. Make them feel important. People love feeling important.

In fact, self-esteem, or how we view ourselves, is near the top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. That’s how important feeling important is to people. It’s a need marketers have been exploiting for decades …

In an article for Fast Company, Robert Rosenthal points us to this U.S. Marines tagline: “The Few. The Proud.” And this American Express tagline: “Membership has its privileges.”

The folks at Google played the exclusivity card, too, creating a frenzy when they launched a soft beta of Google+ and invited only a select few users to create a profile. Google’s marketing team wasn't trying to be mean, they were trying to create desire (that compels) out of thin air. And they succeeded. Psychology’s good for that.

3) Make it emotional.

When it comes to converting a prospect, the features of your product or service will only get you so far. Why? Because features appeal to your prospect’s logical brain. And purchases aren’t driven by logic. They hinge on emotion, which explains why good commercials make us want to laugh or cry or pick up the phone to call home.

For example, Dove's "Real Beauty" campaign was so powerful and thought provoking that it went viral before such a thing even existed. The campaign has been active for over a decade, resonating with millions of women who were left feeling empowered by its message: you are not defined by your makeup.

Image Credit: Ad Fuel

That sentiment created countless emotional moments. Those emotions, then, were what drove Dove’s “Real Beauty” campaign to its celebrated (and well-deserved) success.

(And when those moments weren’t compelling people to reach for Dove soap, they were driving a new social perspective, which is an entirely separate accomplishment.)

4) Draw analogies and metaphors.

A confusing or dull message is rarely compelling, mainly because people don’t pay much attention to what they don’t perceive to be valuable. If you think about it, most things in life boil down to value. It’s a potent human driver. Therefore, as a copywriter, your job is to first and foremost figure out the value in what you’re selling and then put it into clear, concise, and compelling words.

The latter is almost always harder to do. And if you’re new to copywriting, it could feel almost impossible, like trying to thread a needle while wearing hockey gloves. That’s where analogies and metaphors can lend a hand. They’re especially effective at putting concepts into perspective.

Here are a few examples of metaphorical taglines from The Houston Chronicle:

• Tropicana: “Your Daily Ray of Sunshine.”
• Werther’s Original Popcorn: “It’s What Comfort Tastes Like.”
• Burger King: “Subservient Chicken.”

See how these brands combine two starkly different concepts to tell a story or create an image? You can do that in your copy, too. As long as your juxtaposition makes sense -- as long as it connects the dots and isn’t trite -- you’re likely doing your reader a favor by helping them experience your offer in a fresh, descriptive, and interesting way.

5) Avoid weasel words.

Weasel words are used by people who want their statements to maintain some plausible deniability. Politicians trying to avoid making any definitive comments, for instance, would use weasel words. Copywriters use them a lot, too, especially if their product’s promise is weak or loose. For example:

• “Viva Hand Cream fights dryness.” (i.e., you might not win.)
• “Reduce hair loss with Thick & Lush!” (i.e., you won’t cure it.)
• “Rent from as little as…” (i.e., you’re probably going to spend more.)

These words are named after weasels because of the way the little guys eat their eggs: puncturing a small hole and sucking out the contents, leaving the egg appearing intact but, nevertheless, very much empty. Ever held an empty egg? It’s fragile and delicate, right? Given the slightest bit of pressure, if feels like it would collapse.

Is that how you want your copy to come across? Weak and listless, like ants floating in a puddle? Of course not. So avoid the weasel words when you can. Your writing will be stronger, more authoritative, and more compelling for it.

6) Create urgency.

The more relaxed and comfortable we are physically, the less eager we are to move. Nobody plops down in their favorite La-Z-Boy, puts their feet up, cracks a beer, and thinks, I can’t wait to get up. No. People don’t like moving when they’re in a comfy position.

Same goes for people in a comfortable state of mind. Therefore, if your copy leaves readers with the impression that your offer will always be there, patiently waiting for them to pull the trigger, they may use that as a justification to not convert on your call-to-action. They’ll sleep on it, consider their options, and weigh the pros and cons. And after all that, they may very well do nothing at all because you gave them the chance to talk themselves out of it.

Next time, create some urgency. Set a deadline, using time-sensitive language like “This offer ends tomorrow,” or “Last chance,” or “These savings won’t last forever.” You can also play the scarcity card, reminding them that “There are only a few seats left” or that “Supplies are limited.”

The point is to make your prospects feel uneasy about waiting. Strange as it sounds, the more uncomfortable they are, the more likely it is they’ll be compelled to act.

7) Tailor your CTA.

When you want more brown rice at Chipotle, just ask.

When you want a five and five singles back instead of a ten, go ahead and ask.

When you look at them and everything turns to color and you want to spend your life with them, ask. Ask them to take that next step with you, and maybe they’ll smile and say “yes.” Hopefully, they do.

But you gotta ask. Whether you’re at Chipotle, in line at the grocery store, or in love, if you want something, typically, you have to ask for it. Why would copy be any different? That’s why a CTA, or a call-to-action, is one of the most compelling elements your copy can possess -- as long as it’s well-executed.

In other words, don’t settle for the standard “Click now” copy every time. Instead, strive to make your CTAs simple and potent; creative and forthright. Most importantly, make sure to play to your audience. For example:

• If you’re going after an experimental SaaS audience,
  then give them a “Start your free trial now” CTA.
  
  
• If you know your target persona to be curious and discovery-oriented,
  then give them a “See how it works” CTA.

Click here to dive deeper into these and 14 other call-to-action formulas that make people want to click.

Now, are you going to compel everyone?

You won’t. Not even close. But don’t let that bother you. Copywriting, like any craft, is honed over time. So keep failing. Keep stubbing your toes on the hurdles. That’s natural.

What isn’t natural is writing effective copy that converts. That’s where these tips and techniques can help. Practice them and, over time, you’ll steadily compel more people to take action more often. Until one day, these techniques will become part of you, engrained in your skillset.

And then you’ll be dangerous on cue.

What are your best tips for crafting compelling copy? Share them below.

Editor's note: This post was originally published on HubSpot's Marketing Blog. For more content like this, subscribe to Marketing.

Leading a successful, rapidly growing organization can be one of the most thrilling, liberating and stressful things a person can do. Those of us who have taken the plunge into the world of entrepreneurship know, firsthand, that this life is anything but boring.

As I’ve watched my business grow over the years, I’ve often reflected on the sheer number of decisions I made each day and the priorities that had to be juggled in order to stay nimble in the face of tremendous competition. And I’m not alone.

I’m extremely fortunate that both readers and new entrepreneurs often reach out to me to share their stories and lessons learned. I always appreciate the opportunity to meet and interact with so many fantastic entrepreneurs and to learn from each of their experiences.

Can I Answer This Question Alone?

When originally conceptualizing this article, I started with the intent to try answering the question, “What are the greatest priorities for a rapidly growing company?”. But as I began to think about my own response to that question, I realized that the answer may not be valuable or applicable to everyone.

Instead, I feel the best way to find the answer is to ask other successful entrepreneurs who are in the trenches, leading their own organizations through rapid growth. This way, we can explore the commonalities and differences that may exist across several successful, growing companies.

These entrepreneurs come from all walks of life and represent a wide variety of businesses. I asked each of the CEOs three simple questions in order to gauge not only the types of priorities they each had, but also to see if there are any similarities or key differences to be gleaned from multiple perspectives.

Jonathan Raymond, CEO of Refound, a leadership training company that offers membership coaching support to managers who want to become mentors. Jonathan is also the author of the new book, Good Authority: How to Become the Leader Your Team is Waiting For.

Nathan Munits is President of Longwave Financial, based in New York City. Longwave Financial provides financial advisory and asset management services.

Bruce Eckfeldt is CEO of Eckfeldt & Associates, a New York City-based consultancy and coaching practice.

Taylor Wallace is the cofounder of WeVue, a SAAS-based platform designed to help companies actively engage their employees in idea generation and decision-making.

Here’s what these CEOs had to say about their journeys in the wild lands of growth and prioritization, along with my own thoughts on the topic.

Question #1: What are your biggest current business priorities?

Raymond: My biggest priority is developing a truly great customer onboarding experience. We’re a startup and are blessed to have a core group of highly motivated clients, but we’re always looking for ways to make it simpler and more fun to do business with us.

Munitz: For us, growth is the number one priority. I’m always happy to invest in staff and systems but it all flows from new business coming in the door.

Eckfeldt: Identifying key/new customer needs that are not being serviced by traditional learning and development companies. The high-tech, new-economy business world, coupled with the new workforce generation and trends towards a free-lancer economy, is changing professional and career development. We want to find needs and fill them with innovative products and services.

Wallace: Sales and improving our products to better serve our customers and our market.

Cancialosi: For me, it’s about continuing to scale the company in order to solidify our brand as a major influence in the industry. In order to accomplish this, we’ve heavily invested in the development of our team members so that they can provide consistent, high-quality services to our clients.

Question #2: How have these priorities changed since you started your business?

Raymond: When we first started, which was only eight months ago, we didn’t know who we were yet. We were still developing what we call the Refound Philosophy, and figuring out who our ideal customer was and how we could best help them. We’ll never stop asking that question, of course, but we’ve shifted our focus a bit to the experience of the people who have found us to make their world better and trust that the rest will follow.

Munitz: I have maintained growth as priority one since day one. The difference is with so many more demands today that it is a continual challenge to maintain that focus.

Eckfeldt: We’ve evolved from coaching individuals to addressing the broader organizational needs of high-growth businesses. We’ve had to think and act more holistically and strategically with our services and products and how our customers use them.

Wallace: As a software company, we have gone through phases of market research, pure development, and heavy fundraising. But once those priorities were advanced we needed to work towards continued revenue growth.

Cancialosi: When I started out, the priority was survival focused. Get clients, generate revenue and add value as we did it. As we matured and scaled, we became intently focused on building out a solid infrastructure (systems, processes, etc.) to lay a sustainable foundation for growth. Now the focus is on developing the team so that they can successfully and consistently execute on the framework that we’ve established.

Question #3: Where would you suggest leaders of rapidly growing businesses focus their energies to ensure their continued success?

Raymond: Accountability, accountability and accountability. You’re setting the tone for the culture of the future and there is a risk that the choices you make now are based solely on the fact that they may be easier. Looking the other way on an underperforming employee, letting bad founder behavior slide, etc. will come back to bite you later. Oh, and don’t overpromise equity and incentives. The right people don’t go to work for those things in the long run, and it really just serves as an easy band-aid to cover up deeper cultural issues.

Munitz: A close second priority for us (aside from growth) is creating process. A great piece of advice I once read is that if you need to do something more than twice, you should create a process around it. We try to instill that in our people so we can continue to maintain a high level of service, even while we continue to experience rapid growth.

Eckfeldt: In our experience, growth is generally limited by a very small set of factors at any given point in time. The trick is to find the true bottlenecks to a company’s growth at that moment—it could be people, money, operations, or strategy—and focus your efforts on removing that constraint. Then as you do, to keep watching for the constraint to shift to some other area, which it will. As a business leader, the goal is to find the right thing to focus on now, and to stay vigilant for shifting constraints.

Wallace: Make sure you start spending time on the business instead of in the business. It’s so easy to just keep your head down and focus on what you think needs to be done, but if you don’t start planning, you can quickly expel unnecessary energy in the wrong direction. We recently started doing focused, 90-day planning that cascades five objectives down from our vision and mission. Every team member knows if they are working on something, it needs to align with one of those objectives. If it doesn’t, they either shouldn’t be working on it or we need to revisit the objectives. It’s allowed us an unprecedented level of focus with no micromanagement.

Cancialosi: My advice? Focus on something. In my experience working with hundreds of business leaders over the last sixteen years, I’ve found that focusing on nothing or, conversely, focusing on too much often leads to little of substance being accomplished. Those leaders who are able to identify their options and carefully select two or three key areas of focus tend to be those who make the largest sustainable gains. When taking this approach, they are able to see tangible momentum and, once they are satisfied with their progress, they can then turn their attention to the next highest priorities.

Four Key Takeaways For Rapidly Growing Companies

These four entrepreneurs come for diverse backgrounds and their businesses are all in different industries. But there are some interesting commonalities and insights that can be culled from their stories.

1. Don’t try to conquer the world. Rapidly growing companies are full of one thing: change. The operating environment can change on a dime and having the ability to quickly assess the situation and triage the most important things to focus on is critical. Trying to tackle too many things at once leaves you exhausted and you usually fail to make significant headway in anything in the way you’d like.
2. Maintain focus until you’re satisfied with your performance. One pitfall that I’ve seen (and I’ve experienced firsthand) is jumping from priority to priority before you’ve achieved the level of progress you need. A laser focus on fewer priorities will help you, and your team, ensure your efforts are moving the organization in the most important direction at that time.
3. It’s all about managing the dynamic tensions. To me, this is what makes being a leader so difficult. The ability to effectively take stock of your current operating environment and prioritize work effort without losing sight of the fact that you’re trying to balance your business on the head of a pin. To drive sustainable success, leaders must focus on the external as well as the internal. We must be consistent while also being flexible enough to adapt to changes in the business environment. Quinn and Cameron’s competing values framework does a masterful job of articulating these dynamic tensions that all leaders must continue to manage in order to be most successful.
4. Planning and prioritization is an iterative process. For most small, growing businesses, the strategic planning cycles that extend past a couple of years don’t seem to hold much water. The business environment changes so frequently and so dramatically today that I advocate for a more short-term planning cycle. This allows for a more rapid cadence of assessing and adapting one’s plan. This way, companies begin to see strategic planning less as an annual process that they have to live (or die) by no matter what happens, and begin to view it as a continuous learning and evolutionary process. An iterative approach like this affords organizations to stay nimble and to prioritize those activities that will have the most benefit to their organizations at that time.

Leading a rapidly growing company is no easy task. In today’s fast-paced business environment, there are a lot of things that demand your attention as an entrepreneur. The ability to understand the context in which you operate, identify all of the areas of possible focus, and be disciplined enough to dedicate your full attention to a prioritized subset of tasks will allow you the opportunity to have more impact in those areas that are most important to your success. Developing this positive momentum will help you step back occasionally to reassess, and adjust your priorities as things in your environment evolve.

Yes. You read right. This post is about millennials and yes, they are growing into an increasingly important target market for all B2B verticals, especially in manufacturing, technology, and business services.

If you think millennials are not-so-important in the grand scheme of things when it comes to B2B marketing, well, my friend, it’s time to re-evaluate. In 2014 alone, 46% of B2B researchers weremillennials, according to a survey of 3,000 B2B researchers conducted by Google in cooperation with Millward Brown Digital.

In 2012, only 27% of B2B researchers were millennials. Within the following two years, the percentage of B2B researchers in each of the three older age groups decreased by about one-quarter to one-third, while the millenial group went on to conquer a greater piece of the pie.

The Catch

“So what?”, you might be thinking after learning that millennials now constitute the largest share of B2B researchers. “They’re not decision-makers. I can still focus my marketing efforts on nonmillennialexecutives.” I hate to say this, but you need to re-evaluate this thought as well.

According to the same report, over 81% of non-executives influence purchasing decisions. To put this into a more poignant light, “Clearly, if you’re marketing only to the highest level, you’re overlooking the people who need to notice you,” Google points out.

So, what gives? How are millennials different from other generations? Let us count the ways:

1. They Care About Your Message The Most

What’s the best way to win over millennials? Stand for something positive.

Millennialls care about branding too just like previous generations. But instead of looking at the superficial queues, like your logo or your celebrity endorser, millennials tend to dig deep and find out what you really stand for. As a matter of fact, over 37% of millennials say they are willing to purchase products or services at a higher cost if the corresponding brand values a message they believe in.

2. They’re Highly Collaborative And Engaged

Millennials are more collaborative than people of other generations in general. “Contrary to previous generations, Gen Y-ers were brought up in an atmosphere of equal relationships and co-decision-making,” according to a Pew Research Center report.

They want to participate in the co-creation of products and brands, and over a whopping 70% of them feel a responsibility to share feedback with companies after an experience with their products or services.

3. They Take More Risks

Forbes reported that millennials are more than twice as willing as people in older generations “to encounter danger in pursuit of excitement.” This characteristic pertains to business because it means they are more apt to take a chance on a product, a service, or be the subjects of and engage with marketing campaigns. Discovering a new product or idea is particularly exciting to them. On that note, millennials tend to be bored with the status quo and the lack of brand interaction.

4. They Crave Direct Contact

There is nothing more that millennials crave other than experience. Millennials immerse themselves in branded events, mixers, meetups, live or recorded webinars, trade shows, and other interactive forms of communication. They want you to reach out to them in a tangible manner in a memorable way.

The IBM Institute for Business Value Millennial Survey 2014 shows how much B2B millennials differ from the two older generations with respect to who they want to meet while researching products they’re interested in buying. The survey gave each generation nine options. The B2B millennials’ first choice was meeting with vendor’s representatives. Going to trade shows and conferences tied for second with meeting with “colleagues in my organization”, reflecting their interest in collaboration. Gen X-ers and Baby Boomers ranked meeting with vendors reps seventh and fifth respectively.

5. They Rely More On Technology

This is probably the least surprising point, but you might not realize the enormity of the difference. A MarketingProfs study entitled B2B Buyers: Traits by Generation shows that 89% of millennial B2B buyers make online corporate purchases. This figure is 131% higher than people in the two older generations. In addition, millennials are more than twice as likely to use mobile devices to research products they are considering buying.

Millennials are an entire new species, if you will. So much so, that there are several commissioned studies out there to identify key behaviors and characteristics of this peculiarly creative, adventure-seeking, message-driven, and highly engaged group. They are also rapidly becoming more and more influential in the B2B world so devising a marketing strategy to capture their brand loyalty could be integral to you and your company’s future success.

 Since 1902, marketers have relied on the Attention-Interest-Desire-Action (AIDA) Model developed by Elias St. Elmo Lewis to understand how consumers learn about and take actions related to brands.

The growing influence of the consumer’s voice in an always-on digital environment, however, has made obsolete many of the AIDA Model assumptions that underlie the funnel-based view of how consumers and brands engage with each other. The antiquated assumptions include:

• Engagement is a linear process with a distinct beginning and end.
• Communications are initiated and controlled by the brand.
• The only communications that influence the purchase are between the consumer and the brand.

If consumer engagement can no longer be explained by a brand-managed funnel, what construct accurately depicts the way that engagement occurs? And what types of engagement have the biggest impact on customer lifetime value? My colleagues and I at Northwestern University’s Spiegel Research Center set out to answer those questions, and what we found has powerful implications for content marketers.

Watch as Tom discusses the findings of the research that led to the development of the Consumer Engagement Engine:

Introducing the Consumer Engagement Engine

Our research showed us that engagement in today’s digital communications ecosystem works not like a funnel but like an engine where brands and consumers are synergistically interacting with each other in new ways that can have a powerful impact on customer value.

While the Consumer Engagement Engine differs from the traditional funnel in many ways, these five characteristics are particularly important to content marketers looking to engage with consumers in relevant and valuable ways:

1. The engine is elegant

It’s made of five interlocking components: Brand actions, customer motivations, purchase behaviors, brand consumption, and brand dialogue behaviors. Consumers are constantly being influenced by messages from friends, social networks, strangers, the media, and intermediaries – messages that are sent and delivered across numerous platforms and devices.

2. There is no on/off switch

Unlike the funnel, which represents engagement as a linear process with a beginning and an end, the engine reflects the always-on state of engagement. Unlike the funnel’s “end,” often the purchase is the catalyst for the start of new and enhanced levels of engagement. The engagement engine is in perpetual motion.

3. Brand actions are just one of the cogs

The brand no longer controls when and how consumer engagement occurs. Today, customers or other actors are just as likely as marketers to initiate brand-related communication. Brands are moving from being broadcasters to being listener-responders.

4. Users of the brand are vital

Buyers’ brand consumption experiences – good or bad – are fuel for sharing. The good ones positively power the engine.

5. Brand dialogue behavior is the biggest cog

Our research found that non-purchase behaviors – brand dialogue behaviors (BDB) – have the greatest impact on future engagement. We uncovered powerful insights about how BDBs are driving customer lifetime value. Now, we examine BDBs and their role in driving value.

Understanding and ranking brand dialogue behaviors

Our research found that the types of engagement that frequently had the greatest impact on consumers were brand dialogue behaviors, which can involve consumers, other purchasers, non-purchasers, and the brand itself.

The research also found that these BDBs currently lack a categorization, taxonomy, or ranking according to the value they create for the brand. Content marketers need to better understand the opportunity presented by BDBs, as well as the brand’s role in BDBs – a role that involves enhancing the customer experience and/or listening and responding to the engagements.

BDBs can be categorized into three distinct types, all of which have an increasing degree of interactivity and value for the brand:

• Observation – “Lean-back” behavior where the consumer takes a passive role, such as reading a tweet or looking at a retargeting ad

• Participation – Behavior where the consumer takes an active role in engaging with the content, such as retweeting or looking up a consumer review of a product

• Co-creation – Behavior where the consumer creates original content that is relevant to the brand, such as participating in a contest to create a new flavor of potato chips, writing a blog post, or voting in a reality TV show

Our research found that as consumers engage more actively and in ways that involve relevant interaction with the brand, there is a strong correlation to increasing levels of customer lifetime value.

Revving the engine

Here are five things that you can do to engage with customers in ways that drive customer lifetime value in today’s digital ecosystem:

1. Adopt the engine – Use the engine framework to better engage and drive value for your brand.

2. Map your engagement – Identify where your engagement efforts lie on the brand dialogue behavior hierarchy.

3. Invest in your customers – Invest heavily in customer experiences and help this audience become your advertisers.

4. Drive relevant engagement only – Stimulate only the types of engagement that create a relevant connection to the brand.

5. Listen and respond – Use social media to be a responder, not just a broadcaster.

As content marketers continue to adapt to the opportunities and challenges presented by today’s rapidly evolving communications landscape, we believe the Consumer Engagement Engine will be a valuable tool for helping marketers engage with existing customers, prospects, intermediaries, and other actors in ways that create value for the brand.

Stay updated on the latest research and insight from academic and industry experts. Subscribe to the daily or weekly CMI blog.

Cover by Viktor Hanacek, picjumbo, via pixaby.com

The post Don’t Follow a Funnel, Create Content for an Engine [Research] appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

We're happy to announce a new integration for our sales CRM, this time with Prospect.io, a sales prospecting automation tool. As a Close.io user, you get a special discount (see below).

With Prospect.io, find email addresses on websites or LinkedIn and directly send cold emails to prospects. The tool also has other features such as open/click/conversion tracking, reporting, email templates, and more.

Here is a 90 second video to give you an overview of the service.

How to setup the Close.io/Prospect.io integration

1. Click the “Integration” menu on the left panel in Prospect.io.

2. Then click on the “Connect” button in front of the Close.io integration.

3. Enter your API key. In Close.io, in the top right-hand corner, click on your user profile and then “Settings”. Click on “Your API Keys” and copy the API key there, then click on “Next”.

4. Now you can choose when you want Prospect.io to create new leads in Close.io based on events. You can say “I want to create a lead in Close.io when my prospect replies to my email”.

Special discount for Close.io users :)

Signup for Prospect.io and use the coupon “CLOSEIO50” to get 50% off for 3 months.

Strong managers are the driving force behind best-in-class sales organizations. When you have people who are enabled to drive success from each rep, you have a sales team that will shatter sales records. Developing the coaching skills of front-line managers sparks a trickle-down effect that contributes to optimized productivity by your reps.

To maximize the returns of every sales team in your organization, here are some tangible strategies to follow:

1. Clarify Critical Benchmarks and Accountability

The best sales coaches understand the high-value activities that should be encompassing their time. Uncertainty about what’s important means less time spent selling overall for the sales organization, and for sales managers it hinders their ability to emphasize those points for their own reps.

Top leadership has clear goals on what they want the organization to achieve. The key is that those goals are translated into actionable steps with the front-line managers. [Senior Delivery Partner Brian Walsh has a great post on this very topic here.] If revenue is down, the action item shouldn’t be to make double the calls a day. That’s going to create a fire drill and an environment where reps are merely focused on dials and not having meaningful sales conversations.

2. Use a Structured Coaching and Communication Plan

The best sales coaches have an organized and structured plan for reviewing opportunities and communicating feedback. This plan includes specific goals for each stage in the selling process, along with steps for evaluating and coaching for improvement.

A great sales coach should have a consistent cadence for monitoring performance, reviewing processes with reps, and coaching for improvement. This coaching rhythm should also include common development strategies, such as reviewing meetings and role playing.

3. Remember the Buyer

The best sales coaches put the focus on what’s most important – the buyer. The key to make sure this focus happens is to develop tools that allow them to easily understand the landscape in individual reps’ accounts and territories. Standardized tools like opportunity review templates, territory templates and pre-call planners can ensure front-line managers are able to keep the buyer at the forefront of any rep reviews.

4. Give Purposeful and Actionable Feedback

The best sales coaches give their reps actionable feedback, which includes specific directions on the changes or adjustments a rep needs to make.

For instance, a rep that does well at generating leads but not converting sales might need specific guidance on how to better tie the solution to the business pain. Without offering tangible steps, the reps may know what to do, but they won’t know how to do it.

Giving your sales managers the tools to drive accountability will create a team of people working consistently behind the same goal. When they’re continuously reinforcing processes and best practices, you will not only build a team of great coaches, but one that’s focused on bottom-line impact.

Sales Development Reps (SDRs) and Lead Development Reps (SDRs) are not new. But they are a hot topic right now, especially in the SaaS and Cloud marketing circles I frequent.

With all the buzz, I’m surprised how few people truly understand proper strategy and structure for these roles. Quite often, these teams underperform because the up-front thinking has not been done.

In this two part series, I present a checklist for doing it right. I’ve worked with and set up several SDR and LDR teams over the years, supporting both inside and field sales. I’ve seen it done right and done wrong. I think I finally have the formula. Here are your first four steps.

Understand Your Objective – Sounds obvious, but I’ve seen a poorly defined mandate for an SDR or LDR role cause all kinds of confusion and reduce effectiveness. So, decide on your objective. Is your aim to better qualify leads and free up rep time for calls and meetings? Or are you looking to get more meetings for reps in their assigned territories, or perhaps in their assigned account list. Be careful if you said “all of the above,” as these are very different activities that different skill sets. Another way of looking at this question is to ask whether you need better qualified leads, or more leads overall.

Decide on LDRs, SDRs, or Both – Your objective(s) will clarify your strategy, and help decide who to hire. The job of an LDR is to better qualify existing leads. Their focus is on handling the inbound – in other words, qualifying leads that are already coming in. The job of an SDR is to focus on outbound, namely prospecting: “I need a meeting with the person in charge of buying welding robots at Ford.” LDRs should work for marketing, as they are helping with the quality of leads marketing is generating. SDRs should work for sales, as they are working outbound, and are typically assigned to a rep or a territory. You may need both an LDR and SDR function in your company, as I have in my current role.

Build Consensus and Buy In – The two sticking points I’ve seen in setting up an LDR or SDR team are 1) uncertainty over the ROI, and 2) a struggle over the reporting structure. A good benchmark for ROI is Marketo, who themselves expect a 20x ROI from their SDR teams. But it will vary by company. If you can’t convince your CEO or VP of Sales using these, then I recommend running a pilot using a third party firm. There are a lot of telemarketing and sales appointment-setting firms to choose from. They will never be as efficient as your own people, but they are easy to hire for a fixed monthly amount. I did this for the LDR function in my current role and was able to prove that the lower-tier leads the reps never had time to get to were valuable, and the pilot was ROI positive after six months, at which time we decided to hire our first in-house LDR.

Regarding the reporting structure, I think once you have a clear definition of objectives and the role of the LDR and SDR, the struggle over reporting diminishes. It’s when you are not crystal clear on objectives that problems start. Think of it this way. It’s really hard for a head of sales to argue that lead qualification is not a marketing function. And this is exactly the role of an LDR. Likewise, a head of sales does not typically want anyone from marketing prospecting, as this is a sales, and hence SDR, role.

Set Your Targets – Those of you who have read my blog over the years know that I am big on numbers. Numbers are specific and irrefutable. That’s why I like funnel math. SDR and LDR goals should be tied to the funnel you use to drive your business. Here’s how to do it.

LDRs – Decide how many qualified leads you need LDRs to convert and pass to sales. What I like to do is carve out a percentage of my overall funnel for the LDR role, say 10% of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) will come from LDRs. Further, I usually have LDRs focus on the lower quality leads that need more development, like white paper downloaders or webinar attendees. I then calculate how many MQLs are needed to make up 10%, and this is their target (In part 2, we’ll get to calculating activities (calls/emails) needed to his this number.)

SDRs – Decide how many meetings your SDRs need to set to contribute the number of opportunities (sometimes called Sales Generated Leads, or SGLs) you want your SDR team to contribute. You may need to estimate a close rate, as you may have no experience with the role, and success rate will vary widely by company, as the product and buyer may be quite different. You can find some good resources, like this report from OpenView, that give industry averages you can start with.

Hire the Right Profile – Given what we’ve covered already, it’s no surprise that LDRs and SDRs can be quite different human beings. LDRs call and email people who have already expressed an interest in your product. It’s an easier (though not easy) interaction. LDRs are generally assisting and nurturing. SDRs, on the other hand, are prospecting, often cold calling. You want hunters who can handle rejection.

Trish Bertuzzi in her book, The Sales Development Playbook, also makes a great point about differences in career aspirations. SDRs are usually considered reps in training, and most want a career in Sales. LDRs may want to move into sales, though many move on to marketing specialist roles. Trish recommends building out career paths for LDRs and SDRs, and showing new hires where they can go, even going so far as to include career path in the job specs your company posts, to show potential candidates that your company cares about their progression.

You now have a strategy, and depending on your objective, a plan for an LDR or SDR team, of both. The clarity on the role informs the structure of the team, helping alignment between sales and marketing. If you have gotten this far, you are ready to either run a pilot or hire your first development reps.

Next we move on to hiring the right people and making them productive. Part 2 will cover managing and measuring LDR and SDR teams.

What do you think? Did I miss anything? Tips to share?

No conversion funnel is perfect.

• If any company had found the way to perfectly market their product, every person on Earth would own one.
• Even the biggest, most commercially successful companies are constantly working to improve their conversion rate, and can make some pretty serious mistakes at times.

Spotting the holes in your conversion funnel isn’t always easy – it involves being willing to accept flaws in your marketing strategy and working hard to improve them.

If you’re interested in making improvements to your conversion funnel and increasing your sales revenue in the process, I’ve compiled a list of ten of biggest conversion funnel mistakes that businesses looking to market themselves online tend to make.

How much you get out of this list will depend on how closely you’re willing to look at your own conversion funnel and its weaknesses, so remember:

• There’s nothing wrong with having an imperfect marketing strategy, unless you’re unwilling to improve it.

1. Not Giving Site Visitors a Solid Introduction to Your Business

First impressions are hugely important.

• You need to make sure that all visitors to your site get a solid understanding of what you do, your services, and the benefits that you can provide customers.

A large part of this involves having a series of solid dedicated landing pages which is clearly structured and puts the best foot forward for your company.

Research has shown that this can make a huge impact to the way visitors interact with your site and your business:

• 92% of marketers consider landing pages to be effective

The more landing pages you use, the more leads you’ll generate:

• Websites with over 30 landing pages have 7x more leads than websites with less than 10.
• Websites with more than 40 landing pages generate 12x more leads than those with less than 10 landing pages.

It’s important that users have a hassle-free experience when first arriving on your site.

• The more comfortable your site is to use, the more likely visitors will stick around long enough to learn about your products and progress towards conversion.

The user experience on your site should be as streamlined as possible to help users navigate without frustration.

As such, every aspect of your site should be optimized to help visitors have an enjoyable experience.

• For example, a single second’s delay in loading times for your site will drop your conversions by 7%.

The best way to ensure that your site visitors are getting the best possible experience when they first arrive is through regularly A/B testing and optimizing your website and landing pages.

This will help you to give site visitors an introduction that they’ll be impressed with.

2. Missing/Weak Calls to Action

To convince site visitors to do something, they need to be invited.

• Very few users will be so inspired by your website that they seek you out if there are no clear instructions on what they need to do.
• If your conversion funnel lacks solid calls to action, you’re going to miss out on potential leads.

In spite of the importance of giving your potential customers directions, it’s an element of web design that’s sadly all-too-often overlooked:

• 70% of B2B small business websites don’t have a strong call to action.

A good call to action does several things to encourage user engagement:

• It brings a sense of urgency, convincing the person that they need to do something immediately.
• It is a direct instruction, helping site visitors to know exactly what they need to do.
• It doesn’t require too much effort or commitment, so users will follow through on the action without worrying too hard about potential consequences.
• It uses unique, actionable language, standing out from the rest of the text on a site and drawing the user’s attention to the next step of conversion.

A good online conversion funnel leads users through a chain of calls to action, each one leading to the next step of the process and increasing in commitment.

• A first step involves clicking a link to learn more
• The next can be providing contact details or speaking to a representative
• The final step would be making a purchase.

This is a simple example, but it shows how through leading customers through baby steps you can encourage them to make a purchase, because they’ve already built up a pattern of behavior that involves heeding a call to action.

3. Failing to Follow Up with Leads

Not every lead is ready to convert the moment they contact you.

• It’s easy to see leads as either golden customers or time-wasters, but in reality, all leads fall somewhere on a spectrum between these two extremes.
• Most customers will need some encouragement and persuasion before they’ll commit to conversion.

If a customer initially expresses hesitancy or disinterest when it comes to making a purchase, many marketers don’t like to push them. It’s important, though, to solve leads’ concerns rather than writing them off.

• 80% of leads require five points of interacting with a company before they’ll commit to converting.
• This means it’ll often take patience and persistence to help all leads to progress.

It’s also important to note that the way in which you follow up with leads will affect your success.

• If potential customers have a concern, it’s best to deal with it as quickly and comprehensively as possible.
• Leads who have their issues resolved within five minutes of making a request are 9x more likely to lead to conversion.

It’s important to build a rapport with leads – potential customers need to see your company as human, while also being authoritative, informed and helpful.

You need to build the relationship of trust with leads so that they’ll be more willing to discuss issues with you, and so that they’ll be willing to take the actions that you recommend which will lead to sales.

4. Confusing Funnel Progression

Is your conversion funnel clear and simple?

Or is it possible for customers to get lost along the way?

There are plenty of ways a conversion process can end up getting confusing:

• There are too many steps for a potential customer to take
• Distractions cause website visitors to get lost
• A lack of urgency meaning customers don’t feel that progression is important

To make sure your potential customers convert, you need to get them towards making a sale as quickly as possible.

This means removing any distractions from your sales pitch, and making sure your website is as economical as possible with text, images and information.

• Obviously you need enough for customers to understand why your services will help them.
• That said, any unnecessary links or out-of-place content will only serve to make it more difficult for customers to find their way to the bottom of your sales funnel without getting lost.

Humans learn best through stories, and progressing through the conversion process is no different:

• You need to take your customers on a clearly signposted narrative journey which deals with their concerns and answers their questions about why your product is best.

It’s not always easy to mark out the perfect journey for your customers, which is why constant testing is essential to finding how to point site visitors in the right direction.

Heat maps can be particularly useful in identifying elements of your site which are serving as a distraction:

• If you find that website visitors aren’t being naturally drawn towards the elements on a page that will help them to progress, it’s time to remove or rearrange your distractions.

By providing a clear, simple path for site visitors to take, you can make sure that the maximum number of potential leads travel all the way through your conversion funnel.

5. Not Providing Middle-of-the-Funnel and Bottom-of-the-Funnel Support

In marketing, it’s tempting to simply focus on getting as many people as possible to your website and expect that a percentage of them will progress towards a sale.

• A lot of effort typically goes into widening the sales funnel at the top.
• This can lead to a large drop-off at later points of the funnel.

Potential customers need different information at different points along their conversion path.

If all of your content is aimed at attracting website visitors, there won’t be anything to help address the concerns of site users who are performing research before making a sale and need questions about your products answered.

This means providing support and content throughout the funnel.

• A lot of your potential customers will need this aid – 77% of consumers say that they expect a business to provide research for their needs during various points in the conversion process.

Different content will be needed at different times:

• Providing content for middle-of-the-funnel leads can mean giving details on the product and offering FAQs, while at the bottom of the funnel.
• Potential customers will need more specific support, such as troubleshooting for the product or a breakdown of what to expect when placing an order.

Ideally, you’ll identify in advance what content your leads will need at various stages of the process, and you’ll have it ready and available as soon as they need it.

Focusing efforts on the middle of the funnel may reduce the rush of traffic your content provides, but it can mean for steeper sides on your conversion funnel, and speedier progression towards conversion.

6. Targeting the Wrong Audience

Another problem that can occur when marketers focus too closely on drawing people into the top of the funnel is they end up bringing in a lot of people who just aren’t interested.

• Remember: it’s not the number of visitors to your site that increases your conversions, it’s the number of visitors who are willing to make a purchase.
• Attracting a large audience just for the sake of having higher visitor stats can mean you end up wasting a lot of time dealing with people who are only interested in your content, rather than your products.

The important thing is ensuring that you’re targeting the audience that are most likely to convert.

Finding these people means performing research:

• You need to analyze your existing client base to see who they are, what their needs are and how they were originally drawn to your company
• It can also help to perform wider research on your industry to see what general user needs might be and what communities potential customers frequent
• When all else fails, have a look at the types of people your competitors are advertising to, and consider what you can do to either reach the same audience, or try and find a similar audience with slightly different needs.

Tracking down the appropriate audience can take a fair amount of time in planning, and focusing solely on the right people will probably mean a smaller number of visitors to your site.

That said, a higher percentage of these visitors will be genuinely useful, and you can spend your time focusing on the needs of the people who are actually worth your time.

7. Ignoring or Misreading Analytics Data

One problem that too many companies fall into with attracting people towards their business is failing to properly use the data at their disposal.

• Often, analytics tools can appear difficult to understand, but without studying the numbers behind a campaign it’s difficult to identify areas for improvement.

The wealth of statistics and data available in analytics tools is phenomenal, and when studied at length, it’s possible to see patterns that might not be easily recognized otherwise.

Take, for example, the tool in Google Analytics which allows users to see figures on the behaviors of users with different browsers.

• One study found that a website was enjoying its highest conversion rate with visitors who were using high resolution browsers, and that a low res browser increased users’ bounce rates.
• This suggested that in this particular case, web design issues meant that those with older browsers weren’t able to engage with the website properly, leading to a loss of conversions.

There are plenty of in-depth guides available online which will help you get the most out of your analytics research.

Through using the tools available, it’s possible to spot areas of your conversion process that need an overhaul.

8. Overlooking Marketing Opportunities

There are a lot of different ways to attract people to your business.

• A lot of the time with content marketing, businesses feel that they can simply post their content online and expect people to find it.
• This isn’t the case: thanks to all the noise and competing messages on the internet, unless people are specifically looking for your it’ll be hard for them to find you, unless you advertise.

There are plenty of ways of getting people to see your content and discover your business. This can include:

• Making use of social media tools.
• Reaching out to key market influencers.
• Engaging with important communities.

Often overlooked are the way offline methods of attracting business can help, such as:

• Relying on print advertising, which is often ignored, making it an effective way to stand out from the crowd.
• Meeting potential clients face to face – this is believed to be the most effective form of marketing for B2B businesses.

It’s not enough to stick to the familiar avenues of gaining customers – experimentation and trying new ideas is a key step in finding new, successful methods of attracting the right audience to your business.

9. Treating a Sale as the Completion of the Funnel

You’ve convinced someone to visit your website.

You’ve walked them through the benefits of your products, and after some persuasion, they’ve finally made a purchase.

Congratulations! Job done, right?

Wrong.

If you’re treating a sale as the final step on your conversion ladder, you’re making a big mistake.

If someone’s ‘converted’, it means more than just taking a single action.

You want to encourage people to become lifelong converts to your cause.

• This means continuing to make purchases regularly for a long time.
• It also means convincing them to go out of their way to invite others to experience your products, becoming unofficial sales reps for your company.

Turning a one-off customer into a lifelong customer can be just as difficult as convincing them to make the first sale.

• That said, they’ve already begun to develop a pattern of purchasing behavior, so your job at this stage is primarily to keep them going in the right direction.

To help encourage lifelong support of your company, you need to make sure that your marketing and customer support efforts don’t end once a sale has been made:

• You need to provide support and content aimed around showing customers how to get the most out of their purchase, so that they don’t ultimately feel that their money has been wasted.
• You need to offer high quality, speedy customer support in case anything goes wrong, so that the customer feels more valued and supported by your company.
• It’s important for your social media campaign to reach out to existing customers as well as potential buyers, and give your users a space where they can discuss your products and form a community.

By taking these actions, you’ll increase the chance that customers will continue to buy from you, and will be more confident in sharing your products with all of their friends.

10. Impatience

Finally, probably the biggest mistakes that marketers make is not being patient with new ideas and techniques.

• Rome wasn’t built in a day, and no business can take off without giving each idea a proper time to shine.

Often, businesses will attempt marketing tactics that they see popularized by other, larger companies, but when they don’t see instant phenomenal results, the company will pull the plug on the project, deeming it a failure.

• Many businesses overlook the fact that even for the most successful ad campaign, nothing takes off immediately overnight – sometimes campaigns need room to grow before they’ll being producing successful results.
• This is particularly true of content marketing efforts – it’s common for companies to scrap content plans because they don’t instantly see success.
• A lot of the time, this comes combined with a failure to properly distribute content and advertise the company’s products.

Trying new ideas is a big part of finding a successful online strategy and ironing out the creases in a conversion funnel.

• It’s important to have a balance in this, though: constantly leaping from one idea to the next without giving anything a chance to sink in will mean forever only having the beginnings of a campaign in place.
• The most important step to building a successful conversion funnel is therefore giving each strategy enough time to take off.

While there’s no hard and fast rule to how long a campaign needs before it’ll become a hit, as a general rule I like to give each campaign three times longer than I initially expect it needs before changing it – this way, if an idea does take a little longer to start producing results, I’ll have given it enough time to do so.

These ten points are among the most common – and most destructive – ways that companies can end up harming their conversions.

As I said at the beginning, there’s nothing wrong with having an imperfect conversion funnel.

As long as you’re willing to make improvements where they’re needed, your company can – and will – succeed in drawing in new, lasting clients.

What other mistakes have you made with your website’s conversion funnel? Leave me a comment below with your experiences:

Images: Pixabay, Hubspot, Hubspot, Small Business Trends, Pixabay, Flickr, Crazy Egg, Flickr, Practical eCommerce, Pixabay, Flickr, Flickr

Have you ever noticed that you're especially popular with the mosquitoes? Maybe they're swarming you but leaving your friends un-bitten? It might be your skin. Certain bacteria on your skin secrete chemicals that are especially attractive to mosquitoes.

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How you handle the first 10 minutes of your workday can largely determine how productive and effective you'll be the rest of the day.

"Getting off on the right foot isn't just important with relationships. It's important with the start of any workday, as well — particularly busy ones," says Michael Kerr, an international business speaker and author of "You Can't Be Serious! Putting Humor to Work."

"The first 10 minutes can also set the tone and your attitude for the day — so it's imperative that you start it off right, with a clean slate," he says.

Lynn Taylor, a national workplace expert and the author of "Tame Your Terrible Office Tyrant: How to Manage Childish Boss Behavior and Thrive in Your Job," agrees: "Those brief moments can predict your all-important mindset because they're the first impression of your day ahead."

She continues:

The first few minutes at the office can be the most stressful because there's a level of anxiety about what you may face: A sudden onslaught of urgent emails; last-minute crises or meetings; a call to stop by the boss's office; a cranky coworker, and so on. It takes greater self-awareness, a positive mindset, and self-training each morning to counter what feels like negative gravity pulling you down as you face overwhelming demands.

Kerr says that successful people tend to thrive on routine and habits: "Creating consistent habits is largely what makes them successful. And a key time for habit-forming practices is at the start of the day."

Here are 19 things the most successful people do in the first 10 minutes of their workday:

SEE ALSO: Science says this simple tweak to your morning routine could make you happier and healthier at work

No. 1. They show up on time.

The very first thing they do is show up ... on time.

When you rush to work or show up late, you'll probably start the morning in a state of stress, which can affect the rest of your day.

Wake up on time — don't hit snooze! — eat a healthy breakfast, and give yourself enough time to get to work. Try to keep your mornings as calm and stress-free as possible.

No. 2. They reflect.

Achieving your best results requires you to reflect on where you've been, where you are, and where you're going, says Taylor:

Successful people build in quiet time and solitude to do this first thing. They ask themselves: "What did I accomplish toward my goals so far this week — or last week?" "What is the status of my current project?" "What do I need to accomplish today in light of this?"

No. 3. They take a moment to pause and be present.

"This may sound very 'Buddha-like,' but it's important," Kerr says.

"If you arrive and walk into a tumultuous situation with phones ringing and people clambering to see you, you run the risk of starting off on the wrong foot, getting derailed both emotionally and time-wise, and letting other people set the agenda for you," he says.

Centering yourself and being fully present will help make sure you manage the day ahead, rather than allowing it to manage you.

Note: This post is intended for anyone who is interested in growing revenue. Yes, this means you. In a social world, everyone is in business development.

What if you are not in sales?

When I published Your 12-Month Social Sales Plan, I definitely had salespeople in mind but not exclusively. Everyone who talks with others, has a network, engages in any online platforms, networks, volunteers or is engaged in the world has the ability to influence others.

This holds true for those of us who work in business to business environments. Salespeople are more proactive in their outreach, it’s their job. For non-sales employees in a company, there may not be the direct activities that typically drive sales (research, initial contact, messaging, appointments, etc.) but there should be an awareness around who is in their network, the company’s value proposition, how to share information and introducing people to the salespeople.

When Matt Birkelien, CPA and CFO at First Financial Federal Credit Union sent me a note asking about a 12-month plan for the non-sales but socially-oriented on LinkedIn, I paused and wanted to know more about what he was thinking about.

I looked at Matt’s LinkedIn profile: (looks good) and his network (strong) and his recent activity (consistent, varied and not all about him or his credit union). I found three or four great updates that Matt had shared, liked or commented on that I then read and commented on.

I responded to Matt’s comment on my post and that led to a great conversation where I learned more about Matt and his business philosophy. Let’s be honest, CPAs aren’t usually the ones who want to be business developers. Maybe Matt’s different (most likely) but as he learned early in his career, there is power and influence beyond the numbers.

CM: Why LinkedIn?

MB: While I like to keep in touch with family and friends – I never really felt comfortable with Facebook or the other social media outlets – too much useless information or the information was small and outdated before I had a chance to digest it. I remember as a kid I wanted to be a drummer in a rock band or become an accountant. (Easy to see where ultimately landed considering I had virtually no talent on the drums). Upon graduating from Salisbury State University, I went directly into public accounting, earned my CPA and then it hit me – I needed to network and eventually “SELL.” While I rose through the ranks to become a Partner, it didn’t take me long to realize that networking and building a relationship was one major key to success.

CM: As someone who is not in business development directly, what is your primary purpose for using LinkedIn?

MB: I love to learn, help others grow and make valuable connections with those who are in my profession or have passions similar to mine. I left CliftonLarsonAllen LLP, a national top ten accounting firm, where I specialized in auditing and consulting with Credit Unions (professional passion). During those almost 20 years in public accounting, I would often connect with those I did business with (clients), those I believed I could help by working with them (prospects) and those who were associated with Autism and special needs (personal passion – my youngest is on the Autism Spectrum).

In late 2014, I was presented with an opportunity to become the CFO at an incredible Credit Union – First Financial Federal Credit Union, travel much less with reduced hours allowing me to spend more valuable time with my two sons and finally have the ability to help my fellow board members with Pathfinders for Autism, who help with resources for those impacted by Autism. It was the perfect trifecta!

I went dormant for a while after I left CLA. Then it dawned on me – it’s really every employee’s responsibility to get the word out to anyone and everyone about the benefits of working with our Credit Union – First Financial Federal Credit Union. Our CMO, Stephanie Peltzer, mentioned in a meeting that we need our membership to be evangelical. That holds true for our staff just as much. In addition, I think that many businesses and leaders can be reminded of how important it is to share with each other what we know, what we’ve learned and that businesses can help their bottom line by helping their employees and the community as a whole. Give to get.

CM: How do you use LinkedIn? What are the top three actions you take on LinkedIn regularly?

MB: I use LinkedIn every day. It’s funny, I’ve had a few colleagues I’ve not spoken to as often as I would like tell me they see how active I am. Eric Church, my CEO, told me recently his son joked that I was the king of LinkedIn.

I make that comment because it shows that by doing simple items such as “liking” someone’s post or share; commenting to let the person know you appreciated the time it took them to provide content; sharing others’ posts or posting a couple of items of interest really do help you get seen. I’ve met some amazing folks that I would never have met had it not been for LinkedIn.

Every day, I “like” something I read; not for the sake of “liking” but to let folks know I appreciated the content; I comment to someone via a post when it feels right or have side conversations via the internal messaging system.

Finally, I try to find people I’ve met at conferences, meetings, etc… and connect with them with a personalized message. As a side note – I wish people would let me know their intentions when inviting me to connect or at least how they noticed my profile.

CM: I notice you comment and share other people’s posts. How do you decide what to comment on and share?

MB: It’s a great question that I was asked by someone fairly new to LinkedIn. I recently read a post by Michael Bluemling, Jr. (MHR) where he talked about an “ah-ha” moment – a moment he finally seemed to digest a message. When I finished reading – it hit me that I had just come from a conference hosted by ALM First Financial Advisors and I had that same exact feeling. He broke down his reasons why it was finally digested. It just fit. So I shared it. That’s the best way to describe it – with a real life event.

CM: How do you think organizations could better use LinkedIn for recruiting, business development, thought leadership, and perhaps, even customer service? How would you order the priority of these areas?

MB: I think recruiting is clearly a no-brainer. It’s a professional media outlet designed by professionals for professionals. I do, however, dismiss the notion that it’s only for that purpose. If someone is going to leave, LinkedIn may help facilitate, but the reason they are leaving isn’t because of LinkedIn. I won’t go into that because we could spend hours talking about the reasons employees leave.

Business Development is a key to the survival of any organization – both for profits and nonprofits must bring in money or they won’t survive. It’s simple. While LinkedIn could be viewed as more of a B2B – awareness is something important that is missed. If you consistently see messages about what First Financial Credit Union can do to help educate your children on finances, provide you convenient and satisfying self-service or hand holding customer service, help save you money on your mortgage, car or other loans while earning you more on your savings – it’s going to make you think twice in the future.

Oh yeah, and thought leadership. Maybe the term is overused nowadays, but the fact is – if you or your company just repurposes previous material, it won’t take long for the folks we all provide a service or a widget to to ignore. Once upon a time, a boy cried wolf and nobody cared. When they should have.

CM: What three attributes do you consider critical for finance, operations, and HR professionals on LinkedIn?

MB: Curiosity, personal/professional growth, and Passion.

Curiosity – perhaps it’s the former auditor in me but I like to ask questions, always have. Why is something performed a certain way, what made someone choose a career path, how can I be better at what I do for myself and others?

Personal/Professional Growth – I added personal into the mix because you can and should continue to grow personally just as much as you need to professionally. The world isn’t slowing down while we try to catch up. We must continue to learn. It sure was easier years ago – but we don’t live that way anymore. We must adapt and the best way to adapt is to be curious and grow our minds.

Passion – If my colleagues and friends read this – they may roll their eyes – but I truly believe you must have some passion to do a job. We can all argue that every job isn’t glamorous but, (and maybe it isn’t what you dreamt when you were a kid) like the book by Mark Sanborn, “The Fred Factor,” each of us can make a difference if we add a little passion to our jobs.

*end interview*

Just like our conversation with Matt Collins in “3 Attributes of a Social Sales Rock Star,” Matt’s comments illustrate how one person can make a difference, become an evangelist, an authentic and natural connector: the key soft skills every company should be looking for in all of their employees.

We’ve all heard of AirBnB and Uber. But the web is awash with other sharing economy services that aim to squeeze value out of “under-utilized assets”. These range from cars, bikes, lawnmowers, gardens, money, and even time. Instead of letting these assets sit idle, the sharing economy helps us share these with others who need them. This often makes the owner some money, while saving the borrower money. It’s win-win. Here are a range of sharing economy websites that you (maybe) haven’t heard of yet. These will help you with everything from free airport parking, to renting a lawnmower from a neighbor....

Read the full article: Get 11 Big Benefits from These 20 Sharing Economy Tools

GUEST:

We’re seeing a lot of gloom and doom in the SaaS space and the techworld in general as valuation multiples have compressed and late-stage funding has become more challenging. However, there still exists tremendous opportunity to build large, valuable companies in the SaaS space.

How can an entrepreneur do this? Build a “system of record.”

A system of record (SOR) is software that serves as the backbone for a particular business process. By definition, it’s very sticky and hard to rip out for many reasons. And these software solutions have moved beyond the standard questions buyers ask about ROI – they have become a class of software that is a required purchase for a given business process.

Above: Companies with powerful systems of record.

A number of companies have built highly successful systems of record: Salesforce in the sales function, Intuit in finance, Workday in human resources, and vertically oriented companies such as Guidewire and Veeva in insurance and life sciences respectively. What stands out about these companies is how valuable they each are and how low their annual gross churn is.

Once someone buys and implements a system of record (assuming it works as advertised), it’s never coming out.

Are you on path to building a system of record? Here are the seven questions to ask:

1. Does your software run a mission-critical business process? 

Systems of record are typically the backbone of core business processes — processes that will not run if the system of record goes down or gets ripped out. The more your system is at the heart and soul of how a company makes money, the more valuable your system of record will be.

2. Does your software store proprietary business data?

The power of systems of record is that they are the ultimate source and therefore “record” of critical business data. Your general ledger is stored in Quickbooks or Oracle Financials. Your pipeline data is in Salesforce. And your compensation and payroll information is in Workday. Once you are the “store” for critical business data, other applications, by definition, have to integrate into you in order for their solutions to work. Historical SOR companies, like SAP, kept their solutions closed and forced third-party vendors to spend millions of dollars for customer integrations to access the SAP data. Salesforce has taken a more modern approach by having an open API and an entire ecosystem of third-party application providers.

3. Do large portions of the employee population interact with your software on a daily or weekly basis?

The engagement and usage of your solution is a measure of how integrated your solution is into the workflow of rank and file employees. Analytics solutions are great, but if only a small set of data scientists use them, then they are easily replaced. Conversely, large numbers of employees use travel and expense reporting on a weekly basis, and so replacing such solutions would mean retraining huge numbers of people.

4. Is your company the system of truth? Do the outputs from your solution — your reports or insights — form the foundation for important business decisions?

The most valuable SaaS companies have evolved from being systems of record to being systems of truth. The data the executive team looks at for human resources discussions comes from the HRM system, and the data for discussions about customer service operations comes from the CRM system. The goal of any company aspiring to be an SOR should be that the exec team or the owner of a business is using its screens on a regular basis.

5. Does your software codify solutions that are “inside the heads of human beings?”

The more your system requires and benefits from human input of some kind, the harder it is for the next player to take over and replicate what you have. The process of implementing a system of record is a forcing function to take this undocumented knowledge that is spread out inside a company and structure it in a repeatable way in a software solution. Systems of record become the place where rules for how a company operates get codified. This is why systems of records can be so time consuming to implement – this information is sitting inside the heads of a disparate group of people and needs to be extracted and parameterized.

6. Does your software “learn” and improve over time?

Learning can be algorithmically triggered — e.g., your software leverages machine learning to improve the output over time. In addition, learning can come from feedback loops built into business processes (our forecasting approach needs tweaking based on our recent performance, so let’s update the core methodology in the forecasting solution). In this way, systems of record incorporate years of learning within a corporate function or workflow. This is a powerful reason why systems of record are so valuable.

7. Does your solution have negligible “gross” churn rates?

By definition, systems of record that work and are successfully implemented should never be ripped out unless the company goes away or gets acquired. Enterprise-focused companies have gross retention rates above 90% and the best are over 95% (not including upsells). The company where I led sales and marketing, Trilogy, is still collecting annual maintenance from clients we sold in 1995!

This is not necessarily a comprehensive list, but hopefully it provides some directional guidance on what it means to build a system of record.

Many of the examples I’ve given are enterprise-focused companies. But these same concepts apply whether you are selling to large companies or SMBs, whether your solution is horizontal or is specific to one vertical, and whether you are serving a broad function or a narrow one.

Building a system of record is not the only way to build a billion-dollar SaaS company, but it is surely the most reliable way to get there.

Ajay Agarwal is managing director and leader of the Bay Area offices for Bain Capital Ventures, where he focuses on early-stage application software and SaaS investing.

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Referrals are the lifeblood of B2B marketing. According to LinkedIn, 84% of B2B decision makers start their buying process with a referral.

Results from our recent study with Heinz Marketing also found that companies with referral programs have higher conversion rates, shorter sales cycles and greater lifetime customer values.

As a B2B marketer, getting high-quality referrals is one of my top goals.

In 2015, I set a goal to get 1,000 referrals.

How the heck am I going to do this?

This number may not seem like a lot for a large consumer brand, but it’s a big deal for a B2B startup, like Influitive. In 2014, we got 522 referrals.

With the help of our amazing advocates, we were able to surpass this goal and generate 1,229 referrals in 2015.

Before I tell you exactly how I enticed our customers to submit so many referrals, first I need to explain how we built a foundation for a successful program.

Bring in the Three Musketeers: Marketing, Sales and Customer Success

To dramatically increase our referrals, we took a three-pronged approach that involved Marketing, Sales and Customer Success (CS).

Your Sales team may already have a referral process in place—but it’s likely ad-hoc and not as effective as it could be. (“I’d love to help you cold call our customers for referrals!”…said no one ever.)

Our research found referral programs who were managed by the marketing team were 3X more likely to hit their EOY revenue goals. Why? Marketing—which sits in the middle of Sales and Customer Success—has the data and knowledge to provide the best referral experience for your customers, and act as a liaison between the two teams.

Before I break down exactly how marketing should take the lead, I want to explain how you can involve your Sales and CS teams when you start a B2B referral program.

Customer marketing + customer success + sales = referral power!

To get Sales on board, show them that you don’t want to take over their referral program. Instead, explain how you want to complement it and help them get more value from it. Here’s how:

1. Work with them to create a clear process for following up on and prioritizing incoming referrals
2. Integrate the referral process with your Customer Relationship Management software so they don’t have to learn any new tools
3. Collect useful information from your customers and help connect them with the rep so they can work together to engage referred prospects

Your CS team can get involved by identifying potential advocates. Work with them to engage your happiest customers who would be willing to refer. You can do this by mapping the moments when asking for a referral is a good idea, such as when a customer:

1. Finishes onboarding
2. Submits an NPS score of 9 or 10
3. Writes an awesome online review
4. Tells CS about a success they’re having with your product
5. Has a support issues successfully resolved

That’s how Sales and CS should be involved in finding potential referrers and reaching out to prospects. But Marketers should be the ones getting customers to submit referrals.

The dream team is just one part of the B2B referral equation.

I’ve found that the real key to generating referrals is all about building 1:1 relationships with customers, and then asking for referrals in the right way, and at the right time, without annoying your customers.

This doesn’t mean we personally called or emailed all of our users multiple times to remind them to refer. That’s not scalable on our end, and it doesn’t create a great experience for our customers.

Instead, we integrated our referral program into our advocate marketing program (which is run by me, in Customer Marketing!) to automate the referral collection process and make it a seamless, fun experience.

Here’s how…

How marketing can take the lead and generate quality B2B referrals

Our advocate marketing program, Influitive VIP, is an exclusive digital community where we get to know our customers, help make them more successful and occasionally entertain them with a GIF/meme or two.

Everybody loves a good GIF.

Our goal is to turn them into delighted customers who are so happy that they’re more than willing to refer their peers to us.

In the program, we use the data we collect to identify the right times to present them with opportunities to advocate for us. We could ask them to write a review, share our content on social media or—you guessed it—submit referrals. When they complete these activities, we recognize them for their advocacy.

There’s a few specific techniques and campaigns I ran through my advocate marketing program to hit my 2015 referral target. Here are a few lessons I learned that other marketers can do as well:

1. Stay top of mind by keeping things fun

Many advocates won’t send you referrals unless you ask for them. I ran a few referral campaigns in 2015 to keep referrals top of mind and make it fun for our advocates to give us referrals. For example, our March Madness contest brought in 20 referrals in just 1 hour.

One reason this campaign was so successful was because it used scarcity to boost referrals. For instance, advocates had to take part in the campaign’s timeframe (1 hour) to be eligible for prizes. This limitation drove immediate participation and results.

2. Make your referral requests less annoying

Whenever advocates enter the program, I have two ways I can remind them to refer.

First, I can publish a new challenge that specifically asks for a referral. I often offer a high reward value and try to make the title and headline catchy and entertaining.

Second, I have a ‘Referrals’ tab in the top navigation of our product to remind people to refer whenever they log in.

This makes it easy to request and track referrals—as well as reward the customers who provide them. No more emails or cold calls!

3. Educate your advocates about your ideal prospect

Often, advocates want to give you referrals, but they don’t know who to refer you to. So, tell your advocates exactly whom you’d like to connect with. Explain what types of roles and companies you are targeting.

I did this through a series of challenges teaching our customers about referrals.

I also put lots of details about the referral process on our submission page.

4. Make giving referrals easy

The easier it is for advocates to give you referrals, the more leads you will get.

One way to make the process easier is by proactively identifying people you want to meet on LinkedIn (ask your sales reps for help). See if they are connected to any of your advocates. Then, ask your advocates for an introduction.

I did this, and received 100+ high quality referrals. This way, my sales team talked with prospects they really wanted an introduction to and my advocates didn’t have to think too hard about who to refer.

5. Close the feedback loop

Keep advocates informed about the status of their referrals. If advocates feel that you value their time and connections, they will give you more referrals. If you don’t tell them how it goes, or remember to thank or refer them when a referred prospect becomes a new customer, you won’t receive another referral from them.

You can make this process easier by using referral tools and software that automatically tracks leads as they move through different stages of your referral process. You can also use a spreadsheet to track this information, but it won’t be as easy.

Be sure to identify your top 5-10 referrers and treat them with lots of special privileges. For example, you can take them out to dinner, offer them speaking opportunities or give them insider access to your company executives, road map, etc.

The benefits of bringing referrals and advocate marketing together

Marketing, Sales and CS all have something to gain from advocate marketing programs.

• Marketing will generate more high-quality leads for sales and have an easier time generating content, increasing social reach and generating reviews.
• Sales will have a pipeline full of prospect that will convert faster. They can also easily ask advocates for references, testimonials and more.
• Customer Success has an easier time disseminating educational information to customers and delighting customers. This often leads to higher NPS scores and increased retention.

Report: What You Should Know About B2B Referrals

Based on a survey of more than 600 B2B professionals from across North America—including sales, marketing, operations and executive leadership—this research uncovers some striking findings about the impact of referral leads on sales pipeline and revenue growth.

Download now

OTTAWA – A U.S-based technology company is pitching the Trudeau government on an innovative idea to link veterans — who are either out of uniform or about to leave the military — with jobs in the private sector.

Monster Government Solutions has been showcasing its so-called military skills translator software, hoping the Canada will follow the lead of the Obama administration and buy into the program.

The software allows military members to customize job searches through an algorithm that helps match highly technical military skills with potential civilian jobs.

It not only presents former soldiers with a list of job openings but allows them to submit applications instantly.

Terry Howell, director of editorial operations for the company, says it would require the participation of private-sector companies, but the package has a track record of success in the U.S.

“We’re looking for the opportunity to provide this to the Canadian government and by extension to the Canadian employers who are looking for veterans to employ,” Howell said in a recent interview.

The program offers a couple of different avenues of support, but the main one would work as a tool for military counsellors preparing soldiers for civilian life, he added.

During last fall’s federal election, the Liberals promised to examine so-called transition tools and the party president, Anna Gainey, wrote to the company to say “a military skills translator can be a valuable and effective tool.”

In opposition, the Liberals pushed the Harper government to adopt such a system. The House of Commons veterans committee, in a June 2014, report called on the federal government to either buy such transition software or create its own for use at both National Defence and Veterans Affairs.

The cost of Monster’s proposal would be US $1.7 million for start-up and US $400,000 annually in support and upgrades.

In the last three years, a growing number of soldiers have complained that they are ill-prepared to return to civilian life, whether physically, emotionally or even vocationally.

Many have never had to write a resume and have no idea how their training and expertise might be useful in the commercial world.

Some organizations have sprung up to offer post-uniform career counselling. The former Conservative government put in place a helmets-to-hard-hats program, hoping to retrain veterans for the construction sector and also introduced legislation to help fast-track vets into public service jobs.

Even so, the complaints mounted.

The country’s top military commander, Gen. Jonathan Vance, identified the transition to civilian life as a key area where the federal government as an institution can do better.

“It’s in that transition period where we are looking very closely,” Vance said in a year-end interview with The Canadian Press in December. “These people who successfully make it through that transition period and are able to work successfully and achieve what they want to achieve in life after uniform … we want to reinforce that.”

The post Tech company pitches on system to link veterans with private sector jobs appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Justin Trudeau is in New York, but most of the attention aimed at our southern neighbours is still on nasty battles for both the Republican and the Democratic presidential nominations. Donald Trump remains the GOP’s political plutonium—powerful, difficult to contain, and possibly dangerous enough to tear the party to pieces. In Canada, as both the Conservative Party and the NDP face renewal challenges of their own, what lessons are they learning from watching the races in the U.S.?

To discuss the impact of the political battles both north and south of the border, Evan Solomon spoke with Bruce Anderson, the chairman of Abacus Data and a political commentator. (As Anderson has openly disclosed, his daughter is Justin Trudeau’s director of communications.)

The post What nasty American political fights can teach Canadian parties appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Roughly eight months after taking the top job, Evernote's CEO announced a new team of lieutenants on Friday that he hopes will return the company to its glory days.

Evernote CEO Chris O'Neill introduced a group of seven execs to help run the company. The execs come from Google, Skype, HP, Logitech, Microsoft, Motorola, and VMware. The new team replaces many of the senior execs who have moved on from the company in recent months.

O'Neill, who himself came from Google X when he replaced Evernote's founder CEO in July, hopes to rekindle growth at the troubled startup, which was valued at $2 billion 2012 before it began to implode last fall.

Despite reaching 150 million registered users last year, Evernote struggled to grow revenue and in 2015, things started to fall apart. Execs and employees were bailing, and then it hit cost-cutting mode, announced a series of layoffs and closed three of its 10 global offices.

O'Neill is tasked with giving Evernote more focus.

The people joining the team are Erik Wrobel, new head of product; Raymond Tang, new head of China; Andrew Malcolm new head of marketing; Ben McCormack, new head of Technical Operations; Nate Fortin, new head of design;  Michelle Wagner new head of HR; and Azmat Ali new head of brands.

Here's the relevant parts of O'Neill's blog post.

In taking charge of our Product team, Erik Wrobel is leveraging 20 years of experience in product management, most recently as VP of Product at VMware where he started the cloud management product line and got hands-on with deeply technical engineering teams. He brings a wealth of technology experience to Evernote, along with the sort of deep understanding that can guide the business for years to come.

In China, we now have more than 16 million registered users and an independently operating business known as Yinxiang Biji. Raymond Tang, our new leader for Evernote China, has more than 20 years of tech industry experience with companies such as Nokia and Microsoft. Raymond’s ability to work seamlessly with teams from multiple functions will be essential for growing and scaling our burgeoning business in China, bringing the organization together to ensure that we are one Evernote team.

On the Marketing side, Andrew Malcolm exemplifies the ability to fearlessly dive into the details while also thinking at scale. In his first 100 days, he’s taken huge strides in evolving our brand narrative, identifying emerging market trends, renewing our marketing infrastructure, and helping new users discover the value of Evernote more quickly. Andrew’s experience guiding Skype through years of 40% increases in users gives us the foundation required to manage hyper-growth, while time spent at technology investment fund Silver Lake gives him a broad perspective about where markets are headed.

Ben McCormack, our new head of Technical Operations, has spent his career building and managing large scale infrastructure to support the needs of a diverse customer base. More recently, he has deep experience in cloud computing and is bringing that experience to Evernote as we map a future architecture for our service.

Great user experiences begin with great design. Nate Fortin has brought an increased focus on early prototyping to our Design team, with regular feedback from users driving a more focused and engaging Evernote experience. Nate brings a wealth of expertise from his time at Motorola, where he led design for the mobile device market. The critically acclaimed Moto X phone and Moto 360 smartwatch products exemplified Nate’s context-driven design approach.

By hiring leaders who are team members first and foremost, Evernote is building an organizational culture that innovates, looks forward, and helps its people do their best work while adding the capabilities we need to manage growth. As the new leader of our People Operations team, Michelle Wagner is applying nearly 20 years of experience in HR for software companies to grow and find some of the best talent in the industry.

Finally, Azmat Ali joins us at the head of our Brand organization. Azmat brings 20 years of experience in marketing for major technology brands like HP and Logitech, but it’s his start-up scrappiness that really stands out. Here is a brand leader who not only conceives of the Boom Bus to launch the UE Boom but also personally drives it up and down the California coast. I can’t wait to see what he’ll do for us.

These talented executives join a group that includes Seth Hitchings, a six-year Evernote veteran who has assumed the leadership of our Engineering organization, and Jeff Shotts, our CFO and a passionate champion of Evernote. Seth, Jeff, and many others across the company will ensure that even as we pass the baton from an incredible founding team to a new generation of leaders, we will never forget how we got here. 

SEE ALSO: The inside story of how $1 billion Evernote went from Silicon Valley darling to deep trouble

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This video of a massive 230-foot glacier collapsing is absolutely mesmerizing

(Steve Russell/Toronto Star/Getty)

Michael Bloomberg welcomed Justin Trudeau to his corporate home in New York this week with a love letter of such intensity that even Stephen Harper would blush. Bloomberg wrote a column for his global financial media behemoth that called Canada’s prime minister “energetic and pragmatic” and compared Trudeau to John F. Kennedy. “The value of the Canadian dollar and the price of oil, one of the nation’s top exports, have both tumbled to near record lows,” the billionaire and former three-term mayor of New York wrote ahead of Trudeau’s arrival for town-hall event on live television. “But those details—and the apparent demise of the Keystone XL pipeline—don’t begin to tell the story of what lies ahead for the economy of Canada, America’s second-largest trading partner.”

Why the U.S. Fed is still standing pat on interest rates

Canada’s main stock market increased about 1% between the time of Trudeau’s visit to the Bloomberg LP headquarters and the early trading hours of March 18. That’s probably because the U.S. Federal Reserve indicated it was less keen about raising interest rates. But for fun, let’s give Bloomberg’s endorsement of Trudeau’s economic strategy a little of the credit. There is no one on Wall Street with a louder bullhorn than the former mayor.

There certainly is a lot to like about Trudeau’s economic policy agenda. Next week, he will plunge the federal government into deficit, recognizing the unique opportunity presented by ultra-low interest rates to renovate the infrastructure that supports Canada’s economy. There is every reason to think the program will pay for itself through faster economic growth over the medium term. But even if it doesn’t, the potential for improving Canadians’ quality of life through better transit, safer water, and so forth is justification enough. Health and happiness isn’t always free. Canada’s new government is also right on climate change. The previous government was indifferent to the future of costs of a lackadaisical approach to constraining carbon. Trudeau has put his country back on the right side of history. But Trudeau isn’t perfect. He used the Bloomberg stage to state that he intends to follow through on an unfortunate election promise: reversing the previous government’s decision to raise the age at which Canadians start receiving payments from the Old Age Security program to 67 from 65. “Tweaking the age like that is a very simplistic solution that won’t work to a very complex problem,” Trudeau said of an initiative that was meant to save more than $10-billion a year once fully implemented in 2030.  

8 things to watch for in the budget (that aren’t the deficit’s size)

The Prime Minister likes to say that his policies are based on clear, pragmatic thinking. His promise to once again lower the retirement age felt like a political calculation by a third-place party that needed to embarrass a right-wing government and outflank a left-wing official opposition. Trudeau seems to have forgotten that voters will forgive politicians a few unkept promises if they actually win. Raising the retirement age isn’t simplistic, it is necessary. The International Monetary Fund for years has documented that asking ever healthier taxpayers to wait a little longer for their pension benefits is among the handful of measures that will allow developed economies to save their public retirement systems for bankruptcy. There is nothing unfair about doing so. Life expectancy for Canadian men when Trudeau and I were born in the 1970s was no more than 70. Now it’s closer to 75 and rising all the time. We’re living longer than the architects of the pension system ever imagined. It’s entirely reasonable to adjust benefits accordingly.

Despite the weight of evidence, the previous government was among the few in the world that worked up the courage to make the change. Trudeau struggled to justify his decision at the Bloomberg event. He called himself fiscally responsible, and he said the issue of demographic pressure on public pensions demands study. Those are reasons to leave the age increase is place, at least until the study is complete. Trudeau mentioned the need to improve the health of Canadians, a well-meaning goal that would keep people alive longer and further strain pensions. He also justified himself by observing that it was cruel to expect manual labourers to work past the age of 65—surely a concern that could have been answered more elegantly.

The Bank of Canada is awaiting Justin Trudeau’s first budget

Stephen Tapp, a former Bank of Canada economist who now is research director at the Institute for Research on Public Policy, reckons the reversal will cost 0.2 percentage points of gross domestic product annually over the longer term. Trudeau said he will seek a more “nuanced” response to funding public pensions. If those responses existed, they likely would have been discovered by now. But that probably will be the next prime minister’s problem. Trudeau has chosen short-term political gain over making life easier for those who follow him.

MORE ABOUT THE ECONOMY:

• 10 reasons why Canada should eliminate most import tariffs
• Amid a rising tide of tax credits, we need to simplify the tax code
• Tax cuts won’t grow the economy if Canadians are too scared to spend
• Why entrepreneurs are the key to growing Canadian jobs again
• The low loonie is driving a boom in Canada’s used-car exports
• Canada’s hardest-hit economies need immigration to thrive again
• The Bank of Canada’s pro-deficit signals just got even stronger
• Why Canada’s governments shouldn’t be scared of debt right now
• A fast and cheap way to stimulate the economy: a food rebate
• Like everyone else, the Bank of Canada awaits the first Trudeau budget

The post Why Trudeau is wrong on Old Age Security appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

When you go to sleep tonight, put a book under your pillow. When you wake up tomorrow morning, you'll have its contents memorized.

OK, so that probably won't work.

But don't lose hope just yet: It turns out there actually are a few things you can learn — or at least improve your grasp of — while you snooze. Most of them depend on one thing: sound.

Here are some of the skills you may be able to sharpen in your sleep:

LEARN MORE: There's a fascinating reason why it feels like it's gets harder to sleep as you age

DON'T MISS: What too little sleep does to your brain and body

1. Foreign words.

In a recent experiment, scientists had native German speakers start learning Dutch, beginning with some basic vocab. Then they asked them to go to sleep.

Unbeknownst to the dozing Germans, while they slept, the researchers played the sound of some of those basic words to one group of them. The other group was exposed to no such sounds. Later on when they were tested on the words, the group who'd listened to them overnight was better able to identify and translate them.

To make sure the findings were tied to sleep — and not just the result of people hearing the words — they had another group listen to the words while they did something else while awake, like walking. The walkers didn't recall the words nearly as well as the sleepers.

2. Musical skills.

In another study, researchers taught a group of people to play guitar melodies using a technique borrowed from the video game Guitar Hero. Afterward, all the volunteers got to nap. When they woke up, they all were asked to play the tune again.

Unbeknownst to the sleeping participants, one group was played the same melody they'd just learned as they slept. The other group was not. The volunteers who'd been played the sound while they napped — even though they had no memory of it — played the melody far better than those who didn't hear it as they snoozed.

3. Where you put something.

In a 2013 study, researchers had 60 healthy adults use a computer to place a virtual object in a particular location on the screen. When they picked a location and placed the object there, they heard a specific tune. Then, they did two experiments in which they had the participants nap for 1.5 hours. During the first nap, participants dozed as usual, with no sounds playing. During the second nap, the tune that was played when they were placing the object was played again — though none of them reported hearing it.

Not surprisingly, after either nap, people's memories faded. But their memories faded less when they'd been exposed — even sub- or unconsciously — to the sound that had been played when they'd placed the item. Interestingly, their memories were sharper still when they'd been told the virtual object was of "high value."

EXCLUSIVE:

API.ai, an intelligent speech interface company for apps, devices, and the Web, is announcing an integration with Slack that could be a major stepping stone in deepening Slack’s usefulness in the enterprise beyond chat.

The AI startup has been building speech products using machine learning for six years now. It launched the first speech assistant app, even before Siri, and now assistant.ai has 30+ million subscribers and a higher user rating than all the other major voice assistants on the market (Google, Siri, Nuance, etc.). Now API.ai has launched what could be an awesome feature for Slack: a developer tool to create truly conversational bots that rely on NLP (natural language processing).

Bots are the new apps

Conversational interfaces have been around for some time. Do you remember SmarterChild? Every teen of the AOL Instant messaging generation should. You could ask him (at least, I always thought it was a him) for movie times and weather in your area. You could ask him about his favorite song or food. ‘He’ was a brilliant time-waster, and in general, kind of a parlor trick.

*It was an often hilarious parlor trick, if I recall — and what a precursor for what’s coming this year in chat.

The rapidly expanding chat app and messenger market is anything but a trick. In fact, messaging apps have recently surpassed social networks for monthly active users. In the research game, when we see major markets intersect like this, there are significant macro forces at play — and the results ripple throughout every wave of the innovation economy that supports it. In this case, that means investors and entrenched players in messaging. Slack is a big part of this economy on the enterprise side, at least in terms of potential future (over) value. It even launched its own venture fund to push this wave forward.

There’s rumblings of Facebook kicking the tires of a bot ecosystem through Messenger. Kik did so last year and is already seeing massive growth.

The fundamental thinking around the bot ecosystem’s opportunity flies directly in the face of what’s happening with mobile phone engagement. Somewhere around 90 percent of a mobile phone user’s time is spent on email, their preferred social network, and messaging. That’s not to say apps are dead — but the windows of opportunity for competing for a mobile user’s attention outside of those “big 3” apps is shrinking. It’s the driving force for the $100B+ mobile app enabler ecosystem we’ve been covering at VB Insight.

Bots are also going to be a big reason why single-use apps will be a thing of the past. When you go to Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, you can have food brought straight to you via the Levi’s Stadium food delivery app. Great. Now I have to get out my phone, search for the app, put in my password, create an account, add my credit card…

Wouldn’t it be cooler just to chat with a Levibot?

That’s sort of how API.ai functions. The main benefits of using it over other chat bots is that there’s no need for users to memorize commands. API.ai-driven bots can support multi-step/clarifying comments, making chats more contextual. It’s also super easy to build them with no coding required. I built one with CEO Ilya Gelfenbeyn over the phone in a minute or two.

The company has deep expertise in the enterprise with other AI products in various stages of production. They have large clients in IoT (which they couldn’t disclose, but alluded to major players in smart home hubs, wearables, and coming-soon competitors to Amazon’s Echo device), TV set-top boxes, voice-enabled mobile apps, in-car voice interactions, enterprise solutions (CRM, warehouse management, etc.), and even robots — having processed over 2.7 billion API requests so far, with 20,000+ developers working on adding voice or text interaction capabilities to their products.

This is a critical differentiator for them. So yes, while it’s neat you can order a Lyft via Slack, imagine how much money a company could save in employee on-boarding, for instance, by automating the process via chat. API.ai has been working with enterprise resource management tools and CRM systems to make this a reality.

Entire business workflows can be viewed and coordinated inside of the messaging platform. With such functionality, Slack aims to fulfill its lofty promise to redefine the way we work and communicate.

Silicon Valley is experiencing a growth vs. monetization dialectic as of late, spurring massive public markdowns and some less-than-rosy news for tech workers this year. Slack has firmly been on the growth end of that spectrum, but it’s also seen plenty of trough of disillusionment fodder. What will pull Slack out of the backlash? Maybe AI that works.

This post on the Mixpanel blog provides an excellent framework for the main components of the bot opportunity, and how Kik is seeing massive engagement and growth on it already. If you’re interested in this space, you should go read the whole thing.

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When you think of a great salesperson, what characteristics come to mind?

Some of you probably thought of consultative reps who are able to guide prospects through a complicated buying process. For others, maybe being great at active listening is the sign of a top-notch rep.

But many of you probably thought, “Great salespeople can close.”

This isn’t surprising. All salespeople care about closing, and with good reason. Without a close, there’s no sale. Without a sale, you’re not bringing in money. And as a salesperson, if you’re consistently failing to bring in money … well, let’s not even go there.

Basically, it makes sense that closing is so top-of-mind for salespeople. Any sales rep who doesn’t care about closing probably shouldn’t be in the profession.

But in the era of “Always Be Helping” selling, closing is less of an event in and of itself and more of a foregone conclusion.

If you’ve done your job correctly, closing isn’t a separate step of the sales process. It flows organically out of goal-setting and plan creation.

Part of being a good rep is the ability to accurately forecast deals. Accurate forecasts are crucial to helping business leaders understand their company’s health, but they’re also the ultimate test of whether you truly understand your sales process and target customer.

Whenever you’re evaluating your pipeline, examine each deal and ask yourself, What are the top three reasons this prospect would buy, and what are the top three reasons they wouldn’t buy?

If you can’t answer these questions, you shouldn’t be forecasting the deal at all. It’s a sign that you don’t understand your prospect’s main priorities and challenges. As a result, you won’t be able to provide relevant value and you have no guarantee of winning the business.

Modern closes start in the discovery process. Reps should establish what their buyers’ purchasing process and decision criteria are, explore their pain points and top priorities, then design the rest of the sales process around providing value in the areas their prospects care about.

Throughout the rest of the process, reps should consistently take their prospects’ temperature on how they feel about the deal and whether there’s alignment between what the rep can offer and what the prospect needs.

Make sure that what you’re discussing is still valuable, and that you’re kept abreast of any changes in situation that could impact a sale -- for example, new hires or terminations at your prospect’s company, loss of or new rounds of funding, or competing internal initiatives.

If you’ve done this well, there shouldn’t be any surprises when it’s time to get a deal signed. You should know exactly what your prospect needs your product for, how they’ll implement it, and what kind of support they’ll need from your company and their internal team to make the implementation a success.

The only thing that remains is price negotiation. While the dollars and cents may shake out differently than you expected, you know the ballpark number your prospect can afford and have already walked them through your product’s pricing options so they’re not surprised either.

There is one caveat to all of this: Just because you shouldn’t think of closing as a distinct step separate from the rest of your sale process doesn’t mean you don’t have to ask for the business.

You absolutely should ask the prospect if they’re ready to buy, and let them know you won’t leave the deal on the table forever. After all, creating a sense of urgency is essential to making a sale. And you don’t want a deal to end with no decision -- getting a definitive yes or no allows both you and your buyer to move on.

The real distinction between a modern, inbound closing strategy and a traditional one is how the sales rep treats the buyer.

Old-school reps -- the ones who talk instead of listen and push their product instead of trying to do what’s best for their buyers -- need to use slimy sales tactics to close their deals, because they weren’t able to demonstrate value during the sales process in a way that led to a natural close.

But inbound salespeople know that, barring an unavoidable interruption to the sales process, if they run a thorough sales process, satisfy the buyer’s requirements, and are careful to disqualify or make alternate recommendations when it’s not a good fit, a closed deal will never be a surprise.

It makes little sense to spend the time and money training and developing your sales team when the people in whom you are investing do not have the capability for sustainable improvement.

Mis-hiring is an epidemic. Based on my experience helping companies hire sales talent over the years, I believe that somewhere between 20% and 33% of salespeople do not have the capabilities to be successful at their jobs. So investing in sales processes, training, attractive incentive plans, technology, marketing support, and strong products and services to sell will not do much for you unless you have a team of qualified sales professionals with the right attributes.

The demands of today’s hypercompetitive buyers’ market have forced many sales leaders to rethink their approach to hiring. They have learned, all too painfully, that hiring methods of the past no longer apply. These lessons include:

• A salesperson with a past record of stellar performance will not automatically perform in the future. Different company, different competitors, different offering, different customers;
• The accuracy of sales peoples’ resumes and online profiles is declining, so rigorous and methodical reference checking is a must;
• The number of interviews you’ve done or your ability to “read people” can hurt, rather than help hiring effectiveness;
• A bad hire—a salesperson that does not make it through the first year—will cost anywhere from $150k to $800k or more, including lost business opportunity.

More sales leaders are building high performance teams of winners by applying a formal process to what in the past they had done by the seat-of-their-pants: hiring.   A hiring process provides the sales leader with an objective assessment of each candidate, which is the most critical success factor in hiring.

Here are the key elements of a typical hiring process:

1. Form a three-person hiring team.
2. Agree on how the position and company will be described in a consistent way to candidates.
3. Build a profile for each sales role. The profile defines the critical skills and traits required for success.  (A skill is a developed aptitude or ability, such as listening, presenting, cold-calling, and negotiating. A trait is an inherited characteristic, such as tenacity, intelligence, drive for self-improvement, integrity, positivity, flexibility, curiosity, and coachability.)
4. Write an accurate job description to provide to recruiters and posting sites.
5. Create a resume screening filter to eliminate candidates who don’t qualify at the outset.
6. Engineer sets of first-, second-, and, if required, third-round interview questions. For sales candidates, devise questions that will evoke responses that will enable you to determine, based on their behaviors, whether the candidate possesses that skill or trait without telegraphing the answer you are seeking.
7. Build a rigorous reference checking procedure that validates candidates’ claims. Sales leaders with a wide network can often find “blind” references that might provide an honest appraisal of a candidate, knowing that the discussion is strictly confidential. It works for my clients.
8. Verify past performance claims using candidates’ W-2s or other documentation. We also strongly suggest performing background checks, done with the candidate’s cooperation.
9. Build sales call and sales presentation simulation exercises for final candidates. (This is the closest you’ll get to seeing them doing what they will be doing much of the time once they are hired.)
10. Build a relationship with a predictive behavior testing provider. These tests are inexpensive, nearly impossible to trick, and are very accurate in determining a candidate’s likelihood of success.
11. Construct individual ramp-up or on-boarding plans for each new hire. These assure that the gaps between the profile and the candidate’s skill set will be closed within ninety days of employment. They will assure your new hire gets up to speed on the industry you are selling into, for example.

I know what you’re thinking.  You don’t have time for this.

Let’s look at the numbers.  If building this process were to take you as much as 10 hours and taking the first candidate through the process (rather than the typical tell-me-about-your-strengths-and-weaknesses-kind-of-interview) an additional five hours, that’s 15 hours. If you can raise your average from, say, three out of four hires working out to two out of three, and a wrong hire costs your company $500k, that’s a heck of contribution you’re making to your company’s profitability.

Here’s the bottom line

What percentage of salespeople hired into your team in the past three years have been terminated or quit because of performance issues? If the answer is greater than 30%, you need to buy or build a structured hiring process, install it, and use it.

This article was originally published in Sales and Marketing Management magazine.

Image source: richardandrose.com

VANCOUVER – The British Columbia government says it will impose regulatory changes to end the “shady” practice of contract flipping to protect sellers and consumers in the province’s hot housing market.

Premier Christy Clark said “pure, naked greed” is driving real estate agents to flip a property multiple times at higher prices before a deal closes, allowing agents to continue making commissions while buyers avoid paying property tax.

Clark said the new rules will require the original seller to provide informed consent for multiple sales and that profits would go back to that seller.

“The way to end that shady practice for greedy people is to take the profit out of it,” Clark said Friday at a news conference in Stanley Park. “That’s how we know we’ll be able to make a difference.”

The premier said the rules will become part of regulations governing real estate agents and will likely be enforced by the Real Estate Council of B.C. She said she hopes that anyone who breaks the rules will lose their licence to sell real estate.

Clark said the new rules are a “first step,” and could be in place within the next month.

An independent advisory group is investigating so-called real estate contract assignment, and Clark said the province is awaiting recommendations on potential conflict of interest when a Realtor represents both a seller and a buyer in a transaction.

“I know the vast majority of Realtors in British Columbia are conscientious and professional, honest people, but we also know there are a few shady operators, especially in the Vancouver market, that are squeezing people every day and taking advantage.”

Superintendent of Real Estate Carolyn Rogers is leading the advisory group and said in a statement the issue of contract flipping will be part of their investigation. She said they anticipate having additional proposals and recommendations for the council and government to consider.

Finance Minister Mike de Jong and Deputy Premier Rich Coleman are also expected to meet with Vancouver’s mayor to discuss collaborative steps that governments can take to improve housing affordability.

Clark said the province will discuss ways to increase housing supply.

Mayor Gregor Robertson voiced his support for the new rules but noted that supply alone won’t deliver affordability. He has called for a tax on real estate speculation.

“Premier’s commitment to banning shadow flipping is good first step to reduce toxic speculation in (the) B.C. housing market,” he said on Twitter. “Also need new (government) tools to create level playing field, protect affordability.”

B.C.’s Opposition NDP Leader John Horgan said the premier’s announcement was a step in the right direction, but questioned why she was taking action now. The NDP introduced two private member’s bills this week, one calling for a two-per-cent speculation tax and the other to close a loophole allowing investors to avoid paying property transfer tax.

Horgan said the best outcome would be a combination of the new rules Clark announced and measures that the New Democrats have put forward.

“Obviously, if we can keep money in the pocket of the initial seller, that’s good news for them. What we’ve been concerned about is the loss of revenue by allowing (contract) flipping to take place and not capturing that property transfer tax.”

NDP housing critic David Eby said there will be a “serious issue” if the government allows the real estate council to enforce the new rules, given that the regulatory body has apparently failed so far to crack down on the practice of contract flipping.

“The real estate council has been an entirely ineffective body to date,” he said. “It’s my hope that the independent advisory group that is investigating the real estate council right now provides some clear guidance to ensure these rules are actually followed once they’re made.”

The council said in a statement that it will carefully review the premier’s announcement and looks forward to building on it through implementation of the advisory group’s recommendations.

— Follow @ellekane on Twitter.

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