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Header bidding — also known as tagless, advanced, or pre-bidding — has gained significant traction among publishers over the past year with its promise to cut back on inefficiencies in programmatic by maximizing publisher yield and increasing ad revenue. Today, nearly 70% of publishers have adopted the new tech, up from almost no publishers two years ago. 

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we explain how header bidding works with graphics that illustrate the process. We also take a look at how publishers benefit from integrating third-party header code on their webpages and explain how it can be advantageous for buyers when real-time bidding (RTB) technology takes place first — and not last — in the auction. We discuss some of the hurdles that prevent sellers from adopting header bidding, including technical implementation and latency issues, and lay out how header wrappers aim to alleviate some of these pain points. Finally, we take a look at how widespread adoption of header bidding could impact the future of guaranteed buys and ad networks.  

Here are some key takeaways from the report: 

• Publishers are rapidly adopting header bidding technology. Nearly 70% of publishers now use header bidding technology, according to Tom Shields, SVP of publisher strategy at AppNexus. This is up from a negligible number two years ago.
• The technology offers many benefits for publishers and advertisers. For publishers, header bidding offers a means to optimize yield, cut down on passbacks, increase transparency of inventory value, and eliminate Google's favoritism for its own ad exchange, AdX. On the buy side, advertisers are given the opportunity to bid on all available inventory and not just remnant inventory like in a waterfall system.
• But header bidding requires advanced technical implementation and could lead to increased latency issues. To make up for this, many header code providers are creating header wrappers that cut back on operational hurdles when publishers use multiple header providers and offer timeout settings to ease latency problems.  

In full, the report:

• Defines header bidding.
• Illustrates the header bidding process. 
• Compares header bidding to the traditional waterfall auction in programmatic. 
• Details the advantages that header bidding gives both buyers and sellers. 
• Explains some of the hurdles that publishers have to address when implementing a header bidding strategy. 
• Poses questions on the long-term effects of header bidding on the programmatic ecosystem. 

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

1. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally.» Learn More Now
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Critical thinking is a valuable skill that anyone can improve with the right process. Here are five tips to help you solve problems more efficiently and make better decisions.

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OTTAWA – The country’s defence industry association says it warned the federal government over two years ago that the relationship with some of its members was rocky and Cold War-era policies governing their dealings needed an overhaul.

Christyn Cianfarani, president of the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries, says her organization fully supports recommendations in an independent report presented to the new Liberal government last fall.

The exhaustive study by the audit firm PricewaterhouseCoopers examined federal contract pricing and policies and warned that the current system provides what it called perverse incentives for industry to hike their costs, particularly in military equipment deals.

But Cianfarani said her association had a hand in shaping the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, which was leaked to The Canadian Press last week.

The association also presented its own analysis to former Conservative government officials in November 2013.

“Our goal is to fix it,” she said of the troubled procurement system in an interview Thursday.

“We were saying what you’re going to be finding isn’t perfect. It’s actually going to be — in some cases — not pretty, but we have to put it out there to fix it.”

The Trudeau government made overhauling defence procurement one of its promises in last fall’s election and it figured prominently in Public Services Minister Judy Foote’s marching orders after she was sworn in to cabinet.

Tens of billions of dollars are at stake, particularly as cabinet will soon set the direction for the navy’s much-anticipated frigate replacement program.

The Liberals have been inundated with a number of studies and analyses, both internal and independent, that point to an outdated, moribund system that has been starved of people and expertise to handle complex programs.

Aside from the independent PricewaterhouseCooper report, annual internal audits at Public Works show that both military and non-military contractors routinely overbill the federal governments on contacts and bureaucrats are not inclined to ask for repayment.

“We’re not against auditing,” said Cianfarani, who noted the onus is on the government to have a process in place that “allows for industry to be innovative” and allowed to “deliver savings and probably equal — or higher quality service.”

The defence industry association’s 2013 report chronicles the sometimes toxic relationship with federal bureaucrats.

It cites examples of contractors being asked for estimates in 2011, with the government waiting until 2013 to place an order and then expecting to get the two-year-old price.

The report notes that contractors are in business to make money, but officials are often in a race to the bottom.

“If negotiated costs and profits are continuously ratcheted down to the point where profit margins do not provide a suitable return on the full economic costs that a company incurs, then the outcomes are obvious and inevitable,” said the report.

Cianfarani says the industry has seen some recognition of its concerns at senior level, but it has not translated to policies and procedures on the front line.

The report also says that the federal government too often invokes Cold War-era legislation — the Defence Production Act. The legislation gives the public works minister the power, among other things to reduce the total amount payable under a contract to point the government deems reasonable.

The post Defence contractors clamoured for overhaul of toxic relationship two years ago appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

The world of digital marketing, like any tech-dependent industry, is in constant flux. As new technologies evolve and trends rapidly replace one another, it’s extremely difficult for one particular strategy to have real staying power for years on end. Email marketing is one of those rare exceptions. Those who would decry the 44-year-old (really) messaging method as outdated or too interruptive forget two simple facts:

1. It works.
2. It’s only as interruptive as you make it.

Pretty much all of the recent and relevant industry research points to the sustained importance and success of email marketing. It’s one of the easiest ways to reach your customers in a location you know they come back to on a daily or even multiple-times-per-day basis. Plus, email marketing campaigns are easily archived and organized, making them particularly useful for tracking relevant metrics and results.

The question, then, becomes:

“How do I get the most out of my email marketing?”

There are a few different approaches here. If you wanted, you could go without an official service or tool and generate/manage all of your content from a basic email client (like Microsoft Outlook or Gmail). This, though, will likely not be your best bet.

Because all of the writing, designing, setting up, and tracking (not to mention contact list management) will have to be done manually (Outlook offers little to no assistance for those tasks), you’ll end up diverted from your other necessary responsibilities and you’ll miss out on most of the aforementioned benefits of email marketing. Plus, you’ll likely be stretching yourself too thin to adequately handle all of your other important responsibilities.

So, what to do?

Well, if you’re too busy to singlehandedly run your business and develop in-depth email marketing strategies that work well enough to garner meaningful results, your best bet is to look for a helping hand. For some companies, this means adopting a full-scale marketing automation plan.

One way to do that would be to purchase software from a company like HubSpot (we use it ourselves, and we love it – and full disclosure: we’re also a certified partner agency). Full marketing automation software platforms can help you with email marketing, but they are designed to do far more than just that. HubSpot, for example, has amazing email marketing tools, as well as for lead management, landing page development, social media publishing and monitoring, content creation and distribution, and much more. If this big-picture approach seems like something that would work for your business, then investing in this all-encompassing software is likely a wise business decision. However, it’s worth noting that software at this scale requires in-depth training and understanding to truly use effectively. Many business owners don’t have time to acquire that expertise.

This doesn’t ever have to stop you from developing a working, standalone email marketing plan into your overall marketing strategy. Email marketing tools can be hugely beneficial on their own. Using one is an easy way to get your message in front of the eyes of your audience on a consistent and reliable basis. And perhaps most importantly, you’ll be able to easily track how much return you’re getting on your investment.

Even with standalone email marketing, there are software platforms to make your job easier – and many of them are far cheaper and easier to use than their full marketing automation brethren.

Here are a few of the more popular email marketing tools and some benefits to each.

MailChimp

For many business owners, the choice of whether or not to start using email marketing tools/software hinges on price. With so many expenses to contend with, it’s smart to be skeptical about dumping large amounts of a budget into something that they’re not sure is effective yet. For many, that inevitably leads to our first option: MailChimp.

It is widely accepted that MailChimp offers great options for people who are new to email marketing. Their user interface is crisp, logical, and extremely user-friendly. You also have access to their extensive email template library (the templates can be edited with their simple drag and drop editor), which at a glance can be seen below, as well as a handy collection of other marketing tools. Also, their free plan offers a great way to get your email marketing toes wet, so to speak. With it, you can send 12,000 emails per month to less than 2,000 contacts. This works well if you have a small subscriber list (and if you’re new to email marketing, it’s likely that you do), or even if you just want to try it out on small subset of subscribers before jumping in the deep end with a paid plan right off the bat.

As for the paid plans, there are definitely advantages to be had with features only available through paid accounts. With any plan as low as $10 (the rates go up from there in intervals of $5 based on the amount of subscribers you have), you have access to their full analytics and reports dashboard (pictured below), in addition to email automation, list segmentation, connecting your CRM or ecommerce shopping cart, and more.

Ultimately, MailChimp’s usefulness for your business will depend on your goals. If you’re new to email marketing and would like to see how it functions and what kinds of customer interactions it can create for you, MailChimp is probably your best bet. Their free plan option and general ease of use give them an advantage over their competition for smaller businesses.

Emma

Compared to MailChimp, Emma is a less famous option (but one that is steadily growing). Though they do not currently offer a free plan option, they make up for it with their extensive customization. Their templates are completely customizable, so you can set different portions of your audience up with different, personalized visual elements. Much of that visual personalization can be done via their drag-and-drop editor tool, shown below.

via myemma.com

They also seem to be more available for hands-on training than MailChimp. They offer “Emma 101 Training” on all packages to get you started, and the more inclusive packages offer even more opportunities to learn from specialists. Perhaps this is a natural extension of the fact that their market share is so much smaller and their client base more manageable, but this personal attention to individual customers definitely offers some advantage, especially for inexperienced email marketers who need a guiding hand to get going. Emma also allows you to take a “tour” of an existing customer’s account and discuss with them how you see your email goals becoming reality.

In terms of pricing, they offer four basic packages (along with four client-specific options: universities, non-profits, agencies, and franchises). The first flagship option is known as “Pro.” With this, you’ll pay a monthly fee of $89 (a jump from MailChimp, but still reasonable) and have access to all of the features we’ve discussed so far, including Emma 101 training, real-time response data, and smart audience segmentation. The next package is called “Plus” ($149/MO.) and includes everything offered in Pro, plus extras like automated workflows and unlimited emails to your audience. The “Premium” package ($239/MO.) is even more exclusive with the addition of an account manager to help you, along with other specialized onboarding and training options. The final option is “Enterprise.” This option is for agencies, franchises and universities with extremely large databases and multiple accounts to manage.

Emma’s offerings are probably best suited for someone that has time available to devote to email marketing every day of their workweek. Its plans offer customization in areas that the other two listed here do not, and their hands-on training can teach you how to take advantage of them. But having those opportunities available to you can also lead to more work on your end. If you think you can carve out some time in your schedule for this, Emma might be the perfect fit for you and your needs.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is another one of the best and most popular email marketing tools. The company merged with digital marketing software company Endurance back in November 2015, and this should lead to some interesting updates in the coming months.

As it stands, their software works in much the same way as MailChimp and Emma. While MailChimp’s layouts are a bit more user-friendly and easy to use, Constant Contact’s email design options include a collection of basic of templates and pre-designed templates (both which include wide-ranging social media integration options), as well as a Custom Code Editor (for those that have experience working with HTML and XHTML code) and a handy PDF Importer.

In addition, all Constant Contact users have access to extra campaign and marketing tools such as creating a survey, collecting donations, creating a coupon, and more (see below).

In terms of support, Constant Contact offers a little bit more than the others in the way of interactive help. Their users have access to an online learning center, a blog, video tutorials, and a customer service help line that helps take some of the sting away from the fact that their product is a bit less self-explanatory than MailChimp’s or Emma’s.

Ultimately, Constant Contact offers a helpful, solid service that caters perhaps more comfortably to users who already have some email marketing experience. The majority of users who don’t have that experience find MailChimp’s functionality to be slightly more intuitive and easy-to-use. Every user is different, though, so it’s always worth giving a service a trial run (at no cost, in all three of these cases) before discarding it as an option. It’s also worth noting that Constant Contact’s pricing is set up in a cost-effective two tier system: starting at $20 monthly for basic functionality and starting at $45 monthly for their premium service.

Email Marketing Tools Recap

Ultimately, email marketing is and will likely remain an effective way to get your message to your customer base. The best approach to take is to rely on some help from email marketing tools like the ones mentioned in this post, as they will allow you to automate the campaigning process and track the results. Depending on how much you want to spend right off the bat, the tools offer a great introduction to email marketing.

Now that you’ve got a blog, a lead magnet and know what you’re about — now that you know how to pick a fight — what do you need? You need to evangelize.

Today is St. Patrick’s Day and as a proud Irish American, I love this holiday. Why? Because it shows the power of one person’s words.

Patrick was a slave who escaped from Ireland, later became a Christian, and returned to the place of his captivity to be one of the world’s first and most influential missionaries.

What was remarkable about his mission is that unlike many other religious conquests and crusades, his evangelism was entirely peaceful. Ireland became a Christian nation without any bloodshed, in spite of it being a barbarous land at the time. That’s the power of words.

But what good is a message if you don’t share it?

Spread your words to the world

Your mission today is to be like St. Patrick. Go to new lands and spread the good news. And in the world of blogging, that means guest posting.

The best way to get free, qualified traffic is through guest posting. What is it, exactly? Guest posting is free advertising for your blog. It’s you posting your content on someone else’s blog with their permission. And it works really well.

This is how I got my first 10,000 subscribers — through guest posting. Here’s how it works:

1. Identify a blog you want to write for.
2. Read and study the blog until you find a gap in the content you could fill.
3. Build a relationship with the author and ask to contribute a guest post.

Here’s the secret to success with this. When you add more value than you take, people will say yes. Approach this with an attitude of servanthood and you will have better luck than the Irish.

There’s nothing that will kill sales momentum more than four simple words: “What’s the next step?” And unfortunately this question seems to have a permanent residence in today’s sales vocabulary.

The key to momentum is to only send value-added touches to your prospects. Putting the ownership of next steps on them (say, through those four simple words) is the exact opposite of doing that.

But what are you supposed to replace that question with? Glad you asked. I’ve recently discovered one tool that makes a world of difference.

Nothing kills sales momentum more than four simple words: “What’s the next step?”…
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A Framework for Value-Added Touches

One tool I’ve found especially effective in creating value-added touches comes in the form of a few slides. The short version: It’s a custom slide presentation that I send over after completing a discovery meeting, or demo.

The long way to look at it is as a customized framework for how you envision rolling out your product or service within the prospect’s organization.

This is effective because it enables prospects to build their business case internally. Usually, your main contact within the company will be the one spending time putting together a business case that he can share with his peers and higher-ups.

But when you send this over, you’ll have saved that person hours’ worth of work. Hours! That makes an impression.

This also works because you’re helping the prospect envision the impact your solution will have on their specific business problem and the strategy for rolling out your methodology and technology.

By creating a custom presentation that integrates both companies, you help the prospect understand how fruitful a potential partnership could be. It accelerates sales momentum.

Step 1: The Research

Before you can build a customized framework for a prospect, you need to do a little intel. Be diligent and listen often.

During the discovery process, take very specific notes on the prospect’s sales and support objectives. Write words down exactly as the prospect says them, using the same language, terminology and structure.

Write words down exactly as a prospect says them, using same language, terminology and structure.
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Make sure to include a couple of full quotes from key players in the potential customer’s buying process. People who hold a lot of weight, are well respected and wants to make an impact at their company.

The best quotes for your deck will align to business problems your company has successfully solved in the past.

You can even record the discovery process for accuracy purposes, but I would suggest you ask for the prospect’s permission before recording. Once you have that information, you can start to build your custom deck.

Step 2: Building Your Deck

The Personalized Title Page

I like to start my presentation with a title page that immediately demonstrates how our two organizations fit together. I include our organization’s title, logo and a short intro describing how our product addresses their needs. Here’s a simple template:

Easy enough, right? Just note that the customized message should be based on what the prospect has communicated to you in terms of their needs and business goals.

The Objective Alignment Overview

This is the most important part of your framework, because it drives home how your product or service will help XYZ company address their challenges and achieve their goals.

Here you’ll use the information you so carefully denoted during the discovery call. I usually put the most impactful quote from a key player in the buying process at the top, along with a headshot of that person and the company logo.

Below that, I include a quick list of the state objectives from XYZ company. Use the same words and phrases that they did during the discovery call so they can immediately identify with them.

Finally, include a list of your product or service’s application objectives. Explain the pain points that it solves, again using the similar language that was originally communicated to you.

You want to help your prospect understand exactly how your product will address their challenges and align with their core objectives.

Take a look at a potential format for this slide:

The Social Proof

The last customized slide you should include in this deck is the overview and current customer logos. This is where you’ll explain a little bit more about your company and, more importantly, provide social proof for your product or service.

To share more about our company, I include five quick bullet points on the slide that explain:

• Why we exist
• What we we do
• How many customers we already do it for
• Where we’re doing it
• How we do it

The information you include here should be unique and relevant specifically to your company. I start with the why of our organization because people often don’t just buy what you do — they buy why you do it.

In the case of LevelEleven, I explain that we are enabling the modern sales leader. Then I explain how we do it: LevelEleven enables modern sales leaders by providing a sales KPI management platform and activity-based selling methodology.

I follow the how with who — LevelEleven currently serves more than 200 customers. But I’m not really waiting this long to tell them who we’re already working with, because the right side of this slide includes logos of current customers with the same company size, region or industry.

Finally, I add a few little extra pieces just to enforce our unique brand identity. (Ex: LevelEleven is located in the heart of downtown Detroit, and we’re backed by Salesforce Ventures).

Here’s an example of how this slide could look:

The Final Slides

After that, you can include other slides from your traditional sales deck that demonstrate how your product or service works and how implementation might look.

I like to conclude with a slide of quotes from current customers accompanied by their names, titles and headshots.

Step 3: Repurpose

Not bad, right? Especially because you only need to create this presentation template once, and then you can fill it in accordingly each time you need to create a value-added touch with a prospect.

As always, follow up with even more value-added content, such as proposing a product demo or sharing a recent relevant blog post.

Here’s to accelerating sales momentum.

The post The One Question You’re Asking That Kills Sales Momentum (And the Tool to Replace It) appeared first on Sales Hacker.

LinkedIn’s vision is to create economic opportunity for every member of the global workforce. Notice that I said every member, not just white collar workers with four-year college degrees. Everyone.

To achieve our vision, we’re building the world’s first Economic Graph — a digital map of the global economy that includes every member of the global workforce and their skills, all open jobs, all employers, and all educational institutions. We’ve been sharing labor market insights from the Economic Graph with dozens of policymakers across the globe to help create greater economic opportunity.

For example, we’ve been sharing Economic Graph insights with policymakers in Colorado and Phoenix. We realized the combination of our Economic Graph insights and the LinkedIn platform can have an even greater economic impact. So last June we joined Skillful (formerly Rework America Connected) — a Markle Foundation initiative to help workers in Colorado and Phoenix with high school diplomas and some or no college education acquire new skills to advance their careers.

This is important because more than 40% of workers in Colorado, and nearly 50% of workers in Arizona, have a high school diploma and some or no college education. Yet 44% of the more than 468 recruiters and hiring managers we surveyed in Colorado and Phoenix in February said it’s hard to find people with the right technical skills. Companies that have a hard time hiring are less productive, which stunts the growth of the local economy.

Educational institutions — like community colleges, boot camps, and vocational schools — that collaborate with local employers typically have high placement rates.

This is because they tailor training programs to teach students skills that are in demand. Sixty-one percent of the 914 recruiters and hiring managers we surveyed in Colorado and Phoenix said they’d benefit from working more closely with educators. We’re using Economic Graph data to show employers which educational institutions they hire from, and show educators which companies their graduates work at and need their students’ skills.

This data makes it easier for employers to identify which educators they should collaborate with, and vice versa. Plus we’re encouraging Colorado and Phoenix employers to include the skills required for jobs in their job descriptions to help job seekers determine whether or not they’re qualified for jobs.

And most importantly, we’re making the collaboration that’s occurring between employers and educators transparent to the people who need that info most: job seekers. Thirty-nine percent of the 355 U.S. workers who have a high school diploma and some or no college education we surveyed said they want to advance their career in their current field. Forty-two percent said they want to get a new job in a different field. But 54% said they don’t know what jobs are available, and whether or not they need additional training to acquire the skills required for those jobs.

Introducing LinkedIn Training Finder

That’s why we developed Training Finder — a new product that helps job seekers acquire new skills and advance their careers. It shows them relevant training programs in their area; which programs are affiliated with employers; whether or not they’re accredited; the program’s employment rate, cost, and duration; the skills the program will teach them; the jobs they’ll be qualified for when they complete the program; and the estimated salary. These insights will help them choose the training program that will teach them the skills they need to get the job they want.

For now, Training Finder is targeted at job seekers in Phoenix and Colorado who have a high school diploma and some or no college education and want to advance their career in their current field, or get a new job in a different field. If that describes you, check out Training Finder. You can also talk to a career coaches by visiting Skillful.

Colorado and Phoenix are both doing great work to up-skill workers. We’re hopeful that Skillful will amplify their efforts and help create skills-based labor markets that value people’s skills — not just their degrees — and empowers lifelong learning so that workers’ skills evolve with the ever-changing skills needed by companies.

Additional Economic Graph Initiatives

Skillful is one of many examples of how we’re using the Economic Graph and LinkedIn to help create economic opportunity. In June, we began working with the GMCA (Greater Manchester Combined Authority) in the United Kingdom to provide insight into the workforce’s existing skills, the skills required to get jobs in Greater Manchester, and the gap between the two. The results of that research will be used by the GMCA to deploy its resources more effectively, and by local educational institutions to tailor courses so they teach students in-demand skills.

We also used Economic Graph data to provide the City of Toronto with greater insight into its tech sector. Toronto is using the data to help youths learn tech-related skills and bolster its tech sector. For example, Seneca College — one of the largest colleges in Canada — is updating its curriculum and offering new courses to help prepare youths for careers in tech.

And we used Economic Graph data to provide New York City, as part of its Tech Talent Pipeline initiative, with insights on the current state of the city’s tech industry. The city used the insights to determine “how to deploy $10 million in funding to help NYC schools, government, nonprofits, and companies better prepare New Yorkers for in-demand tech jobs and fuel the continuing growth of NYC tech businesses.”

If you’re interested in learning more about the Economic Graph and the work we’re doing to create economic opportunity, please follow the Economic Graph Showcase Page.

Want to get and keep those elusive ‘A’ Player Salespeople, well you better first find out what they want. So here’s a guide, see how many your organisation can say with confidence you’re providing.

A Sharp Sales Manager: Knowledge, support, leadership- salespeople want all this from their sales manager. The sales manager is there to ignite the flame and keep it burning in their sales team. Salespeople need to know that they can turn to their manager at any time when they become dejected, looking for constant guidance, coaching and motivation.

Recognition and Respect: Acknowledgment of success and value to the company goes a long way. On-going rewards, weekly nominations of achievement or a simple pat on the back, reminds top salespeople that their hard work is not going unnoticed. When an employee is feeling unappreciated, they will most likely lose motivation for their work. It is one of the most frequent reasons why people will leave their current job for a new one.

Pay attention, before it comes to this.

New Product Enablement: Salespeople are more efficient at selling products they are comfortable with. Therefore, it’s essential that before launching a new product, they receive the tools to be successful. How will this new product satisfy their critical buyer’s needs? Top salespeople need to be enabled to win with each new solution.

New Challenges: ‘A’ Players want to be intellectually stimulated. They have a thirst for knowledge and will seek out all opportunities for further training and skill enhancement. Challenge your top performers to be even better, invest in sales training courses. They will thank you for it with loyalty.

Great Company Culture: Work culture aligns a company and its employees, allowing them to thrive. Top salespeople aspire to be involved in a culture that promotes both personal and professional growth. The whole person needs to matter, not just the bottom line. If you want to keep the top salespeople, your culture must be consistent. Any inconsistencies or disingenuous messages and you will lose your top performers.

A healthy company culture creates happy employees.

A Solid Company: Workplace culture is one thing, but if it doesn’t exist in a company that harvests a good reputation and is financially stable, it means nothing. Organisations that have solid business plans, financial strength, strong ethics and invested staff will entice top performers. Top salespeople don’t want to work for a company that cannot meet their client requirements, operate with poor systems and processes, poor quality products/service, poor support, and mediocre leadership.

More Opportunities: Success should lead to advancements of opportunities, [and this is what top performers are looking for]. What constitutes a great opportunity varies from person to person. It could be the chance to earn more money or to have more flexible hours, more responsibility perhaps. When you have identified the motivators of your individual top performers, you can establish an environment that can create these opportunities.

Don’t let anything break your top salesperson stride.

Solid Product Offering: Top salespeople don’t need to have the best product to be successful (that is why they are the top performers). But they do need a product that is reliable and deemed by them worthy of selling. It is, after all, their credibility that is on the line.

No Micro Managing: Top salespeople got to the top through hard work and meticulous improvements to their sales process. The last thing they need is their sales manager standing over them picking apart their efforts and complicating everything. A sales manager’s ability to stay close, yet allow breathing space is what helps them to generate more top performers in their teams.

Avoid.

Independence (and Teamwork): This may sound like a contradiction but to a salesperson they know they need both support from their team and manager and at the same time the chance to be completely independent. Solo efforts are as much a part of working in sales as reconvening and learning with the team. It’s about getting the team together, supporting each other and making each other successful.

Is your organization willing to make the effort to entice and keep top performers?

Originally posted on LinkedIn.

Did you know that only 1 out of every 8 A/B tests manage to produce significant results?

And that’s at a professional level! Imagine how the statistics must look for people just getting started.

There are a number of reasons why your A/B tests aren’t giving you the results that you’re looking for. It could be the specific test you’re running, but then again, it might go a little deeper than that.

This article will break down the top 7 reasons your A/B tests aren’t working, and how you can get back on track today.

A/B Testing Mistake #1- You Only Copy Other People’s Tests

We’ve refrained from writing about A/B testing examples for a while now on the Wishpond blog since we believe that while it may be an entertaining read, unless there’s some context behind why those tests were successful, finding out that someone received a 27% conversion boost from changing their button color won’t do your business any good.

Of course while reading an article on A/B testing examples can be a great way of sparking your imagination, they should always be taken with a grain of salt and considered in relation to:

• The offer
• The design of the page
• The audience viewing the test
• The audience’s relationship with the business at hand

For example, take a look at this example from Salesforce who found success using a directional cue pointing at their form.

After reading this, I thought “I should add a directional cue pointing at my form!”

So I pulled my design skills out of the garage and came up with this:

And the result?

A popup that converted 18% worse than the original.

Key Takeaway:

Just because something worked for someone else doesn’t mean that it will work for you. Take the time to consider why something worked rather than jumping the gun to implement new tests based on what you’ve heard about online. An arrow isn’t necessarily better than not having an arrow. A background image isn’t necessarily better than no background image.

It’s all about context, and that’s the context that only you know best.

Side note: Don’t try and be a hero, go and find your designer and let them do their job (I swear, I thought yellow arrows were good for conversions!).

A/B Testing Mistake #2 – Testing too many variables at once

They say less is more. Well that’s definitely true about A/B testing.

By testing less elements at a time, you’ll get…

• More clarity about what caused a specific change
• A more controlled experiment
• Less volatility within your overall conversions / revenue stream

It might be tempting to test multiple elements on a page at a time. There’s nothing wrong with this and there’s actually a name for it, multivariate testing.

But with the potential upswing of a massive increase in conversions, you also run the risk of a massive decrease in conversions. This is especially troubling for businesses that rely on their landing pages and websites to contribute a significant portion of their business.

If you want to run a true A/B test then you need to focus on testing one element at a time.

Here’s is an example of what not to do on an A/B test:

Original

Variation

At first glance you might think that the only difference between these two ads was their background color. But after closer examination you can see that the headline, sub headline, and CTA have changed as well.

Now imagine that the variation wins this test. When creating a new ad, would you know which CTA to use? How about which headline or sub headline? Maybe it was the yellow background that made the difference?

While you might be able to get a more significant change by changing multiple elements at once, testing more than one thing at a time results in sloppy unanalytical tests that yield no conclusive results.

Key Takeaway

Stick to one test at a time. Your team will thank you later.

A/B Testing Mistake #3 – Too little traffic, too small changes

Depending on the traffic to your site, different marketers will be able to run different degrees of tests and still find statistical significance.

One mistake that marketers make is making very minor changes to low traffic campaigns. For instance, A/B testing “Create Your Package” against “Create My Package” as a CTA for a landing page with only a couple hundred visitors per month might take a year to reach statistical significance.

Take a look at this A/B test that ran for a few months on a low traffic popup.

Original:

Variation:

Do you notice the difference? If you look closely, there’s a small arrow to the right of the CTA text in the variation. While converting slightly better, a minor change like this could take months and months to determine a conclusive result.

Generally speaking, it makes more sense to test minor page elements (like subtle directional cues, small copy changes, etc) on high traffic campaigns so you can get feedback quickly. Then apply that learning to your lower traffic campaigns.

Key Takeaway:

Test big changes on low traffic campaigns (while still keeping it one change per test).

A/B Testing Mistake #4 – Not reaching statistical significance

Even if you’re making big changes on high traffic campaigns, you still need to ensure that you’re reaching statistical significance before calling it a day.

That means not determining the results of a test before you’ve reached a result of about a 95% confidence level.

It might be tempting to call your tests early, especially if your variation is winning. This can be dangerous though, as tests have been known to make sudden comebacks even when they’re losing by over 80%.

Take a look at this example from Peep Laja of ConversionXL, where he walks through how a test that was losing by over 89%, managed to come back and beat the original by over 25% with a 95% confidence level.

Losing Variation at the early stages of testing:

The variation that ended up winning:

Key Takeaway

Have patience when testing. Early results won’t always signal a definitive winner. Keep your tests alive until they reach at least a 95% confidence level with at least 100 conversions per variation before calling them.

A/B Testing Mistake #5 – You’re driving the wrong traffic

There’s two main components of an A/B test: the variations you’re testing and the users who are viewing them.

Most marketers get so bogged down with their actual test that they forget to consider the other side: the people behind the test.

In an article posted on Search Engine Journal, columnist Jacob Baadsgaard of Disruptive Advertising explains how he ran a Facebook PPC campaign driving traffic to his new post How to Spice Up Your Love Life With AdWords.

Despite the spicy title, the article wasn’t about relationships at all, rather it was an interesting breakdown of how to use AdWords in a novel way.

To his surprise, once the campaign was underway, despite the regular flow of traffic from a campaign of this sort, his conversion rate was far worse than usual.

Upon further investigation, he discovered that the ad and the term “spice up your love life” was resonating with 55+ year old women.

Because of the demographic (uninterested in Adwords marketing) none of them were converting and his campaign was coming up a flop.

Due to his investigation, he was able to exclude the female population 50+ and his conversion rates went back to normal.

Key Takeaway:

Know where your traffic is coming from and what they’re looking for. Don’t be so quick to call it quits on an A/B test especially if you haven’t considered who you’re testing on.

A/B Testing Mistake #6 – Not running tests for a full week

Even if you have a high traffic site with the right audience reaching a 95% confidence level, your A/B testing data could still be flawed.

Why?

Because you need to take into account weekly trends that result from browsing habits. Does your site get a spike of traffic on the weekends? Are there fluctuations in the types of people that visit your site based on your weekly publishing schedule?

All these aspects need to be considered when running an A/B test.

Take a look at this analytics snapshot from an ecommerce businesses weekly traffic breakdown:

Notice how their Sunday traffic is half of what their Friday traffic is? And do you notice how their conversion rate on Saturday is almost 2% less than what it is on Thursday?

Key Takeaway:

Run your tests for a full week to ensure that your taking into account day-to-day variations for the entire week spread.

A/B Testing Mistake #7 – You’re not proving your high-impact tests completely

There’s no better feeling than having one of your A/B tests destroy the original so that you can go on to crown yourself “King of Conversion.”

But before your inauguration, you might want to double check your findings to ensure that the results weren’t just a fluke and that you’ve actually drilled down to some meaningful results.

This is especially true for tests which surprised you from their sudden landslide victories with a high level of statistical significance. These are the types of tests which you might be tempted to quickly declare a winner and move on. But even if this is the case, and you’ve wrapped up a test with 95% confidence, there’s still a 5% chance that the test could come up a false positive.

Be careful to not jump to a conclusions (in these cases particularly) if the results are something that you’ll be applying globally across your entire site or as a part of your widespread optimization process.

Key Takeaway:

High-impact test results should be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by running the test again. Make absolutely sure there’s not an unidentified variable before implementing across your entire site. If you’re running tests to 95% significance, there’s only a 1 in 400 chance that you’ll get a false positive twice.

Wrapping up

There you have it: 7 reasons why your A/B tests might not be giving you the results you were looking for.

Remember, A/B testing is a science, so treat it like one. Isolate your tests, analyze your findings, and always question why something works, rather than just accepting it at face value.

As a bonus tip, remember to always record your A/B testing results in a spreadsheet so that your team can refer back to the results later. The human brain tends to forget and there’s nothing worse than re-testing the same test again and again 6 months down the line.

ZURICH – FIFA has signed its first World Cup sponsor since 2013, agreeing to a four-tournament deal with a Chinese conglomerate that has links to Sepp Blatter.

FIFA says the deal with property and cinema giant Dalian Wanda Group runs through the 2030 World Cup. The value was not disclosed.

The firm’s Wanda Sports Holding subsidiary is led by Blatter’s nephew, Philippe Blatter. Sepp Blatter was forced out as FIFA president by a corruption crisis.

FIFA last signed a sponsor 2 1/2 years ago when Russian energy giant Gazprom agreed to a deal.

The Wanda money will help fund the spending promises that FIFA President Gianni Infantino’s made before his election last month.

On Thursday, FIFA committed to pay $517 million more to national, regional and continental soccer bodies through 2018.

The post FIFA inks WCup deal with Chinese sponsor linked to Blatter appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

What better way to understand the appeal of Snapchat than by asking college students?

That's exactly what researchers did with Cornell students, who said the main reason they like Snapchat is because messages disappear. Unlike Facebook, students said the app is also mainly used to communicate with close friends.

"Their responses indicate that much of Snapchat’s value comes from its support of mundane, everyday conversation among close friends," according to the study, which was shared with Tech Insider. "Ephemerality plays a key role in this by preventing the accumulation of meaningless and potentially embarrassing content."

Researchers from the Cornell Social Media lab interviewed 25 students (8 male and 17 female) and asked them about how they use Snapchat. Since messages (called "snaps") in Snapchat disappear after they are viewed, participants described the app as "a lot less formal" than Facebook and other social networks.

And since Snapchat's only built-in discovery feature is its ability to scan your phone's contact list for friends, the app encourages communication with real friends.

"Facebook is a lot more acquaintances," said one college student. "Mostly people in my sorority that I’m not trying to be friends with, I think... Snapchat is more close friends and romantic interests."

The study also affirms a trend that Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel has espoused before: Young people are increasingly less interested in looking back at what happened in the past. Snapchat's story feature, which allows you to share snaps of your day with all of your followers, deletes content after just 24 hours.

"I won’t look back at someone’s old photos," said one study participant. "I don’t do that frequently. I’m just interested in the moment and I don’t care about it after I see it, so Facebook, I’m not going to look back on someone’s old photos. A Snap story will go away. I don’t really want to see it again. In a week from now I don’t really care what someone did last weekend, but in the moment it’s nice to see what they’re doing."

Since content disappears in Snapchat, the study notes that there is a greatly reduced risk of snaps being distributed elsewhere on the internet. This makes people feel more comfortable with what they share in the app. You can always screenshot snaps to save them, but that act runs the risk of being confronted by who you're messaging.

"I would confront the person, either text them or in person, just in a mature way say, ‘It’s really important to me that you delete that photo,’ and hope that they delete it," one student said. Another student said that screenshotting in Snapchat was an act "reserved for close friends."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Teens reveal their favorite apps and the winner is clear

Seven months ago, Claudia Telles was making $41,000 a year working for a Chicago-based hospital.

Today, she's at the same institution with a different role — she transitioned from the business-operations team on the academic side of things to being a quality specialist on the hospital side — and receiving a much higher annual salary: $72,000.

How did the 28-year-old make more than a $30,000 leap within the same company?

She played her cards flawlessly when the money conversation surfaced during the interview process. "Negotiation is nerve-racking, especially because you don't do it every day, or even weekly or monthly," she tells Business Insider. "But a five-minute conversation can be an extra $5,000 or $10,000 in your pocket."

We asked Telles for her top tips when it comes to negotiating the compensation you deserve.

SEE ALSO: 7 mistakes too many women make when it's time to negotiate their salary

1. Do your research

Most of the work should happen before you head into the interview, Telles emphasizes.

Start by looking at the salary range for someone with your level of experience and skills and in your industry or company. She used Glassdoor and Payscale to find out that the range for her position maxed out at $75,000, the amount she would eventually ask for. Salary.com and Indeed.com also offer free compensation and benefits information.

This will help you understand what you're worth and keep you from asking for too little or far too much. While you don't want to request too low a salary and leave money on the table, you also don't want to name a number that is well above what the employer had in mind and risk knocking yourself out of the running.

2. Emphasize what the company gains by hiring you

If you've done your homework on the company and the role they're looking to fill, proving your value to the employer should be easy to execute.

While Telles, who has been at the same hospital for three years, didn't need to research the actual company, she got a firm grasp on the job description and expectations of the new position she was applying for. "I was really able to showcase that I knew what was going on and could do the job effectively," she explains. "I told them that for the type of work that needs to get done — and will get done — this is the type of salary that would be appropriate."

If you come prepared to highlight your skills, experience, qualifications, and accomplishments, you can justify what you're asking for.

3. Practice, practice, practice

As personal-finance expert Ramit Sethi says of salary negotiation, "Eighty percent of the work happens before you even enter the room."

In addition to looking up salary ranges, studying the company, and preparing your facts and figures, you want to do mock interviews — over and over and over again. This could mean having a friend or family member ask you probable interview questions or it could mean practicing in front of the mirror.

"I recorded myself to see how my body language was and how my voice sounded," Telles explains. "I practiced not looking up or to the side. I practiced not having 'flying hands.' I made sure I looked confident, that my back was straight, and my posture strong."

As Ivanka Trump, CEO of Ivanka Trump Collection, writes on Motto, "The way in which you carry yourself, even when seated at a desk, matters. Regardless of how fast your heart may be beating, sit upright, make eye contact, and focus on breathing evenly."

Practice and preparation minimizes the risk of fumbling through the conversation when the big day comes. "By the time of the interview, I'd done 50 or so practice rounds and it just came out effortlessly," Telles says.

Every year, businesses spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) on marketing and advertising in order to reach their prospects and consumers and for the majority it is a complete waste of time and money.

When I was in sales for the New England Life and Investment Company in 1996 I remember being told that if I want more business, I have to spend more time advertising and marketing myself.

I was told that again when I started my first business in 2005.

“Don, it’s just a numbers game. You have to reach as many people as you can in order to meet the right ratio of people who will buy from you.”

Hum… I always felt there was something off with that message.

Today, those techniques no longer work they way they once did thanks to the internet.

It’s disrupting everything we ever knew about marketing and advertising and how to reach more prospects and customers.

Compound that with the reality that the internet itself is changing at light speed and many business owners feel trapped between a world that once was… one where you spend a lot of money to reach as many as possible; and a new world where spending a lot of money reaching everyone equals losing a lot of money.

What are you as a business owner to do in order to keep up?

Stop Assuming You Know Your Audience and Discover Who They Really Are

Do you know who your customers “really” are?

Do you know what they need or want or are you assuming?

Do you know what their lifestyle or business lifecycle is and how what you sell fits into their needs or desires?

Over the weekend I bought a car at a dealership near Philadelphia.

I had the chance to talk to some others who buying a car as well and come to find out they were business owners.

As we talked, it was apparent that they had a lot of assumptions about who was visiting their websites, who was following them on social media and who was actually showing up in their place of business to buy from them.

As we talked, each one began to discover that their assumptions were wrong and they admitted that they struggled with marketing and sales and were not happy with their business results.

They were frustrated and visibly upset because they felt conflicted about what to do, and they were honest about how little they trusted those who claimed they could help them.

As we talked, it became apparent to them that the real problems were deeper than just strategies that are always pitched to them.

Do SEO, social media, videos, or create a new website… One said he felt like it’s a ploy to give up their money to these supposed “marketers” who claim they can help them and then they never deliver.

As we talked more, they began to realize the real problem is their message and that they don’t know who their message is for.

In a recent survey by IBM in October 2015, nearly 80% of respondents felt that business websites were in no way relevant to them.

In another study by the 2015 B2B Web Usability Report, nearly 50% of respondents said that website visitors left a website almost immediately due to a lack of message.

In still another survey by Gleanster, inefficiency in content production has resulted in an estimated $958M each year in excessive spending for mid-to-large B2B US companies.

That means they didn’t get a return on their investment.

Why?

Because they didn’t create relevant websites or social media posts for those who were able, willing and ready to buy from them.

Do you see the theme that is developing?

Most Businesses are Making Educated Guesses About their Prospects and Losing Money as a Result

How do I know that the majority of businesses don’t know their real audiences?

Numbers and metrics don’t lie…

On a business website:

• Is traffic to the site high but sales or service pages have less than 20% of the traffic that other pages have in total?
• Are bounce rates higher than 50% (A bounce rate means someone came onto your website and then stayed only on the page they came to and left)?
• The time on a website is less than one minute.
• Do few people tell you that they found what they were looking for or needing on your website when they call or come into your place of business?
• Few to none are filling out your forms or contacting you by email.

On social media:

• You have to participate in groups to gain followers who make your presence look large but don’t care about or need you.
• Very low social engagement on social media posts (i.e. Likes, shares, comments or tweets)?
• Few are sharing your articles around social media.
• You don’t get anyone who calls or shows up at your place of business who says they saw on (insert social media page) that you (insert whatever they need).

Relevancy and specificity is the name of the game when it comes to marketing.

After I finished talking with the business owners waiting to finish up at the dealership, my sales person and I began talking.

I asked him; how many people come in and say they saw a commercial with the cool car racing across the desert or going up a huge mountain and are saying they want that car?

He said; “no one.”

As we were talking, a nearby single mom was listening and interrupted and said us…

“I came in because I was talking with a friend about how this vehicle (as she was pointing) held up in an accident with her two kids in the car and she will never own any other vehicle again. I want that car!”

The car company was completely missing the message to this person.

She only came in because her friend had an experience and if that were her, she would want the same experience.

She wanted safety for her and her children.

She didn’t care about features and benefits.

Yet, the majority of businesses still talk exclusively about features and benefits over solutions to needs, problems, or desires.

For those who are serious are about discovering who their audience really is, it may take months or even years before they stumble into discovering their message.

Why?

Because they don’t have a structure or system to help them know who their specific prospects are and then communicate relevantly to their problems, needs, wants and desires.

Here is an even worse thought if you are conscious at all about making money for your business…

How much money are you wasting trying to save a dollar?

Some estimates say that 2/3 to 3/4 of a marketing budget is wasted, meaning companies have to spend money to make money but the returns are much lower and take longer than they would like.

John Wannamaker, a nineteenth-century department store owner was once quoted as saying:

“Half my advertising is wasted, I just don’t know which half.”

Businesses are spending tons of marketing dollars trying to reach people in old mass marketing methods that don’t work anymore and are throwing tens of thousands of dollars or more down the drain.

When you factor in how much money a business is losing because they have the wrong message for the wrong people that number will likely make your stomach turn.

Yesterday, I was at the pet store when I came across a couple who had a large puppy Neapolitan Mastiff and two Old English Bull Dogs. My son love bull dogs and wants one someday.

As we got to talking, he shared that he is a general manager of a local car dealership (different than where we bought the care… I know it’s confusing but hang in there for the point) who wanted my opinion about marketing on Pandora?

I asked him why he would do that.

His answer was: “The owner thought it was important to do digital marketing.”

Really?

Most people listen to Pandora as it’s on in the background if they are listening at all.

I bet if he knew who was driving his cars he would market very differently to them.

Relevancy and Specificity is Your Friend

Just knowing your broad demographics is not enough. You have to be in the head of your consumers.

You have to talk to them online in such a way that they say:

“OMG, how did you know…”

While making assumptions is a great starting point, you have to get to the real specifics.

That’s where research is important.

Your business may be in a local community so knowing about that community is really important.

Or, your business may be bigger than that.

However, you still have to know about the “community” of prospective buyers as well as how and where to share your business with them.

This is why knowing the lifestyles or business cycles of your audience are important.

I shared in this article titled “How to Go From Out of Work to Successful Entrepreneur” a story about Joe.

Here is the summary of Joe’s specific profile:

• He is a 20 year IT employee of a large company with incredible benefits who was let go to do outsourcing overseas.
• He’s been out of work six months or longer and debts are piling up.
• Employers said he was either over-qualified or they are not hiring at this time.
• He can’t afford to take a low-paying job at Home Depot to support his needs.
• He never saw himself as a business owner and yet he always wanted his independence.
• He’s already broke, so starting a business from his point of view is a good risk.

Joe’s target market for his new IT business – Municipal, County, State and Federal Governments:

• A $450 billion government IT market.
• There are over 2,000 companies competing for government IT contracts at all levels of government (local, county, state and federal) thanks to shrinking profits in corporate America and cheaper IT services overseas according to the Reference USA database of business trends.
• Government IT infrastructure that exists today goes as far back as the 1980’s and in some cases even the 1960’s – they are woefully inadequate to serve the needs of the public.
• For the next ten years the forecast calls for a 4% annual growth in IT services which means there is plenty of room for a company with a dynamic message and the skill set required to meet the needs of the particular agency.
• Governments are experiencing high costs to taxpayers and bloated government budgets due to wasted time and inefficiencies of older IT networks and systems.
• Old equipment, wiring and software that is easily hacked into thus creating a major liability.
• Lack of resources by government staff to handle the upgrade of the system themselves.
• Lack of understanding of how specific networks and systems work and their advantages and disadvantages specific to their needs.

That article has attracted numerous clients to me because of its specificity.

In fact, my sales increased 125% from March 1, 2016 – March 7, 2016 from people who said that article did it for them.

The good news is that article will be working for me still today, tomorrow, next week, next month and in the years to come.

There is a massive ROI just on that one specific article.

No matter what kind of marketing you do either offline or online, it’s vital to have the right message for the right audience who is able, willing and ready to buy.

I hope that the story of the single mom in the car dealership or Joe’s story resonated with you.

I hope that it showed you how important it is to move from being general to specific.

The key to earning sales online (it applies offline as well) through your website, social media, video or email is to be specific, relevant, and relatable.

However, without the intense focus for a short time that is structured and organized, it can take months or years to learn who your audience really is; at an extremely high cost when you factor in how much money a business is losing because they have the wrong message for the wrong people.

Are you ready to stop losing money on marketing and learn how to leverage it to help your business grow?

If you’re reading this article to this point, then you already know that you have a problem.

You’ve been in business for a while and you know you have a great service or product but you’re not getting the business you believe you should be getting.

Perhaps you’ve spent tens of thousands of dollars or maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars, and you have nothing or very little to show for it.

Or, maybe your business has been successful but you know that something is still missing and this is the key to improving your business.

If you’re ready, I have a structure and system to help you discover your specific audience and learn how to communicate relevantly to your prospects problems, needs, wants and desires.

If you ready to really know your customers and create a specific, meaningful, relevant and compelling message that will attract those who are able, willing and ready to buy from you…

Take me up on a free, no-obligation consultation.

Click here to access my calendar or on the image below.

Want to learn more about messaging and digital marketing, click here and visit the “Begin Here” page.

In addition, for a limited time you can have a FREE copy of my highly popular eBook titled “The Shift – Making the Fast Paced Transition from Mass Marketing to Context Marketing.”

Do you have a question, thought or idea and want to share with me and my readers? Leave a comment below in the comments section and let’s chat!

Apple has more to worry about than the FBI, courts and the government breaking Apple’s privacy engineering.

Apple has a peaked market that appears to be limiting their growth.

All markets eventually saturate. The smartphone market, in most first-world nations, is saturated, or nearly so. Thus, the number of people willing to pay a premium for Apple mobile devices is almost capped. iPhones – at least in their current incarnation – appear to have reached saturation. iPhones will not compete in second- and third-world markets against $4 Android phones.

All markets are segmented. When the segment you dominate becomes saturated, you have to change something before revenue growth abates and stockholders call for your head. The question remains which action is correct. Apple has a brand built around the high-end of their market, so they are unlikely to trash their brand by dropping prices.

Since this is basically a segmentation and product question, segmentation and product are where to look.

SEGMENT: If your segment is saturated, you start by looking at other segments. But this depends on how narrowly you defined your beachhead segment. You begin by examining your targeting assumptions and seeing if other segments offer new customers with little or no product changes (often it is a simple as localizing the product for a different geographic region).

REGIONAL: As Apple’s dilemma demonstrates, different regions have different demands, pricing being one. Examine the demands and see where a product can be inexpensively augmented to fit local needs and preferences.

FEATURE: One set of features may be fine for one audience, and either too much or not enough for the next. There is little harm in providing a stripped-down version of a master product, and nearly everyone extends their products to reach previously unreachable buyers.

REPLACEMENT: If all your segments are saturated, then you may be forced into replacement marketing (where Apple appears to be heading). You must keep current customers replacing your products with more of your products, but you can also try to move customers away from competitors (in Apple’s case, this becomes increasingly more difficult as Google solidifies their Android universe).

NEW PRODUCT: If your markets are completely saturated, and the cost of converting customers is high, then creating a new (and preferably synergistic) product is a way forward. Some think this was the goal of the Apple Watch, though sales reports are not encouraging.

Plan for saturation. It always occurs eventually.

Sales technology has come a long way over the past few decades. And when revenue goals are increasingly more aggressive, and reps are expected to sell more, faster, yesterday’s outdated sales tooling will no longer cut it. The rise of the sales stack in 2016 serves as evidence to this fact.

These technological shifts are disrupting the sales process and the way that reps engage with prospects, customers, coworkers, and the world at large. Sales and sales enablement leaders must commit to modernizing their sales team by equipping reps with the right tools to help them do their job efficiently and effectively. So with this in mind, is sales enablement, a technology that has been trending recently, a luxury of a necessity

The Tech-Savvy B2B Marketplace

The B2B marketplace is evolving, and one of the most significant changes is in demographics. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that, as of 2016, Millennials have replaced Boomers as the largest generational cohort, currently accounting for nearly half of all B2B buyers and sellers. Within 10 years, Millennials will comprise three-quarters of the global workforce. Thus, traditional sales strategies, tactics, and tools are no longer as effective as they once were.

The Millennial workforce is not just tech-savvy, having never known life without technology, but they also lack patience for doing things “the way they have always been done”. Wired Magazine asserts, “Thanks to the rise of mobile, cloud, and social, Millennials are used to flexibility, openness, and instantly connecting with people. What they’re not used to are the constraints and restrictions of an IT department when it comes to technology.” This generation of sales reps grew up understanding how to use the latest technology to their advantage and demands access to the tools that will help them work smarter.

Why Sales Enablement Technology is a Necessity

Technology advancement is not slowing down anytime soon. This speed of change means it’s imperative that B2B organizations keep up with the technologies that will impact the ability of sales reps to perform their jobs.

Your reps are eager to learn and use new technology

A few key characteristics of Millennial sales reps are their need for collaboration and knowledge sharing, their openness to change, and their fast tech learning curve. A sales enablement tool fits these requirements, as it learns from the MVPs and recommends proven sales strategies, best practices, and content to the rest of the sales team. Additionally, Millennials adopt new technologies twice as quickly as their colleagues from other generations – they are willing to use the technology, as well as help their peers get up to speed and promote usage throughout the organization.

You can hit more aggressive goals, boost sales, and drive revenue

The optimistic outlook on the economy has resulted in many B2B enterprises targeting larger sales goals. In fact, data from Accenture and CSO Insights shows that 94% of organizations have increased their sales targets. But consider the 20/60/20 rule, which says that about 20% of your sales team are top performers who often meet or exceed quota. That leaves a majority of your sale team with opportunity to increase their quota attainment. And when the sales department is acting as the company’s revenue engine, they need tools that will help them hit their goals.

Sales enablement leaders can enable more reps to exceed expectations by empowering them with the right sales technologies. According to Aberdeen, companies with a sales enablement tool see a 13% revenue growth rate, 3x that of companies without this technology. Accenture asserts, “Leaders [should] prioritize digital investments to align with the highest value aspect of their organization’s selling buying processes and emphasize approaches that power the most profitable growth”.

You can increase sales productivity

Sales productivity is the #1 challenge for almost 2/3 of B2B organizations, according to research from The Bridge Group, and studies show that it continues to decline year after year. While many companies are growing their sales teams and chasing larger goals, they aren’t necessarily scaling their processes, best practices, and sales tools appropriately. In fact, less than 1/3 of a sales person’s time goes to core selling activities because they are spending most of their time on repetitive or non-best practice tasks.

Organizations can leverage technology to create repeatable and scalable sales processes. And sales enablement tools can help streamline workflows and eliminate those unnecessary or tedious tasks, saving steps and time so that reps can devote more time to driving revenue. After all, the efficiency, effectiveness, and productivity of the sales force have a direct and significant impact on the bottom line.

You can gain insight into valuable data

Sales is becoming more data-driven, and leadership is recognizing the importance of metrics above and beyond just revenue – they want to measure those activities that are responsible for revenue increases. But more than half of sales executives are dissatisfied with their ability to offer valuable insights, due to scattered information and limited visibility into data.

Having the right sales technology in place to collect and analyze the proper data can quickly uncover opportunities for improvement and promote more-informed decision-making. The dashboards in a sales enablement tool will also give sales leaders the ability to visualize trends and gain valuable insights into sales rep activity. This type of data-driven sales strategy will replicate the behaviors of top performers and help the average performers improve.

So is sales enablement technology a luxury or necessity? Well, best-in-class companies have long since come to the conclusion that sales technologies are indeed a must-have. According to TOPO, high-growth sales teams have an average of five tools in their technology stack, and 72% of organizations plan to invest in sales technology this year.

Sales enablement technologies aim to align marketing processes and goals and then arm sales teams with the tools and content to improve sales execution and drive revenue. Sales enablement, by nature, empowers and enables sales reps to work more efficiently and effectively. Accenture may sum it up best when they say, “Ironically, the same digital technologies that have upended traditional sales can help forward-thinking companies effectively reinvent their sales management approaches”.

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Part 1 of 2: The Confluence of Buyer Personas and Company Personas (look for part 2 coming soon with our partners at HG Data)

The idea of creating buyer personas has long been used by marketers to create a human profile of our buyers. We’ve grown to understand the buyer beyond their job title which allows us to focus instead on the personality, motivations, authority, responsibilities, priorities and other attributes that comprise buyer personas. In fact, in a recent benchmark study, an overwhelming 93% of respondents confidently understood the drivers and responsibilities of their buyers.

A wide variety of data types and insight are now being used to develop buyer personas that give us an understanding of the people within the companies we are targeting. However, the company persona is a similarly powerful tool to tailor our messaging, and in order to develop it, we need more powerful data – detailed firmographic data. Developing company personas means understanding companies in our target market beyond superficial attributes like headcount, revenue size, or location. Instead, it means including information such as technologies in use, executive staffing changes and current projects underway. This enables us to understand, segment and target the marketing and sales process far more precisely to the organizations’ needs. The end result is a new layer of intelligence that can be combined with buyer personas that can help marketers target and segment an audience contextually, and at scale.

As consumers, we know credit card companies track our purchases and use this information to segment us towards future promotions. Our buying patterns tell so much about us that these companies can extrapolate our future with cohort groups, analytics, and analysis. The same type of information is available in the B2B world about the companies we engage with. The buying patterns of a company are analogous to what each of us do with our credit cards, both online and offline. The personality of an organization is exhibited by its choices, its actions, and its behaviors. If a company had a soul, the purchasing history is a window into it.

It’s time to consider the role that company personas can have in improving our understanding of target accounts, and what that means for the marketing and sales activity designed around them.

What are the benefits of company personas?

The sales process has evolved into a truly collaborative interaction where both seller and buyer come to the table equipped with information. For sales, detailed firmographic company personas can elevate conversations with tight targeting and strategic information before every call.

Well-honed company personas will change the dynamic from that of vendor-customer to one where colleagues are collaborating to achieve an ideal solution.

Some tangible ideas for using company personas:

• Use as a foundation to guide an account-based marketing (ABM) strategy
• Combine company personas in tandem with buyer personas and buying committees to enable granular targeting at scale
• Help sales understand where to penetrate organizations based on the buyer persona combined with the right company persona
• Further segment a contact database by company persona to fine-tune targeting efforts
• Develop specific messaging for inside sales professionals based on the company of the individual they are calling
• Create specific nurture-tracks in marketing automation or email marketing based on the company persona, with relevant offers and content

Don’t take for granted your personal knowledge of the organizations into which you are selling. Each company exhibits specific behavior and attributes that can serve as your guide for how to best engage across both marketing and sales teams. These data-fueled insights help to paint a more complete portrait of our target accounts beyond the superficial details we’ve relied on for years such as size and location.

So, are you ready to start getting to know your target accounts like you would your next-door neighbors?

Find out more in Part II with our partners at HG Data, coming soon.

Marketing data lies at the heart of your business and, therefore, it’s vital that you effectively nurture it. Data is not a static entity – it evolves and changes – and so it’s a mistake not to keep your eye firmly on the ball.

Consider some of these questions. Is your marketing data correct and up-to-date? Is it segmented? Are you using your current data to inform your marketing campaigns? What insights does it provide?

You shouldn’t simply let your data sit there while you work on your marketing strategy and then only think about it when you have to actually send out marketing messages. If you want better response rates, smarter lead generation and a more engaged audience, you need to think about your database in its own right. It’s important to put your data to work, to ensure that it delivers the best results for your business.

Let’s consider three reasons why making your marketing data a priority will pay dividends to your organisation – and the subsequent actions you can take to realise these benefits.

1. Inaccurate data disrupts your marketing and business goals

Using inaccurate data can cause a host of problems, from targeting the wrong people to making poor decisions based on your results.

QGate writes: “If you’re planning on using your data to craft future strategies or make decisions about future developments, you need to make sure that your data is correct. Decisions made based on inaccurate data are as ill-fated as decisions made based on guesses and assumptions.

“By cluttering up your databases with false leads and statistics, bad quality data is derailing your ability to make informed judgements and decisions about the state and future of your business.”

In order to prevent these kinds of scenarios occurring, it’s crucial to continually review your records and remove any inaccurate, defunct or duplicate information.

For example, are there any names that are no longer useful or where the contact information is wrong? People’s jobs and email addresses change on a regular basis. Or maybe there are spelling mistakes in some of your records that need correcting. Duplicate records also need to be removed – your contacts won’t appreciate being sent the same message twice!

Carrying out these checks on a regular basis will prevent you from wasting precious time and resources focusing on the wrong people.

2. Segmented data yields better results

Not everyone in your database will have the same needs, or be dealing with the same issues. Therefore, different people will respond better to different marketing messages: relevance is the key.

It’s well worth carving out some time to segment your database. This simply involves grouping records according to specific criteria. For instance, you might separate contacts according to industry or job title, or where they are in the buyer’s journey.

Writing for Forbes, Larry Myler says: “Individual buyers are convinced that their circumstances and challenges are unique, and unless you can prove to them that your solution has been crafted with their situation in mind, you may lose the deal. On the other hand, you can’t be all things to all buyers. You can, however, be the right solution to a large enough group of buyers to successfully grow your business, if you can implement a smart segmentation strategy.”

Having segmented your database, you can then send out marketing messages that are suited to each group’s needs. Whether phone calls, emails, or mail, people are more likely to engage with content that answers their questions and addresses their problems.

In this way, you will acquire more leads and enjoy a higher ROI.

3. Good data can transform your business

The main reason that you should make marketing data a priority is because it really can make a significant difference to your business. Using good data – the “right” data – ensures that your marketing budget is being spent on communicating to the right people at the right time.

In fact, good data alone is enough to give you an advantage over your competitors. After all, even the most creative and innovative marketing campaigns will not make an impact if they are targeted at the wrong people.

Furthermore, good data will provide valuable insights that can influence your future campaigns. For example, at the end of a campaign, you might discover that picking up the phone works better than sending an email, or that a particular segment of your database would benefit from learning more about a certain topic. Using the “wrong data” won’t have the same impact, as any analysis you make following a campaign will be skewed.

Often, businesses spend a lot of time and money on their marketing strategy but then treat the data that is required to fulfil it as an afterthought. But marketing data should absolutely be a priority for your business. Only by using accurate, up-to-date information, which is correctly segmented and analysed, can you make great strides towards your marketing and wider business goals.

Delivering value, making the ROI case, retaining customers, growing accounts, recruiting top talent, forecasting, implementing a sales process, using sales technologies, winning against the competition, developing sales managers, coaching sales teams, generating leads, onboarding, productivity, compensation ...

There’s no shortage of challenges facing sales leaders, and it can be difficult to decide which deserve to be prioritized first.

The RAIN Group Center for Sales Research recently surveyed 423 sales, enablement, and company leaders to uncover their top challenges and priorities for the next 12 months.

After reviewing the results, we identified three sales enablement strategies to help leaders address top challenges they face and achieve their priorities.

Here’s what we found:

Top Sales Challenges

1. Recruiting and hiring
2. Lead quality and quantity
3. Developing sales skills
4. Developing sales managers

Top Sales Priorities

1. Improve ability to communicate value
2. Improve productivity of sellers and sales teams
3. Increase business with existing accounts
4. Improve customer retention, repeat business, and renewals
5. Improve sales opportunity approach and planning
6. Improve sellers’ ability to inspire with ideas
7. Win more against difficult competition
8. Improve sales manager effectiveness
9. Drive “new logos” / new accounts won
10. Optimize sales process
11. Increase the average size of sales

You might be thinking, “Why do you have 11 priorities? If you have 11, you have none.” These 11 are the priorities that more than 50% of sales leaders said were “very important.”

When we first saw these results, we thought, “We can’t have 11 initiatives. So how can we look at this and still tackle the majority of them well?” Here’s what we came up with.

3 Sales Enablement Strategies to Solve Challenges and Achieve Priorities

To address these priorities while also tackling three of the four top challenges (two through four), the focus should be on three sales enablement strategies.

For those sales organizations that can execute these initiatives well, it makes the top challenge of recruiting top sales talent much less important because you’ll be getting more out of your sales force and developing your own top talent.

1. Improve sales productivity

What if we told you that the productivity of your sales team could be increased by 46%? Sounds like a pipe dream, right? Well, maybe not.

In our Extreme Productivity Benchmark Report, we found that Extremely Productive people (XP) spend 46% more time each work day on their priorities (investment activities), compared to everyone else (The Rest). Furthermore, The Rest spend on average, 4.3 hours per work day on non-value add (Mandatory and Empty) activities. That’s 4.3 hours wasted each day.

It’s no wonder that improving the productivity of sellers and sales teams is the number two priority of sales enablement leaders cited by 65% of respondents.

The opportunity is there to add 46% more time, without adding new sellers. The good news is that productivity can be learned and changed.

2. Develop multi-skilled sellers

Today’s top sellers need to be better than ever. It used to be enough to have sellers who could lead great consultative sales conversations to win the deal.

Now you need sellers who can do that and prospect, bring value to their conversations over and above the product or service you offer, know your customers’ businesses, are masterful negotiators when dealing with procurement, understand how to grow accounts, and develop executive level relationships, to name a few.

This is probably why so many of the priorities that sales leaders focus involve some kind of skill issue.

You need sellers who can succeed across the Sales Competency WheelSM (the common competencies every organization should possess to build a truly successful sales organization).

Across sales skills and knowledge needed to drive sales performance, Top Performers have significantly stronger skills.

Must each seller master every one of these skills? No. That’s unrealistic. However, they should be better than they’ve ever been. It’s not enough to be a product expert and just pitch. Your sellers should excel across many of these competencies, and your focus should be on building a sales force that covers them all.

3. Leverage sales managers

Sales managers are the ones who work most closely with your sellers, day in and day out. They motivate, coach, keep sellers focused, provide feedback, help sellers win, and keep sellers on track to achieve their goals. Or at least that’s what they’re supposed to be doing.

Sales managers hold the keys to unlocking top sales performance. Yet 66% of companies don’t believe their managers have the skills necessary to manage and coach sellers.

That’s two-thirds of companies that don’t have skilled sales managers.

This presents a huge opportunity for sales organizations willing to invest in developing their sales managers and providing them with the knowledge, skills, and tools they need to keep sellers motivated and hold them accountable, as well as manage a team that not only meets, but also exceeds sales goals.

Welcome to "The Pipeline" — a weekly column from HubSpot, featuring actionable advice and insight from real sales leaders.

Every time you use a selfish sales tactic, you’re destroying the trust between you and your buyer — but you’re not just hurting yourself. When a salesperson uses a slimy sales tactic, the entire sales profession takes one step backward.

So many salespeople have done so many slimy things over the years that at this point, buyers now think of “sales” itself as a dirty word. If you've used slimy sales tactics in the past, or if you’re using them today, I implore you: please stop.

If you see a colleague giving salespeople a bad name by doing something shady, show them the right way instead. If you‘re buying something and the salesperson is underhanded and duplicitous, call them out on their approach and don’t give them your business. Below is a story of the slimiest salesperson I ever encountered and the four slimy sales tactics he used on me. Don’t be this person.

How I Nearly Bought a Mattress on Craigslist for the “Guests I Don’t Care About”

Ten years ago, I had a horrible buying experience.

The backstory: In 2007, my eight-month-pregnant wife and I had just bought our first home. For four years prior, I was trying to get a startup off the ground, and long story short, we were in a hefty amount of personal credit card debt and living paycheck to paycheck.

But, our new house had a guest room in it. Being hours away from both of our families and expecting our first child, we were excited to have guests stay at our house. It would be the first time family could visit without staying in a hotel.

Just one problem: we didn't have a bed to put in our guest room. We decided to make a mattress our first post-home-ownership investment.

Here's the dialogue between me and the salesperson at the mattress store:

Salesperson: “Good afternoon, folks. Can I help you with anything today?”

Me: “Can you point me to your cheapest mattress?”

Salesperson: [Walks us over to the middle of the store and starts talking about the features and benefits of a $900 mattress and box spring combo.]

Me: Is this the cheapest mattress you have?

Salesperson: Well, no. This is the cheapest one I'd recommend. [Invites my wife to sit on the mattress that he wants to sell us.]

Me: [Getting pretty pissed off at this point.] Can you please show me which of your mattresses is the cheapest one?

Salesperson: Well, yeah. That's the one over there. [Points in the general direction of a few mattresses and walks away].

At this point, my wife and I tried both beds — the cheapest, and the more expensive. There wasn't a big difference. The more expensive one was perhaps a bit more comfortable, but not by much.

That’s when I see the salesperson strolling back in our direction.

Salesperson: So, what do you think of the two?

Me: [Slightly calmer] “We weren’t sure which one you pointed to. Is this the cheapest one? This is for a guest room, so it'll get used very infrequently.”

Salesperson: “Yes. That’s the cheapest one we have ... but you know you can get a cheaper used mattress on Craigslist, right?”

Me: [Angrier now] “I don't want a used mattress. I am looking for the cheapest one here.”

Salesperson: “Yes. Well, if you don't care about the person sleeping on it, that one is fine.”

Me: “Okay. We'll let you know.”

(Not fully trusting him, I did a lap around the store.)

We ended up buying the cheap mattress. My parents, in-laws, and other family have all slept soundly in the bed over the years. My wife and I have slept on it occasionally when one of us is sick. Of course, we joke that it‘s the bed for "people we don’t care about." But, it is perfectly fine.

4 Slimy Sales Tactics This Mattress Salesperson Tried to Use on Me

This salesperson — like many others before and since — used some seriously slimy sales tactics to try and get us to buy a more expensive mattress. In pursuit of a bigger commission check, he pulled out all the stops. He lied. He tried to oversell. He insulted me and he tried to make us feel guilty about our cost-conscious buying criteria.

Here are the four things he did that you definitely shouldn’t, and what to do instead.

1. Lying

If a customer asks a question, acknowledge the question and answer it. Don't ignore it like the mattress salesman ignored my “Where is your cheapest mattress?” question (not just once, but twice). When a prospect asks a question, simply restating it is a good way to acknowledge they’ve been heard. He could have said, “You’d like me to show you the cheapest mattress?”

Whatever you do, don’t pretend you’re answering their question when you know that you’re not. When this mattress salesperson showed us the first mattress, he did it implying it was the cheapest one. That was a lie. And once he lied, I didn’t trust anything he said.

I imagine that this mattress salesperson got away with lying in the past. Some people are embarrassed to talk about money or admit they don’t have the money for a more expensive option.

He probably didn't expect me to so unabashedly tell him I was looking for the cheapest one three times. But, just because you can get away with lying doesn’t mean you should. Eventually, lying not only catches up to individual salespeople, but it also damages the reputation of our entire profession.

2. Overselling

There is a difference between upselling and overselling. There is nothing wrong with upselling a customer if the more expensive option is truly the right fit for them. But, empower prospects to make that decision — don't try to make it for them. Prospects see salespeople’s agenda a mile away these days when they try to push a higher-priced option.

If your pricing is transparent, don‘t be afraid to walk your buyer through the benefits of different packages. But since buyers are so used to getting upsold, don’t recommend the more expensive package unless it's in their best interest. Certainly, explain what they could get if they chose the more expensive package, but err on the side of recommending the less expensive package.

That could sound like, “I recommend our starter package for you since price seems to be your biggest concern and because you are just getting started with this new initiative. The middle package would get you X which would be nice, but probably not necessary to start.”

Using this rule of thumb, the mattress salesperson might have said, “Price sounds like the most important thing for you right now since you’re obviously just starting a family. This is our least expensive mattress right here. But before you make your decision, I recommend you lay on this one for a bit. This one will last longer and be more comfortable for your guests if you can afford it. But the least expensive one will work for your guest room too.”

Salespeople gain trust with prospects when they recommend a less expensive product. Upselling then becomes significantly easier down the line once a prospect has derived value and an ROI from their initial purchase.

If you sell a product or service that can’t be upsold at a later date (you can‘t upsell a mattress after the initial sale, I guess), focus on delivering a positive experience to increase your chances of getting referrals and repeat purchases. The next time my wife and I bought a mattress, we certainly didn’t go back to that store.

3. Insulting Your Prospects

Truthfully, I don't understand the trick the salesperson was trying to pull by suggesting I buy a used mattress on Craigslist. (I later checked out of curiosity — there are in fact used mattresses available on the site.)

Although he might say he was trying to be helpful by suggesting a used mattress, I doubt he was making this recommendation to save me a few bucks. If anything, he was probably testing me to see whether I was going to buy anything at all. But, he could have done this in a much more effective (and polite) way by asking, “Do you have guests visiting any time soon? When do you need this mattress?”

So, my conclusion was (and still is) that he was trying to make me feel guilty for buying a cheap mattress instead of the one he wanted to sell us — the one that would earn him a higher commission. Either way, the suggestion he made would be interpreted as an insult by most people, I think.

It is not smart to insult your prospects purposefully, even if you have plausible deniability that you weren‘t trying to. Prospects aren’t stupid. And if they’re being frugal or asking for something specific, they probably have their reasons. If anything, chat them up and understand why they're asking for the thing they’re asking for. Then, and only then, introduce the benefits of the more expensive option.

4. Don't try to guilt your prospects.

The last slimy sales tactic this mattress salesperson used was guilt. He tried several times to make me feel guilty for buying a cheap mattress. His comment that cheap mattresses are fine for “people you don't care about” was indisputably meant to make me feel guilty.

I imagine some people in this scenario would feel guilty enough to buy the slightly more expensive, slightly softer one. But, even then, they'd probably feel a bit pissed about spending more than they wanted to spend.

Don’t make your prospects feel guilty for choosing a cheaper version or not choosing you. If they don’t choose you, It’s not worth burning the bridge. Instead, call them back in a week or a few months to see how your competitor is faring. If they are unhappy with their selection, you may get another shot at the business.

Let’s put slimy sales tactics in the past.

Salespeople (mattress or otherwise) always need to keep others top of mind — namely, their prospects and other sales professionals. Slimy sales tactics will eventually undermine your efforts and give your fellow sales pros a bad rap.

So be sure to think beyond yourself, ditch selfish selling, and approach potential customers with integrity and goodwill — you'll be doing everyone a favor.

An effective B2B content marketing initiative needs more than just compelling content to attract buyers at each stage of the buying. The content needs to be put in front of the buyers, command their attention, and sway their purchase intention. Here are 9 channels to consider when strategizing B2B content marketing tactics

1) LinkedIn. This professional social networking platform is effective for building professional relationships and gaining brand exposure in front of a quality audience. By creating attention-grabbing headlines, compelling intros, and irresistible images, you can demand the attention of B2B professionals.

2) YouTube. You can use YouTube to create product demos or interactive videos to humanize your brand or engage with your audience. You can also include transcripts so search engines can index your keywords and viewers can opt to skim your key points.

3) Industry-specific forums. Join forums such as Warrior Forums or Marketing Profs and offer helpful advice to build up your reputation. Use this opportunity to develop relationships with other marketing professionals and most importantly, include a link to your content in your forum signature.

4) Twitter. Create witty and interesting content that’s shareable. Target specific users using the Tailored Audience feature.

5) Slideshare. Include strong call-to-actions in your presentations that lead readers to your website.

6) Retargeting ads. Use paid retargeting to reach website visitors after they leave. Segment your audience to serve content that prompts them to move to the next buying stage.

7) Quora. Establish yourself as a trusted source by giving comprehensive answers with references.

8) Surveys and studies. Use original data to capture interest. Promote with press releases. Go beyond online submissions. Contact local and industry publications directly.

9) Direct mail. Use personalized emails to send articles to prospects and clients who will find it helpful.

By using the nine tactics above, you can deliver customized content to your target audience cost-effectively through multiple online and offline traditional. This will help you improve your overall brand awareness and increase your chance of attracting prospects and generating sales!

Regular readers of Branding Strategy Insider know we welcome and answer marketing questions of all types. Today’s we hear from Karl, a business reporter with China Daily who asks these questions about the state of the discipline of brand management in Asia.

Do Chinese companies need to brand themselves and if so why? Branding allows organizations and their products and services to take on human qualities. Why is this important? Because human qualities allow for emotional connection with customers including shared values. This leads to brand loyalty and brand advocacy. Most decisions (including most purchase decisions) are made by people’s hearts, not their heads. Absent of brands, companies are just companies, products are just products and services are just services. Strong brands enable not only increased customer loyalty but also the ability to charge price premiums, the ability to attract and retain highly talented employees, better negotiating leverage with business partners, increased sales, increased market share, increased profitability, increased stock price and increased shareholder value. The financial value of many companies far exceeds the value of their tangible assets. This is especially true of Internet-based brands. While this additional value has several sources, a primary source is the strength of the brand.

Did the listing of Alibaba 18 moths ago in NY do anything for Chinese brands and if so what? It increased awareness of Alibaba in the USA. It also demonstrated that China is capable of creating some very large, substantial brands. It may have also set an example that will inspire Chinese companies to think brand.

What is holding Chinese companies back from investing in branding? Branding has taken decades to mature as a specialized profession in the USA. Despite the fact that almost everything – companies, not-for-profit organizations, schools, musical groups, municipalities, sports teams, individuals, etc. – seem to be branded in the USA, branding is still misunderstood by many people, including many business executives. Our culture, our markets and our increasing body of brand development and management techniques supports our very strong brands. This is not something that can be duplicated overnight.

A starting point for Chinese companies should be to think differentiation. Resist the temptation to copy competitors, instead focus on what makes their offering compelling and unique in comparison. Become value creators rather than simply competing for the value created by others.

Do South East Asian companies need to brand themselves and why? Ultimately, if they want to build global markets for their products and compete effectively against other global brands, they will need to build strong brands. This requires using all of the tools in a brand management tool kit, especially the brand research tools. Cultures vary across geographies so it’s important to understand what brand elements may remain constant across cultures and which must vary by culture to be understood and remain relevant.

Do Asian companies see any value in branding? This varies quite a bit. Some companies understand the power of branding, while others do not. I would say that Asia is just further behind the brand development curve than the USA. Eventually, more and more Asian companies will embrace the concept and discipline of branding. Branding is part art and part science. While there are very specific tools and analytics that help one manage brands, often the real breakthroughs come from understanding human motivations, especially on an emotional level. This is where I see many Asian companies falling short. Not only do they need to understand deep emotional triggers for their own cultures but also for foreign cultures. This requires well-designed, in-depth consumer research and a strong intuition about human behavior.

Why have Japanese and Korean companies been so successful at branding? There are several reasons. The Japanese have had an intuitive sense of consumer needs and they have conducted the required research to better meet those needs, especially in cultures outside of their own. When marketing consumer products, it is very important to build strong brands. Many of Japan’s most well known brands are consumer product brands (especially consumer electronics brands).

Japan and Korea also produce strong automotive brands. Automobile brands also require a strong understanding of consumer needs including their emotional, experiential and self-expressive needs. Many automobile brands are self-expression vehicles for their owners. Having said that, Japanese and Korean automakers have developed models that appeal to an unusually large cross-section of consumers.

Japan and Korea’s post war relationships with the West may have also influenced this success. Close business partnerships offered a clear view of best practices in brand building and management. Finally a determined focus on branding techniques and activities also led to strong brands from these countries.

Thanks for your questions Karl. Do you have a question related to branding? Just Ask The Blake Project

The Blake Project Can Help: Accelerate Brand Growth Through Powerful Emotional Connections

Build A Stronger Brand. Join us for The Un-Conference: 360 Degrees of Brand Strategy for a Changing World, May 2-4, 2016 in San Diego, California. A fun, competitive-learning experience reserved for 50 marketing oriented leaders and professionals.

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

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Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has become a “must have” line item for 2016. And this enthusiasm isn’t just a fleeting trend. More than just a highly targeted engagement tactic, a full-fledged ABM program supports the post-sale customer lifecycle, using marketing’s toolkit to contribute to the overall customer experience at the most profitable accounts.

Thus, ABM represents more than just targeting – it’s a transformation in the way B2B marketing, sales and customer support are perceived and executed.

Yet, ABM is only a smart strategy when executed well. Its promises of efficiency and effectiveness can’t payoff unless marketers have the know-how and ability to reach the decision-makers at accounts showing buy signals. Unfortunately, several common B2B marketing challenges stand in the way of successful execution.

A Big Problem: B2B Marketing Organizations Aren’t Optimized for ABM

The Database Dilemma

ABM strategies are only as good as the data that informs them (whether such data is interpreted by predictive analytics or sales and marketing teams). And unfortunately, most marketing databases aren’t refined to requisite levels.

Studies show that B2B marketing databases contain high percentages of outdated and inaccurate information. SiriusDecisions found that 60% of marketers consider the overall health of their data as unreliable.

This lack of database confidence is unsurprising when you consider that an Integrate’s prospect data quality report found 40% of B2B leads contain incorrect, duplicate or missing data. Meanwhile, according to an Ascend2 survey, 54% of B2B marketers believe that “lack of data quality/completeness” was the most challenging obstacle to marketing success.

Poor database integrity (customer and prospect info) affects ABM programs in several important ways. Targeted company lists compiled to match current customer accounts or high-converting lead characteristics won’t reflect the best chances of winning new accounts or upselling current customers. Databases must be accurate, complete and up-to-date if ABM strategies are to pay off.

MarTech Systems and Demand Marketing Processes Remain Disconnected

When it comes to demand marketing, processes, systems, data and even people are still very much disconnected from one another. Specifically, top-funnel prospect engagement activities (owned by demand generation teams) and lower-funnel data management and analytics activities (owned by marketing operations teams) are often greatly misaligned – yet they depend on each other extensively.

The polarization of top- and lower-funnel priorities in effect compromises:

Data integrity – manual demand gen activities can’t ensure the accuracy of all the prospect data it sends to marketing automation and/or CRM systems.

Lead velocity – the disconnect causes delays in the speed with which prospect data can be nurtured, decreasing conversion rates.

Team resources – demand marketers spend excessive amounts of time managing campaigns and dealing with decentralized data sources; marketing operations wastes just has much time with manual data processing tasks, such as lead scrubbing, deduping, normalization and uploading.

Program transparency and predictability – manual processes coupled with the delayed transmission of ungoverned data isn’t conducive to clear program reporting, undermining the marketing ops team’s ability to understand and predict the future performance of various sources, account types, content and channels.

All of these elements are vital to the success of ABM strategies. And until marketing systems and processes are properly integrated and aligned, these issues will continue to restrict the value of ABM programs.

ABM Execution Isn’t Understood…Yet

Marketers are still very much enamored with the idea of ABM. But there’s no clear “best practice” for acting on target account lists. ABM targeting is only informing engagement in theory – not in action.

Execution – that is to say, identifying, engaging and obtaining info on decision-makers at target accounts – must become a top focus if the promise of ABM is to payoff. And once firmly committed to execution, marketers will need to ensure they have the right environment to act on their ABM strategies.

Tackling the ABM Execution Challenge

Integrate and Demandbase are teaming up to help marketers face these important execution challenges. On Wednesday, March 30 Scott Vaughan (CMO, Integrate) and Peter Isaacson (CMO, Demandbase) will discuss these ABM issues and ways Integrate and Demandbase help solve them.

Register for this webinar to learn how to:

• Attract the accounts that your sales team values most
• Deliver leads to your sales team from target accounts that are showing buying signals
• Prove the ROI of your ABM programs from first touch to close

When you are just starting your career in sales it can be hard to figure out how to generate sales. The main goal is to close the most sales in the shortest amount of time. But how can you do that when your co-workers are also your competition? Going into the sales field can be overwhelming at first, but once you get the hang of it you will find it can be a lucrative career choice. Many people have the idea that the more people you pitch to the more sales you will get. This is just not true. If you spend your time sending thousands of emails, making twitter and Facebook posts, blogging and cold calling random numbers you are wasting your time and the time of everyone you pitch to. This method is time-consuming and does not generate a lot of sales. You need to learn decisive selling techniques that will help you get the most sales in the shortest amount of time.

Decide Which People Are the Best Targets

A target is the audience you wish to make your pitch to in order to get them to buy your product. No matter how great you think your product is or if you think everyone could benefit, not everyone is a target. Do not waste your time or the time of other people by trying to sell your product to people who are not interested in the product or do not qualify as a target. Make a list of potential viable targets and their similarities/differences and work from there. You will have more success in sales if you make a list of potential targets and work through that list. If you are selling appliances don’t waste your time giving flyers to people who live in apartments. You should be visiting homebuilding sites, mobile home showrooms, and giving flyers and business cards to homeowners. If you are calling numbers you need to choose a section of numbers, do your research and make sure you are only calling numbers attached to residential neighborhoods. Making a decision as to who your potential viable targets will be is the first step to success. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling, if you are pitching to the wrong audience.

Decide When to Continue and When to Stop

Nothing is more annoying to the person you are trying to sell to than pushing your product on them when they don’t want it. When someone is interested in your product, you will know right away by the fact that they are actively listening to you or asking you questions. If someone sounds uninterested in your product you need to decide when it is best to end the conversation in a respectful manner. You also need to decide if they might be a viable reference source. If they are not interested in buying or cannot buy from you at this point in time it is perfectly ok to ask them if they know anyone who might be interested. You can also leave your contact information and ask them to tell their friends who might want to buy your product. Never push your product, be rude to the customer, or hang up on them. The point is to generate sales leads, and you cannot do that if you are making everyone dislike you. More than likely they will remember what you are selling, but not your name. You need to be able to decide if they are a target, someone wasting your time, or if you just need to stop the conversation.

Let me introduce you to Kelly. Kelly is a 39-year-old marketing director at a growing mid-size company. She’s the sole marketing person at her organization, and she’s relatively new at the company—but she learned quickly that she needs to prove her value to the CEO and the VP of Sales, who think marketing is a touchy-feely department that doesn’t provide the sales team with the support they need.

Kelly wants to make a marketing impact at her company that helps them achieve real growth. She’s thinking about implementing inbound marketing, but she doesn’t how to get started or how to convince other stakeholders that inbound can provide the results they’re looking for. She’s looking for a strategic and creative partner who can help her launch and optimize an inbound marketing system that delivers meaningful sales support.

Kelly is vital to my work because she helps me understand our clients better.

She’s also one of my imaginary friends.

Use Buyer Personas to Target Your Marketing

Specifically, Kelly is a buyer persona. A buyer persona is one of the greatest tools for your marketing activities and a vital way to understand and reach your customers.

A persona is a semi-fictional representation of your real and potential customers, based on market research and data. A persona encompasses your customers’ goals, motivations, behaviors, values and pain points. While you don’t need to include every detail about a persona’s life (you probably don’t need to know their favorite color or the first time they fell in love), the more you flesh out relevant details, the more it helps you to understand your actual customers.

Fully understanding your personas helps you plan a marketing strategy that answers your real customers’ questions and leads them through the sales funnel. Every marketing activity should be informed by your buyer personas.

How to Create an Accurate Buyer Persona that Wins More Sales

How do you create a buyer persona that gets results? To get real value out of your personas, it’s critical that you follow a smart process for creating them. This is the process we follow at The Whole Brain Group.

Get the right information

If you’re a B2B company, you probably don’t need much personal information about your persona, but you do need to understand them as a person—what they’re struggling with, how they’re feeling, and why. Answer the following questions with as much detail as you can.

• Name, age, sex
• Role at the company (this doesn’t have to be a job title)
• Relevant demographics such as race, if applicable
• Professional worldview (one sentence that sums up this person)
• Motivation (overall goals)
• What they’re looking for (situational needs)
• Pain points (what’s standing in the way)
• Common questions

Ask the right people

You can probably answer most of these questions fairly well already, but unless you’re interacting with your ideal customer on a daily basis, you shouldn’t rely on your current knowledge to fill in the details. Go to the people who know your personas best:

• The sales team. Your sales team should know exactly what your personas’ pain points, motivations, and biggest questions are. Mine their knowledge and experience to get a fully fleshed-out, three-dimensional understanding of your personas. This is your best resource, because ultimately, your marketing efforts are designed to support the sales team in winning more customers from the buyer personas you’re creating.
• Customer support. Your customer support team can be a great resource as well. They interact with your customers after the sale, and so they can provide an understanding of your persona that sales won’t have. After the sale, questions or issues come up that didn’t present themselves during the sale. If you understand these things about your persona before the sale, you can create an even better buying experience for your customers!
• Your customers. Who knows your customers better than your customers? You can’t always interview them, but you can collect valuable information from them during the buying process, which you can use to inform the creation of your persona. But if you can talk personally with your customers to understand them better, go for it!

Design your personas

Now that you’ve got all the right information for your persona and it’s been vetted, it’s time to put it together in an attractively designed one-page reference. This is an important part of developing your buyer persona, because you want it to be easy and enjoyable to use. Add a photo of your persona to the sheet. Print it out and keep the persona within easy reach so you can quickly refer to it every time you start a new marketing campaign or content piece.

One of our clients got so excited about their buyer personas, they blew them up and printed them out as posters, which they have hanging on their wall. It’s a constant reminder to their entire team—sales, marketing, customer services—who their customers are that they’re serving.

Finding and hiring top talent is no easy feat, and retaining those coveted, high-potential workers for the long haul is equally as difficult. And when it comes to the hiring process, without a united effort among your recruiters, both hiring and retention efforts are liable to suffer.

In the United States alone, over 2 million Americans quit their jobs every month according to columnist Alan Hall of Forbes magazine. No matter where you’re located, though, odds are if you’re recruiting for service roles or retail positions, hiring top talent can feel like a constant, uphill battle.

Though parts of the global economy are healing and slowly crawling toward prosperity, many employers are still experiencing recruiting difficulties. In fact, according to a survey conducted by CareerBuilder, 81 percent of employers claim it is at least somewhat difficult to fill job vacancies.

If you’re among the majority of employers experiencing some hiring pains, it’s time to explore some effective ways of improving your hiring process, starting with your recruiting efforts. When your recruiting team is contending with a large number of openings to fill, here are 7 tips to set your recruiting team up for success.

1. Make Sure Your Recruiting Team is the Right Size for the Hiring Process

Scaling up your business means scaling up your recruiting team. When a recruiting team diminishes, it impedes recruiters’ ability to effectively source candidates and slows recruiting speed. In order to efficiently source candidates quickly, it is imperative to keep a balance on your recruiting team. FurstPerson recommends 100 – 200 hires per recruiter.

2. Create an Incentive Plan

Consider tying aspects of recruiter compensation or bonuses to performance. If you opt to tie compensation to performance, try including metrics such as attrition and fill rate. Examples include credits for employees that stay for 90 days and deductions for those who quit or are fired within 90 days. If you choose to apply bonuses, establish a bonus amount, then apply a debit against the bonus for each new hire that does not stay for 90 days.

3. Give Your Recruiters the Details and Time Needed

Pushing incentives will only lead to rushed and potentially sloppy recruiting efforts if recruiters don’t have ample time (and a solid description with all the must-haves) to do their jobs correctly. As Mike Wolford points out in a recent recruiting piece, one of the most frustrating events for recruiters is finding a candidate – or group of candidates – only to have them be dismissed for lacking credentials the hiring manager forgot to mention.

4. Choose Your Recruiters as Carefully as You Want them to Choose Your Employees

Carefully determine each role on the recruiting team and hire specifically to that role. While some junior recruiters might be able to handle filling positions with an abundance of applicants, positions requiring candidates with a more refined set of skills – like developers – may require the expertise of a single, senior recruiter.

Recruiters with more industry knowledge will know exactly where the talent pools lie, and are oftentimes well worth the investment. Each recruiting team should have roles for individuals that are masters in sourcing specific candidates for specific positions. Ensuring the recruiting team is staffed for each role is critical for success.

5. Centralize Your Recruiting Efforts

Talent acquisition is a key priority for HR executives in companies of all sizes. However, for larger organizations, recruiting processes can become more complex. When it comes to getting a large number of positions filled in a timely manner, it makes sense to have a concerted and centralized recruiting effort. This is a little trickier (but not impossible) if your company is a large enterprise with multiple locations. If this is the case, talk with your team to determine which processes can be centralized to reduce costs and allow for local resources to be more flexible.

6. Focus on Internet-Based Recruiting and Employee Referrals

Many of the most effective recruiting strategies are those in which recruiters take a step back and look at their efforts through the eyes of a marketer. These days, a large majority of candidates conduct their job searches via the internet, and research shows internet-based recruiting has proven to drive both candidate volume and quality. However, getting candidates to apply to a position in your company as opposed to a competitor requires some creativity. Crafting compelling (but truthful) job descriptions boosts your company’s talent brand and creates a profile that allows the truth to be enticing.

Additionally, many companies have opted to start utilizing referral programs, however the effectiveness of such programs varies with how they are structured. FurstPerson recommends reworking your employee referral program into something that looks a little more like a sales process (leads/qualified/opportunity/close). Instead of using generic referral programs, break the program down into the following milestones:

• Point of referral
• Date of hire
• First day on the job
• 30 days
• 60 days
• 90 days

Use each referral to reinforce the overhauled program to the rest of the organization.

7. Determine which Sources Provide the Best Candidates

Strengthening recruitment efforts all starts with knowing where your best employees are coming from. Do your high performers come largely from LinkedIn job boards, or do they tend to come from career sites like Indeed.com? Hiring teams that maximize their quality of hire persistently focus on linking the recruiting sources to the new hire performance data. This way, they can optimize their recruitment efforts.

FurstPerson recommends analyzing each recruiting source based on the number of applicants generated, the retention rate of those applicants at 30, 60, 90, and 180 days and overall performance based on scorecard, rating, and review. This way, you can assign each source a ranking that can be used to identify which sources are sending you the most promising prospect versus those that aren’t.

For marketers at growing companies who are ready to make the leap from a small marketing group to a larger-scale function, making their programs larger and more effective is almost always on their minds. But how do you grow with your programs so that you don’t get left in the dust?

I started at Marketo when our marketing team was relatively small, and since then we have more than doubled. Throughout this time I have observed two types of marketers—the ones that have been able to grow with the company and the ones that weren’t able to punch above their original weight class.

So how do you make sure that you’re growing with your company? Here are four ways to take yourself, and your marketing, to the next level:

1. Start Digging for Insights

If you have no idea where to begin, start by looking at which of your programs are performing well and which could use some improvement. Indicators of program performance can include things like subjective opinion, pipeline attribution, or even something as basic as abnormal response rates. When you dig into this, you’ll find is that your original question will cascade into a series of additional questions such as “Is this an anomaly?” or “How can this be replicated?”. Ultimately, it’s the insights that stem from your curiosity that will lead you to a new idea to boost your programs.

At Marketo, to gain insight into how we could grow our virtual event from 9,000 attendees to over 20,000 attendees, we put together a focus group of people with varying degrees of knowledge about what a virtual event was. Then, we asked them a series of questions, drilling into their answers looking for more insights. What we found were new ways of promoting the event, messaging around it, and other things our current event lacked. For example, we found that virtual attendees appreciate subtitles as not everyone can rely solely on audio. Another insight we found was that there was a misconception that a virtual event was a webinar, and that people didn’t realize it was very interactive and that they could interact with sponsors, network, listen to different sessions, download content, and also win prizes.

Aside from focus groups, other ways you can uncover insights for your company include surveys, internal interviews, customer interviews, and of course reports.

2. Coordinate with Other Teams

The difference between a small program and a larger program often comes down to cross-functional coordination. If you are effectively able to leverage other teams, you’ll have a greater impact with what you can do. The reason our field events at Marketo have grown so vigorously is because we have a buy-in process with sales and a coordinated effort of different roles and responsibilities to penetrate any given region. We start by showing our sales reps all the options available to them in terms of campaigns, events, and reports. Then, we have them request these options through a form or meeting. Doing this enables us to understand what our reps needs, which we can then translate into a plan. Our plans are reviewed by sales, so they can provide their feedback on whether or not it supports their objectives. As you can see, our program would be stifled if only handled by one group and not as a collaborative effort.

Cross-functional coordination doesn’t apply to just sales and marketing alignment for B2B marketers, but extends to other departments as well as applies across marketing. Consider working closely with customer success, support, and other teams in your organization.

3. Plan Your Program Backwards

Dream big, and then figure out what it takes to get there. This might seem intuitive, but in reality this is probably done poorly most of the time because of the considerable amount of effort it takes. Say for example that you want 1,000 people to register for your event. What do you have to do to get there? It will take a lot of brainstorming, and although you may not reach your goal initially, over time you will learn more effective ways to achieve the big dreams that you have.

Remember that this is an iterative process. The first time you do this, your guesstimates or forecasts will probably be off. For example, you may think that sending one email can drive 100 people to a webinar, but it only really drove 10. While your assumption was off, the next time you go through this process, you will be able to better understand your investments and how to reach the numbers you are trying to achieve.

4. Obtain the Appropriate Resources

I hate to tell you, but the honest truth is, if you want something to grow and scale, it will require resources in the form of time and money. What I will say though is that when there’s a will there’s a way. If you’ve done a good job of planning, you’ll be sharp and ready to handle any objections when talking to stakeholders—proving to them that what you want will help them achieve their goals. It’s unbelievable the number of times I’ve gotten my program invested internally over others, purely because I’ve put together a well-thought out plan of how the investment will be used and why it’s the right allocation of budget.

At the end of the day, obtaining the appropriate resources is about creating a convincing argument as to why your program deserves more investment than another. To help you create a convincing argument, measure as many aspects of your program as possible to see where there may be outlier results that you can leverage to get your project funded. Things to measure may include pipeline, new logos, customer acquisition cost, new names, attendance rate, or number of marketing qualified leads to name a few.

Growing with your marketing can be painful. It requires adaptability, a big dream, but also the willingness to learn and sweat to create something larger than yourself. Ask questions and get curious, bring in other teams to do something larger than just one function, plan a way to get what you want, and ask for the appropriate resources to get there with the right metrics to back it up.

One of the most powerful, easy-to-use and effective sales tools on all of LinkedIn is all but hiding in plain sight.

It’s easy to miss because LinkedIn has chosen (for whatever reason) to make it virtually invisible to see on your profile page.

Yet, when used properly, this feature becomes a veritable goldmine in terms of building up and showcasing the credibility and social proof you need to sell your product or service on LinkedIn (or anywhere else online).

It all has to do with LinkedIn Recommendations, and I’m going to spend the rest of this post explaining what they are and how they’re going to help you generate more sales leads, clients and revenue as a result.

LinkedIn Recommendations & Testimonials = Goldmine!

We all know the inherent value and social proof behind client testimonials and recommendations, and nothing captures that better online than LinkedIn recommendations.

And while it’s great to have people praising you and your product or service via a LinkedIn recommendation, there’s just one problem – almost nobody sees them!

As indicated in the screenshot below, LinkedIn Recommendations are easy to miss when perusing someone’s profile:

It makes zero sense to work that hard to get a glowing recommendation or testimonial via LinkedIn, and then struggle to have prospects view it, right?

Here’s the Solution – Spread Your Recommendations Far and Wide!

As you’ll see in a moment via the video below, asking someone for a LinkedIn recommendation is fairly easy. (And I’ve made it even easier by giving you some copy-and-paste scripts and templates to follow during the process!)

But once those recommendations do come in, the real work begins!

Watch the video below to discover not only how to ask for (and get!) glowing recommendations on LinkedIn, but also how and where to utilize those recommendations online. If you do, you’ll start spreading that critical social proof, credibility and word-of-mouth endorsements that are key to generating more sales and revenue.

Video: How to Ask For (and Utilize) LinkedIn Testimonials!

LinkedIn Testimonials – Use These Scripts!

Use the scripts below when asking your LinkedIn connections for a Recommendation or Testimonial.

Subject Lines (replace generic LinkedIn subject line with one of the ideas below)

quick favor?

need your help

[INSERT FIRST NAME] can you help me out fast?

[INSERT FIRST NAME] quick favor

[INSERT FIRST NAME] – need your help fast!

[thrive_leads id=’3453′]

Testimonial Text (replace the generic LinkedIn text with one of the scripts below.)

Option A (general ask)

Dear [INSERT FIRST NAME],

I’m in the midst of shoring up my LinkedIn profile and thought I’d reach out to see if you’d be up for giving me a brief recommendation here on LinkedIn based on your knowledge of who I am and the work I’ve done.

And if you’re not comfortable doing so absolutely no worries.

Meantime hope this note finds you well, and (sincerely) if there’s anything I can do to help you out here on LinkedIn or otherwise, please let me know!

— [INSERT YOUR NAME and COMPANY NAME]

Option B (more detailed ask)

Hi [INSERT FIRST NAME],

I’m in the midst of shoring up my LinkedIn profile and thought I’d reach out to see if you’d be up for giving me a brief recommendation here on LinkedIn?

I’m really looking to have you answer questions like …

— How did [PRODUCT OR SERVICE NAME] help you [ACHIEVE DESIRED RESULT]

— How did [PRODUCT OR SERVICE NAME] impact your [DESIRED BENEFIT OR PROBLEM CUSTOMERS HAVE]?

— What was the biggest value or benefit you received from [PRODUCT OR SERVICE NAME]? (Give me some details!)

Anything specific you could share around questions like that would be perfect and mean the world to me!

I know you’ve mentioned in the past how pleased you’ve been with [PRODUCT or SERVICE] so it’s really just an extension of that thought, along with (ideally) a few specific types of results you could share that someone in your shoes looking for something like [PRODUCT or SERVICE] would want to hear about before choosing to work with me.

Does that make sense?

Again I’d be grateful beyond words if you can help, and no worries if don’t feel comfortable writing anything up.

Either way let me know how YOU are doing and how (sincerely!) I can help you out with anything here on LinkedIn or otherwise!

Talk more soon!

— [YOUR NAME and COMPANY NAME]

Option B – WITH BLANKS FILLED IN (to see what it can look like)

Hi Roger,

I’m in the midst of shoring up my LinkedIn profile and thought I’d reach out to see if you’d be up for giving me a brief recommendation here on LinkedIn?

I’m really looking to have you answer questions like …

— How did LinkedIn Riches help you generate more sales leads, clients and revenue?

— How did LinkedIn Riches impact your sales and/or lead generation efforts?

— What was the biggest value or benefit you received from LinkedIn Riches? (Give me some details!)

Anything specific you could share around questions like that would be perfect and mean the world to me!

I know you’ve mentioned in the past how pleased you’ve been with LinkedIn Riches, so it’s really just an extension of that thought, along with (ideally) a few specific types of results you could share that someone in your shoes looking for something like LinkedIn Riches would want to hear about before choosing to work with me.

Does that make sense?

Again I’d be grateful beyond words if you can help, and no worries if don’t feel comfortable writing anything up.

Either way let me know how YOU are doing and how (sincerely!) I can help you out with anything here on LinkedIn or otherwise!

Talk more soon!

Bonus Tip – Give, Then Ask!

If you want to jumpstart the process, be proactive – go through your current LinkedIn connections, pick out key clients, and give THEM an unsolicited testimonial. Talk about how great they are to work with, what a great business they run, etc. They will feel obligated socially to return the favor, plus LinkedIn makes it super easy for them to quickly and easily recommend you in response!

All self-made millionaires had to start somewhere.

Much of their transformation from ordinary to seven-figure status can attributed to "rich habits," a term coined by Thomas C. Corley, who spent five years researching the daily habits of 177 self-made millionaires.

"From my research, I discovered that daily habits dictate how successful or unsuccessful you will be in life," he writes in his upcoming book "Change Your Habits, Change Your Life." "There is a cause and effect associated with habits. Habits are the cause of wealth, poverty, happiness, sadness, stress, good relationships, bad relationships, good health, or bad health."

The good news is all habits can be changed, Corley notes. Here are a few "rich habits" of self-made millionaires that you can start developing today:

SEE ALSO: 21 ways rich people think differently than the average person

1. They read consistently.

The rich would rather be educated than entertained. As Corley writes, "Eighty-eight percent of the rich devote thirty minutes or more each day to self-education or self-improvement reading ... Most did not read for entertainment ... The rich read to acquire or maintain knowledge."

Corley found that they tend to read three types of books: biographies of successful people, self-help or personal development, and history.

2. They exercise.

"Seventy-six percent of the rich aerobically exercise 30 minutes or more every day," Corley reports. Aerobic exercise includes anything cardio, such as running, jogging, walking, or biking.

"Cardio is not only good for the body, but it's good for the brain," he writes. "It grows the neurons (brain cells) in the brain ... Exercise also increases the production of glucose. Glucose is brain fuel. The more fuel you feed your brain, the more it grows and the smarter you become."

3. They hang out with other successful people.

"You are only as successful as those you frequently associate with," Corley writes. "The rich are always on the lookout for individuals who are goal-oriented, optimistic, enthusiastic, and who have an overall positive mental outlook."

It's equally important to avoid negative people and influences, Corley emphasizes: "Negative, destructive criticism will derail you from pursing success."

Aston Martin announced today that it has teamed up with Formula One's Red Bull Racing to create what it calls the "ultimate hypercar."

Codenamed Project AM-RB 001, the new Aston will be a follow up to the limited edition, million dollar One-77 and $2 million Vulcan hypercars.

The company's goal is to build the fastest road car in the world and to create what is in effect a road-legal race car, a company insider told us. 

Aston Martin has been working together with Red Bull on the project for three months and is expected to show some version of the car later this year, the source told Business Insider.

Deliveries of the the production variant is set to commence in 2018.

Aston is expected to build between 20 to 100 of the cars with a price tag north of the $2.4 million it charged for the Vulcan. Also, Vulcan owners are expected to be given preference when it comes time to order the new Aston.

The company has not released any detailed renderings on the design of the AM-RB 001.

Although an early sketch of the new model —known internally under the nickname "Project Nebula"— suggests that the AM-RB 001 may abandon Aston's familiar front/front-mid engine layout and locate the powertrain behind the driver.

According to Aston Martin, the upcoming hyper car will incorporate a significant amount of Formula One racing technology and take advantage of the Red Bull's expertise in advanced composites, aerodynamics and manufacturing.

The company has not offered an official comment on the powertrain of the new car, but expect to a see a blend between traditional Aston (could be a V12) and modern F1 tech (hybridization and some sort of kinetic energy recovery system is likely).

"Formula One offers the ultimate global stage to build wider awareness of the Aston Martin brand," Aston Martin CEO Dr. Andy Palmer said in a statement.

"However, this partnership will deliver even more than that when the hypercar that Aston Martin and Adrian Newey are in the process of developing hits the road."

The partnership will see Aston Martin designer director Marek Reichman work in conjunction with Red Bull Racing CTO Adrian Newey to develop the new car.

Reichman has been the driving force behind the design of both the One-77 and the Vulcan as well as James Bond's special DB10 and the newly introduced DB11.

Adrian Newey is the most successful race car designer in modern Formula One history. Newey designed cars have won 10 F1 constructors world championships since 1992 including four in a row at Red Bull between 2010 and 2013.

Aston Martin is in the middle of a major revamp of its product lineup. This announcement comes just weeks after the company unveiled the new DB11 road car — a successor to the venerable DB9. Earlier this year, Aston announced plans to build a new factory in Wales to produce its DBX crossover.

SEE ALSO: The Cadillac ATS-V is a car BMW can't ignore

Join the conversation about this story »

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