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How prevalent is social media? According to Pew Research Center, over 90 percent of retail brands are using two or more channels—and over half of all adults have at least one active social media account. It’s clear that social media marketing offers huge advantages for businesses in terms of awareness, engagement, traffic, and leads, especially if it’s done right.

Done poorly, however, it can drive away customers (and potential customers) and damage your brand’s reputation. You can avoid unforced errors with good social media policies and a little common sense. Ready to dip your toes into the social media pool? Check out these 13 easily avoidable mistakes you don’t want to make.

1. No Defined Social Media Strategy

Don’t launch your social media presence until you can answer the following questions:

➤How will social media advance your overall marketing goals?

➤How will you measure your social media efforts?

➤What platforms are most closely aligned with your target audience and your social media objectives?

Blindly jumping into the social media milieu is a recipe for disaster; as with every other marketing channel, you need a policy, a plan, and a measurable set of objectives. A documented social media strategy will ensure your content is consistent, engaging, and helpful to your brand.

2. Not Using an Authentic “Voice”

Social media creates a personal, direct connection with your followers, so it’s important to humanize your social media presence. Before you begin posting and tweeting, think about your brand history and identity and how that translates into a social media “voice.” Once you’ve found your authentic voice, use it consistently in all your posts.

Of course, your brand voice doesn’t have to be stuffy or serious; in fact, this is one marketing channel where it’s OK to show your humorous, quirky, casual side. Consider Denny’s weird—and hugely successful—social media voice:

we know some of our tweets can be cheesy. they may not be safe for the…

LAUGHTOSE INTOLERANT

— Denny's (@DennysDiner) January 15, 2016

we shouldn't be listening to a rodent & its shadow we should be listening to a talking burger w/ googly eyes on the bun, let's switch it up.

— Denny's (@DennysDiner) February 2, 2016

CONGRATS TO THE DENVER OMELETTES AND THE CAROLINA PANCAKES FOR MAKING IT TO THE SUPPER BOWL

— Denny's (@DennysDiner) January 25, 2016

OK, this voice isn’t right for every brand, but Denny’s has used it to increase growth by 150 percent and boost engagement to an average of over 1,800 interactions per post. That’s 900 million social impressions in two years alone.

3. Signing Up for Too Many Platforms

Your business will likely benefit from having a presence on more than one social media platform, but you don’t need to be on all of them just because you can. It’s smart for an accounting firm, for example, to be on Facebook and LinkedIn, but Pinterest and Instagram? Probably not so much. Match your platforms to your target audience and avoid spreading yourself too thin.

Not sure where you’re likely to find your target audience? This handy post will help you decide where to focus your efforts to engage your brand’s ideal customers.

4. Letting the Wrong People Manage Your Accounts

Social media is a very personal expression of your brand voice and reputation, and you should guard it carefully. This means closely vetting everyone you hand over the keys to your accounts—and tightly controlling his or her access—or you could wind up with a disaster like this one following a layoff at HMV:

Does this mean you can never outsource your social media accounts or rely on a summer intern to manage your posts? No, but it does mean you should exercise extreme caution and be sure you can shut down unauthorized users before they can damage your brand.

5. Posting the Same Content Across Every Channel

One of the great things about the different social media platforms is that each draws a different audience and is uniquely suited for different types of content. For best results, you should tailor your posts to suit each channel and the interests and characteristics of the people who follow you there.

A deep dive into a recent Supreme Court decision would be appropriate for a law firm’s LinkedIn page, for example, but probably not for its Facebook page, where the audience is less technical—and likely less interested.

Great images, infographics, and videos, however, are the exception to the rule, since this type of content performs well across all platforms, but it’s still important to keep your audience in mind. Remember to write fresh blurbs for each post, specific to the platform, and pay attention to optimal character counts and hashtag preferences for each.

6. Posting Controversial, Personal, or Insensitive Content

Unless your business is expressly religious or political in nature, it’s a good idea to stay away from from these often divisive topics. You might be really excited about a candidate in an upcoming election, but a huge chunk of your audience probably isn’t, so keep it to yourself. And unless your target audience is near-unanimous in its position on a particular social issue, or the issue is closely related to your brand, avoid taking a controversial stand.

There are businesses that go overboard when it comes to personal content—if you can’t think of one, you might be one. While work culture has undoubtedly changed as Millennials entered the workforce (visible tattoos, casual attire, funky workspaces, and unusual perks), there are still boundaries for good social content, and certain personal posts are just out of bounds.

Take baby pictures: It’s OK to mark the birth of a staff member’s baby with a cute newborn pic, but unless you’re in a business that caters to babies, save your baby photos for your personal account.

Keep posts professional and in good taste for your industry—and at least tangentially related to your business or marketing objectives. For example, it’s engaging and fun when a Silicon Valley startup Instagrams the trendy craft beer in the company fridge; not so much when a doctor’s office does.

And stay away from disparaging, insensitive, or offensive remarks.

7. Constantly Plugging Your Brand

Too many social media neophytes think social media marketing is all about putting their brand out front and center—in as many places as possible. But social media isn’t designed for that; it’s all about building relationships with your customers as individuals. It’s marketing, not advertising.

That doesn’t mean you should never mention your brand or push your products and services—there’s definitely a place for that type of content. But the non-branded content should far outweigh the branded posts, and the branded posts should be engaging, interesting, and worthy of sharing; go easy on CTAs.

In life you are either a passenger or a pilot✈️, it's your choice. pic.twitter.com/nPaSGu9nzm

— Red Bull (@redbull) February 2, 2016

We call tails. Just sayin’. #ChampionshipSunday #NEvsDEN pic.twitter.com/EARvlZCE5k

— Charmin (@Charmin) January 24, 2016

8. Getting the Hashtag Thing All Wrong

Hashtags are dangerous in the wrong hands, and when your hashtags go wrong, all sorts of bad things happen.

#nowthatchersdead pic.twitter.com/wI2MwEfmq9

— aaronhoff (@aaronhoff) April 9, 2013

Hashtags are, however, useful for helping people find your content, and boosting engagement, so you should learn to use them to your advantage. Here are a few simple hashtag rules:

Don’t go overboard. Even though Instagram allows 30(!!), don’t go there. Research shows that three is the optimal number of hashtags per post; more than that, and engagement goes down.

Keep your hashtags short, specific, and simple. Use capitalization when needed for clarity—and don’t forget to proofread to avoid embarrassing yourself.

Susan Boyle has officially the most unfortunate hashtag. Are we all looking forward to Susan Boyle's #susanalbumparty ? pic.twitter.com/H1aW6ViN

— Luke Robinson (@mrlukerobinson) November 22, 2012

Use caution when hijacking a trending hashtag to promote your brand and make sure you understand the context. DiGiorno made a costly mistake when it hijacked a trending hashtag about domestic violence in the wake of the Ray Rice assault video.

Oh, you missed @DiGiornoPizza 's idiotic #whyistayed tweet? Here…I screen captured for you. #Stupid pic.twitter.com/ObKDGH4Dt7

— Ashley (@hiashleylamar) September 9, 2014

A million apologies. Did not read what the hashtag was about before posting.

— DiGiorno Pizza (@DiGiornoPizza) September 9, 2014

9. Forgetting the “Social” in Social Media

Unlike your other marketing channels, social media involves regular interaction with your followers—give and take is the name of the game. This means you should monitor your accounts, engage with your audience, and respond promptly to comments and questions.

This is especially true when you get negative or inflammatory comments that could reflect badly on your brand. Don’t ignore or delete your unpleasant feedback, use it as an opportunity to demonstrate your customer service chops.

Here are some tips to remember:

➤Respond to everything—within reason, of course. There’s no satisfying the trolls, but you should probably be answering about 90 percent of your comments and complaints.

➤Avoid the non-apology apology: “We’ve been manufacturing the finest cowboy boots in Texas for over 50 years. We’re sorry your experience with our excellent footwear didn’t meet your expectations.”

➤Know when to escalate. Your goal is to solve the problem that caused the complaint, not simply address the complainer. If there’s a technical issue, for example, pass it on to the engineers.

➤Know when to take a conversation out of the public eye. Comments on social media are visible to everyone and too often, negative comments result in a pile-on. Suggest a direct message or an offline channel to resolve the situation one-on-one if it threatens to spiral out of control.

➤Take the time to personalize your response and avoid automated replies.

Image via The Financial Brand

10. Spamming Your Own Followers

You should definitely be active on your social accounts, sharing content and status updates on a regular basis. But you shouldn’t overdo it and risk turning off your followers. Finding the right balance involves multiple variables, including the size of your audience, how active they are, the platforms you post on, and of course, the resources you have to manage your accounts.

While there’s no hard and fast rule about the optimal frequency for social media posts, here’s what the research shows:

Top brands on Facebook averaged one post per day.

Image via socialbakers

Engagement drops off after the third tweet per day.

Image via socialbakers

Posting 20 times per month on LinkedIn will reach 60 percent of your audience.

Brands grew their audience fastest when posting 5 or more times daily on Pinterest.

The average brand posts 1.5 times per day on Instagram, but there appears to be no downside to posting more frequently.

11. Not Posting Updates When Your Audience Is Most Active

You spend a lot of time creating fabulous content; wouldn’t you like to post it when it’s most likely to be seen? Knowing when your audience is active on social media can boost your engagement by 30 percent or more, according to marketing research.

Fortunately, you don’t have to experiment yourself to figure out the best time to post on each channel—you can find all the information you need to reach your social audience at the optimal time in this handy infographic.

12. Not Using Automated Social Media Management Tools

If you’ve read the last two mistakes, you’re probably wondering how you’ll manage to post with the right frequency at the right time of day on each of your social platforms. Managing your social media accounts is a daunting task if you hope to get the best results from your efforts.

There are a number of online tools that take the work out of scheduling your posts; some even offer enhancements like social listening, analytics, and reporting. Many are free and/or offer affordable monthly plans with loads of extra features. Here are some of the best:

Hootsuite has a full suite of social management tools including scheduling, analytics, social listening, and RSS feeds connecting with 35 different social apps. Hootsuite plans include a free version for personal use, as well as pro and enterprise versions starting at $9.99/month.

Buffer is a superior multiplatform scheduling tool with powerful analytics and a browser extension for posting. Individual use is free and small business plans start at $50/month.

SproutSocial is an engagement and management platform with a Smart Inbox that routes all your social media messages into a single filterable stream. Plans start at $59/month for up to 10 social profiles.

For single platform management, you should also check out TweetDeck, a free tool for anyone with a Twitter account; SocialOomph, a tool for organizing Twitter accounts with optional Facebook features (free and Pro versions); Friends+Me, a free tool to manage your Google+ account; and SocialBro, a tool to target and engage your Twitter audience.

13. Buying an Audience or Paying for Likes

A huge following and a pile of likes validates your social proof and builds your visibility—but only if they’re genuine and organic. Paying for an audience is a desperate tactic that doesn’t boost engagement, improve ROI, or help you build relationships. In fact, it can damage your brand and your legitimate social accounts. Avoid the headaches and just don’t do it.

One last tip: Don’t forget to monitor, measure, and analyze your efforts to make sure you are driving traffic, reaching the right people, and seeing a good return on your social media investment.

Nick Triantos was on a mission to find a job where he could help build the next big thing. That’s what drew him to SRI where he’s the managing director of its venture arm. The non-profit research firm has a storied past in technology, from creating liquid crystal displays (LCD), to eye tracking technology, the mouse, ARPANET (the predecessor to the modern-age Internet), the digital fax machine, 9-1-1, virtual private networks, natural language speech recognition, and Siri.

Above: SRI Ventures managing director Nick Triantos

Image Credit: SRI

But while many of its programs are government funded, that hasn’t stopped SRI from working with the private sector to commercialize its innovations. In an interview with VentureBeat, Triantos explained how SRI is entrepreneurial in nature — more than 60 ventures have been spun out in its 60 year history, including Nuance, Tempo AI, Desti, and Symantec — and it’s always on the hunt for ways to make its technology advances more widely available.

SRI’s research efforts are funded by government contracts and while the resulting technologies are handed back to their respective agencies, the intellectual property is retained by SRI. Triantos said that 90 percent of the firm’s revenue comes from agencies like DARPA, the National Institute of Health, and the United States Department of Energy. In thinking about what to do with all its technology, SRI Ventures was created.

Although it may be considered to be a venture arm, as a non-profit, SRI Ventures doesn’t raise money from limited partners, nor does it operate discrete funds. Its investment capital instead comes from the profits generated by spinouts and licensing, which is passed back to the research firm. And while it does invest some financial capital, SRI Ventures’s real value to startups is the IP it has access to. “When we create a venture, we invest a lot of IP, prototypes, and code. We also invest several hundreds of thousands of dollars in the venture. All in, we’re contributing millions of dollars of value, and these days, finding money is substantially easier than finding great core technology, so we feel pretty good about what we bring to the table.”

Technology licensing and company formation

A big part of what Triantos’ team does is find ways to get SRI’s technology into the marketplace. It does this by either working with existing companies or by starting a new company themselves.

The firm licenses its technology to some of the largest companies in the world like those in banking and energy industries, and to startups, too. Some “customers” in the past include Summly (which was acquired by Yahoo), Verb Surgical, and Meta. Triantos said that about 1,000 research projects are worked on every year at SRI, many of which are multi-year efforts, so the developments that come out of each one could be beneficial to a young startup. Whether it’s in artificial intelligence, cyber security, natural language processing, healthcare, or speech recognition, to name a few categories, entrepreneurs often are able to find something to choose from. However, not everyone that applies for a license will be granted permission.

“Our criteria vary, based on the technology to which they’d like access,” Triantos noted. “We have some technologies, such as our DynaSpeak search engine, which we can license broadly. There are other pieces of research for which we need to set a higher bar, since we may not have productized the technology before, or we may have some markets where we have already chosen other paths to bring our innovations to market.”

“In general, we try to use a similar lens to what [venture capitalists] use,” he explained. “First, is this market one in which our technology is appropriate and well-differentiated? Second, is this the right team to bring our technology to market? Third, do we believe we will have sufficient ROI to justify working on this particular license?”

SRI also creates startups that it thinks can bring an advance to market. In the beginning, researchers shepherd their ideas from the lab to a more formal concept phase, at which time the firm brings in an entrepreneur to lead the project. The inclusion of a startup founder relatively late in the game is unusual to normal company formation,and Triantos and his team are exploring ways to involve entrepreneurs-in-residence (EIR) earlier in the company building process.

“Our preferred method is to have a rough idea of the market where we think we can add value, hire someone entrepreneurial, and give them a bit more latitude to help flesh out the business,” Triantos elaborated. “It’s still the case that if we decide the business is evolving in a way that we don’t agree with, we can pull back or part ways with the EIR, but everyone in the team is excited by some of the early results of this new model. We have a few companies we’ll be announcing later this year that were born from this way of doing things (one in robotics, one in medical diagnostics, and one in computer vision).”

One recent example of this process is Tempo AI. SRI initially wanted to use artificial intelligence to create a personal search engine and brought in Raj Singh to help. Formerly an EIR at Storm Ventures, he worked alongside SRI’s researchers to launch the company. The concept evolved into a smart calendar assistant, which was officially spun out with a license for SRI’s AI technology, and two years later, the startup was acquired by Salesforce.

Advancing technology developments

Moving the needle forward on technology is something SRI is passionate about. “This is one of the only places in the world where if you have an idea about a robot that lives in the home and, for whatever reason, you want it to understand and communicate with you, not based on what you asked, but your emotional state” you’ll find people doing similar research, according to Triantos. “Yes, you could go build a new Tinder app, but when you’ve got the kind of resources we have at SRI, you should go out and build something unique with our technology.”

A former entrepreneur, Triantos founded the high security mobile collaboration platform ionGrid which NetApp acquired, served as the chief executive of Toxkox, and did a stint at Nvidia as its chief software architect. He’s also an angel investor and was a partner at Quantum Technology Partners. Some of his investments include Pathwork Diagnostics, Liftopia, Digital Shadows, and Intelligent Medical Implants.

“The challenge for a lot of venture capitalists is that you’re always on the sidelines, you’re not involved in the creation process,” he said. This is the appeal he saw with SRI Ventures, choosing it over a traditional venture capital firm. Triantos is excited to apply not only his investing experience, but also his knowledge of what it takes to start and build companies. And then there’s SRI’s long history of developing groundbreaking technologies. It’s all about “making the world a better place,” he said.

More information:

Oil production in the US has skyrocketed since 2010, primarily due t0 due to hydraulic fracturing (fracking) and utilizing horizontal wells. However, the global supply of oil has far surpassed demand. As a result, oil prices have dropped dramatically, and oil companies are facing steep revenue losses.

To combat this, oil companies are utilizing Internet of Things (IoT) technology to reduce their production costs by becoming more operationally efficient.

In a new report from BI Intelligence, we examine why oil companies are connecting their oil wells, rigs, and exploration devices to the internet. We also look at the potential value these companies will realize from the IoT.

Here are some key takeaways from the report: 

• Over the next three to five years, 62% of oil and gas executives worldwide say they will invest more than they currently do in digital, according to a recent Microsoft and Accenture survey. 
• Oil and gas companies will use IoT devices and their associated analytics to survey land for new potential drilling sites and extract the oil from the ground. Among oil and gas executives, 89% believe they can leverage analytics to improve business practices, according to Microsoft and Accenture.
• We estimate the number of devices used on oil extraction sites — primarily wells — will increase at a 70% compound annual growth rate (CAGR). The devices will primarily be internet-connected sensors used to provide environmental metrics about extraction sites.
• By fully optimizing the IoT solutions available, an oil and gas company with $50 billion in annual revenue could increase its profits by nearly $1 billion, according to a Cisco study. 

In full, the report:

• Explains the driving forces for the increase in oil production
• Examines how IoT analytics are being utilized by oil and gas companies in oil fields
• Identifies the types of networks needed to connect the devices
• Discusses the importance of mobile devices to control IoT devices

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

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

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TL;DR

You want to know the state of agility in your organization? Here we go: Download the checklist, distribute it generously among your colleagues and run a quick poll. It will only take 5 minutes of their time–and then run an analysis on their feedback. If the average number of checkboxes marked is higher than nine, then you are probably practicing cargo cult agile. Consider changing it. Or abandon your agile experiment all together. But don’t refer to it as “agile” any longer.

Everyday Failures In Applying Agile

Agile methodologies, like Scrum, have been on the rise across organizations of all kind and sizes for some years by now. Many consultants responded to the increasing demand for agile practitioners, particularly from corporate organizations, with rebranding themselves.

I do not mind professionals pursuing new career opportunities. But pretending to be able to practice “agile” by taking a shortcut, for example reading some books, has increasingly resulted in collateral damage to the agile community. And the damage is tainting the reputation of a great way to build software. A significant part of the developer community meanwhile seems to despise Scrum, for example.

To my experience, “agile”—e.g. Scrum—isn’t learned from books or from attending workshops, but in the trenches when confronted with real problems and the urge to ship product. Hence, it is not too difficult to figure out, when the introduction of an agile methodology or framework to an organization didn’t work out as planned.

If some of the following observations are common in your organization, you might be experiencing a phenomenon often referred to as “cargo cult”.

A cargo cult generally describes a movement that applies a set of rules to the letter without understanding for what reason they should be practiced.

One of the well-known examples with regard to technology was described by Richard Feynman:

In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head for headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.

Source: “You are surely joking, Mr. Feynman!“, page 340.

It turns out, that Scrum seems to be particularly well suited for cargo cult agile. So, best practices become rules overnight. And rules need to be enforced. And if the people don’t live up to them, if metrics are not met, then you need–of course–more structure, more rules “to fix agile”.

What Is the Purpose of the Poll?

The purpose of the whole exercise is to start a conversation about what part of your agile transition is going well and where actions needs to be taken. The poll supports this approach in several ways:

• It is anonymous—no one will hold back, contrary to retrospectives as a competing format to gather feedback.
• The poll delivers data, it’s no longer a gut feeling, and hence a good basis to start talking to the management.
• It is very affordable.

Download the Cargo Cult Agile Checklist as a PDF

You can download the following list of 25 issues as a PDF, print and use them for yourself. If you do so, I would appreciate your feedback on how this worked out for you and what manifestations you would add to the list. (Please note that downloading the PDF will also subscribe you to our weekly hand-curated newsletter, if you haven’t yet signed up already. You can unsubscribe at any time.)

The Cargo Cult Agile Checklist

Now let’s have a look at some typical manifestations of cargo cult agile within an organization. The checklist assumes that you are using Scrum, but can be applied generally to other agile practices accordingly. (A final note: The list may be become less applicable with an increase in size of the organization in question.):

1. (Product) vision and strategy are not communicated
2. Roadmaps with fixed release dates are provided for a year ahead by the CTO
3. No one from the organization is talking to customers
4. CTO and stakeholders insist on every change to be approved by them in advance
5. Offline boards are banned for confidentiality reasons
6. Product owners are bypassed by stakeholders talking directly to the CTO
7. Stakeholders decide on shipping product increments, not the product owner
8. Projects are shipped only when completed, but not incrementally
9. Stakeholders are prevented from talking to the Scrum teams
10. The product backlog is defined by a product council
11. Features of doubtful value are being pushed through, e.g. to secure bonuses
12. Sales is promising non-existent features to close deals w/o including the product owner
13. Deadlines or fixed schedules are still in use for noncritical issues
14. Product management isn’t granted access to business intelligence to make informed, data-driven decisions
15. Stakeholders communicate to product and engineering in the form of requirement documents
16. Product owners spend time mostly on the creation and administration of user stories
17. Sprint backlogs are changed on short notice after the sprint started
18. There is a dedicated Scrum team even for bugs and minor change requests
19. Scrum ceremonies are never attended by any stakeholders
20. Velocity matching commitment is the main metric to measure the success of Scrum
21. Developers are not participating in user story creation
22. Scrum teams are changing in size and composition, depending on the number of simultaneously running side projects and task forces
23. During stand-ups, the team members are reporting to the Scrum master
24. Retrospectives are held regularly, but no changes follow
25. Scrum teams are not cross-functional and therefore depending on other teams or departments.

The Cargo Cult Agile Litmus Test For Your Organization

Now, here is a fun game for everyone involved in agile processes in your organization to check the health status:

Print out this post–or download the printable PDF version instead–, and distribute it generously among your colleagues. Ask them to go through it and check all boxes that apply to your organization–it will only take 5 minutes of their time. Then run an analysis on their feedback and assess your situation:

• 0 to 2 boxes: I would like to talk to you how you managed to do that. Care for a Skype-call? Or would you like to contribute a guest-post to my blog?
• 3 to 5 boxes: Well done! You’re on a good way.
• 6 to 8 boxes: There is room for improvement. Lot’s of it.
• 9 to 14 boxes: If you haven’t very recently embarked on your agile voyage, then it is time to change your approach.
• 15 to 20 boxes: Okay, start over with agile–it is not working in the current set-up within your organization.
• 21 to 25 boxes: You either haven’t started going agile yet. Or you are sugar-coating command-and-control structures to look “agile”. It won’t work, by the way.

Conclusion

There is no “agile by the book” that automatically works well within your organization, if you only stick to the letters. You will have to identify your version of “agile” by yourself. Start doing so by testing things that have been successfully used by other organizations in the past.

If those work for you, too, great–stick with them. Otherwise, move on. It is absolutely okay to adapt or even drop standard agile rituals in the process, if it helps figuring out, what is working within your organization. And don’t hesitate to change or adapt any best practices as you see fit to make them work within your organization.

Millennials are the largest generation by population, and they have taken the marketing world by storm. Study after study has been written on how to engage best with this generation. But we should differentiate superficial differences based on technology from the real and latent needs of consumers. These needs cut across generations and age groups.

There are 2 things we should be aware of. These will lead us to comprehensively prepare an engagement model that is ready to take on the possibilities of new digital age.

The Disappearing Virtual-Real Divide

Several studies have brought out the natural evolution of behaviors as technology has evolved. These trends are about using social and real-time messaging over email, making services available over multiple channels, removing friction in typical commerce and onboarding processes, being more visual than textual among other things. It goes without saying that these trends must be met head on for our customer engagement efforts to be successful.

When it comes to millennials, it is correct to assume that they are generally more exposed to new technology, and hence more comfortable using it. While that same assumption is true of almost everyone else who has exposure and access to technology, an updated digital strategy is more crucial for millennials because they haven’t seen a world (ideally) where alternatives are obvious. Because of that very reason, older generations may find it easier to fall back to – and maintain – traditional methods of engagement such as branches, increased wait times and calling in instead of engaging in online chat. That’s also perhaps the primary reason why satisfaction levels of the millennial generation are lower for companies that don’t have their digital act together.

However, this should not be interpreted as a cue to develop a millennials oriented strategy. The Real-Virtual divide in the customers’ minds is disappearing rapidly, and is only going to be accelerated as technology awareness and access increases. Ask anyone from any age group on social media today, and they will tell you that email matters less for casual conversations than messages on social and messaging platforms. The same goes for not having to send in paper documents for account verification, not having to visit a bank branch, having the ability to check for retail store inventory online, or redeeming coupons that can be stored on the phone.

The real driver for digital strategy should be about driving consumer adoption of the technology-assisted processes that are right for the business, and not just based on segmentation by age. In fact, this study by Adweek shows the most used apps by millennials where social apps top the charts. There is much to be desired for core business process oriented applications as is depicted by this study from Nielsen which shows how older age groups are more likely to engage in complex business apps such as investing in mutual funds online. In fact, banking research shows that people rely on branch visits for account opening when the conversation gets more complex than just a simple checking account. Part of this is due to the issues with implementing straight through processing, but a lot is also perhaps related to meeting the overall needs of education, information asymmetry, and optimal long-term financial management.

When designing your digital strategy, it’ll be best to evaluate the desired overall customer experience and drive the organizational changes that are needed to meet the challenges of an evolving marketplace. The millennials will definitely raise the urgency, but that is only a consideration for the short term. People are adopting digital at an increasing rate, and have newer options available every day to meet their needs.

Meeting the Latent Needs of Consumers

While eliminating the virtual-real divide is the current hot topic, a look at customer engagement presents an entirely different story. Supplementing your digital strategy with these following principles is crucial to winning in today’s world, not just with millennials but with everyone else.

1. Providing connected experiences – A lot of digital innovation today is all about applying the same marketing and commerce principles more digitally. But that’s what led to commoditization in the first place. We are speaking to customers and reaching them in more places, but we need to be able to give customers a reason to engage with us beyond the offer of a better price. Leading companies are doing this through the promise of convenience and context. For example Nordstrom knows what you’ve liked on Pinterest when you come into the store. The integration of online aggregators such as Zillow (real estate) with mortgage providers eliminates significant friction in the process of data gathering and allows both the customer and lender to come right to the point. Similarly personal wealth management upstarts like Clink (www.clink.com) are linking retail and restaurants with investment management. None of these are millennial-specific strategies, but they drive commerce very effectively.
2. Providing external reinforcement – This is an area which still needs work. Other than the most commoditized products, consumers want to know that they are making a good decision. The lure of a free checking account doesn’t mean much when the bank is unable to help them invest and plan for the future in an optimal way. The lowest APR for a mortgage does not attract as much when the lender cannot comfort the borrower about other external costs of a mortgage. The issue here is of understanding and addressing the latent needs of customers. Again, this is digital at its best, but not just focused on millennials. This approach needs a combination of both consumer digital as well as internal capabilities to provide our external customer touch-points with the right information.
3. Linking to higher causes: Transparency and honesty are being appreciated more and more as the marketing noise is increasing. In this connected age, we care more about factors such as global poverty, human rights, and animal welfare among other things. In addition, all businesses have stories about their origins, place of business, how they chose to name their businesses, or most importantly about their employees. Bringing these out and creating an identity beyond our products leads to greater engagement in today’s world. We need to be able to position our enterprise as one that is aligned to these causes.

In the age of the millennials, the most important lesson is that this is a transformation of how customers are engaging and responding. While activity on social and mobile may be most visible, we ultimately crave for support on more important issues as customers. The latent needs of value, convenience and aspirations are critical to address. For that reason, a millennials oriented digital strategy should actually be considered as a strategy about how to compete in a digital and connected world.

People often skip the first step of building an effective sales strategy. That first step is to build a persuasive, bulletproof narrative that will grab people's attention, get them to question existing solutions, and ultimately convince them that not using your product is costing them.

This narrative will be the guiding message that will be used for all marketing collateral such as presentation slides, spoken messaging, website copy, videos, and so on.

There are a variety of methods to create your customer-facing narrative. I recommend the Problem - Solution - Specifics framework.

1. Identify the problem.
2. What are the existing solutions and what’s your solution?
3. What are the specifics of your solution?

Let’s dive deeper into these questions.

1) "What is the problem and who has it?"

You need to clearly identify the pain point you’re solving so your audience can quickly evaluate whether or not the issue pertains to them.

In the case of my company, TalentBin, our problem statement was, “Technical recruiting is hard. It’s hard to find software engineering talent that has the relevant skills, and even if you can find them, getting in contact with them is tough. And once you’ve found and contacted talent, keeping on top of all those conversations can be a huge time suck fraught with dropped balls, all leading to slower hire times and raised cost of hire.”

For the HubSpot CRM, the problem statement might be, “B2B sales is hard. As a rep, you have multiple conversations going at once, multiple deals in the pipeline, and you have to manually log all those interactions into your CRM. That means less time spent selling, which makes it more difficult to hit your quota. For managers, it’s difficult to know how productive your reps are, how many calls they’re making, and how many deals they’re closing -- and if they aren’t closing deals, what they’re doing wrong. Worse yet, you don’t have a clear view of your pipeline. These issues lead to underperforming teams and missed forecasts.”

A good test to determine if you’ve nailed your problem statement is to pose it to someone in the industry. It’s a good sign if you ask, “Have you encountered this?” and that person not only says yes, but can have deeper conversation about it.

Equally important is identifying the person who has the problem and is looking to solve it. In B2B sales, there’s usually a specific person whose job is to solve the problem you’re surfacing. Your goal is to identify that person.

Job titles are often good indicators of who makes the decisions. Let’s use HubSpot CRM as an example. The system focuses on improving on rep efficiency and managerial insight. While a rep may want to work more efficiently, she likely won’t decide if the company will implement a new CRM. The person who would have the final say in implementing a new CRM platform would be a manager, director, or VP of sales.

2) "What are the costs associated with this problem?"

Understanding the costs associated with the problem will help you frame an argument for why prospects should pay for your solution. There are three types of costs.

1) Concrete Costs

In the case of data storage solutions, more data is needed for every employee that’s added to an organization, and that means more money. This is a very specific cost. If your solution can minimize this cost, then you can identify the specific amount of money you can save the buyer.

In this case, implementing your solution would decrease the customer’s cost by a concrete amount.

2) Opportunity Cost

In the case of sales software, an opportunity cost would be missed deals in a given time frame due to low rep efficiency.

For example, using their current CRM, a rep might close eight deals a month with an average deal value of $8,000. But if that rep were to use a new CRM that improves efficiency, he would be able to close close 10 deals -- resulting in $16,000 in additional revenue.

3) Qualitative Cost

These costs are much more difficult to quantify. For instance, information technology vendors often sell the value of increased agility -- users would be able to help clients capture more business opportunities more quickly. While that may be true, it’s not as direct or powerful as concrete or opportunity costs.

You need to understand the costs of the problems you’re addressing, so you can position the value of solving them with your solution.

3) "How do people solve this problem and why are current solutions not good enough?"

Sales conversations will often touch on why your solution is better than what the prospect currently uses. It’ll be difficult to have that conversation if you don’t know about current solutions and their shortcomings. There are three types of conversations here.

1) The prospect doesn’t think the solution is worth solving.

One of the most common roadblocks is a prospect who thinks, “We don’t need to solve that problem.” Your challenge is to convince them that it’s worth solving by showing them the costs of not solving it.

2) The prospect hacked together a solution.

In the case of TalentBin, the problem that technical recruiters have is discovering and engaging with software engineers that they can’t find on LinkedIn or Monster. Some recruiters have a process that includes Google search to discover engineers on Twitter, GitHub, and StackOverflow. They then reach out and follow up via email. But while the system works, it isn’t the most efficient.

In these cases, you need to address why their existing process is flawed and how your solution can make that process 10X easier, faster, or cheaper.

3) The prospect is already paying for a solution.

These are the most advanced prospects because they’re already paying for a solution -- likely made by one of your competitors. This may be discouraging, but it’s a good sign because it shows the organization is willing to pay to solve the problem.

The more mature a space, the more solutions there may already be. And the more you know about other solutions and their upsides and downsides, the better.

The only way to build an authoritative narrative is to become credible in the industry. That means recognizing the strengths in existing solutions and being able to speak intelligently about them. A deep understanding of competing solutions will help you position your narrative in the larger context of the market.

4) "What has changed that requires a new solution?"

In product innovation, there’s often a change in the market or technology that opens the door for new solutions to crop up. It’s important to understand the causes of that change and explain how your solution fits into the evolving market. That change will be crucial to how you frame the new opportunities that have opened up for your prospects.

For instance, in the case of CRM, the rise of modern-designed, user-first software provided an opportunity for HubSpot to create a CRM offering that was far less clunky than previous generation SaaS CRMs.

5) "How does the new solution work?"

A good way to clearly explain your solution to prospects is to use existing solutions that your prospect understands as anchors to compare with your product.

For HubSpot CRM, this explanation would sound something like, “Similar to what you know and love about CRMs, but easy to implement, intuitive to use, and reduces the amount of repetitive work you need to do. Reps will actually use it because it fits in with their current processes, making them better at their jobs, and providing managers with better insight to team productivity and sales pipeline. By the way -- it’s free.”

Provide Proof of a Better Solution

When comparing your solution against another product, your message may be as simple as “Our offering does more X” or “Our offering requires less Y.”

This is where you can guide the conversation based on your deep understanding of the problem, market, and existing solutions. You may be able to point out that competitors share the wrong metrics.

For the recruiting space, the key metrics are generally cost per hire, time to fill an open role, and quality of hire, but some competitors cite metrics such as “we have 200 million profiles!” It sounds interesting, but it doesn’t help recruiters find quality candidates.

Third-party validation is another way to present your product’s superiority and lend credibility to your claims. This could include customer count, customer testimonials, deep dive case studies, press and analyst coverage, and so on. This isn’t a core part of the narrative, but is a means to say “these people agree with us.”

Put It All Together

Now you have to put all these pieces together to create holistic view of the complete narrative. Again, the narrative exists separately from the media you end up using to communicate it. Regardless of the channel, you need to be able to tell a coherent story.

Test yourself by experimenting with an elevator pitch. Based on your interaction with the listener, as they ask questions on certain points, you can expand or condense your narrative.

Here’s an example.

The Hubspot CRM Narrative

What is the problem and who has it? B2B sales is hard. As a rep, you have multiple conversations going at once, multiple deals in the pipeline, and you have to manually log all those interactions into your CRM. That means less time spent selling, which makes it more difficult to hit your quota. For managers, it’s difficult to know how productive your reps are, how many calls they’re making, and how many deals they’re closing -- and if they aren’t closing deals, what they’re doing wrong. Worse yet, you don’t have a clear view of your pipeline. These issues lead to underperforming teams and missed forecasts.

What are the costs associated with this problem? If a rep has multiple conversations going on and forgets to follow up or send a proposal, it can mean losing tens of thousands of dollars each year. If reps are spending a lot of time manually logging emails and calls, they’re missing out on potential deals and conversations. For sales managers, not being able to measure rep productivity, identify weak points in the pipeline, or forecast accurately translates to lost revenue opportunities. That could mean missed quarters and negative stock impacts.

How do people solve this problem and why are current solutions not good enough? Reps are using ancient, clunky contact managers or last-generation CRMs that are difficult and time-consuming to use. These tools weren’t designed to seamlessly keep track of customer relationships and maximize rep efficiency. These last-generation CRM systems are difficult to set up and hard to use -- taking up time and money rather than helping reps make more money. As a result, reps don’t actually use the CRM which, in turn, makes it difficult for their managers to be successful.

What has changed that requires a new solution? Prospects now work faster than ever before and expect more personalization in sales outreach. Companies that use legacy CRMs aren’t agile enough to keep up with this change in the buyer’s journey. They’re focused on selling rather than helping the buyer. This shift called for a lighter, faster, easier-to-use CRM that enables more personalization so reps can match their selling process to the buyer’s journey.

How does the new solution work? Hubspot CRM provides a rep-first CRM that was built to reduce the work for reps so they can focus on having more conversations and making more deals. It has gone through various iterations on design and user experience to be intuitive and easy to use. It also provides various integrations with other tools reps may use, allowing them to work efficiently individually and as a team.

Proof of a Better Solution. Because the software automates much of the manual work previous CRMs required, you get reps who are logging information as much as 3X -- 10X as often as on legacy CRMs. That not only reduces the potential for lost opportunities -- as you can see by the 20%-50% increase in win rates for reps who adopt Hubspot CRM -- but also makes for more accurate forecasts for the sales manager. We’ve seen a 30%-50% reduction in missed forecasts for managers whose teams use Hubspot CRM.

Bake The Narrative, Then Make Collateral

Once you’ve formed your narrative, take the story and distribute it in various formats for easy consumption. In general, this will take the form of sales collateral for prospects, but the same narrative will get recast for press contacts, analysts, partners, and even investors and acquirers.

If you don’t have that narrative nailed down, all the collateral in the world won’t do you a bit of good. It’ll just be shiny nonsense. Nail your narrative first.

Editor's note: This post has been excerpted from Founding Sales: Sales for Founders (and Others) in First-Time Sales Roles by Pete Kazanjy, TalentBin founder. It is republished here with permission.

mCommerce is “growing like a weed” according to a recent Criteo report. Mobile shopping grew to almost 30% of all eCommerce transactions in the United States, and an astonishing 50% in South Korea and Japan!

Interestingly, all consumers actually view the same number of products on their mobile devices. The problem is the lower conversion rates for U.S. sales.

If the eCommerce boom is evolving into mCommerce dominance, it’s essential that all online sellers avoid making these simple mobile commerce mistakes this year.

Mistake #1: Believing All Shoppers Are Equal

Although the mCommerce industry is growing, the buying habits of Millennials are in an entirely different category. According to Facebook IQ, 57% of Millennials will buy something using their smartphone next year!

If Millennials are in your target market, you must do everything possible to ensure the entire sales process, from initial marketing message to the final sales process, is tailor-made for this group. This means thinking about non-traditional marketing, like integrating advertising into mobile gaming. And as Millennials are especially drawn into reward-type offers, mobile gaming is an excellent way to connect with the largest mCommerce group.

Mistake #2: Low “Mobile Friendly” Score

Good eCommerce platforms understand the importance of mobile-responsive websites that work seamlessly on any size device. Using a system like Selz is critical, as their checkout experience is designed specifically to work smoothly on mobile. Which is extra important because Google announced last year that it would include a site’s “mobile friendly” score in their search algorithm.

So not only does the site need to be mobile responsive to make it easy for consumers to buy, the site needs to be mobile friendly to gain higher Google rankings. The good news is Google has an easy-to-use tool, called the Mobile-Friendly Test, that measures any site’s mobile scores.

Mistake #3: Don’t Offer a PayPal Option

PayPal seems like it would be the obvious choice for any online seller. In 2014, PayPal processed over 4 billion payments, and more than a quarter of those sales were on a mobile device. But not all online sellers offer the widely popular payment option.

Online retailer Amazon still refuses to consider adding PayPal as an option. Although this tactic can work for the hugely successful Amazon, it won’t work for smaller online stores. In fact, 83% of online merchants say sales have increased by offering PayPal as an option. Plus, it’s considered one of the top trusted ways to purchase items online. To ensure you don’t miss out on any sale, always add PayPal as an online payment option.

Go Where Your Buyers Are

An old marketing rule is to always go where your buyers can see you. As technology changes, our marketing efforts have traveled from newspaper to commercials to online ads. Now, it’s essential to understand that today’s buyers use their phones for much more than a simple communication tool.

This means we have to keep up with the mCommerce revolution to ensure we stay relevant. If we want to grab our share of mCommerce sales, we have to stop treating mCommerce like a novelty and start treating mCommerce like the growing force it has become.

GUEST:

Smart businesses that recognize the value of an outside-in perspective have long analyzed attributes like demographics and firmographics in an attempt to better understand their customer base. In particular, consumer marketers have tailored messaging around characteristics like age, gender, marital status, or household income. Business-to-business marketers on the other hand, logically focus their marketing messages on a different version of similar data for companies, like number of employees, industry, revenues, and growth rate.

While it’s still important for any business to comprehend the demographic and firmographic makeup of its customers, we’re now seeing marketers begin to adopt an invaluable new lens, called technography, that attempts to better understand a customer by analyzing their tech stack. By figuring out what a company’s technology stack says about them, managers can define technographic profiles and determine next-best actions that match each prospective customer. When they know which pain points their product(s) alleviate for which customers, they’ll be able to apply this data via deeper personalization.

Why does technography matter?

When it comes to consumers, you can glean valuable information from the dozens of technologies each individual uses. Are the people you’re trying to reach Apple or Android mobile users? Do they subscribe to Netflix or Amazon Prime? What apps or wearables do they use most? Retailers often leverage this technographic information to predict which customers are most likely to shop in store, online, or via mobile, and target messages accordingly.

It’s time now for business-to-business companies to take notice of this opportunity and look just as closely at their prospects’ and customers’ technology stacks. Everything from their office productivity and project management tools to their CRM and Marketing Automation systems can inform your go-to-market strategies and messages. You may even identify the next emerging role you should be selling to.

Technographic insight can be hugely valuable when you figure out what a company’s stack says about them. Do they prioritize scale over ease-of-use in their technology choices? We’ve seen some technographic signals act as an important proxy for things that are seemingly unrelated to the technology. For example, a financial tech firm noticed that Eloqua marketing automation was a predictive signal for its top prospects. The company is in a completely separate vertical, so it wouldn’t make sense to personalize messages about this platform, however it did help them deduce a few things. They recognized that companies running Eloqua tend to have a certain level of technical sophistication, and are usually big enough to be able to afford premium enterprise systems.

Of course, as business tools proliferate, understanding these nuances gets harder and harder. Artificial intelligence (AI) can help uncover clues that would be impossible to decipher with human brainpower alone. As Kevin Slavin pointed out in his TED talk about algorithms, there is so much data in our world today that we can’t possibly makes sense of it all without artful machine learning.

Putting technography to work

These technology signals are easier to track down than most people think. Data providers like The Big Willow, Social123, and Builtwith can build segments to reach companies that use particular web hosting, analytics, e-commerce, advertising, or content management platforms. And web crawlers like Ghostery offer simple Google Chrome extensions that let you easily see under the hood of a company’s web site to find out what technologies it is built on.

Once you have access to this information, it’s important to define technographic profiles and determine next-best actions that match each prospective customer. If you can figure out which pain points your product(s) alleviate for which customers, you’ll be able to share the right messages at the right times. For example, analytics company Looker builds out highly targeted campaigns focused on companies that use Amazon Web Services, including content specifically related to their key challenges. The more marketers take this personalized approach and focus on delivering a better customer experience, the more they’ll influence marketing to become a valued profession.

But it’s not just marketing campaigns that can leverage technographic data to their advantage, other exciting use cases for sales, business development, product management, and even human resources include:

• Improving sales prospecting. When reps understand the technography of their leads, they can have informed conversations with more and more prospects. With the proliferation of “Shadow IT”, vendors are no longer just pitching CIOs; all kinds of business people are inundated with information about how various apps can help them do their jobs better. Wouldn’t it be great if those messages actually reflected a user’s true motivations and demonstrated how a particular offering would solve a true problem?

• Identifying new markets. As companies reach the expansion stage, the first thing they want to know is where the ground is softest. By interpreting the stories told through customers’ technology choices, you’ll be able to spot new opportunities that can inform business development and product planning. For example, cloud-based learning platform Mindflash recognized potential demand for a Salesforce training program and, once it was ready, used technographic signals to easily identify which prospects to promote it to.

• Informing decision-making throughout the business. Even beyond go-to-market opportunities, technographic insight can add real value in areas like cultural alignment. Knowing the individual technographic profiles of your employees and job candidates can tell you a lot about the technology disposition of your workforce and how well it aligns with that of the customers or partners you’re going after. If you identify areas where you need to do more training, you can avoid the productivity hiccups that often arise from technology disconnects between employees.

Technographic signals are under-utilized in most companies, but they represent a big opportunity to drive competitive advantage if leveraged properly. By looking at customers differently, businesses can develop a deeper understanding of them. Companies that use this insight can make a major impact on the customer experience, cultivating not only loyalty and retention but also bigger revenues and deal sizes.

Vik Singh is CEO of Infer. Prior to founding Infer, he was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Sutter Hill Ventures, and prior to that, he helped create and architect Yahoo BOSS, an open search platform that runs over 1 billion queries a month. In 2009, MIT’s Technology Review listed him as one of the Top 35 under 35 Innovators for his contributions to search.

Sean Zinsmeister is senior director of product marketing at Infer. He previously worked at Nitro where he developed and led a global marketing team.

In the 1900s, there were less than 3,000 cars on the road in France. Driving was considered a luxury and one that most families didn’t have an extreme need for. After all, there was public transportation to get people from point A to point B.

For the tire company Michelin, this perceived need posed a unique challenge. The company needed people to buy cars so that they could buy tires. The company could post ads and hope people decided to buy, but they chose a different approach.

If Michelin was going to sell their tires, they had to get creative about how to inspire more people to buy the latest transportation innovation – automobiles.

The Underrated Importance of Truly Knowing Your Customers

You hear it time and time again – create your buyer personas.

Still, it doesn’t quite sink in until you see how these buyer personas can translate into dollars and cents. That’s what Michelin took into consideration when they deployed their 1900’s strategy of creating the Michelin Guide.

Here’s the gist:

The annual guidebook was meant to get people on the road and using their tires. It gave people a reason to ditch the planes and trains in lieu of an automobile.

The first guides were designed to help motorists understand the inner workings of their car. Because there weren’t as many drivers back then, auto repair wasn’t common knowledge.

In 1926, the guide shifted to focus specifically on restaurants. The tire company started to reward restaurants with a gold star if it was considered fine dining. By 1931, the three star system was introduced to give travelers even more perspective on where to dine.

Today, Michelin continues to publish these guides. For restaurateurs, being awarded a star gives bragging rights. For travelers, knowing where to go for a quality dining experience makes travel more enjoyable. For all other businesses, the lessons that were learned from this marketing strategy open the door to discover how to generate business leads from unlikely sources.

Here are the top three lessons you can use to tweak your strategy.

Lesson #1: Get Clear on the Way Your Product is Used

When Micheline first started creating their guides, they knew there was a hunger by consumers to understand what was going on under the hood. The thought of owning an automobile was new. Most car owners didn’t understand how their vehicle worked or how to make basic repairs to keep it functional.

If a car broke down, a person was probably not going to drive for some time. Less driving meant fewer tires. And thus, Michelin had inspiration to keep their customers on the move so they could boost sales.

But as auto buying became more commonplace, things changed. Michelin knew that tires in and of themselves weren’t sexy. To the average consumer, the actual rubber meeting the road stopped being exciting and started to feel more commonplace.

What was still exciting were the possibilities behind each road trip.

Every time a family piled into their new car, they were on a journey to somewhere fun. In the 1920s, when this campaign began, many families traveled by car to enjoy a nice dinner on the town. And thus, the Michelin Star guide was created to give their consumers more of a reason to eat out.

What benefits does your customer experience when using your product?

This is the question Michelin asked when creating the guides. It’s an equally strong question for you to ask when deciding how to generate business leads through a more strategic marketing campaign.

Lesson #2: Think Outside of Your Existing Market

When the Michelin Guides first came out, they were filled with tips exclusive to helping car owners. At this time, there weren’t many vehicles on the road, so there wasn’t as big of a demand for tires.

In 1926, Michelin changed the perceived need for a car by thinking outside of their existing market.

Instead of publishing guides about cars, which would only appeal to their current captive audience, they decided to publish guides that would appeal to a larger demographic – everyone who loved to go out to eat.

There were two reasons this was a smart strategy.

1. At that time, the people who could go out to eat were also the ones who were likely to be able to afford to buy a vehicle.
2. Offering a guide to help consumers use a vehicle gave a purpose to making the purchase.

What’s the actual benefit someone gets when buying your product?

Michelin knew there were many reasons for consumers to buy their product. Still, they focused on just one – dining out. This was fun, exciting and enticing.

Think outside of your existing market. What types of activities do your potential customers enjoy by having your product that are not related to what you sell?

This is tricky but it opens the door to lesson #3 – giving your customers a reason to buy.

Lesson #3: Give Away Free Valuable Content

As Michelin discovered the benefits of buying cars and tires, they came up with their marketing strategy of publishing restaurant guides.

To plant a seed of perceived need to their potential buyers, thereby generating more leads, they published free, ultra-valuable content. Then, they gave this content away for free.

Some might say that giving away free content plays into the buying psychology principle of reciprocity – and it does. But the Michelin approach goes a step beyond that. The content they provide also showed their customers how to use their product in a way that would benefit them outside of the obvious. It was valuable because it was applicable in real life in a unique way than any other tire company or car company was providing.

What kind of free content can you provide your customers?

Content marketing continues to dominate the marketing world – and for good reason. If it worked in the 1900s, it still works.

The trick is, not all content is made equal. If your content doesn’t deliver value and contribute to the perceived idea that your product is a must-have instead of a nice-to-have, you’re missing out.

Give away valuable free content and in exchange, people will be more likely to give you their personal information because they know what you offer is useful.

What’s Your Next Step?

Go through these questions for your business:

What benefits does your customer experience when using your product?

What’s the actual benefit someone gets when buying your product?

What kind of free content can you provide your customers?

By following Michelin’s lead, you can discover new ways to attract people to your industry and your business. You’ll position yourself as the authority in your market because your potential customers will see that you get it. They’ll know you understand what they need and aren’t trying to sell something of little value.

Thanks for coming back to get Part 2 of this blog post on conversion rate optimization (CRO). We left off talking about how, like all digital marketing efforts, to successfully increase your conversion rates you have to develop a plan. There are 4 main parts to a conversion plan:

1. Identify what your goals are for conversions
2. Develop a baseline
3. Setup a way to measure your results
4. Develop a testing procedure for improvement
5. Evaluate and improve

In this post, we’re going to look at each of these 4 components to a conversion rate optimization plan and talk about how to get started.

Goals

Before you start working on improving your conversions, you have to know where you’re going. Goals for conversion typically focus on the final step in the buying process. Things like more contact us forms filled out, or more product sales trough an online store. But what about businesses that have a more complex sell cycle. Businesses like auto dealerships or B2B companies. These business environments have customers that take an amount of time to make their decision. They educate themselves on the products, the companies, and even the solutions that they are committing to. In these scenarios, there are a number of conversions that have to happen before the customer is ready to fill out the contact us form or to put a product into a shopping cart and pay for it. And, if you’re not focusing on the conversion steps that have to take place before they commit to a purchase, they will just leave.

For complex sales, conversion goals will focus on getting the prospect to engage in the areas of the website that will answer the questions that they have before they make a decision. As an example, let’s say that you sell a widget on your website that solves a problem for manufacturers but you know that before anyone buys one of your widgets you have to educate them on how the widget works, the savings that they will get when they install your widget, and what size widget will be right for them.

In this scenario, your conversion goals should be activities like:

• Time spent on the “solutions” page of your website
• Downloading a white paper from the resources area of your website
• Time spent on the about us page of your website
• Downloading a case study from your website

All of these activities demonstrate people that are qualifying themselves as they get the answers to their purchase decision. Your goals should then focus on these activities.

Baseline

Everything about conversion rate optimization (CRO) is focused on growing but before you can identify growth you have to know where you started from. Now, chances are that you probably haven’t setup your website for all of the conversion points, so start your baseline with what you have. If you have Google Analytics installed on your site, you’ll be able to get an amazing amount of information from there.

• Measure the time on page of the most important pages of your website. Pages like product description pages, solutions pages and even your about us page.
• Measure your bounce rate (for the whole site) and for these important pages that you have identified. Find out what pages are responsible for driving your visitors away.
• If you have more than 1 form on your site, measure the conversion rates for these forms.
  • Conversion Rate Formula: (# of form entries ÷ # of visitors)
• Traffic source is an important measurement because you will be able to eliminate areas that you don’t sell to (i.e. Russia probably not a great source of traffic for most businesses)

Setup Measurements

As I mentioned earlier, Google Analytics (GA) is a great start for measuring conversions. If you don’t have it installed on your site, get it installed as soon as you can. Their basic package is free and the installation can be handled by virtually anyone that has some web programming experience.

Within GA there are some reports that you will want to make sure that you get setup:

• Unique Page Views: behavior -> site content -> all pages: This report will give you information like, bounce rates, time on page, % entrance, and % exit, for each page on your site.
• User Flow: audience -> user flow: This report will give you a graph of how your website visitors travel through you site.
• Goals: conversion -> goals: This report will take a little bit of setup but it will be well worth the effort. You will be able to set it up to measure when conversion activities like forms getting filled out, happen.

Test, Test, & Test

Once you commit to CRO you’ll find that it can be a bit addictive. If you go from a 3% conversion to a 5% conversion, you’re going to want to get to a 10% conversion. The best way to continue increasing your conversion rates is to test different scenarios.

We’ve all heard about the mythical company that changed their old gray submit button to green and saw a 3,000% increase in conversions. Don’t be disappointed when this doesn’t happen to you. Conversion rate optimization is more complicated that this.

Figure out a scenario for what you think would impact your customer and then make that change. Once the change is made, measure the results, compare the results to what you were doing and compare the difference. This is why establishing a baseline is so important. If you don’t have a baseline set, you won’t know if you’re improving.

Here are some quick and easy things to get started testing:

• Shorten every form on your site to collect just the basic information that you need. If you’re trying to generate sales leads for your sales team, you don’t have to ask 20 questions about their business, sales volume, profit margins, etc. Just get contact information (if your site is setup with a marketing automation platform you can find what product they were looking at from there).
• Setup navigation based on the different segments of customers that you sell to. Let them go to the area that just talks to them.
• Stop using industry jargon on your website. The biggest problem with website’s today is a visitor’s inability to read a page and understand what the company is saying.
• Give the visitor the information that they need, at each stage of the buying cycle. They will not contact you before they are ready to talk to someone and if you don’t give them the early stage information, they will go to a site that does.

Ahh, the “Demand Waterfall”. Otherwise known as “The Funnel,” this framework introduced by the research and advisory firm SiriusDecisions defines a shared view between marketing and sales of the lead management process. Though many of us many have various versions of the funnel defined within each of our organizations, here’s the official and most updated version of the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall.

Image used with permission from SiriusDecisions, The Demand Waterfall®, Rearchitected

The context for commonly-used terms in B2B like “marketing qualified leads” (MQLs) and “sales qualified leads” (SQLs) is found within this framework. Performance of marketing and sales teams are typically measured by KPIs aligned along the funnel, with target/quota metrics that are calculated (or oftentimes assumed!) by backing in from the bottom of the funnel (i.e., closed won customers) all the way to the top (i.e., inquiries or prospects). Many demand generation marketers will then plan campaigns and programs that are meant to drive conversions throughout the funnel with the aim at meeting or exceeding these performance goals.

However, as the saying goes “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” According to studies by SiriusDecisions, about 98% of MQLs never result in closed business. If this is the case, and if we have a certain number of wins we need to acquire at the bottom of the funnel as our target, then the easiest thing for a marketer to do is pour more into the top of the funnel. More leads! I want more leads! Said no sales person ever. Sales wants ready-to-close deals with a neatly tied bow on top. If they can’t get that then the next best thing is more opportunities.

However, with the growth of marketing technology, we (the marketers) have gotten better and better at creating larger and larger volumes of leads. The problem is, of course, that not all leads convert, and there are numerous reasons why. But what inadvertently happens is that in order for marketing to meet their MQL targets, they generate more and more leads. They throw them over the wall to sales in the hopes that, if conversion rates stay stable, then more will flow through the middle and bottom of the funnel.

In reality, this torrent of leads contain a high amount of crappy leads with some great-fit leads sprinkled in here and there without any reliable way to identify them. So, it’s not uncommon to hear sales tell marketing that the leads they’re passing over are crap. As a result, sales stop following up on all of the leads and marketing begins blaming sales by saying that they don’t call on the leads. It’s a vicious cycle that breeds mistrust between the two teams, which leads to the stereotypical misalignment between marketing and sales. Junior sales or business development reps (SDRs and BDRs) are hired as a stopgap to crank out a high volume of prospecting calls with the goal of finding the good leads to pass on to their account executives.

The fact of the matter is that there are still a lot more wasted calls on poor leads than on the good ones. So as a way to prioritize leads for follow-up, the concept of lead scoring was born. According to Marketo’s Definitive Guide to Lead Scoring, lead scoring is a methodology that ranks leads in order to determine their sales readiness.

With greater adoption of marketing automation, the built-in functionality for lead scoring in these tools are used as an attempt to predict which leads have a higher propensity to buy or likeliness to convert to the next buying stage. I say “attempt” because while lead scoring that occurs in marketing automation platforms today has provided tremendous benefits, it also has some serious limitations. Setting up a lead scoring system that works (i.e., is accurate) takes A LOT of time and effort. If you’ve ever taken part in building up a lead scoring model, you’ll know that to be true. Why is lead scoring so hard to do and to get it right? I think there could be a number of different reasons:

Not Enough Data Is Available For Accurate Scoring

The first reason is that most of us don’t have enough data in order to build an accurate scoring model off of. Much of the data is simply captured upon form fills on a website or landing page. Best practices tell us that the shorter the form, the better the on-page conversion. However, the less data you collect, the less you know about your prospect. In addition, this is assuming that the prospect is not entering any incorrect info, either purposefully (e.g., “abcd@efg.com”) or unwittingly (“fat-fingering” it while typing on a mobile device).

Traditional Scoring Models Are Often Based On Guesswork

Secondly, we don’t know if the data that we’re using to score are actually the right ones to use. We follow general rules of thumb, such as scoring visits to our pricing page or looking at long on-page dwell times as a qualifier. Thus, we say to ourselves, “let’s assign 50 points to any leads that engaged in these activities.” This is essentially basing our scoring on gut feeling (aka guessing). The problem is that we don’t know if these actions are truly applicable or how much importance they should carry.

Irrelevant Data Points Used In Scoring Will Give Inaccurate Results

Thirdly (and this is related to the second reason above), our scoring may be based on false correlations because we performed what I call “eyeballing-analysis.” What this refers to is basically the fallacy of placing emphasis on specific data points because we see them as common data points across our customers, which may not be great indicators. For example, let’s say we noticed in our data that four out of the last five customers who purchased our CRM software had red hair. So, we decide to score any new prospects with red hair really high. We even decide to get this critical info by asking what hair color they have on our landing page forms. This is obviously a very silly example, but many lead scoring models are based on this type of shoot-from-the-hip analysis.

Predictive Lead Scoring – Restoring Sales’ Trust In Marketing

So while lead scoring as a concept is actually meant to be predictive in nature, the reality is that traditional lead scoring models aren’t very accurate predictors of sales readiness. This is because of the challenges that lie in the surface level analysis of the small pool of data that we use to build our lead scoring upon.

The recent increase in popularity of predictive marketing vendors (including the company that I work with) is proofpoint that traditional lead scoring methodologies aren’t cutting it. What’s missing are all the data points describing your ideal customer profile that aren’t found in your CRM or marketing automation. And what’s needed is a systematic and scientific way to identify which of these data points truly matter in determining your ideal customer profile.

Many predictive lead scoring systems scour the web for potential buying signals that can be found about your customers. These can include:

• Looking at source code on their websites.
• Gathering information found on job boards and press releases about their company.
• Knowing that kind of technology stack they use.
• Understanding how much they spend on PPC ads.
• And perhaps thousands of other data points from all over the web.

Then, all of this data is inputted into predictive models to uncover the data points that actually matter for your business and have the highest correlation across your customers. These commonly-shared data points or traits will then give you a good, full picture of your ideal customer profile. You can therefore match your leads up against this profile – the closer the match the higher the predictive lead score, which means the lead looks very similar to customers who purchased from you before.

This is obviously a very simplified explanation of how predictive lead scoring works, but the end benefit should be clear – lead scoring that truly identifies best fit prospects most likely to purchase or convert. To learn more about predictive lead scoring, check out our on-demand webinar titled “Demystifying Predictive Lead Scoring.”

As buyers we’re increasingly content to choose the “good-enough” option, rather than the better (or best) one.

Ten years ago, for example, upgrading your PC meant comparing CPU speeds, screen resolution, and hard disk storage capacity. Today PC sales are falling, as most people’s computing needs can be more than adequately met by an iPad or a Chromebook – regardless of whether it’s for business or pleasure.

Most people use their PC for sending emails, sorting and sharing photos, buying and playing music, or drafting the occasional letter. Even the most basic CPU today is more than capable for such tasks. Storage is increasingly moving to the cloud, so gargantuan internal hard disks are less of a draw.

Going with Good Enough is all that most people need.

Good Enough Is Everywhere

Good Enough touches more and more of our behavioral choices. Starbucks coffee isn’t the best coffee you can get, but most people are happy to settle for it. It’s a similar story when buying music as MP3 files, or flying on a no-frills airline.

Yes, there are better options, but for most people Good Enough is good enough.

Accepting Mediocrity

More often than not, any individual marketing project is born as a response to a perceived problem or issue.

• “Our website isn’t generating leads for the sales team and doesn’t rank well in search engine results.”
• “We need to increase awareness and close more on-booth business at our next tradeshow.”
• “Our existing sales and marketing collateral looks poor against the competition.”

The response is swift and – more often than not – addresses the issue to the level at which most stakeholders are content. The result may not be anything ground breaking or jaw-droppingly awesome. But it’s delivered at a sufficient quality that (hopefully) makes the problem go away. Done and dusted, time to move on.

To all intents and purposes it’s fit for purpose. But is it enough?

Is Good Enough sufficient to win? Can a mentality of Good Enough gain traction to change the status-quo? Can it produce something that will reinvent and revitalize your business? Your job? Your Future?

Changing The Rules

The problem with Good Enough is that it’s the safe bet. It’s not rocking the boat. The requirement is solved even if the solution isn’t exactly setting the world on fire. Producing something that’s Good Enough probably won’t end with you losing your job – which is partly the problem.

But what if the original brief was different? Supposing the goal was to radically change the existing landscape, take people out of their comfort zone, and produce something so awe-inspiring that it would force the audience to re-evaluate their perception of such things to the point that they’d talk about it with their friends?

The potential of creating something like that could be amazing. It could exponentially better for your business, your career, your life. But the risks involved are immeasurably greater too. You might be ridiculed. You might fail. You might get fired.

The Search For Something Better

For hundreds of years the way we approached a problem was to work on it until we came up with a good-enough solution, instead of coming-up with the right solution. In the past this didn’t matter, as the marketplace rewarded solutions that were Good Enough – and often cheaper to boot.

Today, however, that’s no longer the case.

Thanks to the internet, and therefore today’s global ultra-competitive commercial environment, the market is moving in two opposing directions at the same time. On the one hand we’re drowning in high-volume, low margin Good Enough stuff – exactly the same mindset and process that you’ve been adopting all these years.

But there’s another – far more interesting – direction. There are those on the continuing and passionate Search For Something Better. These are companies and individuals who are fed-up with Good Enough, aiming their wares at a like-minded audience.

These are the people who believe there is a better way to buy stuff (Amazon), travel from one end of the city to another (Uber), or find accommodation (Airbnb). Their solution isn’t for everyone – but it’s not meant to be. And that’s fine.

You can resign yourself to the well-trodden path of Good Enough. Alternatively you can take the less-traveled road of re-invention, iteration, and changing the rules on an ongoing basis.

One of these options may take you out in your comfort zone, and involve an element of risk. But at the same time it may be the only way to get results beyond what you’re getting to date.

Exhibitions give you the perfect opportunity to start conversations with prospects and drive new business. However, you’re not guaranteed lead generation success by simply turning up.

Once you’ve decided to exhibit, and usually paid for the privilege, the hard work really begins. For starters, this means organising transport, accommodation and a stand. But how can you ensure that you will get footfall at your stand? And that this footfall will include the type of people you want to target?

Many exhibitors choose to send a mass email to their existing contact list, with information about where their stand can be found at the exhibition. Although this is good practice, as some of your existing contacts may be planning to attend, there’s actually so much more that can be done in terms of pre-event outreach. Through online research with the right tools, it’s possible to identify other exhibition attendees, gather data on those who are your target prospects and reach out to them in advance.

Pre-event planning is not the only thing that’s needed for lead generation success. To build a strong ROI from every exhibition your company has invested time and money in attending, post-event follow up is essential. After all, you don’t want the hard work that you put in before and during the exhibition to go to waste, but it can very easily happen. Two post-event ‘musts’ are to make sure that all of the new data you’ve collected is stored somewhere suitable, such as a CRM system, and also that a lead nurturing system is in place and clearly understood by your sales and marketing teams.

We’ve put together an infographic, which you can see below, with our top tips on what to do before, during and after an exhibition to generate as many new leads as possible.

Original Source: How To Have A Successful Exhibition

By now, just about everyone involved in B2B marketing is aware of the hype surrounding account-based marketing (ABM). Many thought leaders argue that ABM is the “next big thing” in B2B marketing, and recent research confirms that the enthusiasm for account-based marketing is strong and growing.

• In the 2015 State of Account Based Marketing Survey by SiriusDecisions, 92% of respondents said that ABM is “extremely” or “very” important to their overall marketing efforts.
• In Demand Metric’s 2015 Account-Based Marketing Adoption study, 71% of survey respondents said they are interested in adopting ABM, are testing it, or are already using it.

If someone views your LinkedIn profile, does it look like you're an experienced user or an inexperienced newbie?

As a LinkedIn consultant and speaker, I look at hundreds of profiles each week, and many of them are downright embarrassing. But the good news is that most of the mistakes can be fixed in just a few minutes.

However, before you make these changes, you may want to slide your Update Notification toggle to "No" so you aren't alerting your network that you're fixing these mistakes.
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10 fast and easy solutions to common LinkedIn mistakes

Think of this as spring cleaning your LinkedIn profile. When you're finished, your profile will shine and stand out from your competitors.

1.  Photo doesn't fully fill the photo square. Try reloading your photo, and be sure it's a high resolution photo.

2.  Your most important current job is not listed first. Just click the up/down arrow next to the job entry you want to move. Then hold and drag the gray vertical bar. Each current job is movable.

3.  You have not customized your unique LinkedIn URL. This is an important link that you should be using on all your marketing information (business card, email signature, etc.). Simply click the edit pencil and add your name.

If you have a common name and the URL with your name is already taken, you could put a "1" following your name or add your middle initial. If you prefer, try including the first letter of your first name with your full last name.

4.  You haven't listed any websites in your Contact Info section. You can display up to three websites, and they're hyperlinked to the web page. If you don't list any websites, it looks like you don't have a company or anything you're interested in.

5.  The first 35-40 characters of your headline are not descriptive. When someone scrolls over your photo or name in numerous places on the LinkedIn site, your headline is truncated, and only the first 35 to 40 characters are visible. Therefore, make sure the beginning of your headline describes exactly who you are and what you do.

6.  Your current company logo isn't displayed on your profile. This is happening because either your company doesn't have a logo on its company page (ask your marketing folks to fix this) or you had your LinkedIn profile prior to the company having a company page or logo. You need to reattach to your company page by editing that entry. Click Change Company and then select the company page entry when it shows up in the drop-down listing of companies.

7.  Your school's logo doesn't show up on your profile. Try to rectify this problem by following the same steps you used to get your company logo onto your profile.

8.  You are not using the Advice for Contacting section to share your business email and/or business phone number. This is especially important if you use LinkedIn for business development or job searching.

The Advice for Contacting section is an optional profile section that is available for free. Locate it by clicking See more near the top of your profile. If you don't include your phone number and/or email address here, people outside your first-level network may not know how to contact you.

9.  You're not capitalizing on the Interests section. This section is important for two reasons. If you separate your entries with commas, they are searchable by clicking the word. Also, if you view someone's profile or someone views your profile, any common interests you have will appear in the In Common With section.

This is a great way to discover topics that can break the ice in conversations or correspondence. So, rather than using full sentences in this section, use words or phrases that other people with similar interests are likely to use.

10.  You have not optimized your profile for mobile. LinkedIn has taken some liberties with how your profile gets displayed on the mobile app. Because 60 percent of profile views are on mobile, be sure to check out how you're showing up. For more information on mobile, read my two articles (Part 1 and Part 2) about LinkedIn mobile strategies.

If you've followed these simple steps, your LinkedIn house should be in order, and you'll be viewed as an experienced professional rather than an inexperienced newbie.

The post 10 Common LinkedIn Mistakes You Can Fix in Just 10 Minutes appeared first on Wayne Breitbarth.

The "Shark Tank" investors were charmed by baby-faced Benjamin Stern, the 16-year-old founder and CEO of bottle-less bath products company Nohbo, whose pitch involved washing his grandmother's hair.

But after the high-school junior from Florida explained how he cold-called invention headhunters at companies like Clorox and then set forth to secure patents after hearing interest, the Sharks respected him as a bona-fide entrepreneur.

Mark Cuban said he saw himself in Stern, calling Stern "Mini Me," and made a deal with him for $100,000 in exchange for 25% of the company.

Stern and Cuban closed the deal since filming the pitch last summer, and Stern said his business has been kicked up a level since his segment premiered in a season-seven episode two weeks ago.

Stern told Business Insider that Cuban and his team have already revamped Nohbo's website and secured it with a manufacturing deal, as well as given him plenty of valuable guidance. Stern shared several key lessons they've already taught him.

You have to walk before you run

When he was 14, Stern watched a documentary about the plastic-bottling industry and realized that much of the plastic that goes unrecycled came from people's bathrooms, where they're more likely to toss an empty bottle into the trash.

He decided to find a way to take the idea behind detergent pods and apply it to shampoo, body wash, and shaving cream. He and a chemist developed a prototype that looked like a Lindt chocolate ball — a dissoluble ball held in a biodegradable wrapper.

Stern has always wanted Nohbo to be a revolutionary product; one that could end up in hotels and licensed to major toiletry manufacturers. Cuban was drawn to Stern's passion but taught him to minimize risk and keep his ambitions grounded.

"They have taught me I shouldn't start something without knowing and preparing for the absolute worst outcome that could happen, even if we expect the best," Stern said.

You don't need to wait for the perfect time to seek a deal

While Cuban taught Stern to stay grounded, he's also given him the assurance that reaching out to potential licensing partners this early in the company's life "is never a bad thing," and that he was right to follow his instinct when he called Clorox a couple years ago to gauge its interest in his product.

Cuban wants Stern to hedge his bets, but not to lose his aggressive confidence.

You need to foster excitement over your brand

Stern has already exceeded the $10,000 goal for his Indiegogo campaign for the launch of Nohbo and has been fielding investment offers. But Cuban and his team told Stern the "Shark Tank" buzz won't last forever.

Stern said he realized that "keeping up the excitement is an inevitable and ongoing challenge." He's determined to build relationships with customers and clients, making the most of the momentum he's got.

You need to surround yourself with people better than you

"I want to run Nohbo in a way that allows flexibility and secures a sense of loyalty for all of our workers," Stern said.

"As a CEO, I'm adjusting to working with people all the time, and jumping into an area which I know little about," he said. In his journey as a founder-CEO, he's already recognized that Cuban and his team have helped him avoid mistakes he would have made on his own. He wants to bolster his team even further, and not let his ego get in the way.

"I know how many bad turns I have avoided by surrounding myself with geniuses in the business field, so if I can get them on board to back us completely, that would be amazing, and would progress Nohbo more than anything I could possibly do," Stern said.

SEE ALSO: 'Shark Tank' investor Daymond John shares 9 business books he thinks everyone should read

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 'Shark Tank' investor reveals the biggest mistake you can make in the office

If I had a pound, euro, dollar or yen for each person that has had an epiphany when I have explained this I could have retired.

We all go to networking events and onto LinkedIn looking to meet clients or partners, starting to build those long term relationships that are both profitable and critical to our business and personal success, but we are doing it in the hardest way possible.

The number one mistake we often make is trying to sell to the person in front of us. What do I mean by that? Well imagine you’re at a networking event or on LinkedIn – you try to sell to the person in front of you and by doing so you often sabotage your chances of success before you have even started!

By selling to that individual you are exposed to a number of relational risks:

1. They think you’re a pushy sales person, put the defensive barriers up and you will never engage them in the future.
2. Once the barriers are up any future opportunity will go elsewhere.
3. They might tell others of your pushy sales approach and hence your reputation is also being tarnished before you even meet the next person!

Can you imagine how you felt last time someone tried to sell something to you? Even with the best of intent it often gets a negative reaction.

Now imagine that everyone you meet knows hundreds of other people that they could introduce you to. Would that shift your focus to their network (as opposed to them) as I am pretty sure you would rather sell to a few as opposed to one?

How much better would your sales “chats” be if someone else had introduced or referred you onto someone they knew?

By selling to that persons’ network you are building a number of relational bonuses:

1. You differentiate yourself by not selling to them.
2. They think you’re a great person as you’re trying to help them, this brings the barriers down and you can always engage with them positively in the future.
3. Once the barriers are down any future opportunity will go to you (as long as you keep in touch).
4. They will tell others of your proactive and positive approach to help them and enhance your local reputation
5. They might even introduce you to someone that they know that they think you can help with your expertise, insight, service or products.

Imagine the email – “you must meet X, I met them at an event recently and they were telling me about Y and I instantly thought of you. You must meet up over a coffee and have a chat”. Wouldn’t that make your business development and sales easier?

The number one mistake when you network is to sell to the person facing you, as opposed to gaining trust and sponsored access to their networks – network (face to face or on LinkedIn) to build rapport, strengthen relationships and this will open doors and get significantly better results.

When your team is struggling to figure out what feature or product to build next, how to position your next service offering, or how to price out the next version of your software, a customer advisory board can be invaluable.

What is a Customer Advisory Board (CAB)?

For SaaS companies, a Customer Advisory Board (CAB) can act like a regular marketing research panel of trusted decision makers and influencers, providing constant customer feedback that is absolutely essential to building a long-lasting, constantly evolving, and growing business. Best yet, you might learn more than you expected.

But given the benefits, a board of these customers can be very demanding on your time and energy – so is it worth creating and managing it? If so, how should your SaaS company start building this group of trusted advisors, and what should it look like?

Your Customer Advisory Board needs the same time and attention as any other key stakeholder relationship, not unlike investors or employees. CABs tend to be the most valuable in complex, regulated industries or with complex products and business models like enterprise software. The expertise of the CAB can help executives and department leaders understand the complexities faster and in turn act faster, creating a win-win situation: customers get the product they want faster, and your team is better informed on what to build (and monetize) for your uses.

Build Your CAB with the Right Mix of Customers

Before you grab a random smattering of customers from your CRM system and fly them into town, there’s a few things you should ask yourself (and probably some of your internal stakeholders) and even more things to keep in mind while you get your CAB up and running.

Getting the right mix of individuals is incredibly important when building your CAB. Having customers that are in it for the wrong reasons or aren’t fully committed can cause more harm than good. You should strive to have a group of approximately 10-12 individuals that represent a mix of various characteristics. It’s also important to have customers who have been with your company from the early days, as well as those who are newer and have a fresh perspective.

Equally important is to ensure you have brands of all shapes and sizes – not just enterprise brands and not just small to medium sized brands. Make sure your CAB represents your customer base well. In addition, be sure to include executive-level customers as well as those that are very knowledgeable users or influencers. If your CAB is composed of just executive-level customers, then it will be difficult to get into the weeds of product and services offerings. And on the other hand, if your CAB is composed of all users and influencers, then it will be difficult to have more strategic conversations. The best CABs have a healthy mix of both.

Find your customer champions. Who are the customers that use your product fearlessly, are forward-thinkers, and push innovation? Who are you NOT meeting the needs of today? It’s best to start with a wide range of individuals, and gain insight from Customer Success Managers (CSMs) and others who work closely with customers to determine who should not be included, and who the top contenders should be. Often times a few will immediately rise to the surface, but be sure that the group is diverse enough to meet the needs of your CAB.

In a recent blog post, Stengel Solutions outlines their approach to finding the right candidate: “Of course, when forming a CAB you need to understand its purpose, but you also need to know what specific skills to seek. In general, look for diverse skills, expertise and experience. You want members who are problem solvers, strong communicators, and are open minded. Big names can be a bonus … but not always: Getting a heavyweight on your board of advisers can give you credibility, but it’s also important to have members who are going to spend the time to give you thoughtful advice or are well connected and willing to make introductions.”

Once you’ve identified the individuals you want to include, have an executive from your company – preferably the CEO – specifically invite the customer to be part of CAB and outline the requirements, travel, and input needed. Having the invitation come directly from the C-Suite will ensure the customer takes the commitment very seriously.

When to Form Your First CAB

Even when your company is just starting out, it’s important to have a group of customers who you can rely on to give you true, honest to goodness feedback about their experience and your product and services. Whether it’s a formal group or not, companies should determine 5-10 customers early on that can be a voice and that are willing to provide referrals and help grow your business.

Over time, it’s okay if your CAB changes and some customers leave and others step in – in fact, that’s perfectly natural. Most likely, over time the size of the organizations you’ll work with will be large as you gain more expertise and can service them appropriately, so it’s equally important to add enterprise customers so you have a full perspective.

Think About Your CAB’s Charter

According to a recent UserVoice article, one way to get organizational alignment on this topic is to create an official charter, not only will a charter help your company be on the same page regarding the purpose of your CAB, but it will also serve as a resource to share with potential members. Take for example the mission statement in Oracle’s BI Customer Advisory Board Charter which not only lists the organization’s objectives, but also its vision for the board:

“The overall objectives for the BI Customer Advisory Board is strategic planning, long term performance and growth. As a result of these objectives Oracle will be working with the customer to help set our future product direction. Our vision for the Customer Advisory Board is to have customers share how they are using our products in the “real world” and where they are going and for Oracle to share with CAB members our current plans and future directions. This feedback, will help build the next generation of the Oracle Business Intelligence Tools.”

Hosting Your First CAB

After your CAB is formed, it’s time to plan your first meeting. It’s important to consider the agenda and have a well planned out several days for CAB, including a large focus on product, services, customer experience, open discussion, and breakouts. Pragmatic Marketing gives a great agenda breakdown which you can read on their blog.

But beyond the quarterly in person meetings, what are other ways you can listen to your customers year round? So much can change in 3 months and customers now expect that you are keeping up with them on a regular basis – and especially those represented in your CAB. Beyond what your CSM is managing on a daily basis, how are your C-Suite executives involved in real customer situations? How can you gain knowledge from customers virtually, rather than just in person once a quarter? Citrix explains their full approach in a useful blog, but here’s a quick breakdown:

1. Sales & Support Interactions
2. Social Media
3. Annual Customer Survey
4. Inquiry Survey
5. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
6. Feedback requests at the end of a session
7. Exit interviews
8. Customer visits/phone calls/meetings
9. Usability studies
10. A day in the life

No matter what stage your company is at – whether you have a CAB formed already or not – there are always ways to improve the customer experience. While CAB is an excellent way to receive information directly and create a feedback loop with customers, there are other ways to better the customer experience as well.

Check out our resources below for more customer success best practices and insights for how your organization can listen to and learn from customers while showing them appreciation:

eBook:

5 Ways to Surprise & Delight Your Customers

We’re told our whole lives that envying others is bad, but studying and learning from your envy might actually help you figure out what you want to do with your life.

Read more...

If Monet’s Water Lilies series had been tucked away inside an abandoned shed surrounded by overgrown grass in a sketchy neighborhood, would it be less valuable? Of course, we know that it wouldn’t.

However, if located in undesirable surroundings such as these, instead of in the stunning Musée de l’Orangerie, it’s likely that only die-hard art lovers would venture to see the beloved Impressionist’s paintings.

The point?

If you’re going to sell someone on the beauty of an object, first impressions matter.

BWhile it’s unlikely that you’ve created any Monet-like pieces lately, you may have created a marketing masterpiece in the form of an eBook, a webinar, or a case study. How you present that work of art to your audience marks the difference between a quick glance and a conversion.

In this post, we’ll discuss a few key elements to a successful CTA, including:

• Design
• Copy
• Placement

“One of the main reasons why most landing pages and sales pages are not converting leads into customers is a weak call to action.” ~Neil Patel

Design Elements of CTAs That Increase Lead Generation

Design, as an art form, is highly subjective. That being said, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t agree that Monet’s Water Lilies is a thing of beauty, regardless of whether or not the person is a fan of Impressionists.

The same is true for your CTAs. You may not convert everyone with your CTA, but creating a design that’s beautiful is a step in the right direction.

Shape

Let’s start with the shape of your CTA. Typically, you’ll want to aim for a rectangle shape. This is because you want your CTA to resemble a button. You can play with variations of this shape.

For instance, Content Verve more than doubled the amount of clicks that a CTA on a real estate website received when they upgraded the design of its CTA:

Same shape, same copy, but different size. Likewise, A/B testing of your CTA will reveal whether rounded or sharp edges, a large or small size, or overlays vs. basic rectangle is best for your brand.

Color

Some experts will tell you that colors such as red and orange are the highest converters. However, it’s a bit more involved than that.

Take these basic CTA buttons as an example:

The example on the left uses my brand colors, which happen to be colors that are known for conversion. However this combination is quite jarring, whereas the button on the left is clean and much easier on the eyes.

The bottom line?

Contrasting colors that are pleasing to the eye are essential elements of any CTA.

Fonts and Text

With thousands of fonts to choose from, you may end up with a case of analyzation paralyzation. However, it really doesn’t have to be that difficult.

Fonts in your CTA should be simple and easy to read. Let’s refer to our A/B test:

Clearly, the example on the right is easier to read and grabs your attention. Perhaps you have a stylistic font on your site that identifies your brand. However, your CTA need not include your brand font. It just needs to be legible and attention-grabbing.

Images

Every great CTA should include a great image. Are you offering an eBook? Include a small image of the ebook in your CTA, as shown here:

How to Write Copy for a Lead-Generating CTA

While the design of the CTA is what hooks readers, the copy is what leads them to your landing page.

There are a few rules of thumb to writing a successful CTA copy.

• Describe the benefits, not the features of the offer.
• Avoid language that make it sound like work or effort is involved on the part of the reader.
• Don’t promise anything that the reader won’t get.

Let’s check out what a bad example of our CTA in progress would look like:

Oh boy! Where do I start?! First, using the word “submit” on a CTA is not motivating. It doesn’t describe to the reader what benefit he will get from this eBook. Second, the copy on the bottom merely describes, in vague language, what the book contains. It also puts the burden on the reader to “request” his copy, rather than putting the onus on the company to provide something of value to prospects.

Let’s see how we can improve on that.

That’s a bit better, eh? The only burden that rests with the reader is to click. You want to make sure the intention of your button is clear, so wording such as “click here” or “click here to start now,” will direct readers’ to the path you want them to follow.

The copy also promises a quick and specific payoff the reader receives for downloading the ebook.

Where to Place a CTA to Increase B2B Lead Generation

The short answer here is that there is no one right location for your CTA. On a blog post, you might find it most effective at the bottom of your post since your blog should largely be informational, not sales-pitchy.

However, on your home page, you may want to include it on the top half of your page, or as a slider.

Experiment with various locations to see what works best for you.

The Ultimate Source for B2B Lead Generation

Your CTAs, landing pages, attraction offers, social media campaigns and much more will all increase your lead generation when done properly.

However, sometimes it’s difficult to tell in which basket most of your eggs should go. While it’s important to extend your reach, you may wonder if you should be active on all social media channels. Is Snapchat right for your B2B? Or would your efforts be better spent on more established social media platforms? Well, that’s a subject for extensive discussion.

However, I will share this little tidbit with you:

80% of social media leads come from LinkedIn ~Oktopost

It’s with this in mind, that I’ve created my latest ebook, The Visual Guide to Creating the Perfect LinkedIn Company Page. Inside, you’ll get insider info on how creating the perfect LinkedIn Company Page will drive more leads and increase visibility of your brand.

You’ll learn how to create a stunning home page filled with captivating graphics, an inviting career page, and showcases pages that highlight your brand. The payoff? More leads through a viable platform.

Go ahead and download your FREE copy!

It’s so easy to get caught up in just thinking that to get your business noticed you need an endless stream of press releases (see PR glossary). Sometimes, the simple things, like client testimonials, get left behind but they can be most effective in building profile, making a splash and boosting your PR (Public Relations).

Client testimonials create two-way PR

A calendar of proactive PR opportunities is great but it’s just as important to leverage the value your clients already put on your services. Satisfied clients will sing your praises – you can reciprocate that to boost your, and their, PR. That can only serve to cement your working relationship further, can’t it?

Getting testimonials

Let’s face it, your clients are busy. And, even if they love you it can be a struggle for them to find the time to write you a testimonial. It simply might not make it to the top of their ‘to do’ list. The key is to make it as easy as possible for them. In fact, there are three essential elements you need for capturing great testimonials:

1. Make getting testimonials part of your process. So, when you have completed a project, or your contract comes to an end, ensure that you have the email to fire off to give you feedback on how you performed
2. Include in that email key questions – those questions will not only give you valuable feedback they will also give you the precise words you can use in your testimonial
3. Write the testimonial for your client based on their responses and then send it back to them and ask them to approve it. That way you make it as easy as possible for them to give you a glowing testimonial.

And, it doesn’t stop there. It’s a good idea to have in mind exactly how you will use your testimonials to help shout your praises. You can do so much more than just pop them on your website, although that is a good place to start.

Get PR by leveraging client testimonials and quotes

There are many ways to make use of your testimonials, I’ve picked out a few in this article that are worth looking at:

1. Quotes in your press releases – it’s far stronger for other people to shout about how great you are in press releases than relying on just yourself. That third party endorsement can help to set you apart as well as build credibility and reputation.
2. Testimonials on your website – testimonials might be in written or video form. Whichever, they can be incredibly powerful in helping to build trust with potential clients.
3. Case studies for use on your website and with the press and media – the press and media are always looking for case studies so it’s well worth taking the time to build up a bank of case studies that demonstrate the problems you have helped solve.
4. Photo stories for display at events – photos help any story come alive and also make it more memorable. People are interested in people. So, don’t focus on dry statistics and mission statements – focus on the people stories.
5. Putting testimonials in your newsletter – so that your audience gets more insight about the work you have been doing and how it has helped.
6. Using them in content you share via platforms like YouTube and Slideshare.
7. Putting them into speaker kits and materials you develop to promote your products and services.

Capture testimonials from social media too for your PR

Don’t forget too that if you are using social media then building a community of supporters and clients can be incredibly powerful in helping to establish your credibility and authority. It’s also worth considering how you can display endorsements from social networks on your website – you can, for example, embed tweets on your website and that can be useful in demonstrating your reach, profile and reputation.

In a nutshell: If you have supportive customers then give careful thought about whether you are making the most of the goodwill they offer, there are so many ways you can use testimonials to create great PR. Let your happy customers sing your praises.

How do you leverage your client’s goodwill to get great PR?

Image credit: Debbie Leven

Whether your customer success team is in its infancy or more established, it’s important to have a strategy in place to ensure your team’s success as they approach a new quarter. With about a month to go until quarter’s end, it’s a great time to reset the dials, take a step back, and ensure you (and your customers) are prepared for the upcoming quarter. It important to start now, so the last couple weeks of the quarter (that valuable time reserved for closing deals and renewing contracts) doesn’t disrupt your preparedness.

Develop Your Game Plan Early

Unfortunately, many organizations put new quarter preparation at the end of their to-dos and it certainly does feel that way for CSMs. It’s crucial to have a game plan in place to set both you and your customers up for success.

The health of a SaaS business and its customer success department are directly tied to its ability to retain its customers and prevent churn. To do this, you have to ensure that your customers are happy. That means making sure they get the promised business benefits and value of your software.

Here are 3 techniques you can adopt to prepare for each quarter:

Customer Success Techniques to Prepare for a New Quarter

1. Review Customer Goals & KPIs for the Next Year

Similar to ensuring your customer is prepared for the next quarter in terms of product usage, it’s just as important to understand their goals and KPIs.

Here are a few questions to ask your customers:

• What changes do you envision happening at your company next quarter? (ie – new product release, surge in hiring, new locations, etc)
• What impact do you think those changes will have on your business?
• What are your personal KPIs for next quarter?
• How will our product or service play a part in meeting those goals?
• What will success mean as it relates to our product/service?
• What major milestones do you see as it relates to our product/service next quarter? For your company in general?

Discuss KBOs (key business objectives) and KPIs with your customers and, if possible, try to understand how your key stakeholders are measured and comp’ed. Knowing and documenting those important measurements will ensure clear alignment in the coming quarter.

Asking these questions and having a keen sense of what success means in the following quarter and then striving to hit those KPIs with your customer is incredibly important. Going blindly into a new quarter (or new year, if you’re approaching Q4) without having that all important conversation will set you behind before the quarter even begins.

2. Ensure Your Customer Is Prepared

Preparing your customer for the following quarter is about understanding where they are in the customer success journey (cycle) and having a keen understanding of what they need to do in order to be successful. Many of your customers may have recently completed quarterly planning exercises and have outlined their plans to drive success in the following quarter. Make sure you are aligned with their plans.

Reviewing those now will ensure you’re helping your customer hit the ground running in achieving those goals. Often times, this means reviewing how they are currently using your product or service, asking questions about what could be better or why members of the team are not more engaged. Dig deep into use cases and help them identify new and innovative ways to use your product or service to see the most value and return so they are sure to renew when the time comes.

In addition, understand your customer’s industries. Are they in retail? If so, Q4 is likely one of the most crucial times of the year for them, and it’s important for you to understand how your product fits into their stack. What do they need from you in order to be exceptionally successful? What can you do to help ease the burden or give them more information on how to thrive during these busy months? No matter their industry, take it upon yourself to understand what success means in Q4 and even in Q1, and how you can ensure they meet those goals.

3. Plan (Way) Ahead of the Renewal or Upsell

As a customer, there’s nothing worse than having limited interaction with a customer success representative, only to get an “urgent renewal” notification at quarter’s end. Or worse, a pushy upsell for a product or service that had never before been introduced, with a generic sales message. This communication strategy is frustrating for the customer because they feel like they are only valued for their money, versus feeling valued as a true partner. And for a CSM, it creates that awful end-of-quarter stress that can keep you up at night, and following up with customers last minute to push upsells or renewals over the line. This scenario is less than ideal for both parties.

As a CSM, it’s important to understand exactly where each customer is in the buying or renewal process, and to map out an engagement plan that starts weeks – if not months – before the actual line-in-the-sand renewal date. This engagement plan should consist of an internal evaluation of the products and services the customer currently uses, a recommended path forward directly aligned to customer goals, KPIs and KBOs as discussed above, and a plan of when and how you will engage with the customer to present them with your plan.

Start the education process early, listen to their questions, and respond thoughtfully. The technique of working in advance for renewals and upsells will help both parties win – and will certainly make the end of the quarter much less threatening. In addition, you’ll have visibility into the health of the customer weeks or months in advance, giving you a chance to be proactive in the process.

How Does Your Customer Success Department Prepare For EOQ?

Preparing effectively for the EOQ (end of the quarter) is just as important for the CSM as it is the customer. While the above 3 techniques are important, there are certainly many more ways that CSMs have found to be successful.

How does your customer success team prepare for the end of the quarter?

According to HubSpot, the average email marketing list loses 25 percent of its contacts every year. For many businesses, that rate of decay is simply unacceptable.

Fortunately, there’s hope for businesses in search of a cost-effective way to re-engage contacts with email marketing.

As it turns out, marketing to dormant contacts is possible and can dramatically boost your conversion rates when you follow these seven (7) easy steps.

1. Identify All of Your Inactive Contacts

The first step in any successful re-engagement strategy is clear: you need to identify all of your inactive contacts. This process follows the steps below:

• Choose a starting metric that helps determine the age of each contact. This could be the date on which they became a contact or the date on which they first converted, became a customer or even received their first email. Your choice of metric will determine which contacts you focus on in the later stages of the re-engagement process.
• Determine the average length of your company’s buying cycle. This is typically the period between first contact and closing.
• Determine how long a contact must be inactive to be formally considered inactive or dormant.
• Determine how you’ll track inactivity. Usually this requires specific action tracking such as email opens or clicks.

2. Build a Comprehensive Inactive Contact List

Next, you need to build a comprehensive list of all the contacts that qualify as inactive by the metrics you’ve identified in the previous step. Use an organizing tool to streamline this list and render it understandable for anyone who might need to use it in the future.

Also, be sure to use “rolling age” logic to capture each inactive contact who passes the established cutoff age and becomes formally dormant. Otherwise, your list won’t account for customers and prospects that become dormant after you create and run your re-engagement workflow.

3. Choose an Email Re-Engagement Type for Each Group of Inactive Contacts

Once your list is in place, it’s time to choose an effective email re-engagement type. If your inactive contact list is segmented by buyer persona or other criteria, you can certainly use more than one email type. After all, personalized emails are a great way to appeal to prospects.

The major types of re-engagement emails are:

• Email preference updates: These emails ask contacts whether they’d like to receive emails less frequently or customize their content preferences to ensure more relevant content.
• Feedback surveys: These can be classic “how are we doing” surveys or more nuanced questionnaires designed to reveal why contacts have gone dormant.
• Incentives to engage: Offer a freebie or discount based on each contact’s past buying history.
• Emotional appeals: These are generally variations on the “we miss you” email style. While they can work for certain buyer personas, they may actually be counterproductive for others.
• Deadline-based opt-ins: This “last resort” approach asks contacts to opt into further email communications by a specified deadline. Since many recipients likely won’t opt in, this is an effective tool for narrowing your contact list and boosting contact quality.

4. Select an Effective Email Template

The most effective re-engagement emails use preset templates with a proven aesthetic and crisp, clear action cues that draw the contact to complete the desired action. Choose the template that best fits your needs.

Keep in mind that different re-engagement emails are likely to demand different template styles, so there’s no need to put all your eggs in a single template’s basket.

5. Create Your Email(s) and Save for Automation

The next step is to create your email. Follow a few well-worn email marketing tactics for higher open rates and click-throughs:

• Clearly and succinctly outline your email’s value proposition in the message body
• Ensure that the copy makes sense in the context of your re-engagement type
• Use crisp, clean aesthetics that support your company’s brand
• Include a powerful call-to-action in a highly visible location

Once you’ve composed your email, plug it into an automation platform that reduces the amount of work necessary on your end.

6. Build and Activate Your Workflow

Next, it’s time to build and activate your workflow. Set up the workflow(s) according to the type of email you are sending and what would naturally follow next. If you have any questions about this process, we’re happy to help.

7. Set the Parameters for a Successful Re-Engagement Campaign

Once your workflow is automated, put the finishing touches on your re-engagement operation by setting clear parameters for each campaign such as email frequency, content type, subject matter and more.

If you haven’t already, take the time to segment your recipients by buyer persona. As time allows, consider developing future re-engagement emails to appeal to personas on a more granular level.

Discover More Ways to Re-Engage Contacts with Email Marketing

These seven easy steps will help guide you through the initial process of re-engaging dormant contacts, some of whom you probably never expected to come back into your company’s fold. Email marketing tactics like these have proven tremendously effective at uncovering new leads in unexpected places without needlessly diminishing ROI or adding to marketing costs.

There was a hilarious article in the New York Times, A Robot That Has Fun At Telemarketing’s Expense. It got me to thinking about the future of buying and selling.

The sales and marketing automation markets are among the hottest SaaS markets around. Each year, 1000’s of new suppliers of software solutions emerge. Collectively the markets are expected to generate 10’s of billions of revenues.

All of this supposedly oriented at making sales and marketers more efficient and effective.

We are drowning in the output of these tools. We are drowning in emails, most of which are irrelevant. While the tools are supposed to help improve the targeting and relevance, marketers don’t bother with it. 87% of emails have no or limited targeting. After all, why worry about being relevant, when you can just play a numbers game, papering the web with endless emails about your cool products. It seems we have unlimited ability to broadcast and the analytics help us understand the “engagement.”

We don’t even get the opportunity to read that white paper we download, because we are getting a phone call (from a local area code), asking us about our interest in the products of the company. “No, I’m not interested in your products, I’m interested in your white paper. Why don’t you talk to me about that?” Of course they can’t, their script doesn’t allow that option, but they can set up a meeting with someone who can.

We got digital mounds of content stacking up, available to all. Most seems to be collecting digital dust.

We’ve got tools that prompt and remind us about everything. Do this, don’t do that. We’ve got scripts for every situation, we know the key piece of content to send, based on the analytics, so we don’t have to think about the conversation.

The tools tell us the words to say, then measure the response from the customers, telling us more words to say and when, based on the response. We are lost without our devices, we sit in meetings, leveraging the latest collaboration tools, while at the same time multitasking and participating in a separate conversation across the globe or even across the table. Yet our meetings are increasingly ineffective.

We don’t know what to do or say, until we look at what the app prompts us to do or say, “Here are your coaching objectives, make sure you cover this. Here’s the latest analysis of our products in your industry and the results other customers are presenting. We’ve heard that objection before and based on an analysis of all the responses, here’s the response that causes us to win—sorry I don’t know if it answers your objecting……..”

We do this all this in the spirit of connecting more effectively with our customers, engaging them better, and making us more efficient and impactful.

The data is interesting, however. Time spent on selling and selling activities is on the decline. People are spending more time updating CRM and the other tools. Quota performance is declining. Customers are disengaging, choosing digital wandering over engaging. It seems our solutions are to crank up the volume of marketing programs–more emails, more content, more SEO optimization, tweak the analytics.

Ever the opportunist, I’m wondering how to jump in this multibillion band wagon. What’s the cool tool I can bring to market. Then I read the NYT article, and it strikes me. Buyers have to have the same problem sales and marketing has, only it’s from their point of view. The next emerging market has to be Buying Automation. After all, the sales and marketing automation markets are terribly crowded and confusing. we know there will be dramatic consolidation.

But the Buying Automation market is nascent. Yes, Google, Bing, and Yahoo (remember them) have the lion’s share–through search. And the sales/marketing people are always increasing their spending on SEO, PPC, and other programs. But there is so much more to do. The guy in the NYT has a solution for dealing with all the inbound prospecting calls, and the white paper calls. We can refine and tune it. We can look at tools to handle email. We can have buying automation tools we can leverage in meetings to script our responses, based on what the sales automation tools are telling the sales person to do. We have analytics that can interact with the sellers analytics and perhaps solve the problem without needing to bother us.

We can aggressively move the needle from 57% (Brent got a little miffed when I referred to it as tired–we had a good laugh). As an overachiever, my goal is to provide buying automation tools to move it from 57% to 100%! Ultimately, we can cut out all the middle people, my buying app will engage with your selling app and figure everything out, issuing a digital contract, digital PO, with digital signatures! Our analytics will do battle with your analytics, arriving at an agreed upon price, all in nanoseconds. (As I riff on the idea, I wonder if Watson ever played chess with Watson? Who would win?)

But to achieve this vision, we need to get started with Buying Automation. It’s a huge market, with huge opportunity–can you spell Unicorn?

Phew, I needed to get that out of my system! Thanks for letting me play and for putting up with my tongue in cheek cynicism. I hope you had a little fun reading it.

In reality I’m a real fan of tools that help us be more effective, engage the right customers with the right conversations at the right time. Tools, implemented and used well can make us more impactful, effective, and efficient.

But I worry, when they become the crutch, when they become the substitute for being engaged, for being part of the conversation–shaping, guiding it, challenging others. I worry, when we no longer expect our people to think critically, to challenge, to figure things out. I worry, when we can’t help our customers and our people solve problems.

I think we probably need to pause, perhaps hit the reset button. What are you doing to train your people on critical thinking? What are you doing to help them learn how to solve problems and guide your customer in solving problems? How good are your people at figuring things out, how are you helping them get better.

Enough for now, I’m putting together a pitch deck for my first buying automation app. I have a meeting with investors for my seed round.

The digital presence of B2B companies like HubSpot, MailChimp and even shipping giant, Maersk, could give some B2C brands a run for their money. But despite the advanced techniques that some B2B companies are using, B2B marketers are struggling to catch up to the digital age as well as B2C companies. Forrester Research, in collaboration with AdRoll, recently surveyed marketers around the world to see where they continue to struggle, and made recommendations for how we can improve.

Following B2C’s lead, but lagging behind

We recently talked about what B2B brands can learn from B2C to differentiate their content. Forrester’s Report, “B2B Prospecting Goes Digital in The Age of The Customer,” offers up why they need to. B2B buyers are also consumers, and their “professional expectations increasingly mimic their personal ones as they research, purchase, and engage” with products. In other words, buyers expect B2B companies to have the sophistication that pervades B2C.

Forrester finds that B2B eCommerce is on the rise, with current companies selling online having 46 percent of their sales through online channels and an annual growth rate of 7.7 percent over the next five years. But although buyers expect a seamless experience across every channel, and adoption rates of channels like programmatic advertising and text messages are on the rise at marketers’ companies (overall adoption at 79 percent), they don’t use these channels personally and/or frequently (average rate of personal and frequent use at 40 percent).

The top-of-the-funnel struggle

So where do B2B marketers struggle most? 59 percent say that it’s the discovery phase, when prospects are first considering their needs and potential solutions. There are a few reasons:

• Buyers choose to be anonymous, and can be, as they research on digital channels
• Sales reps no longer guard details like pricing and customer reviews, and marketers no longer have control over the information buyers can access
• 61 percent of marketers find managing different touch points difficult as buyers move freely between channels, engaging in an increasingly nonlinear way with content

Not only is identifying buyers more difficult, but it’s more expensive too. As Forrester says, “Marketers risk spreading themselves and their dollars too thin without capabilities and processes that accommodate the nuances of the omnichannel B2B buyer’s journey.”

More mature technology adoption is a must

Marketers know that technology is important, with Forrester reporting 76 percent of respondents seeing more qualified opportunities with better capabilities. The problem? Only 17 percent of those B2B marketers consider themselves technical “experts.” Almost half of marketers have below average capabilities in technology like predictive marketing or sales enablement, if they have them at all.

There are two technologies that aren’t widely used, but B2B marketers who do use them rave about them: programmatic advertising and retargeting. Just using these won’t necessarily net marketers wins, however. Forrester finds that “mature” marketers who lead in their use of tech are more likely to find these technologies to be beneficial. The challenge lies in setting aside the feeling that you can’t be more mature without more marketing technology because you can take it on before you’re “ready.”

Technology based on strategy (not the other way around)

Because using technology isn’t transformative in and of itself, Forrester recommends the following steps to develop a strategy and technology portfolio for great prospect and customer engagement:

• First, assess what business objectives things like display ads and account-based marketing solutions are expected to achieve and compare different solutions.
• If you get a technology without a strategy, it’ll fail. Start with detailed buyer personas and create an automation strategy so you can decide on the right technology, not vice versa.
• Use different sources of data (e.g., CRM, partners, social listening) to understand your customers and target them.
• Target prospects across the different channels they use during the discovery phase and deliver personalized content wherever they are—and remember, personalized content need not stop with marketing content.
• Make sure you can capture the value that comes with the ability to track buyers. New technologies allow marketers to prove effectiveness of their technology from the moment they see an ad through the last sales meeting before a deal closes.

For more insights about how marketers use technology, download Forrester’s report. To learn more about how salespeople can carry on prospecting efforts, and how marketers can help, click below to watch Forrester and Mediafly’s webinar.

Image credit: ORIGINAL IMAGE FOR DOWN UNDER CHALLENGE #832 by Mark Rutley | Creative Commons

Most B2B lead generation campaigns involve multiple touches via multiple media channels. But how do you decide which media are optimal, and more to the point, how they work together to generate a qualified lead? It’s an iterative process. The first step is to establish with the sales team their monthly (or weekly, or quarterly) requirements for the number of qualified leads per rep—or by product, or by territory, or whatever is needed. Then, plan carefully the media mix that will feed the machine.

The media mix is a function of several variables, which you need to research:

• The ROI each medium can deliver, based on your company’s experience and industry benchmarks.
• The medium’s availability. Some media channels are scheduled intermittently. Consider when the trade shows and conferences in your industry are scheduled throughout the year. Other media may be only intermittently profitable. Content syndication, for example, is priced all over the place. Can you get enough leads from this channel to satisfy your requirements?
• The campaign’s time horizon. Digital media are faster to produce than direct mail. Business events can take months of planning before a lead emerges.
• Lead flow requirements. For example, sales may need more leads in the first and fourth quarters.
• Your business objectives. Are there particular geographies or industry targets you need to reach?
• Media effectiveness. Media come and go, in terms of their power to attract business buyers. Thank goodness there are new and exciting B2B media arriving on the scene regularly.

Enter your research data into a spreadsheet, and play around with it as an iterative planning tool. The table here presents a simple hypothetical example of how this can work.

Calculating Cost Per Lead by Medium

You can expand this spreadsheet to include other key variables, like timing, geographic territory requirements, and your ROI hurdle rates.

You are likely to end up with some very inexpensive leads in your mix, and that’s a blessing. The unfortunate thing is that, typically, these leads are unlikely to be enough to meet your revenue targets or support your sales force’s quota. So you’ll need to select several options, ranking them by ROI, availability, and your lead flow criteria, to come up with the optimal mix.

Multiple media working together generate better results than single media, with one big proviso: the messages must be consistent across media. An inconsistent message can cause confusion and erode the value of your brand.

Pulling this off is not always easy, especially in larger companies. You have to coordinate functional silos with their own managers, vocabularies, cultures, budgets, and objectives. This requires tenacity, a focus on the customer experience, and support from senior management. But the payoff is colossal. All outbound contacts with customers, whether they are customer service messages or even billing-related messages, can potentially be harnessed for the lead effort.

A simple technique is to put the company URL on all messages received by customers. The same principle applies to customer touch points that are less obviously part of marketing communications, like packaging and invoices—any point where the customer comes in contact with the product or service. Be sure you have a gated offer prominently positioned on the home page.

Similarly, some ongoing marketing communications channels can be designed to support lead generation. To stimulate your thinking:

• Ensure that all brand-awareness advertising includes an offer, a call to action, and a response device.
• Include a white paper offer, with response instructions, such as an 800 number or a web form URL, in your press releases.
• When executives give speeches, invite your customers and prospects to attend.

Lead generation can harness all kinds of media channels, if you give it some thought and planning.

Having a strong web presence is mandatory, even for small businesses just starting out. The ability to find and evaluate products and services online is crucial for all customers, and it’s your responsibility as a business owner to ensure that they can do so easily.

Before you throw a website together just for the sake of having one, take the time to educate yourself on what role a website plays in your marketing strategy and how you can optimize it to generate more leads for your business.

A great place to start is with what your customers see in their browser when they arrive at your website for the very first time. In the world of web design, this is known as your “above the fold” content, and there are a few things you can do to ensure that it generates as much value as possible for your business.

Here is an infographic on 50 features every small business website must have to be successful online.

Source: 99MediaLab.com

How To Optimize Your Site’s “Above The Fold” Content

A lot has been said about what goes on “above the fold”. The term has its origins in print media, when newspapers came folded in half, making only the top of the front page visible. This is what every potential customer saw, and it was all they had to go on when deciding whether or not to purchase the paper. Better content above the fold meant higher sales numbers.

These days it refers to the top 600 pixels of a web page, which is what most browsers render on arrival. Not every visitor will scroll down, but they’ll all see what you’ve got above the fold.

You have every reason to make sure this content is of the highest quality possible. It’s what all of your visitors will see, and you owe it to your brand to keep it highly polished. Listed below are five pieces of content that should absolutely be placed above the fold, and how they can be optimized.

Get An Appropriate Domain Name

While not strictly “rendered” by the browser, your domain name is the gateway that all of your visitors pass through. It’s in your best interest to choose one that gets your message across to customers at the earliest opportunity.

To ensure that potential customers find your website, include an industry-relevant keyword in your domain whenever possible. If you’re running an auto-repair shop, consider starting with words like “car”, “repair”, or “automotive”. Because Google and other search engines take domain names into account in their search algorithms, better keywords mean more organic traffic.

Bust A Name is a fantastic domain tool that not only lets you quickly check what domains are taken, but also automatically suggests alternative top-level domains that you might want to consider. On top of that, it automatically populates a list of different words you might want to pair with your original idea. Once you’ve found one you like, you can pick from a list of domain name providers and prices directly within the interface.

Keep Your Logo Simple

Simplicity should be your primary goal when designing a logo. Resist the urge to over-communicate by adding too many details. If you’ve landed on an idea but aren’t quite sure if you’re overdoing it, try squinting your eyes and having another look. Can you still clearly discern all of the relevant details? If not, distill the design down to its primary parts. This ensures your logo can be seen and understood even with just a passing glance.

If you’re stuck for ideas, consider your logo in one of two ways: either as an icon or as a symbol. An icon is a logo that emulates the reality of what your business does, and therefore communicates more to your prospective customers. If it’s not apparent from your brand name what industry you work in, an iconic logo can help you communicate that information up front. For example: Hubspot is a digital sales and marketing software company. They chose a series of networked nodes as their logo. Without knowing anything else about the company, viewers can understand that their business is related to connectivity.

In contrast, a symbol is an image that has nothing to do with the service you provide but instead serves as a stand-in for your brand name. You can recognize a logo as being a symbolic if it needs to be explained to anyone who has never seen it before. The best symbolic logos are made of primitive shapes and primary colours, making them easy to identify in any environment.

If you’re still hurting for inspiration, Lynda.com teamed up with Aaron Draplin to produce this fantastic video on logo design. It’s a must-see for beginners and experts alike.

Write A Clear Tagline

Your company’s tagline should be the second or third piece of content that visitors see. Crafting the perfect tagline will require a thorough understanding of your business’s marketing plan and what you consider to be your unique value proposition.

This shouldn’t just be the product or service you offer. There are plenty of other companies that do the same thing. How are you different?

• Do you put customer service above all else? (Zappos – Powered by Service)
• Do you have the absolute lowest prices? (Walmart – Save money. Live better)
• Do you cater to a higher income clientele? (Porter – Flying, Refined)

All of these are great examples of your unique “positioning”, and a tagline is the ideal opportunity to set yourself apart from the competition. Think of your tagline as a sort of “written logo”. It should be simple, recognizable, and use basic language that anyone can understand.

Include Your Phone Number

This is often overlooked in this age of digital communication. A simple phone call is still one of the most popular ways of doing business. According to a recent article, 60% of Domino’s pizza orders in the US are still conducted over the phone. It’s an old technology that has been around long enough to mature, so almost everyone has experience using it.

Email and online forms are great, but there’s still nothing more direct that a phone conversation. Keep it above the fold so that when a customer recognizes in the first few seconds that you’re the product or service for them, they can get a hold of you immediately.

Build A Clear Top Navigation Bar

Your site’s structural navigation bar is yet another piece of information that potential clients will evaluate within the first few seconds of visiting, and it’s worth taking the time to learn how to design a good one. If the solution to their problem isn’t clearly visible within the navigation bar, you run the risk of losing them.

Make sure that users don’t have to work to find what they’re looking for. As a best practice, your navigation should always be wider than it is deep, and should clearly communicate to visitors where they currently are in the site’s structure. Keep in mind that drop-downs aren’t immediately rendered, and the majority of visitors won’t see their contents.

Good to Go!

Optimizing your site’s above the fold content provides some of the highest return on investment in digital marketing. Keep your site looking sharp and ready to solve problems as soon as visitors arrive and you’ll soon find yourself doing more business with happier customers.

“Thanks, we will get back to you.”

These words may sound encouraging but to a salesperson it can enter the realms of discouraging, time wasted and frustration. Leaving salespeople asking: “Am I fishing with the wrong bait or fishing with no bait at all?”

Despite what businesses wish to believe, not everyone is going to need or want the product or service they’re offering. It’s then up to the salespeople who are left with the tricky task of deciphering if someone will buy or not. So how exactly does a salesperson determine if someone is worth their time?

They learn the art of questioning. Any great salesperson knows that the best qualification tool is asking questions, lots of questions, great questions, ones that don’t waste yours or the client’s time. In this time, a salesperson wants to focus on not so much about products/services but what is happening in the client’s business, their area and what they are focussed on solving.

For internal sales I would have a checklist- a process to ensure they ask appropriate questions.

For external sales- this should be ingrained- and yet the norm is far from it. I generally insist on having the answers to certain questions before a proposal is allowed to be generated.

Unravelling the client’s true mentality towards a product/service takes energy and time. During qualification, it’s up to the salesperson to recognise who’s a successful client in the making and who is giving them the run-around. In conjunction this process aids in getting any elephants out of the room, establishing relationships and trust between the salesperson and their lead.

Here are ten great questions to ask:

1. What is prompting you to do something about this now?
2. How does your company make the decision to buy?
3. Who is the key decision maker?
4. If you don’t take any action to purchase this time, what remedial actions do you plan to make?
5. What are you currently spending to solve the problem?
6. Is there anyone else in the company who I should present to?
7. Are there any hurdles that we may encounter that could get in the way of us working together?
8. Have you ever considered buying this product?
9. How do you see yourself using this product? How will it help?
10. What will it cost you and your company if you don’t buy and keep things the way they are today?

Once you know the answers to these questions, you can decide whether it’s a Green-Go, Yellow-Go Cautiously Ahead or a Red-Stop Now, situation.

This is why it is so important to have a sales process and an ideal client, this help so you can focus your time and energy on leads that make the cut. Ensure a more targeted and focused lead generation approach- a salesperson’s dream.

What question would you add to this list?

Originally posted on LinkedIn

The funeral for outbound marketing took place several years ago. Friends and relatives celebrated its life and moved on, letting inbound marketing fill the void. But now, what was old is new again. Outbound marketing is coming back to life. This begs the big question, “Why?”

• Lead Scoring Doesn’t Qualify Leads

Don’t get me wrong, I like lead scoring. It’s highly effective in increasing the efficiency of generating qualified leads. There is, however, a caveat. It does not do the whole job.

What does lead scoring do? You score leads based on their engagement level with your content as well as on the strength of demographic criteria that qualifies them. When you do so, you’re able to spot the hottest prospects, narrowing down the list, so you know who to call. In this way, it increases productivity.

Effective digital marketing and automation make outbound marketing more efficient. They do not eliminate the need for it. That’s because you need a two-way conversation to answer all the qualifying questions.

Some of your leads, for example, could be opening your emails, reading blog posts and downloading white papers. But how do you know if they can afford the product, service or solution you’re offering? You may have captured your leads’ titles, but every organization is different, so how do you know if they have the authority to buy? You can’t even start to guess who else is involved in the buying decision.

That’s why you have to make a phone call.

Who should make the call? You’re better off having your inside sales people or telemarketers pick up the phone than shunting your high scoring leads off to your field sales reps. If outside salespeople discover the leads they receive are not ready to buy, they are likely to lose their faith in all marketing leads. The result? They’ll stop following up on them and qualified leads mixed in with unqualified ones will go to waste.

• Following the Crowd Puts You Behind

You’ve heard the stats. 57% of the buyer’s journey is complete before they contact a vendor. (Source: CEB.) Should you sit back and wait? That’s exactly what many other companies are doing today.

However, do you really want to wait until an executive has done all his or her research or do you want the advantage of being the first mover? I’m not suggesting that you go in early with a hard sale. Instead, get in touch with an executive-level decision maker to see if you can help them successfully solve their problem. By doing this, you will be way ahead of your competitors who sit back and score the leads that interact with the company online.

Why is that? Because, according to Forrester Research, buyers don’t always know what they need. The early-bird salesperson can frame the solution to the problem around his or her company’s offering. As he helps the executive sort through a tangled web of issues, he gains credibility, builds a relationship and is much more likely to reach the finish line than those who show up for the request for proposal (RFP).

That said, your field salespeople should not make the initial contact. It goes back to ensuring process efficiencies. You can use telemarketing or inside sales to put yourself ahead of the crowd. Make sure that your business development specialists who man the phones know how to help decision-makers in the early phases of problem-solving. They will need to take a consultative approach, look at the big picture, and pull together integrated solutions rather than focusing on individual products.

• Inbound Marketing Adds Muscle to Outbound Marketing

Because inbound marketing relies heavily on educational content, savvy marketers have built libraries of information designed to attract and inform the audience. While they created these content assets for inbound marketing, they can be used to bolster outbound techniques. For example, when calling an executive, you may learn they are struggling with some issues. To address them, a business development representative can offer an e-book, white paper or even a blog post on the subject. Content has a synergistic effect on outbound sales, making it stronger than ever before.

The bottom line is that you don’t have to choose between inbound and outbound marketing. You simply need to assess how best to marry the two together to optimize your overall marketing approach.