Tumblr Strategies to Follow

1: Be Mysterious. — Regardless of what you post on your Tumblr page, the first rule is to be mysterious. Any pictures that are less than mysterious should be removed at all costs. — REMEMBER: The way your audience looks at you is based on what you put out there. If your images don’t look mysterious to them, they will not try to engage.

2: Engage With Your New Followers Via Private Message. — Customers purchase from people they trust. It is important to reach out to your new followers at the beginning. This will make you stand out compared to the rest of the marketers who never really engage with their potential clients.

3: Post New Pictures Daily. – Updating constantly is the key. Why? Well, it is because your audience wants to know every move and every step that you take in your business. So, do NOT post one new picture per month and expect your business to grow. That’s impossible.

4: Track Your Links. — Be a geek. Always test the type of pictures that will result in a higher engagement rate versus the pictures that will waste your time. This allows you to increase your traffic with the right images on your Tumblr account.

5: Redirect Your Posts to Your Squeeze Page. — It is important to redirect your audience to your squeeze page. Why is it? It is because studies have shown for many decades that each subscriber that you have is equal to $1 to $1.50 per month for your business. It is important to build your subscriber base as soon as possible.

Disaster Strategies to Avoid

1: Entering the Tumblr world just because everyone is utilizing Pinterest. — It is similar with trying to get a diamond in the desert which is a waste of time. Worse, if you are not careful, you will receive a lot of negative feedback from other Tumblr users. That’s exactly the nightmare many new comers experience with their businesses.

2: Not doing enough research. — Who is your target market? Are they freebie seekers or potential buyers? What is your method on providing solutions? You MUST have these benchmarks before you enter the Tumblr world.

3: Target everyone who speaks English. — Assumptions are the keys to disaster. If you want to build your business, you can’t just assume everyone needs to lose weight, make money, and have low self-esteem. It is similar with cold calling.

4: Focus on following everyone on Tumblr. — This is a big mistake. Why? It is because NOT everyone will be interested in what you have to say. My point is you have to be picky on the type of audience you would like to attract in your business.

5: Focus on Selling To Your Audience, Instead of Educating them. — Why is this considered a bad idea? Remember, every time you sell to your audience, people will stay away from you. On the other hand, every time you educate your audience, you will attract relationship with your audience. My point is… Balance between selling your audience and educating your audience on each post.

6: Creating your pictures on your own with Photoshop. — Unless you are a professional artist, please use the professional on Fiverr.com. It will only cost you $5.

7: Avoid tracking your links on every post. — Unless you don’t care on wasting your time on Tumblr, you MUST track your links on every image you post. This allows you to know which post gives you the most traffic and which posts are wasting your time.

As American voters head to the polls on Super Tuesday, the Republicans among them could move a few steps closer to nominating Donald Trump as their party’s candidate for president. Were the Donald to win that nomination and ultimately prevail in the November general election, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would presumably pick up the phone and congratulate the billionaire politician on his new job at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Today, Trudeau joined News1130 for a wide-ranging interview that touched on the sluggish economy, pipeline politics, Syrian refugees, the legalization of marijuana, interprovincial relations, why no Canadian team will make the NHL playoffs—and, in the wake of the Washington Post‘s dubbing of Trudeau as the “anti-Trump,” the PM also answered questions about prospective cross-border relations with the businessman-turned-politician. (Listen to the full interview.)

Listen to Justin Trudeau on a possible Donald Trump presidency

“I look forward to working with whoever gets elected president,” Trudeau said. “There have been times where the president and the prime minister have been perhaps misaligned on ideological or political spectrum levels where we’ve been able to to work very, very well together. We have to remember that ideology can’t drive our relationship. It has to be pragmatic, focused on the things where we do agree—and making sure that we’re creating jobs and opportunities for Canadians.”

The PM concluded that so tightly connected are the two economies, the next president would simply have to find ways to cooperate. Trudeau’s answer neatly avoided any direct reference to Trump’s divisive, inconsistent personality that’s rocked American politics. He went much further in the Maclean’s Town Hall last December, when he distanced himself from Trump’s style after City News reporter Cynthia Mulligan asked a question from Twitter and followed up in her own words.

Q: You’re basking in your post-election win, and one year from now, America will have a new President. Polls suggest that Donald Trump is surging in popularity. What do you think of his politics? What would you say if you could sit down and talk to him?

A: First of all, I think it’s extremely important that someone in my position doesn’t engage in the electoral processes of another country. So I’m, I’m certainly going to be very cautious about engaging in this particular topic, just because I think it’s going to be important for Canadians, for Canadian jobs, for Canadian prosperity to be able to have a positive relationship with whoever Americans choose as their President.

However, (laughter) I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone that I stand firmly against the politics of division, the politics of fear, the politics of intolerance or hateful rhetoric. I stood clearly against that in the Charte des valeurs divisive issues put forward by the former Premier of Quebec. I took a very strong stand against the previous government’s playing dangerous games with veils and citizenship issues. I think Canada and indeed any modern society does best when we understand that diversity is a source of strength, not a source of weakness, that the elements on which we are similar are always far greater than the elements on which we are diverse.

And if we allow politicians to succeed by scaring people, we don’t actually end up any safer. Fear doesn’t make us safer, it makes us weaker. And at this time, when there is reason to be concerned for security around the world and here at home, we need to remain focused on keeping our communities safe and keeping our communities united instead of trying to build walls and scapegoat communities that, I mean, to talk directly about the Muslim community, they are predominantly, they are the greatest victims of terrorist acts around the world at the present time.

And painting ISIS and others with a broad brush that extends to all Muslims is not just ignorant, it’s irresponsible.

Listen to Justin Trudeau’s full interview with News1130

The post How Trudeau would work with a Trump presidency appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Unless your company is undergoing an identity crisis, the core of your website — your homepage, your product, and “about us” pages — should be pretty static. Your blog, on the other hand, is where your brand’s content and keyword arsenal builds and diversifies.

Across digital marketing channels, your brand’s blog content functions like a shop-window: Offer something timely and eye-catching and you may just make a visitor interested enough to step inside and take a look around.

Not convinced you need to spruce up your brand’s window display? TrackMaven’s comprehensive report on the state of content marketing includes evidence that there’s a big opportunity for brand to capitalize on their blogs, some of which we’ll share below.

Why blog in the first place?

Because blogging is still a core competency for marketers.

The percentage of marketers utilizing a company blog as a marketing tactic is certainly on the rise. Eighty-one percent of B2B marketers and 77 percent of B2C marketers report using a blog as a content marketing tactic, both up five percent since 2014. But just because more people are blogging doesn’t mean you should start cranking out more content — or that everyone is doing it well.

In recent TrackMaven research, we actually found that there was a dip in the output of blogs per brand across 2015. The findings are presented in the summary graph below, which depicts the average number of social shares per blog post per brand (red) and number of blog posts per month per brand (blue).

In contrast to our findings on engagement with social content [link], the average number of blogs per brand per month actually decreased by 16 percent across the year to a low of 58. The average number of social shares per blog post per brand, however, held steady across the year, even climbing slightly to a peak of 190.7 average social shares per post in July 2015. In short: brands blogged less, but got more engagement overall.

So what does that mean for your brand? These findings signify the value of blogging efficiency — or lean blogging — in the marketing universe. In fact, among the 22,957 brands we analyzed, we identified many top-performing brands that reflected this trend of lean blogging: publishing fewer posts with higher impact that drive greater social engagement overall.

Here are three of those top-performing lean blogs that revved up their content marketing efficiency and brand value across 2015; by creating the right content, they drove major surges in their average social shares per post across 2015.

Three lean blogs (and what you can learn from them)

1. The Motley Fool

• Blog: Fool.com
• Why it’s a lean blog: In 2015, it published just over 17 thousand blog posts in 2015 that drove three billion social shares. That’s 176,000 social shares per blog post on average. Unless you’re a publisher trying to keep up with BuzzFeed, that’s a blog engagement metric to aspire to.
• Most engaging post: Better Dividend Stock: AbbVie or Johnson & Johnson? (14.5 million social shares and counting)
• Why it’s an effective post: It puts a competitive spin on an esoteric financial topic (top-tier dividend stocks).

2. InsightSquared

• Blog: Ramp, The InsightSquared Blog
• Why it’s a lean blog:
• Most engaging post: 8 Things The Top 1% Of Sales Reps Do Differently (3.4 thousand social shares and counting)
• Why it’s an effective post: It’s both aspirational (calling to the top 1 percent of sales reps) and actionable (offering eight emulate-able traits of top performing sales representatives).

3. Cato Institute

• Blog: Cato at Liberty
• Why it’s a lean blog: From January to December 2015, Cato cut the number of blog posts per month in half but reaped 400 times more blog social shares per month.
• Most engaging post: Syrian Refugees Don’t Pose a Serious Security Threat (75 thousand social shares and counting)
• Why it’s an effective post: It takes a definitive stance on a timely, controversial topic.

Still not inspired to resuscitate your blog? Here are five more ways that efficient blogging contributes to marketing performance:

1) Fresh blog content fuels your distribution platforms.
The blog is the collaborative keystone between content creators and social media managers. The consistent delivery of quality blog content fuels your brand’s social accounts with fresh content. It’s a beautiful symbiosis, really. To paraphrase A Field of Dreams, “Write it, distribute it, and they will come.”

At TrackMaven, we analyzed a sample of 1.2 million brand-generated blog posts and found that Facebook likes and shares account for the majority of blog interactions.

There’s also a reason social share buttons are a mainstay of every legitimate blog: If your content is deemed valuable, visitors can spread your brand’s gospel themselves with a simple click of a button.

2) Your blog keeps your brand fresh in the eyes of search engines.
Every time you write a blog post you’re adding one more indexed page under your brand umbrella in the eyes of Google and its Search Engine Brethren. That means you’ve increased your odds of showing up in search engine results. (And if you picked a high-intent keyword for your brand, that could boost your inbound lead generation).

3) Blogging extends the keyword tail for your brand.
The keyword profile for most brand websites (i.e. not publishers) looks something like the graph below, with a handful of (most likely) brand-related keywords that drive a high volume of traffic to your website, and a long tail of keywords that each drive lower traffic.

For the TrackMaven website, for example, “trackmaven” and “track maven” are among the brand-related search terms driving high traffic volume to our website. The keywords in the “long tail,” however, are typically categorically linked to your industry at large (but not your specific brand). But don’t underestimate the long tail of search. Added together, they have a significant cumulative impact. And the more you blog, the more keywords you’re adding to your keyword tail.

4) Blogging tees up high-impact calls-to-action.
A well-crafted blog post will provide valuable insight on a topic, but leave the reader wanting more. That’s where the call-to-action (CTA) comes in. If you have an ebook, whitepaper, event, newsletter subscription, or product offering that appropriately pairs with your blog subject matter, make sure to plug it. Take a look at the CTAs featured in the blogs we highlighted above for inspiration. [Hint: The InsightSquared post has FOUR CTAs in that one blog post.]

5) Blogging fuels your newsletter and email marketing campaigns.
Most brands can’t count on visitors navigating directly to their blog and finding each new piece of content on their own. That’s why email marketing — along with RSS-aggregators like Flipboard and Feedly — exist.That’s also where a brand’s newsletter comes in! An email marketing strategy can repurpose blog content to service your contact database in a newsletter.

Want more insights into the latest content marketing trends? Get your copy of TrackMaven’s latest ebook, The Content Marketing Paradox Revisited.

"We have a great discount to offer if you think this product works for you!"

Oh, heavens! How many times have you felt just assaulted with the preemptive, dreaded, discount Hail Mary? Maybe you should let me get my second foot in the door!

If a salesperson ever asked me how best to look weak, unprepared and needy, I would instruct them to lead with a discount.

Can we stop the madness?

You typically see this strategy from sellers who are unprepared to handle objections. More importantly, sellers who use this strategy are the ones who are unable to create value and a sense of urgency, only generate interest that doesn't translate into sales.

The truth is that if a prospect is determined to get what you are selling, they'll move heaven and earth to get it.

They will move money around, hold off on other priorities, finance this effort, wait on other projects -- are you with me?

And no discount creates that kind of desire.

Now, if your prospect's desire is already off the charts, a discount may deliver the knockout punch, but if you've done your job properly you you probably won't even need to offer it.

Your job is to create more than enough value to justify the price to your prospects.

And people love to buy! Notice that once they say "Yes!", they're thrilled! No more hemming and hawing about their cat needing surgery or their kitchen needing remodeling.

Now they're busy little bees happily telling you how they're going to use your product, where they're going to put it, how it's going to look to their friends, and who they're going to tell about it ... all while posting about it on their social and professional networks!

They've crossed the divide from looking around for excuses to blooming like an Irish rose before our eyes.

And did you notice?

That price-induced furrowed brow from five minutes ago is nowhere to be found.

Sellers, if a prospect is giving you a price objection, that is not a "No."

Let me translate: It means, "I don't see any congruency between your price and my perceived value."

If they haven't walked out or hung up, that means, "Try again."

And top producers will take that signal and back up, regroup and dig deeper.

If you didn't do a good discovery, back up and do it.

If you didn't connect what they want with what your product can offer, regroup and try again.

If their answers are too vague, drill down until you know exactly what it's going to take.

No discount will accomplish the above.

It's all up to you: You're the star of this show, so you better learn your part!

If all of this has you squinting and holding your head like Rodin's Thinker, call me. I'll translate for you.

Happy Selling!

How long have we been using the 4Ps of marketing? Marketer E. Jerome McCarthy proposed a four Ps classification in 1960 – 56 years ago! Maybe it’s time for an overhaul?

First, let’s understand the 4Ps so we can improve upon them. In my book, Beyond Your Logo: 7 Brand Ideas That Matter Most For Small Business Success, I describe them this way:

PRODUCT

“What your business sells to its target audiences (includes name, brand identity, appearance, packaging, functions, features, benefits).”

PRICE

“How you price your goods and services (value, discounts, seasonal, sale pricing).”

PLACE

“Where you sell your company’s goods and services (distribution, locations, inventory, shipping).”

PROMOTION

“How you promote your goods and services to target market segments (advertising, sales, public relations, marketing communications).”

I suppose it’s OK and can still work, but for smaller businesses (or nonprofit organizations), simpler is better. So, I developed a better marketing mix. (I know, you’ll be the judge.)

Here’s my explanation:

“Because marketing is no longer about ‘pushing’ messages out to buyers by interrupting them to hear you, marketers can now directly engage with their target audiences, drawing them in through the different stages of the new sales cycle. First, prospective customers become aware of your business’ brand or its products and services. This may be the result of content marketing, word-of-mouth referrals, search engines, webinars, and other channels that attract their interest.

After prospective customers see the same messages in multiple channels, they may be more keenly interested in your business’ products or services. If they decide to explore more about your business, they can research review sites, browse your website, or ask others if they have heard of your company.

They can also contact your business to seek further information. That’s the perfect time for you (or sales people) to engage with prospects further, solving their problems and fulfilling their needs. If prospects are not interested at that moment, they may (or may not) bookmark your site or file your company information for future reference.

After prospective customers have completed their research, they then make a decision whether or not to make a purchase. If they do, they convert into customers and the relationship continues.

You want to thank these new customers, engage them, and give them reasons to stay loyal to your business. The ultimate goal is to earn their trust so they become one of your company’s brand ambassadors, tooting your horn for you.”

Since many smaller businesses can’t afford to hire marketing consultants or agencies, and many business owners have limited marketing knowledge, I will now reveal “the better marketing mix!” (

My Marketing Mix Based on the 5Ws of Journalism:

• WHO: To whom are you marketing? Identify your target audiences.
• WHAT: What products or services are you promoting to each audience?
• WHERE: Where are you marketing to each audience? Where are your products and services available? Which marketing communication channels are you using to reach out to each target audience?
• WHEN: When are you marketing to each audience? What is the time frame for each tactic?
• WHY: Why are you marketing to each audience? What is the associated strategy?

Here’s a matrix of this model with an example for a B2C cosmetics company. Please note that this represents the beginning of writing the mix and is by no means a complete matrix.

If you find that your marketing mix is heavier in one channel than in another, you may decide to drill down even further.
Example:

If you rely a lot on content or social media marketing, you can develop a separate, auxiliary plan for these channels. Of course, this will depend on having the time availability, inclination, and desire to go into more detail. However, it will be a valuable asset for evaluation purposes.

In the customer contact industry – as with any large enterprise – identifying budget-friendly ways to attract quality talent that will stick around is often a delicate dance between HR and the executive team.

The fact of the matter is sometimes, a large amount of hiring needs to be done, and it needs to be done frequently, quickly, and accurately. Many organizations have turned to pre-employment assessments to aid in their talent recruitment efforts, because such tools can streamline the talent selection process and enable hiring managers to target employees with the skills necessary to drive revenue by providing quality service.

Assessments are incredibly useful tools when selected carefully and used correctly. As with any other product on the market, it’s in an organization’s best interest to do its due diligence and research potential talent assessment tools so it can get the best program for its specific needs. When an assessment truly adds value to the hiring process, the results are evident in a multitude of areas, including workforce productivity, quality of customer service, and revenue.

When making buying decisions among products as sophisticated as talent selection tools, it can be difficult to narrow down the field of options. However, there are a few ways consumers can spot a poorly-designed assessment versus a well-designed and streamlined selection assessment tool.

Investigate the Company’s Reputation for Talent Selection

Experienced managers take precautions during and after the hiring process to ensure candidates are carefully vetted, and a talent acquisition platform shouldn’t be any different. When investing in a pre-hire assessment – just as with any employee – it is to the organization’s advantage to do its due diligence and evaluate potential partners extensively. Knowing what other clients have to say about a pre-hire assessment company can help give an objective perspective on the ROI, service levels, and the collaborative nature of the organization.

Ask: How Well-Vetted are the Company’s Talent Assessment Tools?

When a well-validated assessment is put into the hands of a knowledgeable professional who takes the time to understand the company and culture, the tool can be used as part of a solution that drives extraordinary value. However, a poorly designed tool or a tool that is not used properly can undermine a company’s talent strategy by identifying the wrong people for a job opportunity or by failing to identify those individuals with the highest potential for on-the-job success.

A reputable assessment company will gladly furnish documentation – in the form of technical manuals and research briefs – of the assessment(s) tool’s design, psychometric analysis, and validation. Prospective buyers should evaluate a test or assessment based on the following components.

Technical Documentation

Customers want to know their dollars are being put to good use. When it comes to talent assessment tools, any reputable publisher should be able to demonstrate that an assessment has undergone a rigorous development process. Written documentation summarizing an assessment’s development and validation should be available for review.

Reliability

Hiring managers can’t exactly rely on a test that doesn’t consistently pinpoint the core competencies needed to perform the job, as well as the candidates who possess them. They need a reliable test that will correctly gauge the data time and time again. Reliability can be broken down into two components, and assessment publishers should be able to demonstrate that an assessment possesses adequate measures of both:

• Internal consistency: This statistic summarizes the extent to which test items on a specific scale are measuring the same thing. For example, if respondents expressed agreement to “I am trustworthy,” “People often say they can trust me,” and “I do everything I can to avoid lying,” this is a sign of good internal consistency of the test.
• Test-retest reliability: This summarizes the stability of an assessment score over time. If the scores remain consistent, then tests can be trusted to do what they’re created to do: pinpoint top talent in the most seamless way possible.

Both these attributes provide important information about an assessment’s ability to accurately measure candidate results consistently.

Validation

Every hiring manager wants to make sure the product his or her company is investing in is valid, right? It sounds like a good, promising quality in a pre-hire assessment test. The most important consideration when selecting any pre-employment assessment is evidence of validity.

Consumers should be careful here, because no test is 100% “valid.” Companies that opt to use the term “valid” when advertising or explaining their talent selection software should be a red flag for a prospective buyer. Evidence of validity is more like an ongoing mission for an assessment to continuously prove that it is effective in helping pinpoint desirable qualities in candidates. After all, consumers want to know the product works before they use it, but what’s even better is knowing it will continue to work after they purchase it.

For this reason, an assessment company should be willing to share evidence that is has accumulated enough data to illustrate a pattern of evidence supporting a tool’s validity. By sharing this information, it gives the prospective buyer insight into the assessment’s ability to predict how a candidate will perform in similar jobs in their own company.

Wondering if Your Pre-Hire Assessment is Legit? Here’s How to Find Out.

If your company doesn’t have an internal testing expert who is capable of reviewing technical documentation and evidence of validity, it’s easy to find one by contacting the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. By hiring an objective expert to review the merit of a provider’s technical materials, you can ensure that you partnering with a reputable company that has developed and validated its tools in an appropriate manner.

To learn more about how talent analytics tools can streamline the hiring process, download your free copy of our whitepaper “How Can Simulations Help You Hire Better?”.

Mastering lead generation requires you to be a bit of a jack of all trades. You need to be able to attract prospects to your funnel, write informative (and persuasive) content and convert.

Each stage is a crucial step that a prospect must experience before they have a relationship with you and are qualified for a sales call. So are you an expert in every stage? Are you happy with the amount of leads you are currently generating?

I teamed up with Siobhán McGinty of HubSpot (the inbound marketing experts) to create this guide on attracting more prospects, writing awesome content and converting 50% more leads with live chat.

Stop what you are doing and read these quick tips now. You might think that your lead generation game is strong but we’re sure that we can provide at least 1 new technique to give it more muscle.

Attracting prospects to the funnel

There are a tonne of things you can do to attract prospects into your funnel. Here are a few ideas:

Create a good headline

They say that you have one chance to make a good impression, and that’s certainly the case with content. Put thought and love into your headlines. Really work to find that “hook” that will make people really NEED to click on your headline. Here are some ideas:

1) The ‘Best’ Headlines

2) The ‘Make My Life Easier’ Headlines

3) The ‘It’s a Race’ Headlines

4) The ‘If I Were You’ Headlines

5) The ‘What We Do When…’ Headlines

(If five ideas aren’t enough, we’ve got eight more right here)

And remember, headlines are not just for blog posts. You need to think about your headline for social media posts, landing pages and longer-form content too.

Invest in creative

When it comes to promotion, you cannot underestimate the power of a great visual. Thankfully, gone are the days where you have to spend budget on creating really slick-looking images for your campaign. By using tools like Canva, it’s very easy to create something eye-catching.

However, don’t stop there. Creating GIFs and short promotional videos can do wonders for catching the eyes of your target audience. We recently experimented with this short promotional video for a LinkedIn Kit we created, and it resulted in far higher engagement across social media, compared to static images.

My latest project @HubSpot, expertly penned by myself, @bleaning & the folks at @LinkedIn: https://t.co/j63mLgeTYd pic.twitter.com/yhAyOwck1W

— Siobhán McGinty (@Siobbz) December 8, 2015

Think about promotion before you create the asset

In my opinion, one of the biggest mistakes marketers make is obsessing over the content before even thinking about promotion. Once you nail down whatever your content piece is going to be, sit down and plan out your potential promotion plan. Is there anything you can do outside what you usually do? Experiment with different channels and tools. Is there any way you can create your content asset to be more suitable for a channel you know will work well?

By flipping the content creating process on its head, you will uncover more and more ways to attract new people into your funnel. By relying on the same channels and tactics for every campaign, you’ll limit your potential audience.

Warming with content

Your content warms prospects by providing them with value and you also begin some basic qualification with gated content. You start to build a relationship by offering value and solutions for little in return.

Content is one of the key components of building relationships with prospects and warming them as leads — essentially lead nurturing. However, it’s important to understand where different types of content sit at each stage of the funnel.

Helpful blog posts (that don’t even mention your product or service) are great as a means of attracting traffic to your website and generating prospects, but they aren’t the strongest tool for generating leads. So if you’re a company starting out, building a frequently-updated blog is a great way to get started in terms of driving traffic and prospects. Of course, you cannot expect blog posts to transform the top of your funnel by themselves. You need to put thought into how you’re going to promote them — whether that’s through various social media sites (organically/paid), guest posting, outreach, or using platforms like Inbound.org.

Longer-form content is valuable once you have a base of prospects to work from (though, if you’ve got a bank of organically-ranking longer-form content, it can also be a great way of attracting people into your funnel too!).

As you can see from the illustration above, we typically assign different types of content to the different stages of the funnel. It doesn’t make sense, for example, to offer a live demo to someone who’s not really aware of what you offer.

Helping prospects with the next steps

After you’ve nailed the inbound marketing process set up, the next step is looking at how you can convert more browsing visitors into quality leads for your sales team. What if we told you that you could push your inbound marketing process into a new gear and convert 50% more leads from your existing traffic? Well, it’s true, you can.

Once you’ve got a good flow of traffic to your content (say at least 10,000 visits a month) you don’t want to keep increasing spend on paid social and PPC to increase conversions.

Take your existing traffic and make it work harder. Don’t convert 2% of your traffic, convert 3% and more.

We’re not saying that everyone has the expertise to do this on their own, but we can give you a few tips to make sure you are generating more leads with live chat.

We’re going to share some of our secrets with you right now, so that with or without our live chat experts and unique methodology, you’ll be able to generate more leads from your existing website traffic and marketing content. And if you have a decent amount of traffic, you’ll be surprised at how many more quality leads you can generate from your inbound marketing process.

Live chat lead generation

To begin generating more leads with the help of live chat, you need to do more than stick a button on your website and occasionally answer the odd question that comes through. You need to approach your website visitors (not all of them, more on that in a second) and start having real conversations that allow you to learn much more about each other.

No regurgitating FAQs or using robotic scripts, thank you. Fill in the information gaps that prospects have, start building a relationship with them and provide more reasons to convert. Just like your content should, your conversations should nurture leads and begin to qualify them for the sales team. Give value to prospects in the form of solutions to their problems and learn more about their individual needs (and therefore start to qualify them for sales).

It’s all about providing your prospects with a better user-experience. Ask questions to make a recommendation that they appreciate and trust. This will encourage them to take a call with your sales team (or whatever your next sales step is).

Targeting your content readers

You don’t want to just wait for prospects to come and chat to you…often website visitors need further information but they aren’t prepared to reach out and get it.

To generate more leads you need to start directly engaging with prospects that are reading your content. You need to proactively invite prospects to chat when they have the potential to be high quality leads in need of further guidance. There are so many website visitors that currently read your content and then leave, but that’s not necessarily because they aren’t interested in buying.

Invite these people to chat. Instead of mindlessly trying to invite every Tom, Dick and Harry to chat though, you need to be smart about it. Most live chat software allows you to program the chat window to pop up at certain stages of a visitor’s journey. This is called proactive live chat.

Work out when to engage with someone based on your website analytics data. We study the flow of visitor behaviour through a website to determine where we might use proactive live chat or where we might leave prospects to come to us.

When do you want to engage someone? If it’s your first time using live chat then we suggest starting off by analysing website averages and using these as indicators. How many pages does a prospect read before they convert? Engage the prospects that have been reading the right content but have not taken the next step.

Stay relevant

You should also use targeted interactions that are connected to specific marketing campaigns. When a prospect reaches your website from a specific advert (based on their referral URL) talk to them about the problem they might be facing, based on the ad they clicked.

We know that not everyone needs our help and that not everyone is a suitable, potential lead. To make sure that you’re only engaging with visitors that are likely to genuinely need your help or that have a real potential to be leads, stack instructions in your live chat code. For example you might only engage visitors after they have read at least 3 pages and been on your site for 2+ minutes.

You can add more complex invites, test and improve as you go. This will increase the number of relevant chats that you have and the number of leads you website is able to convert.

If you need more inspiration on the sort of proactives you could use, check out LiveChat’s Chat Greetings Efficiency Report. Each live chat software has different capabilities though, and you might even want to build some proactives in-house to suit certain visitor behaviour.

To increase lead generation by 50%, you need to do more than just invite the right people to chat of course. You need to chat with them too! And those conversations need to be real conversations, not robotic scripts.

Encourage agents to let their personalities shine through when chatting with prospects. Real conversation allows a relationship to be built between prospect and client.

Content and conversations with prospects should answer the questions they have, whilst asking them questions in return. Get to know prospects to understand how you can help them. Guide them with great advice and the solution perfect for their needs, whilst you qualify them for your sales team.

Your inbound marketing process should be genuinely useful to the prospect. Put their goal before yours in order to build relationships and trust that encourages conversion.

This blog post originally appeared on The Chat Shop blog.

Lead Generation – A Complete System written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

 

Leads are the lifeblood of every business. Clients are actually the lifeblood, however, without leads there are no clients, but that’s a topic for another post. Today I want to focus on how you get enough appointments, phone calls and contacts to grow your business in a systematic manner.

Lead generation is essentially a game of channels more than tactics. Meaning you need to find the right mix of channels that allow you to profitably attract a high enough number of leads over and over again in order to feed your growth objectives. You don’t simply assemble a few tactics; you master a few channels.

A channel for lead generation purposes is simply a broad way to gain access to your prospective audience – so referral generation is a channel, sales is a channel, SEO is a channel, and speaking is a channel – and there are countless ways to master every channel.

It all starts with channels

I believe that there are 16 marketing channels available to us today. (About ½ of which are additions from the last decade or so.)

The real job for any business, depending upon where they are in terms of their growth goals, is to get very, very good at getting clients in just a few of these channels. Trying to master or even dabble in them all is the fastest way to get stuck in the idea of the week rut.

A business just getting going may need to root around in marketing channel test mode to figure out which channels can produce sustainable growth while a more entrenched business may be better served finding ways to cut back and optimize the channels that are already working.

Here’s quick rundown of the various channels to choose from.

1. Referral Marketing– This includes intentional word of mouth activities, viral tactics as well as intentional referral generation
2. Public Relations– This includes activities aimed at receiving coverage in traditional media outlets
3. Online Advertising– This includes the use of pay-per-click platforms, social networks, display ads and retargeting
4. Offline Advertising– This includes advertising in offline print and broadcast outlets such as magazine, TV and radio
5. Content Marketing– This includes publishing, optimizing and sharing educational content that draws search traffic, links and subscribers
6. Sales Playbooks– This includes the creation of specific actions aimed at mining, generating, nurturing and converting leads
7. Email Marketing– This includes the use of targeted and automated email campaigns based on conversion actions
8. Utility Marketing– This includes the creation of useful tools that stimulate traffic, sharing and brand awareness
9. Influencer Marketing– This includes the practice of building relationships with individuals and outlets that can influence pre-established communities
10. Search Engine Optimization– This includes on page and off page optimization activities aimed at generating organic search engine traffic
11. Partner Marketing– This includes co-marketing activities run in collaboration with strategic marketing partners
12. Social Media Marketing– This includes the act of building engagement on established platforms and networks such Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn as well as targeted industry platforms
13. Online Events– This includes events such as webinars, demonstrations, and workshops conducted using online tools
14. Offline Events– This includes events such as workshops, demonstrations, seminars, trade shows, showcases and customer appreciation events
15. Speaking Engagements– This includes the appearance of company representatives in sponsored speaking engagements at events such as industry conferences
16. Community Building– This includes the intentional act of building and facilitating a community around a shared interest or topic related to the organization’s industry

So the first trick is to look at your business today and determine your most effective channel currently.

While this might seem like a simple thing there can be variables that make it tougher than it might appear. For example, if you convert all of your leads via personal sales calls, it might be tempting to say that sales is your most important channel. But, if all of those appointments come about because people find your website when they search, then SEO or content might actually be your most effective channels currently.

Conversely, many businesses land a significant portion of their business by way of referral, but don’t even consider it a lead channel in the marketing mix.

Adding the power of channel leverage

The reason this idea is so important is due to something I’ve been calling channel leverage. The power behind channel leverage is simple – it’s far easier to generate even more leads in a channel that’s already proven effective than it is to jump in and explore new channels.

So this would suggest that once you find a channel like referral generation that’s driving leads you should expend a great deal of energy finding more and more ways to leverage this channel rather than simply accepting that you are receiving all the leads you can.

This applies to cross-channel leverage as well. So, if referral generation is your greatest lead channel then you should consider tactics in other channels like content, speaking or public relations as ways to enhance your referral generation channel.

For example – creating content that makes it easier for your strategic partners to introduce and refer you is a great way to use content marketing to further leverage your referral success. Creating a free workshop and reaching out to groups that need speakers is a great way to think about using speaking as a way to have groups refer you. Promoting your referral program that supports local non-profits is a great way to use PR to enhance your referral program.

Each of these tactics could be considered fairly commonplace as stand-alone promotional initiatives, but with a channel leverage mindset, they make up an integrated playbook of cross-channel support – more like multipliers than add-ons.

Below are three fully developed lead generation playbooks that could easily apply as significant channels for, say, a consulting business. As you read through each and glean ideas to apply to your lead generation, think about how much powerful these three approaches could be when you think about how well they could work together.

3 Fully Developed Lead Generation Playbooks

1) Your content funnel

The notion of getting someone to your website, landing page or content of some sort and enticing them to exchange their email address and other contact information to get something they are looking for is pretty much standard marketing fare these days.

The idea of bait for lead capture has certainly evolved, though. There was a time when all you needed was a lead capture form and message that asked people to sign up to capture an email, but then people got very tired of all the email this generated.

Smart marketers realized that they needed to offer something valuable in exchange – an ebook, webinar or free trial of some sort.

Even so visitors started getting harder to convert as more and more sites featured pop-up, slide in and scrolling calls to sign up and download.

Today, and who knows how long really, marketers have tapped the seemingly insatiable hunger for useful, actionable, educational content and are employing highly targeted “content upgrades” to effectively convert visiting traffic to lead funnels like never before.

The basic idea behind a content upgrade is this – Write a really great, useful blog post and then when people show up to read it offer them an “upgrade” to the content in the form of a checklist, video, or case study relevant to the topic in exchange for  content details.

Less content, more value

Brian Dean of Backlinko told me that when he discovered the power of the content upgrade he started producing content less frequently while focusing on creating posts so full of great content they couldn’t be ignored. He then married these posts with a content upgrade that ensured a large percentage of the traffic these posts received (sometimes from the thousands of shares and links from other sites) also turned into leads for his various SEO offerings. (Listen to Brian on a recent Duct Tape Marketing Podcast.)

In this post on Dean’s site Google’s 200 Ranking Factors: The Complete List you’ll find a link to download a handy checklist of the top factors. Dean claims that the addition of this checklist increased conversion on this post by 785%. Not too shabby.

I do think there’s a move towards less content, but better content and the content upgrade philosophy plays right into this. The days of writing wispy daily posts may be coming to an end – at least for highly competitive industries.

Precisely segmented visitors

Another important factor to the multi-variant content upgrade is that it helps you segment visitor interest.

Very few people are that interested in the generic ebook or report you wrote several years ago, but they are terribly interested in how to do that one specific thing they searched for – all the better that you now have the ability to know what they are looking for and tailor your response to that specific need.

Think about the implications for this when it comes to email marketing follow-up. You now have a much more focused idea about what your subscribers care most about and tailor your follow-up with this knowledge and even use it to create more complete products and courses based on this interest.

Better automation and follow-up

One of the drivers of this form of lead capture is better automation technology. The days of one size fits all pop-up boxes are over. My current favorite toolset Thrive Leads offers WordPress users what amounts to a Swiss Army Knife of various form creation options.

The Thrive Leads plugin allows you to create up to a dozen variations of inline forms, light boxes, welcome mats, and slide in two-step sign up forms. Every form can be executed on a single page or post, and every type of capture campaign can be tested against variations.

This type of powerful form creation coupled with lead nurturing campaigns using a tool like Infusionsoft makes the content upgrade an almost unfair competitive advantage.

Developing content upgrades

I wrote a post some time ago on something called Facebook Dark Posts. Google smiled on this post and shows it whenever someone goes out there searching for this trending topic.

If I happened to have a course or ebook on Facebook I could easily capture highly targeted leads by adding a content upgrade to that page.

One of the quickest ways to identify great candidates for immediate content upgrade opportunities is to look through your analytics and find your most popular content today and consider ways to personalize a content upgrade for these posts.

You can find your most popular pages in Google Analytics by going to Behavior –> Site Content –> Landing Pages

Another great ploy is to use a tool like BuzzSumo to identify some of the most shared content online based on the keyword phrases that relate to your business or ideal client.

My guess is you can easily identify a post that is getting tons of shares that you might be able to both up the game on and create a content upgrade for.

My guess is that in the example above for Backlinko Brian found a post for the top 100 factors and created the top 200 post that kicked that already great post in the rear – add a content upgrade and watch your list explode!

Landing page pioneer Lead Pages has long been a promoter of the simple content upgrade for conversion. Here’s a great post with 21 examples of content upgrades to get your mind humming. (Pay close attention to the content upgrade offer you’ll get on this page too.)

What makes a good upgrade

You don’t have to overthink the package for a content upgrade. In many cases what you’re looking to do is simplify information not make it more complex. People want relevant snacks more than the full manual.

• One of the easiest content upgrades is a checklist based on a how to post. People like checklists and they are easy to create.
• Take a 100 factors kind of post and reveal the top 10 in detail in an upgrade. (Similar to Backlinko post above)
• Create a list of tools related to a particular type of advice – I could easily add the top 10 tools to use in creating content upgrades to this post on content upgrades
• Compile a list of links from around the web telling people how to do something based on the tool they use – set up lead nurturing in Infusionsoft, Act-On, Aweber, etc. – the best part is you don’t have to create all of the tutorials you just have to find them.
• Create or compile a swipe file – if you are telling people how to get influencers to write about their business, share exact scripts and emails they might use as an upgrade.
• Offer a screencast showing readers exactly how to do what you’ve written about in your post.
  Partner with a tool provider – write a post talking about how to do something and contact one or more provider of a tool for actually doing it and let people enter for a chance to get this tool for free.
• People love templates – if you write a post giving advice offer to share a template, completed example or form they can use to do what you’ve suggested.

I think it’s time to make content upgrades a big part of your content marketing and lead capture game plan.

2) Speaking for leads

A lot of folks dream of being a sought after, highly paid speaker (some people wet themselves at the thought of it as well.) But, in this education based marketing environment we find ourselves in today, speaking for leads may be the best approach ever.

Getting up in front of a highly targeted, interested group of prospects and demonstrating for 45 minutes or so that, you’re not only a very likable chap, you know a heck of a lot about something they need, is today’s most effective form of lead generation and conversion all rolled into one.

So forget the paid speaking career for now and start speaking for leads. Let’s say you sell a pretty standard $4,000 web design package. Would you be better off charging a sponsor group $2,500 to share your brilliance or speaking for free and walking away with 20 hot prospects that eventually convert to 6 immediate design engagements? (I’ll do the math – that’s $24,000) Any business, regardless of industry, can benefit from this approach.

Here are 5 tips to keep in mind to make your free speaking career pay off big.

Step 1: Get referred

You can create your own workshop events, but one of my favorite strategies is to approach two potential groups and offer to present great information to their clients and networks. The key here is that you have a topic that is very hot and seen as very valuable. This is not a sales presentation; it’s an education and value add tool. Approach your two partners with the idea that you’ll present a great topic, they offer it to their customers, and they get to cross-promote to each others attendees as part of the deal. You simply get referred in as the expert. (Every time you do this you will get asked to speak at an event one of the attendees is involved with as well.)

Step 2: Make a deal with the sponsor

You are a highly sought after speaker willing to waive your fee only if they permit you to elegantly reveal that there is a way for attendees to acquire your products and services and that you will also be offering some free stuff in exchange for contact information of those interested in the free stuff. Make it known that you have no intention of selling, merely informing. This approach raises the value of your presentation and gets you what you need as a lead generation opportunity. This can be a deal breaker for you or the sponsor. If you over promote, don’t expect to get asked back, if they won’t allow you to acquire leads, don’t bother.

Step 3: Educate like crazy

Don’t be afraid to give away all of your secrets. Some folks suggest you should just tell them what they need, but not how to get it done. I don’t agree. If you tell them how some may think they can do it themselves, but those who want what you have will realize through your specific details, how tos, and examples that you do indeed possess the knowledge and tools to help them get what they want. Educate and you won’t have to sell!

Step 4: Collect those addresses

In some cases people will rush up to you after a thought provoking presentation and ask how they can buy, but, in case they don’t, make sure you give all attendees a valuable reason to share their contact information for the purpose of follow-up. You can offer them the slides to your presentation, a free resource guide related to your topic, or a more detailed report based on the topic, in exchange for business cards. If you don’t have this preplanned, you’ll find you won’t get a second chance to wow these folks. Of course, I hope it goes without saying that you should also have a follow-up process. Write a hand-written note, add them to a pre-written drip email campaign on the topic, or call them up after the event to measure their engagement.

Step 5: Simple call to action

When I first started speaking in the manner I’ve described here, I would pour my heart out, mindful of not selling, and then come to the end and there would be this awkward moment when I knew people wanted to buy something, but I didn’t have an offer. Well, I quickly learned that didn’t serve either of us very well. If you provide great information and a clear road map to solve someone’s problems, you’ll often find them wanting you to reveal how they could take the next step. But here’s the key – in that environment, they want a deal for acting right now. Not every audience or speaking engagement will present this opportunity, but I’ve found that in a straight free speaking gig, where I’ve been given permission to introduce my products and services, this 3-step approach is well received.

a)tell your audience right up front you’re going to give them great information and tell them at the end about what you do

b) about half way through, after you’ve built some trust, take a quick minute to reveal, for instance, a paid workshop or program you have coming up, tell them the price and go on

c) at the end answer questions, make free offers, and, almost as an afterthought, agree to let them also bring a friend to the event you mentioned at the same price if they sign-up today. (You’ve just made the event half price in their mind, turned them into a recruiter, and given your potential attendee a valuable tool to offer to a friend or colleague) So, all of a sudden, anyone considering the offer is now highly motivated by this compelling change of events. Don’t hard sell this, simply put it out there and let people do the math. Don’t risk tainting your wonderful information with a sales pitch, but don’t leave those who want to buy without an option either.

3) Strategic Partners

One of the most overlooked sources of leads for any business is the rich pool of non-competing businesses that serve the same target market.

Identifying a group of “best of class” providers in your market and finding ways to gain access to their customer base is one of the quickest ways to flood your business with new opportunities.

Many businesses get this idea, and some even actively strike up the occasional strategic partner deal or lead swapping campaign, but few tap this approach to the full extent.

For the right business, a strategy devised to make your business irresistible to potential strategic partners may indeed produce that greatest ROI of any marketing activity.

The key to building a powerful referral network is to adopt the proper point of view—in this case, the point of view of your customer. As you identify and recruit members to be part of your team, you should always filter your list based on this question: “Would I feel 100 percent confident referring my best customer to this business?” If a potential strategic or referral partner can’t pass that test, then don’t even consider entering into a referral relationship.

If you adopt that mind-set you will never attempt to add a referral partner based simply on what you think they can do for you—and that distinction is huge. If you always ask yourself what a potential relationship might mean for your customer, you will most likely stay on the right track.

One of the most powerful things you can do to increase your value in the eyes of your customers is to become a wealth of information and resources related to all of your customer’s needs, even if they may be unrelated to what you sell or provide. If you or your business can become known as the go-to provider for any need under the sun, you can develop a very important place in the mind of your customer.

Below is a systematic approach for doing just that.

Step 1: Discover

The first step is to identify the partners you would like to attract. You may be able to find some of these potential matches from your own experience and research, but your customers can also be a great source of suggestions. Ask them about other businesses they like doing business with.

Think in terms of building an entire team of first-rate providers as though you were going to go to your best customers with a suggested list of partners for every need they have.

Step 2: Recruit

Now that you have your initial list of candidates, it’s time to reach out and introduce yourself and your idea for partnering.  This is an important step and one that many get wrong. Instead of simply cold calling these prospects and suggesting you could work together, (a step that others are probably pitching them) reach out and ask them to show you the best way to introduce them to your customers. If you are recruiting potential partners that your clients recommended make the common connection between your shared customers a starting point.

When you make this type of invitation you get their attention in a way that is potentially beneficial to them and that will make all the difference in helping you stand out.

Perfect Introduction in reverse process

The Perfect Introduction is a tool that we use as a way to properly educate referral sources. It gives the referral source a clear picture of the ideal target client, a way to communicate what you do and the comfort of knowing how you work with prospects. This is something that we have most of our clients (especially professional service providers) complete and use in their own business as part of their referral lead generation process.

The Perfect Introduction in Reverse uses this tool as a way to recruit referral network partners. It is a very low-key way to find good referral sources, introduce your business in a creative manner.

Here’s why this works. You won’t simply try to introduce your business to this potential partner – you are going to do a reverse introduction. In other words, you are going to reach out to them and ask them to introduce their business to you with the idea that you could refer them to your network.

This is why it’s so important that no one is on your list unless you are serious about referring business to them.

Steps in the system

• Create a list of 20-30 potential referral sources. Other businesses that work with small business owners and that you either know for a fact or feel operate in a way that would make you confident in referring them to your clients and network. (Think loan officers, insurance, financial planners, accountants, lawyers, print shops, graphic designers, web designers, software companies, computer consultants, leadership and HR trainers, sales trainers)
• Send the Perfect Intro letter (sample follows), your Perfect Intro and the Blank Perfect Into (sample) to each of the potential sources.
• Keep track of the phone calls, returned forms and file for later use.
• Follow-up with responsive prospects to learn more about their business and help them better understand what you have to offer

Step 3: Ignite

If you’ve completed steps one and two as stated above, you should have a handful of potential strategic partners interested in telling you more about their business and open to allowing the same from you.

This is the place where your plan is going to really standout. Most potential strategic partnerships fall flat because neither partner takes the initiative to make partnering both easy and logical. Simply sending a letter to all your clients saying you are now partnering with ABC Corp. isn’t going to benefit you, your partners or your customers.

If you want to ignite your strategic relationships then come to the table with a winning, prepackaged way for them to immediately benefit while introducing you to their customers.

Create content opportunities – Invite your partners to contribute to your newsletter, act as a guest on your podcast or blog. Giving your partners exposure by way of content gets them exposure and you content. Consider taking this up a notch and create a group blog optimized for all of the partners.

Co-brand content: Create a valuable report or ebook that provides lots of great information that you know your customers will gobble up. (You should be doing this routinely anyway) Take this field-tested free report and offer it to your partners as a tool they can provide to their customers and prospects. Allow them to co-brand the information and use it freely. They know they should be providing this kind of education to their customers, and now you’ve just made them look good and gotten your name in front of their customers in a logical way.

Conduct video interviews – Set a meeting with your partners and use the opportunity to record an introduction video so you can have content to run on your website letting the world know about your partners. This will show you mean business.

Acquire special offers – Get your partners to contribute a product or service that you can use as a way to enhance your offering. Free business cards for every logo purchased or free flowers when you make a reservation for dinner, free tickets to give away in your marketing, or free HVAC check-up when you get some plumbing work. This is a great way to promote your partners while adding real appeal to what your marketing. Make sure you create real perceived value here.

Make referrals – Make it a habit to consciously go out of your way to refer business to your partners. Don’t wait for people to ask, do it as part of your Monday routine. This is how you become someone that lots of great providers want to partner with, but you also increase your value to your customers by consistently helping get what they need in every aspect of their life.

Rate and review – If at all possible become of a customer of every one of your partners. This will make you a much more authentic referral sources (as a user) and allow you to test and filter the truly great experiences. Follow-up on this by actively writing reviews and ratings on Yelp and other online sites.

Create events – Figure out how to bring your partners together to network and create deeper engagement. Let each partner have a day where they educate everyone in the network. Create workshops and offer to conduct them for your partner’s customers. Develop a day devoted to topics that your partners can present useful information on and have everyone promote the event.

The win-win workshop: Take your same valuable information from the above example and turn it into a workshop. Now you can go to your partners and offer to provide this workshop, either in person or online, free of charge to their customers. No selling, just great information. Now, if you want to really get them excited, go to two potential partners and suggest they cohost the free workshop. This way they not only get to provide great information to their customers, but they also get to meet and mingle with some potential prospects from the other partner’s business.

Step 4: Promote

The last step is to find ways to promote your partners and make them glad they got on board with your program. Create opportunities for them to meet your customers, teach them how to create and promote content, provide a blog for all your partners and allow them to contribute posts related to their field, conduct video interviews and tours of their businesses and run these on your site, put together events and allow them to present and invite guests.

When you take this platform approach to partnering you go from being a nice idea they may get around to some day to an irresistible marketing partner they can’t stop raving about.

So there you have it – that should keep you busy for a few months! Since you read this far I’m guessing you found some value in this book length post, so I hope you’ll share it with others.

 

Sales is all about numbers – hitting the numbers or missing them. Did you know that about 13% of all jobs in the US are full time sales positions? It may sound like a lot, but what’s intriguing is that 8% of them close about 80% of sales. That’s because being a world class seller requires some skills like negotiation and relationship building. Only 2% of sales happen during the first meeting.

If you want to be a great seller that differentiates from the others, you have to know what’s working best and what isn’t. Learn from other people’s experiences and understand the techniques that can help you sell products online or offline.

In this article, I’ll share with you 27 sales stats that will make you rethink some of the things you are doing and some things that you should be doing.

Calling is Essential, Cold Calling is Not

“In 2007 an average of 3.68 cold call attempts were necessary to reach a prospect. Today it takes about 8 attempts.” (Source: TeleNet and Ovation Sales Group)

Comment: People have a much lower tolerance to irrelevant communication today and there are much better ways to get your message across.
“A mere 2% of cold calls result in scheduled appointments.” (Source: Leap Job).

Comment: You should find more effective ways to reach your prospects.
“The optimal length of a voicemail message is between 8 and 14 seconds.” (Source: The Sales Hunter)

Comment: “Short and sweet” works but it has to be informative too.
“The average SDR makes 52 calls every day.” (Source: Gtmhub Sales Analytics)

Comment: With this volume it’s essential to master voice mails and good introductions.

The Early Bird Catches the Worm

“Following up with web leads within 5 minutes makes you 9 times more likely to engage them.” (Source: InsideSales.com)

Comment: Switching context is exhausting so try to engage prospects before they move onto the next thing.
“The first sales rep to contact the lead gets 50% of deals.” (Source: InsideSales.com)

Comment: If your win rate is under 50% you should try to be the first to engage.
“The first viable vendor to reach a decision maker has a 74% chance to win the deal if they manage to set the buying vision.” (Source: Forrester)

Comment: Being the first to engage with the buyer puts you in a unique position – you can help identify new pains and give less weight to perceived issues.
“The chance of successfully qualifying a lead drops 4 times after waiting just 10 minutes to respond.” (Source: Leadresponsemanagement.org)

Comment: This is a big part of increasing your chances to win the deal. If you fail or delay to engage your competitor will close the deal.
“At the same time over 75% of organizations who receive a web lead will NOT respond by phone.” (Source: InsideSales.com)

Comment: Engaging over email could also be very effective as long as it’s done within the window of opportunity.

Connections and Referrals Still Work Best

“Referred customers have a 16% higher lifetime value than non-referred customers.: (Source: Journal of Marketing)

Comment: Delivering more than expected always pays off in the long run.
“91% of clients say they are open to provide referrals. Yet, only 11% of salespeople ask for referrals.” (Source: Dale Carnegie)

Comment: Sometimes there’s a gap between what people say and what they do. Nonetheless, referrals are untapped potential for most companies.
“On average, referrals amount to 65% of a company’s new business.” (Source: New York Times).

Comment: If your referral revenue is much less than that you’re either not tracking it well or not serving your customers well.

“B2B buyers are 5 times more likely to engage when introduced” (Source: LinkedIn)

Comment: Relationships are essential in B2B. It’s no surprise that this metric comes from LinkedIn
“84% of B2B decision makers begin the buying journey with a referral” (Source: Salesbenchmark Index)

Comment: Something to think about the next time you ignore a customer request.
“Referral leads convert 30% better than leads from other marketing channels.” (Source: R&G Technologies)

Comment: Awareness is so much more powerful when it comes with a recommendation.

Your Content Speaks for You – Make it Count

“Buyers complete 57% their journey before the talking to sales.” (Source: Corporate Executive Board)

Comment: This is where great content and effective nurturing comes into play. If you’re not creating enough sales opportunities, it’s likely because people give up on you before they even talk to you.
“95% of buyers go with a vendor that “Provided them with ample content to help navigate through each stage of the buying process”. (Source: DemandGen Report)

Comment: The rest probably bought what was cheaper so if you “only” got the 95% you’re not missing out on much ;)

“Companies that nurture leads make 50% more sales at a cost 33% lower than non-nurtured leads.” (Source: Forrester Research)

Comment: If you are not educating prospects through nurturing, it’s probably your sales team that’s doing it one on one (hence the higher cost).

“By 2020, customers will manage 85% of their interaction with the brand without interacting with a human.” (Source: Gartner)

Comment: Today 57% of the buyers’ journey happens before the first sales conversation so we’re more than half way there.

Persistence Pays Off

“80% of deals require 5 follow-up calls after a meeting. 44% of salespeople give up after 1 follow up” (Source: The Marketing Donut)

Comment: If you give up easy, a career in sales is not a good choice.
“The average salesperson only makes 2 attempts to reach a prospect.” (Source: Sirius Decisions)

Comment: You should probably make it a rule to do at least 5 follow up calls and emails to make sure you pick what your competitors leave on the table.

Social Selling Works

“You are up to 70% more likely to get an appointment on an unexpected sale if you join LinkedIn Groups.” (Source: Vorsight)

Comment: You’re more likely to be on the high end of that 70% range if you are active in the groups you join ;)
“Top salespeople use LinkedIn at least 6 hours per week. “(Source: The Sales Management Association)

Comment: LinkedIn is one of the best prospecting tools sales people have. If you’re not using it, you’re missing out.

Bonus Stats

“71% of sales reps say they spend too much time on data entry.” (Source: ToutApp)

Comment: Any amount of time spent entering data that doesn’t help you is too much time. The entered data must help the rep sell more or they will never buy in the process.
“46% of high-growth tech companies are growing via inside sales.” (Source: Harvard Business Review)

Comment: High growth is usually on a smaller scale and inside sales reps cost much less than field sales reps.
“Nearly 57% of B2B prospects and customers feel that their sales teams are not prepared for the first meeting.” (Source: IDC)

Comment: This is the feeling you get when you’ve spent more time researching the market than the sales rep “consulting” you.
“After a presentation, 63% of attendees remember stories. Only 5% remember statistics.” (Source: Chip and Dan Heath)

Comment: Telling a story of how you helped a client is much more likely to be remembered than anything else. If the statistics are important you can always send them as a reference after the meeting

15 techniques to grow your email subscribers

It's often easy to neglect your email list when there's a push to grow fans and followers on the social networks. But it's worth working on boosting email subscriptions too since email subscribers often have a strong level of trust in your content and brand. It's also easier to target them more easily with relevant offers based on their preferences and past behaviour. It’s often your email subscribers who convert to sale at a much higher rate than other sources of web traffic; they are most likely a significant segment of your buyers.

It makes sense to focus on getting sign-ups to an email list. "Traffic" is less useful unless you're confident of the source and that you can convert it, to something. Email traffic is a strong source of warm traffic.

We'll look at growing subscribers in two steps. First reviewing all the customer touchpoints when opt-in can occur and second ideas to boost opt-in. I hope these give you some ideas to review your approaches!

Update: Thanks to @tawatson alerting me to this update sharing research on the most popular ways to grow your email list from Marketing Sherpa, I have have added this chart to help you get new ideas to grow your list:

Now onto my suggestions to help you find the best way to grow your list:

Step 1. Review prospect and customer touchpoints

An approach that I’ve found is a good way to review all the possible methods of capturing e-mail addresses is for marketers to brainstorm alternative methods for capturing e-mail address by thinking about opportunities for capture which are:

• Online
• Offline
• Existing customers
• News customers

The matrix below can be used to generate ideas. 4 examples of different types of opportunities to capture e-mail addresses are shown.

Next we will consider online and offline opportunities for e-mail capture separately. Many of these apply equally to potential and existing customers.

Online opportunities for capture

Here are eight online methods to help build a house list.

1. Direct from web site – permanent incentives to capture leads should be one of the main aims of a web presence, particularly for a B2B organisation. Design, structure and content should be devised to maximise conversion to sign-up.
2. Web response from offline communications. Here an offer is publicised offline and respondents are referred to a web site to sign-up. (e.g. Dell offered a monthly notebook prize draw (www.dell.co.uk/winanotebook).
3. Renting an e-mail list from a third party –recipients who click-through to a landing page are encouraged to opt-in to your house-list.
4. Placing an ad in a third party e-newsletter. This has the same aims as 3, but may be more cost effective and can often be tightly targeted.
5. Using a third party site, sometimes referred to as an ‘acquisition’ centre to provide offers with a view to sign-up.
6. Campaigns with viral elements where a friend or colleague is referred can also increase the size of the house list. Here permission marketing and data protection law requires you to send an e-mail offering the referred person the option to opt-in before further communications are sent
7. Any other forms of online traffic-building not mentioned above. Examples include graphical online ads or Pay Per Click text search engine ads)
8. E-mail appending services. Less used now than previously, companies can be used to identify likely e-mail addresses from existing customers who have not yet supplied their address, e.g. John Smith at IBM is John.Smith@ibm.com (perhaps not the best example). Similar services can also attempt to correct e-mail addresses with typos.

Offline opportunities for capture

Offline opportunities are the full-range of customer touch-points. Here are eight more:

1. Any form of paper registration or order form. But be sure to check the form of wording such that an opt-in to all forms of future communications is achieved.
2. Visit from sales representatives. Can be used for opt-in either on paper, or through subscribing online.
3. A phone contact at a call centre. For example a bank could ask customers whether they have an e-mail address during a routine phone enquiry.
4. Telemarketing. This can be specifically to capture e-mail addresses, but is more cost-effective if it is part of a telemarketing campaign
5. Point-of-sale. For a retail context.
6. Trade show or conference. For example from a prize draw collecting business cards (but care with the opt-in).
7. Paper response to a direct mail offer. Traditional direct response.
8. Phone response to direct mail or ad. Again traditional direct response.

When e-mail addresses are captured offline a common problem is the level of errors in the address – this can often reach a double figure percentage. Plan for this also – staff should be trained in the importance of getting the e-mail address correct and how to check for an invalid address formats. Some call centres have even incentivised staff according to the number of valid e-mail addresses they collect. When collecting addresses on paper, some practical steps can help such as allowing sufficient space for the e-mail address and asking for it to be written in CAPS.

Step 2. Increasing email signup rates

So we have looked at reviewing different touchpoints for increasing signup. What about best practice to get more sign-up on these touchpoints? Here are our ideas to increase your email sign-up rate?

1. Provide something of value. If you're focussing on a newsletter then ensure the content in it is remarkable and not just laden with offers! If you provide a service, offer something for free “white paper/ebook” download with your email sign-up. It can be as short as three pages or as long as 10-12 pages. If you are not a writer, then hire someone that is - that alone can make the difference between 5 and 50 sign-ups. If you provide a product then ensure regular great offers such as free shipping or a % off.
2. Offer Social Proof. As Seth Godin notes, we all want to belong to groups, to tribes. When a person is on your blog or website and is thinking about handing over their email address, the first thing they are going to think about is whether they are alone in doing so. They require social proof. Your visitors need to see that other subscribers have validated their decision to join you and they want it in a range of ways. If you don’t have big subscriber numbers already then consider:
   • Using testimonials in your sign up area. Why not show them what other people are saying about becoming a subscriber?
   • Use exclusivity. Play to the tribe's benefits, "people like you", "our community of… "
   • Use social media. Encourage the happy readers you already have to tweet your content, like it on Facebook - demonstrate that you’ve got good stuff.
3. Ensure a compelling, findable sign-up. Is it at the top of your screen - “above the fold” – and on on important, high-traffic web pages? Remember not everyone comes to your site via your home page. Also, a direct call to action will usually converts better than a soft, vanilla flavoured one. It shouldn’t be in-your-face, yet it does need to instil confidence and simply ask the question.
4. Offer a contest for monthly subscribers. So long as the prize is something that is relevant to your specific demographic then it'll have appeal, even better if it's something that is hard to get ordinarily. The aim is to ensure additional buzz above and beyond the quality of the content itself.
5. Ensure sociable email. If they believe in you and your product or service, they will often be willing to spread the word. All you have to do is ask, and ideally ask that they forward to their friends emails and or social network. Tie this idea to number 3 above so create the incentive and inspiration to do so.
6. Think guerrilla! Attracting email sign-up is not confined to your web page, consider natural places (touch-points) where a prospective or current customer may be interested in going online, especially with mobile in mind, to sign-up. Print newsletters, direct mail, email footers, brochures… there are a lot of touch-points. Ensure that you communicate what they are receiving in the newsletter - tips, offers, new releases, launches, prizes?
7. Face objections. What kinds of experiences could cause turn a current or perspective subscriber off?
   • Too many updates
   • Poor relevance
   • Email subscriptions that are complicated to unsubscribe from
   • Concern that my email address will be sold to spammers

The big news in the financial world last week was Salesforce’s surprising quarter. Just looking at revenue alone, Salesforce earned $1.81 billion against a guidance of $1.79 billion. This during a time when the market as a whole, and the tech industry in particular, has been struggling. This big quarter may come as a surprise… Read More

The best leaders hold their team accountable, but the best leaders also know that micromanaging is a terrible idea.

We all know that micromanaging is bad. Employees become unmotivated, it’s a waste of time for everyone involved, and employees never grow.

But of course, as a leader, you can’t never check in with your employees and let them do whatever they want, there has to be some control.

So managers are in a tough spot. How do you balance the two? How do you walk that very delicate line and keep your team in check while not looking like a micromanager?

While I want to say the best thing to do is to default to trust and expect your employees to perform the best, it’s a bit of a risky idea. If you avoid the micromanaging and then for whatever reason the employee doesn’t meet their results, that’s on you.

So of course you want to avoid that, but on the other hand, we know that autonomy is key to employee engagement.

Not only does it improve the morale of them personally, but it increases the morale of everyone on the team, frees up your time, and gets employees to take initiative.

In this post, I want to dive deep into this question and see how managers can get everyone to be accountable without micromanaging.

Micromanagement Versus Accountability

Before we go into detail answering this question, I wanted to quickly highlight the difference between micromanagement and accountability.

Micromanagement is when a manager takes over or watches every step of the people under them.

A micro-manager will take the work on themselves without involvement (or very little involvement) from the employees.

Mainly, they do not trust that the employee can do the job properly.

Accountability is taking responsibility for your actions. There are two types of accountability:

• Personal accountability
• Team accountability

Unlike micromanagement, accountability asks for an immense amount of input from the employees. Leaders will often ask employees to come up with the solutions to whatever problems there are to maintain that accountability.

A smart leader will emphasize the importance of accountability and get everyone on the team to understand what and who they’re accountable to.

Managers are accountable for their team, so it’s important that they lead by example.

Understanding the difference in the definition of these two will help us determine how to go about this.

As a leader, you want to avoid micromanaging at all costs, but you want to hold employees accountable.

The best part about all of this is that employees want to be held accountable for their work. Accountability means responsibility, and responsibility leads to several intrinsic motivators like purpose and accomplishment.

Holding your employees accountable is crucial to keeping them engaged.

Disengaged employees cost U.S. companies anywhere between $450 billion and $550 billion every year in lost productivity, so companies can’t afford to have disengaged employees.

The Case Against Micromanaging

We all know that micromanaging is bad, but just in case there are still any micromanagers out there, here is some of the research behind why micromanaging doesn’t work.

A study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology¹ showed that people who believe they are being watched perform at a lower level.

When employees feel like they are being constantly watched, they get distracted and it affects working memory, according to the researchers.

What happens is employees don’t learn new skills or pay much attention to the tasks they’re doing, because they spend so much time worrying about the supervision, and become paralyzed by the pressure.

Another study² from University of Pennsylvania professor Alexandra Michel found highly educated employees work more when given autonomy over their schedules. In fact, they’ll often work more than they should.

When employees were pressured to work more, they were less inspired, she found. But when they were allowed to set their own schedules, they could accept it because it was their choice.

Holding Your Team More Accountable

Did you know that one out of every two managers is terrible at accountability?

In an article for Harvard Business Review, after researching more than 5,400 upper level managers around the world, they found that holding people accountable is the single biggest thing that managers avoid doing.

From their research:

There is an even deeper explanation for the lack of managerial courage to hold employees to account for their performance.

The evidence comes from experimental studies of cooperation and the problem of “free-riding,” which reveal the individual- and group-level outcomes that accrue when some team members don’t carry their weight and drag on the performance of others.

The first lesson from this research is that within a group, free-riders and cheaters often get ahead of hard working contributors: they enjoy the benefits of group membership without making the personal sacrifice.

However, groups of cooperative contributors outperform groups of cheating free-riders. Thus, it is no surprise that groups in which free-riders are punished for their loafing outperform groups in which they are not.

But the interesting finding in all of this is that the person who does the punishing actually pays a personal price in terms of lost social support. In a nutshell, group performance requires that someone plays the role of sheriff, but it is a thankless job.

Here are a few ways to make your team more accountable:

1. Set Clear Expectations

   This is the core of holding your team accountable. Setting clear, measurable goals makes it unambiguous about what is expected from an employee.

   If both you and an employee agree on what their goals are, it’s much harder for them to argue and it lets them have that personal accountability from the beginning.

   Using a system like Objectives and Key Results (OKR) with the whole team is the best way to hold the entire team accountable from day one.

2. Openly Discuss Accountability

   Is the idea of accountability a taboo subject in your organization? It shouldn’t be.

   As a leader, get everyone comfortable with the idea of holding each other accountable.

   During team meetings or meetings about planning work, feel free to say something like “so, how will we hold each other accountable for this task?”

   This opens up the conversation and gets everyone comfortable thinking about accountability.

   Not only that, but ask your team members how they’d like to be held accountable, and come up with a process that is good for everyone.

3. Use Lots Of Data

   A great way to build a culture of accountability is through data. Work hard to give your employees access to the data they need.

   Using analytics to help find out where the issues are can help make people more accountable.

4. Work With Them To Make A Plan

   Work with employees to discover what actions need to be taken to make sure everyone can be held accountable and the results will be hit.

   Make them a part of that process, and work with them to make sure that everyone’s expectations are clear.

How Do You Hold Your Team Accountable?

Let us know in the comments below!

When I first started out in sales, I didn’t expect sales prospecting to be so tough. I was a bit naïve and expected more instant success. I wasn’t prepared for strong objections and rejection.

I wish someone had said to me beforehand, “Look, this is going to be hard. You’re going to get knock-backs and rejections. The win rate is going to be low at first; you’ve got to expect that.” Now, I know how tough prospecting can be. If it’s not page one of the sales manual, it should be.

That’s why I’ve prepared several posts to help sales professionals improve their sales prospecting. In Four Tips for Better Sales Prospecting and Five More Tips for Even Better Sales Prospecting, I shared some thoughts on ways to make prospecting an easier and more integral part of the job. In this post, I present six final thoughts on how to sales prospect more effectively.

• Set an objective. Know what you want to achieve with every call to a prospect. The goal of the first call might only be to set up a second call during which you can have a needs dialogue. Or, the goal might be to have a physical meeting. You have limited time to get your point across, so know what you want to accomplish beforehand.
• Develop a really sharp elevator pitch. Yes, you will need an elevator pitch for your first contact, so prepare a compelling statement that grabs the prospect’s attention in 30 seconds or less. These days, prospects are so bombarded by sales calls and e-mails that you have mere seconds to establish a connection and pique their interest.
• Develop a few good lines. Let’s say you’re in a sales meeting with a prospect who has just admitted that there is an incumbent provider who is performing satisfactorily. You just might open the door to some new opportunities by pulling out a few broader lines of questioning. “If you had an unlimited budget, what else would you like? What would be the dream scenario?” Sometimes, this approach can lead to a wider discussion about what’s working well and what’s not, and it can also uncover new paths of possible collaboration.
• Forget the formula. Most people don’t like being sold to or feeling coerced or pushed into a corner. They want to feel like they’re having a sensible conversation with someone about something that’s quite interesting to both parties. The problem is when the conversation begins to sound more like a script. The most successful sales professionals know how to have conversations with prospects without sounding formulaic. They hit all of their marks, following their targeted questioning techniques while making it all sound natural and conversational.
• Consider marketing colleagues as allies. There used to be a distinct boundary between marketing and sales. That boundary is now more porous, if it exists at all. I’ve heard it said that business development is really that strong link between marketing and sales. As sales professionals, we need to be much more aware and savvy about effective ways to work with our marketing colleagues. Even in recent years, sales professionals might have thought that e-mail or LinkedIn campaigns were marketing tools and that, instead of electronic communication, they should “just pick up the phone and see if anybody’s interested.” Now, the capabilities and work alliances are more fluid, and sales professionals are realizing how much more effective they can be when sales and marketing work hand-in-hand.
• Do your homework. If you’ve done all the hard work to get yourself in front of a sales prospect who’s interested in what you have to say, you certainly don’t want to blow it because you’re not prepared to engage in a proper needs dialogue and to discuss the value of what you can offer. Success in prospecting only opens the door. You’ve got to draw on your selling skills in order to walk through the following phases of the sales process: developing the opportunity, developing the solution, presenting the solution, negotiating and closing, and then maintaining and expanding the relationship.

The post Six Thoughts on How to Sales Prospect More Effectively appeared first on Richardson Sales Enablement Blog.

Cold calling — a staple of several (if not most) sales org's operations that's every bit as frustrating as it is prevalent. It's a tricky process that takes a lot of patience, persistence, practice, and finesse to nail consistently.

Here, we'll take a closer look at what cold calling is, review why sales orgs still leverage it, and see some strategies you can employ to do it right. Let's jump in.

Cold calling has a reputation for being one of the more grating, demoralizing tasks salespeople — particularly newer reps — have to deal with.Research from LinkedIn actually found that 63% of sellers say cold calling is the worst part of their job.

On top of that, the method only has a conversion rate of around 2%, and it typically takes a rep 18 or more dials to reach a tech prospect with cold calling. But while cold calling has an extremely limited success rate, it can still be a useful means of reaching new contacts, making it a common outreach method — less than stellar conversion rate and all.

The telephone is still an incredibly popular resource for salespeople. According to a study by RAIN Group, 70% of sellers attempt to connect with buyers and generate meetings using the phone — an outreach method that's second only to email in terms of popularity.

On top of that, research from Sales Insight Lab found that 41.2% of reps say that the phone is the most effective sales tool at their disposal. Clearly, several sales orgs see value in leveraging phone conversations as a proactive outreach method — and cold calls are one of the most fundamental, straightforward categories of that kind of communication.

Why is cold calling done by sales professionals?

As I just touched on, there's a lot of merit to proactive outreach in sales. A study from RAIN Group found that 82% of buyers accept meetings with sellers who reach out proactively — cold calling falls under that umbrella.

And while individual cold calls might not have a particularly convincing conversion rate, Crunchbase found that 69% of buyers have accepted cold calls from new providers — meaning there are plenty of prospects who are receptive to the method in some capacity.

Ultimately, cold calling is about planting a lot of seeds and seeing what grows, and while that underlying philosophy can make the practice stressful and frustrating, it's still effective — that same research from Crunchbase found that organizations that don’t cold call experienced 42% less growth than those who used the tactic.

1. Gather intel ahead of time.

The best cold calls are made with some degree of research behind them. Crunchbase found that top sellers spend an average of six hours every week researching their prospects.

As the name implies, cold calls are going to be cold — but you don't want to go into one freezing. You still have to convey a specific value proposition. If you don't have any idea who you're talking to, you're setting yourself up for failure.

One major gripe buyers tend to have with cold calls is that they're impersonal. They know you're likely making hundreds of these calls per week, and no one wants to be reduced to another name on a list. If you can personally cater to them with some specific insight about what you can do for their business, you can get more out of your cold calls.

2. Work off of a cold call script — but don't just recite it.

Working with some direction can be a big help when cold calling. You want to have some kind of guidance — a backbone that helps you plot an ideal trajectory for a conversation. That often comes in the form of a cold call script

These guides can inform better-structured, more effective cold calls — that being said, you shouldn't treat them as concrete, rigid documents that you read directly from with no room for improvisation or natural deviation.

Cold calls shouldn't be conducted blindly. You need some idea of where you want things to go, but there's a line between direction and dictation — make sure you conduct your calls with some finesse to avoid crossing it.

3. Learn to take rejection in stride.

The vast majority of cold calls go nowhere — and some calls might end pretty brutally. Most prospects will hit you with a hard "no" quickly, and others might vent some pent-up frustrations on you after connecting.

You can't let that slow you down. Accept rejection as a fact of sales life, and adopt an "onto the next one" mentality. If you keep at it, you're bound to connect with a receptive prospect eventually and book the meeting you've been after.

Take the uglier parts of cold calling in stride, and you'll set yourself up to see solid results. Rejection isn't necessarily a reflection of you as a sales professional — so keep your chin up and legs moving.

4. Know when to call.

Not all cold calls are created equal. Some are bound to be more successful than others given factors like the disposition of the contact you connect with, the company in question's need for a solution like yours, and timing.

That last one is important, and the answer for when sales calls are most effective might surprise you — the sweet spot is between 4:00 PM and 5:00 PM, the buyer's local time, and Wednesday and Thursday are the best days of the week for your cold calls to land. Have a feel for when your calls will be most effective. Bear that in mind, and plan accordingly.

5. Start with a proactive opener.

Your cold calls need to have a definitive purpose — a point you're trying to arrive at. There's always a reason for one of these calls, and you should lead by referencing it. According to insight from Gong, beginning with a call with a proactive reason for why you're getting in touch makes a call nearly twice as likely to be successful than a call that starts without one.

Leading with something like, "The reason for my call is … " helps set a frank, practical tone for the call. Prospects don't want you to dance around why you're calling. Consider a cold call a mini elevator pitch — you want to get to the meat of the conversation quickly and decisively.

As I mentioned earlier, 82% of buyers are more inclined to accept meetings with sellers who reach out proactively. That kind of outreach is more effective than its alternative. Get to where you're going with authority, and start that process early in the call.

6. Prioritize selling over discovery.

There's a difference between cold calls and discovery calls — the latter generally comes after you've connected with a prospect. During that discussion, you ask your prospect a series of questions to uncover their needs, challenges, and goals as they relate to your solution.

That process doesn't start during your preliminary cold call. You approach that first conversation with selling in mind. Remember, the prospect on the other end of the call probably hasn't heard much — if anything — about your company.

You're trying to sell the next conversation on your cold call, so focus on that. Don't spend too much time asking your prospect about their business — you should already have some perspective on that from your research. Don't be afraid to talk. This graphic from Gong can serve as a solid reference point.

Image Source: Gong

Don't completely dominate the conversation — not letting your prospect get a word in edgewise is never a good call. But as the graphic shows, going on a longer monologue can help your cold call go that much smoother.

7. Educate and inform your buyer.

If a prospect is amicable and interested enough to stay on the line when you connect via cold call, they're going to want to learn about your solution. That's why you need to know your product or service top to bottom and be able to reliably convey that expertise.

One of your main priorities on a sales call is to convincingly educate your prospect on your offering within a short window — enough to inspire serious curiosity and lead to whatever next steps you're pursuing.

Don't berate your prospect with question after question or let them run the dialogue, talking too much about themselves. Own the conversation — thoughtfully direct it, and make sure you're getting relevant information about your solution across.

Cold calling is the bane of many a sales rep's existence — and even the most skilled, motivated ones can still struggle with it. But if you're willing to buckle down, truck through rejection, develop extensive product knowledge, thoroughly prepare, and remain composed, you'll put yourself in a solid position to consistently conduct effective cold calls and deliver results.

The well-advertised boom in startups and venture capital in recent years has coincided with the emergence of new players in startup ecosystems. One of these, startup accelerators, has received a great deal of attention but also little scrutiny. Moreover, they are commonly misunderstood or mistakenly lumped in with other institutions supporting early-stage startups, such as incubators, angel investors, and early-stage venture capitalists.

In a recent analysis published by the Brookings Institution, I tackle some of the confusion around startup accelerators by laying out a clearer picture of what they do, and how they differ from other early-stage institutions. I also provide a review of the research literature on the effectiveness of accelerators to achieve their stated aims, some best practices for accelerator programs, and some figures on the size, scope, and impact of these organizations in the United States.

Accelerators are playing an increasing role in startup communities throughout the United States and beyond. Early evidence demonstrates the significant potential of accelerators to improve startups’ outcomes, and for these benefits to spill over into the broader startup community. However, the measurable impact accelerators have on performance varies widely among programs — not all accelerators are created equally. Quality matters.

Insight Center

What are startup accelerators?

Startup accelerators support early-stage, growth-driven companies through education, mentorship, and financing. Startups enter accelerators for a fixed-period of time, and as part of a cohort of companies. The accelerator experience is a process of intense, rapid, and immersive education aimed at accelerating the life cycle of young innovative companies, compressing years’ worth of learning-by-doing into just a few months.

Susan Cohen of the University of Richmond and Yael Hochberg of Rice University highlight the four distinct factors that make accelerators unique: they are fixed-term, cohort-based, and mentorship-driven, and they culminate in a graduation or “demo day.” None of the other previously mentioned early-stage institutions — incubators, angel investors, or seed-stage venture capitalists — have these collective elements. Accelerators may share with these others the goal of cultivating early-stage startups, but it is clear that they are different, with distinctly different business models and incentive structures.

 

Yet the confusion is real, including within the startup sector itself. In fact, of the nearly 700 U.S.-based organizations that were identified as an “accelerator” or “accelerator/incubator” or similar — either through self-identification or through leading investor databases — I could confirm these four criteria in fewer than one-third of them. In other words, two of every three “accelerators” are not in fact accelerators, based on this criterion.

Accelerators in the United States

Silicon Valley–based Y Combinator launched the first seed accelerator program, in 2005, in Boston, followed closely by TechStars, which was founded the next year in Boulder, Colorado. Both programs have evolved over the years and have traditionally been considered the two premier accelerator programs globally.

Growth in U.S.-based accelerators really took off after 2008, as it did for startups, early-stage capital, and venture investment more broadly. The number of U.S.-based accelerators increased by an average of 50% each year between 2008 and 2014.

 

I was able to identify 172 U.S.-based accelerators in existence during the 2005–2015 period. Collectively, they invested in more than 5,000 U.S. startups. During this period, these companies have raised a total of $19.5 billion in funding, a number that will surely increase as accelerator programs continue to turn out companies and recent graduates work their way to maturity.

Accelerator graduates that went on to raise additional venture capital investment had a median valuation of $15.6 million during this period, and an average valuation of $90 million. Some very well-known companies belong to this group, including “unicorns” AirBnB, Dropbox, and Stripe, among others.

Why Startup Accelerators

Accelerators have clearly taken hold in recent years. But what is it about what accelerators do that makes them so different from other early stage investors and support organizations and so valuable to the startups that are apparently falling over each other to be in their ranks?

I recently posed this question to Brad Feld, a cofounder of TechStars, and he likened the accelerator experience to immersive education, where a period of intense, focused attention provides company founders an opportunity to learn at a rapid pace. Learning-by-doing is vital to the process of scaling ventures, and the point of accelerators, suggests Feld and others, is to accelerate that process. In this way, founders compress years’ worth of learning into a period of a few months.

Feld’s explanation seems sensible to me, but what evidence is there? The relative novelty of accelerators means that little systematic research exists on the effect they have on the participating companies and on the broader startup community. Four papers stand out as contributing to our understanding. Here’s what they’ve found:

• When matched with a comparable group of companies that didn’t participate in accelerator programs, those that graduated from top programs saw an acceleration in reaching key milestones, such as time to raising venture capital, exit by acquisition, and gaining customer traction. However, these positive effects dissipate when looking at a broader sample of accelerators: many programs do not seem to accelerate startup development, and in some cases may even slow them down.
• A comparison of graduates of top accelerators with a set of similar startups that instead raised angel funding from leading angel investment groups found that the accelerator graduates were more likely to receive their next round of financing significantly sooner and were more likely to be either acquired or to fail.
• Additional research indicates the channels through which accelerators aid venture development, demonstrating that it is primarily about learning in the accelerator experience, not potentially confounding factors such as credential signaling to future investors, selection bias, or previous founder experience at top companies. In other words, the value of accelerators seems real and likely comes from the intensive learning environment itself.
• Accelerators have a positive impact on regional entrepreneurial ecosystems, particularly with regard to the financing environment. Metropolitan areas where an accelerator is established subsequently have more seed and early-stage entrepreneurial financing activity, which appears not to be restricted to accelerated startups themselves, but spills over to non-accelerated companies as well — occurring primarily from an increase in investors.

To summarize, accelerators can have a positive effect on the performance of the startups they work with, even compared with other key early-stage investors. But this finding is not universal among all accelerators and so far has been isolated to leading programs. Early evidence also shows that accelerators may have a positive effect on attracting seed and early-stage financing to a community, bringing spillover benefits to the wider regional economy.

Considering the growth of accelerators in recent years, this evidence is encouraging. By and large, accelerators seem to be a positive addition to startup ecosystems across the country and the world. Some may not make much of a difference, but many clearly do, and the best ones are poised to meaningfully improve the odds of success for the startups that graduate from them.

The undifferentiated professional services firm—there are a lot of you out there.

It happens innocently enough. Firms grow early on as they grab business by being all things to all people. As easy as that initial undifferentiated climb can be, executing a sustained growth strategy when you aren’t differentiated can be near impossible.

Differentiation is one of the most poorly understood pillars of professional services marketing. Many execs still believe differentiation isn’t a necessary component of overall growth. Reality is, it matters. In fact, it matters a lot.

In our research on high-growth, high-value professional services firms, we found that high-growth firms are almost three times more likely to have a strong differentiator.

Differentiators make it easy for decision makers to understand why they should choose you. And differentiators make it easy for referrals to explain why others should choose you, too. So, the foundation of any growth strategy for an undifferentiated firm must be to uncover your differentiators.

What is a differentiator?

Put simply, a differentiator is something that makes your firm meaningfully different from other firms. Yours doesn’t have to be the only firm with that characteristic. You just want to set yourself apart from the competition.

Say, for example, you specialize in working with manufacturing companies. Others in your industry may share that specialty. But as long as most do not, you have a differentiator.

A good differentiator makes it easy for a prospective client to decide you’re the one. For that reason, differentiators are at the heart of any solid growth strategy.

What a differentiator is not

To meaningfully set yourself apart from the competition, your differentiators have to be true (of course), relevant to your target audience, and supportable.

With that in mind, statements like “We care about our clients,” or “We do quality work,” or even “We have great people,” are not differentiators at all. They may be true, they may even be relevant to your audience. But almost every firm will stake a claim around good people and good work.

Unfortunately, these “soft” characteristics are often the very attributes that firms believe sets them apart. But with so many others saying the same thing, it’s hard to support how you might actually be different in this regard.

Building a growth strategy around differentiation

So how can you uncover your own set of differentiators? Here are five principle steps that will help you find a real differentiator for your firm—and not just find it, but own it. Then develop it into a solid and sustained growth strategy.

1. Choose an approach to differentiation. There are two basic approaches to identifying your differentiators. You’ll need to understand and weigh your options before you proceed. At the highest level, the two approaches are:

• Making conscious management decisions that differentiate your firm from the competition. Put another way, you can make deliberate decisions around how you will be different.
• Discovering the existing characteristics that distinguish your firm. This is a process of uncovering—or discovering—differences, but not creating them.

Both approaches are legitimate and can be effective. Of course, the first approach is more proactive. It requires a boldness and improvisation and could mean making significant changes to the nature and direction of your business.

The second approach is a bit more passive, relatively speaking. But it can yield tremendous benefits to firms that aren’t situated or seeking to make dramatic changes in direction.

Interestingly, you can explore both paths in parallel, because the way forward for both approaches is the same: research.

2. Assess possible differentiators through research. Many firms fall into the trap of sitting their best and brightest around a boardroom table and tasking them with coming up with a list of differentiators. It doesn’t work. Time and again, we’ve seen that firms misperceive their audiences’ key challenges, their own relevance to client needs, and even who their competitors are.

Research allows you to uncover the way your clients, prospects, or even influencers define the problem, talk about their needs, see your competition, or even perceive you. Research empowers you to base decisions about your differentiators on facts rather than hunches.

If you’re exploring conscious changes in direction, research may help you specialize based on what you learn about your success with particular clients. Perhaps research uncovers that you’ve had particular success with family-owned businesses, for example. This finding may be an avenue for specialization, and that specialty could make for an effective differentiator.

Similarly, you could research several business categories and find one that seems to afford the most opportunity. You may discover emerging issues, business models, or unmet needs that you’re particularly well-suited to address. Research helps you objectively evaluate these opportunities for differentiation.

On the other hand, if you are leaning towards discovering your differentiators, you’ll want to focus marketplace research on your clients, influencers, and prospects to understand how they perceive your firm. Is there anything you do that strikes these audiences as different, unique, or valuable? Is there anything you’re considering that stands out as being worthwhile?

Your clients and prospective clients may even identify an aspect of your firm that you haven’t recognized, simply because it’s business as usual for you. For example, they may help you realize that you’ve configured your services in a way that other people haven’t, but that difference isn’t obvious to you. For example, you may be offering workshops in an industry that typically doesn’t.

Taking advantage of external perspectives will help you see yourself as the marketplace sees you, which can be invaluable.

3. Identify the differentiators you want to pursue. Once you’ve explored potential differentiators through research, it’s time to choose the ones that you will focus on to define your firm in the marketplace. You’ll want to aim for 3–5 differentiators. Any more than that, and you’re likely to be in the realm of general rather than distinguishing characteristics.

To be sure, there are two sides to every differentiator: a downside as well as an upside. Firms understandably worry that, once they decide on a few differentiators, they do so at the expense of all revenue that might come from being a jack of all trades.

For example, if you decide to focus on serving small firms, you may be discounting opportunities with larger firms. But that focus could be the right direction for you. Remember that specialization drives business growth faster than generalization.

The best strategy is to consider the intersection of the kind of firm you want to be and the genuine opportunity to solve the real problems of your target audience. Then select your differentiators accordingly.

4. Validate with the marketplace. Once you’ve identified your differentiators—either the existing qualities you will emphasize or those that you’re setting out to claim—it’s time to validate them with the marketplace.

Validation may come in the form of secondary research to ensure you can back up every claim effectively. Evaluate your proposed differentiators. Investigate whether competitors are taking a similar tack, and to make certain what you’ve identified is true, relevant, and supportable.

5. Support your differentiators. After validating your differentiators, it’s time to live them out, proving and re-proving them every day. Of course, some differentiators are easier to prove than others. If you say, “our specialty is working exclusively with female entrepreneurs,” audiences will know pretty quickly whether or not you can back that up.

Other differentiating claims, like “Our customer service is demonstrably better than the competition,” might require more work to support. For these broader differentiators, you’ll need more than testimonials—you might need a thorough study. Something going much deeper than an assertion.

You will also need to back each differentiator up with policies and training to make it real and lasting.

And your differentiators must be communicated. If no one knows it, it’s not a differentiator. Ensure your website and marketing materials describe, reflect and prove your differentiators. Likewise, make sure that everyone, from senior leadership to business development to human resources to marketing communicates, speaks in a way that reinforces your differentiators.

The Bottom Line on Differentiators

An effective differentiator is a lot more than a lofty idea. It is your firm’s very DNA. When a differentiator is working as it should, it’s a guiding imperative, expressing itself in your firm’s every action.

You have to live your differentiators every day, working and acting in ways that are consistent with them. The work is continuous, and if you do it well, it can move you to new levels of success, and growth.

Sales professionals make decisions every day about what prospects and customers they will be meeting with, what products or services they will highlight in their pitches, and even what elements of your value proposition they will emphasize. McKinsey & Co. research on B2B purchases indicates that 25% of the buying decision depends on the interaction with the sales professional. That puts your strategy in the hands of inexperienced company strategists who are focused, often solely, on how to reach a quota.

Are you comfortable with that? If not, there are three things you should do to make sure that your salespeople understand and implement your strategy as you intended it, and that their actions are in line with your goals, not just the target they want to make.

Make sure your salespeople pursue the right leads. A global consulting firm I work with has an explicit strategy to target Fortune 1000 companies, yet less than 15% of their business comes from those companies. Many companies in my experience have a similar disconnect between their intended market or customer type and their actual client base. That’s because when your sales people are trying to make a number, any business looks like good business. Sometimes it makes sense for your sales team to be opportunistic and acquire business outside of your ideal client profile, especially low-hanging fruit. But if a majority of your clients are not within that profile, you’re simply not pursuing your strategy.

There’s a reason you chose those target markets or customer types. Likely you’ve learned that those are the clients who’ll place the highest value on your offering, and be willing to pay a premium. If you want to realize the growth that strategy promises, you need to direct most pursuit efforts at acquiring the right clients. Define territories carefully (by geography, industry or simply named accounts) and be sure your sales team is focusing there. Be vigilant about which organizations you are marketing to, and ensure that lead distribution reflects the space in the market where you expect to win. Make sure that CRM data on prospects isn’t populated with companies that are outside of your target market. And require a clear rationale from any salesperson pursuing leads that don’t match your ideal client profile; don’t let your salespeople chase just any easy deal.

It’s a balancing act. But remember, every hour spent developing an opportunity that’s outside your sweet spot is a non-strategic use of time, energy, and resources.

When strategy shifts, make sure that sales shifts with it. An Inc. 500 technology distribution company I’m working with has expanded its offerings to include services like installation and hardware management. It’s a smart move for the business but if that strategy is going to get traction, the sales team has to make a significant shift. Instead of calling on IT managers or purchasing staff to buy equipment, they’ll need to start talking with senior managers all the way up to the CIO. Sales teams must identify those buyers, understand what’s important to them, and be comfortable in conversations with these executives. Changing customer targets represents a massive shift for many sales professionals, and often they try to stick with old approaches—calling on familiar contacts who don’t have the authority to make the new purchasing decisions or who can only agree to smaller, transactional purchases. By spending their efforts on buyers who can’t say yes to your new value proposition, the sales force can undermine your strategy.

Focus the team on creating value beyond the products and services it sells. While the concept of consultative or “solution” selling is decades old, it’s surprising how few salespeople (even very sophisticated high-level sellers) do it. I’ve observed over 1,000 sales calls, and I still hear more old-school pitching than in-depth discussions about the client’s needs. Unless your strategy is to be the lowest cost provider, your sellers need to do more than communicate the advantages of your products and services; they need to be part of the advantage. That requires having deep conversations about the client’s objectives, and providing insights about problems and opportunities they may not have recognized — and how the seller’s solution can help. This isn’t a new idea but it is still not the default setting for most sales professionals, and it needs to be. (For more detail, see my article, “How a sales force creates value.”)

Bottom line: Don’t assume that just because you’ve shared your company’s strategy with the sales team and done some training that the team is going to effectively translate that into their sales approach. If you want your team to bring your strategy to life, work closely with sales leaders and their teams to help them see how their decisions, focus, and specific behaviors make the strategy succeed or fail.

Social selling has been rising in popularity for awhile. There’s a reason: It works. It’s not a magic bullet (don’t nix cold calling yet), but social selling does work. According to research from the Aberdeen Group:

• 6% of the salespeople using social selling as part of their sales process outperformed their sales peers.
• 46% of social sellers hit their quotas, compared to 38% of other reps who don’t.

Despite the good results, many sales people are still holding back. Several research studies have documented this. PeopleLinx’s 2015 The State of Social Selling is one of the most recent.

Given how widespread the use of social media is, those stats are a bit alarming. They’re also alarming because most buyers will be well along in their buying process by the time they actually talk to a sales team member.

Depending on which study you cite, buyers are up to 67% of the way through the sales process by the time of their first contact with a sales rep. Now, those figures are under dispute, but even if buyers are only a third of the way along, it’d be nice to be present for those first touches, right? That’s part of what social selling is about.

If you want to get started with social selling, or if you want to become a more advanced social seller, keep reading. We’ve framed this post to show you what the best social sellers do. Follow their lead to get more of your leads to close.

1) The best social sellers understand what social media is – and isn’t.

Sales success comes as much from a mindset as a skills set. Social selling is no different. If you don’t really get the core principles of social media, you’ll struggle – no matter how many LinkedIn tricks you know.

Here are a few guiding principles:

• Social media (and social selling) is not advertising. It’s supposed to be a two-way conversation. That well-worn metaphor about social media being like a party is still true. It’s not polite (or interesting) to make social media – or social selling – all about you.

• Social selling is not “set it and forget it”. A good social presence requires some work every day. It requires interacting with other people and having something to say, even if you’re sharing someone else’s article. That said, you can use some social media automation tools to queue up social posts ahead of time.

• Social selling is more about being helpful than it is about selling. Always be asking yourself “Am I being helpful?,” “Am I delivering value?” Focusing on only what you want from your social media relationships will hurt your results. That’s why the best social sellers are authentic and helpful. First, last and always.

• Social media changes. Fast. I sympathize that it’s hard to learn new technologies. It’s frustrating to try to keep up with all the changes that happen on social platforms. But that’s the way it is. A bit of curiosity and flexibility goes a long way on social media.

2) They know how to use social media.

Remember that stat from the opening – the one about how only 26% of sales reps feel they know how to use social for selling? Call me crazy, but I think that’s the #1 reason there hasn’t been more adoption of social selling.

If you’re not comfortable with a technology, you’ll avoid using it. And, if and when you do use it, you’ll likely do it poorly and under half steam.

That’s why the smartest social sellers know the ins and outs of social media. They take the time to read up on new tricks. They watch how other social sellers work. They’re constantly learning. That gives them a confidence less-frequent or new social sellers don’t have. It also means top social sellers can work faster and get in more prospect contacts every day.

Want proof that skills can boost social selling adoption? Check out the charts below. A bit of training and company support makes a difference:

Unfortunately, it appears most companies aren’t offering this kind of support. According to that same PeopleLinx report:

• Only 22% of companies encourage the use of social selling
• Only 11% train their employees to use social selling
• …and only 6% measure (and thus reward) their employees based on their social selling

There’s more proof of how social selling is a low priority for companies from Altimeter’s 2015 State of Social Business report. Social selling is the second last in the chart below.

If you want to start performing like a top social seller, either make a self-improvement project out of learning social media, or start pressing your company to bring in some social media training.

3) They do their homework.

“Sales is a numbers game.” I’m sure you’ve heard that before. And while just dialing like a banshee will indeed improve your odds, please think quality over quantity. Don’t blast the same follow-up to everyone.

I realize it’s hard to find the time for customized messages. You’ve got to make a certain number of touches per day. But how long does it really take to look at a website or learn even a little bit about someone by looking at their LinkedIn profile? Two minutes, max.

If you’re worried about getting sucked into doing too much research, set a timer to restrict your research time to two to three minutes per lead. Then write an email or leave a voicemail (or a LinkedIn invitation to connect) that shows you know at least a bit about the company beyond what the contact form included.

Want a tool to help speed this up? Consider Riffle, one of Jack Kosakowski’s favorite social selling tools.

We know that personalized messages get significantly higher conversion rates. A bit of research also says to your prospect:

• You understand their unique situation
• You are the type of person who takes extra care and treats people well
• You’re more engaged than 90% of the other sales people who are going to contact them today

Still skeptical? Okay. Figure something out for me: How many fewer contacts will you be able to make if you did those two minutes of research for each lead? Now, if you got 20% more sales to close from those personalized contacts, would it be worth the extra time?

4) They leverage more than one medium and more than one social media platform.

Top social sellers are active on more than one social media channel. They are equally adept via–

• Email
• Phone
• Text message
• LinkedIn InMail
• Skype call
• Twitter direct messages
• Facebook
• Google+
• And more

They know tricks like how to record a short personalized video (less than 30 seconds) on their phone and then send it to someone via Twitter. They use visuals to educate their prospects, not just whitepapers and text-based content.

All this gives them far more channels to reach people through. It means that if they’ve got a visual learner, they won’t turn them off with a wonky whitepaper. And if they do have a quant on hand, they’ll have the charts and graphs and technical specs to keep them happy, too.

This can be a stretch for new social sellers. If you’re still on Twitter baby steps, sending a video message might seem out of reach. And that’s okay. Try to learn even one new format every month, and you’ll be going multichannel with the best of them in no time.

5) They use industry tools and sync them up.

If you’re going to have all those channels to communicate through, why not integrate them? That’s what top social sellers do.

For example, they’ll get a premium LinkedIn account. That LinkedIn account will get hooked into their company’s CRM. On top of that, they’ll use a few email tools to save some more time. They might also use social media tools like Narrow.io to build their Twitter following, or an email finder tool like VoilaNorbert. (Or they might use Act-On Anywhere, to keep marketing assets handy when they’re working on other platforms or apps.)

This integrated social selling is ideally something a company would offer. Hopefully, you’re at a firm that’s at least got some marketing automation software set up, and hopefully your sales management software talks to other platforms.

But even if neither of those things is in place, just having a premium LinkedIn account, a couple of inbox management tools, and some social media automation software can get you pretty far along.

6) They understand that they’re as much in the business of teaching as they are in the business of selling.

This is more of a mindset tip than a skills tip. I mentioned it earlier when I was talking about being helpful. Good social sellers view the whole sales landscape through the lens of being helpful. And that has great consequences on social media. It can take many forms, including:

• Sending someone an article that’s perfect for some issue they’re struggling with
• Introducing one person to another
• Thanking people publicly for their good work
• Making recommendations about companies or services that might help someone (companies that aren’t your competitors, of course)
• Sharing content that espouses values or industry trends you want to support
• Sharing humor or inspirational quotes (especially on Fridays)

All this, of course, is another way to be authentic. And likable. And trustworthy.

7) They are well-connected to the marketing department – and to the content creation and content marketing strategies.

Remember how the buyer is far along in their buying process by the time they talk to a salesperson? Well, that means the company’s content is making a lot of the first impressions potential buyers get of your brand and product. Good social sellers want to know what those first contacts are about, so they know the content the marketing department is publishing. They might even help shape which content gets made.

After all, those early messages matter; all that content has to perform. It has to attract the attention of the ideal prospects. It has to be good enough for buyers to make the choice to engage with your content, rather than your competitors’ content.

So whether it’s tweets, white papers, LinkedIn posts, eBooks, webinars, or conference booths, smart social sellers know what content their company is putting out. Ideally, they’ll also have a voice in that process.

Conclusion

The best social sellers aren’t necessarily social media gurus. But they do know a couple of things:

• They understand what social media is – and isn’t
• They know how to use social media platforms with confidence
• They take the time to research their leads so their follow-ups are more relevant and personal
• They are on multiple social media platforms and they reach out to prospects through multiple channels
• They use marketing automation, CRM software, and other tools to speed up their work
• They teach first and sell second
• They know what content the marketing department is publishing and they may even help shape what content gets created

Have we missed anything? What other things do you think top social sellers do differently?

People buy from people, not companies, and social media is one of the best channels for building meaningful connections with your prospects. Download, Social Selling: 5 Steps to Building Relationships with Social Media to learn the five key steps to use social selling to build relationships that last, provide value, demonstrate consistency, and are mutually beneficial.

Big Data propaganda is rampant these days. One analytics vendor after another is selling you on their ability to analyze and make sense of “any” data. Demand generation leaders know it’s not true, though. Garbage in; garbage out. And most marketing and sales data is just that — garbage.

So what is the key to better demand generation analytics? How can we better tie buying and content/channel interactions to opportunities and closed revenue in a closed-loop fashion — to fuel our demand process optimization? We must take a different approach — a structured approach — to demand generation analytics.

A few thoughts on where to start:

Analyze critical path, not attribution: Marketing analytics is mired in poorly considered “attribution” models. Really we want to know the critical path of content offer and engagement channel dialogue that led to someone becoming a qualified lead, opportunity and/or closed revenue? Analyzing this means building a new class of fields that track time-based engagement with every content offer and engagement channel in your perpetual demand generation engine. And this allows us to assess two new KPI categories — elasticity and velocity.

Elasticity looks at the probability that interacting with a given content offer or engagement channel will lead to a given outcome (e.g., closed revenue).

Velocity looks at the average time between consumption and a given outcome. Analyzing the average velocity of high-elasticity program elements and pivoting by personas allows us to essentially assess critical path through content offers and engagement channels for key targeted buyers.

Don’t analyze silos: As a marketer, you should focus on the alignment of people, process, content, technology and data in demand process outcomes. This is the starting point in truly closing the loop. This means evolving your KPIs beyond clicks, page traffic and cost per contact. Your KPIs should be focused on outcomes and the alignment of key demand process elements, such as how your content marketing model is interacting with your lead management framework.

An example of an outcome-driven KPI is one that examines the elasticity of engagement channels and of content offers from the perspective of lead stage — i.e., connecting the dots between channel and content activity and how it is driving buyers through lead qualification stages.

Connect account-level outcomes to contact-level activity: CRM platforms such as Salesforce.com are largely organized around account and opportunity objects. The problem is that most marketing automation platforms focus at the lead/contact level, collecting every action and every step taken by an individual buyer. Successful demand generation analytics must bridge the two.

Thus it’s critical that you configure integration between your marketing automation and CRM systems to populate account-level data back to the contacts that originated this data — allowing you to see true lead to revenue and analyze down to the individual content offer and engagement channel interaction level.

Build structured, exportable demand data from the start: Know what you want to measure — i.e., what your demand process KPIs are going to be — and envision the structure of the data required to populate these KPIs in advance. Then make sure you build a progressive profile model that supports this and that collects the information in a structured way (e.g., pick lists and hidden fields). This means avoiding free-text fields and structuring your persona options versus capturing open-ended titles for prospects.

This also will involve adding dozens or even hundreds of fields into CRM and marketing automation that do not exist today — fields that capture movement through the demand process and that enable the data to be exported to an external analytics tool such as Tableau.

Success in anything starts with first building a strong foundation. If you want to close the loop on your demand generation programs, you’ve got to first build a structured system of data collection that mirrors this process and that populates the insights you need to optimize your demand process on an ongoing basis.

*This post first ran in Demand Gen Report January 15, 2016

Author: Adam Needles @abneedles Chief Strategy Officer and Principal, ANNUITAS

 

The post A Structured Approach to Demand Generation Analytics appeared first on ANNUITAS.

We’ve been looking at the importance of lead quality and lead quantity, starting with the first post in this series.

This time we focus on 4 resources to help you align efforts in your organization to get better leads.

It may seem that the lead quality vs. lead quality debate is out of your control. Marketing believes it is attracting the right kind of customer, but Sales blames Marketing for sending bad leads. Arguing against each other doesn’t work, but still, many people do it, either out loud or under the radar.

As we saw in the previous post, lead quality is a top priority for business executives. The whole organization’s success depends on it. The resources you have to address this problem may be closer than you think. These are the first 4 of 7 tools to help you stop the back-and-forth between teams, and develop solutions that work for everyone and produce better leads:

1) Assign Who is Responsible for Resolution.

The buck stops where? Management’s role is to lead consensus between Sales and Marketing.

The executive who is responsible for sales and marketing is uniquely positioned to provide a neutral forum and sense of perspective.While it depends on company size and corporate culture, the executive with direct oversight over Sales and Marketing should ensure that sales and marketing goals and company targets are met.

2) Make Realistic Expectations.

Goals and expectations are necessary. Base them on real data.

Make your expectations realistic.Is it realistic? Many times it is not and the annual lead number to reach revenue goals become unrealistic as well.

Once an annual revenue number is determined, setting sales and marketing “lead” goals should tie into the annual revenue number. However, if the annual revenue number is unrealistic, it is highly likely that the number of qualified leads generated to form the pipeline is unrealistic.

3) Have a Clear Reporting Structure.

Depending on the organization, Sales Development may report to Sales, Marketing or both.

Sales Development is traditionally responsible for outbound prospecting and follow-up with inbound marketing leads. The function of Sales Development is to qualify potential buyers to fill the sales pipeline, and provide a predictable revenue stream to aid sales in meeting their revenue goal.

Reasons vary from company to company in deciding whether Sales Development reports to Sales, Marketing, or both. It is imperative that wherever it reports, the dollars and resources are allocated and committed for this function to succeed.

The reporting structure for Sales Development should be clearly defined, whether it is organized under Sales or Marketing.

4) Plan to Succeed.

Do you have a plan?

Your ability to align sales and marketing depends on a good understanding of three factors:

1. Knowing who determines and enforces sales and marketing accountability
2. Knowing the realistic annual revenue numbers that you have determined and agreed upon
3. Using the approved reporting structure for sales and marketing personnel

A well developed plan is necessary to monitor success.

Benjamin Franklin said it best: “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!”

This is a brief excerpt from our downloadable eBook Solve the Sales and Marketing Debate Get Better Leads 7 Tools to optimize lead quality. Subscribe to receive our next update for details about the first 4 steps to help you optimize lead quality and improve ROI of your sales and marketing efforts.

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LinkedIn has launched a new way for marketers to target people at specific companies on the professional social network using their sales data. With LinkedIn Account Targeting, you can tailor Sponsored Updates or Sponsored InMail campaigns to a specific list of accounts, allowing you reach the most engaged people. This offering is the first part of the company’s Audience Match platform.

To utilize this feature, marketers provide LinkedIn with a list of up to 30,000 companies from which custom segments can be created. The company will then cross-reference the list against more than 8 million Company Pages in order to create an account target segment based on the match. Once the system has identified the common denominator, LinkedIn will create a new category specific to the customer’s area of interest, which can be targeted using Sponsored Updates or Sponsored InMail. Additional filtering, such as by job function and seniority, can also be applied.

This is different from LinkedIn’s previous offering, which produced a list of 100 companies. That list could then be entered into the site and any segmentation was done manually, company by company. With today’s launch, the process has become more automated and includes a larger sample size. The goal is to provide marketers with a platform that “accurately targets influencers, and empowers them to deliver relevant content that translates into meaningful results.”

Account Targeting is just the first part of what will eventually become LinkedIn’s Audience Match platform. Russ Glass, the company’s head of products for its marketing solutions, told VentureBeat that LinkedIn’s aim is to help marketers engage with professionals as effectively as possible. Right now it’s going with account-based targeting, but other capabilities will be added in the future.

“You can’t get the scale of business professionals anywhere else than what you can get on LinkedIn,” Glass said. “[Account Targeting] allows marketers to both ensure that they’re focusing on the right accounts, but also layer in all the goodness that LinkedIn can bring from a targeting and ecosystem perspective.”

“Because member and company information is tied to one’s professional and public brand, it is likely to be up-to-date and accurate,” LinkedIn stated. “We also have a platform for opportunity, so senior management and purchase influencers are more accessible, making sharing information a lot easier, particularly in the B2B context. We’re the only social platform that can target by company.  Our customers have the capability to target more than 6.8 million C-level executives, more than 40 million decision makers, and more than 61 million senior level influencers.”

LinkedIn Account Targeting is only available for those who have signed up for managed services. Glass said that support for self-service customers is on the company’s roadmap and could roll out later this year.

More information:

I just got back from Social Media Week NYC, one of the biggest industry events of the year. Social media marketers from across the globe came together in the Big Apple to learn from some of the most influential names in marketing. Among them were Forbes, BuzzFeed, The Coca-Cola Company and IBM, just to name a few.

Are you starting to feel a twinge of conference FOMO?

So here I am, post-conference, brimming with actionable tactics and inspiration that I just can’t keep to myself. Here are nine things that I learned and how they translate to your email strategy:

1. “Not all reach is created equal.” – @Forbes

If you’re spending all of your time trying to get your content out to the most people in the most places at the most times, you’re doing it wrong. Why?

Because not all reach is created equal.

Shift the conversation from page views (or in the email marketer’s case, open rates), to the people who are actually engaging with your content. Having a big list is impressive, but if those subscribers aren’t opening or responding to your emails, you may want to rethink your strategy.

Pro Tip:

Focus on building a more curated list of people who are genuinely interested in what you have to say. These are your most loyal readers, and the ones who are most likely to do business with you in the future.

2. “Each space tells its own story.” – @Buzzfeed

Adapting original content that works on one platform to many others is the key to extending your reach. Facebook, Twitter, Google+… all of these platforms have different audiences and those audiences respond to different types of content.

What may have been a hit on Twitter may not necessarily translate well to your Facebook audience.

Try turning that listicle into a video, and vice versa. Keep tabs on the types of content that your audience is clicking through and sharing and keep on iterating.

Pro Tip:

Email is no exception. Don’t just copy and paste your latest article into a broadcast. Your emails should hold a level of exclusivity that gives people a reason to subscribe, even if that means simply repurposing content by changing the format.

3. “Brands are what people say they are.” – @RicolaUSA

The media landscape is changing and we’re witnessing a shift in the brand/people relationship. The opinions of friends, family and peers are becoming more influential than ever and this is kind of a big deal.

Brands used to be what brands say they were. Brands are now what people say they are.

It makes sense: relationships are a two-way street. Think of your subscribers as co-authors of your brand story. Acknowledge their voice and find ways to invite collaboration. Allow them to take part in shaping your content. Then what you can expect from them becomes significantly greater.

Pro Tip:

Send out a survey to your subscribers to see what kind of content resonates with them the most. Inviting their feedback is a great way to build trust and gain insights into what’s working within your campaign. Data can reveal a lot about your reader’s behaviors, but only they can tell you the reasons behind it.

4. “Think like a startup.” – @AbsolutVodka

Why? That’s exactly it. Startups are all about the why. The brands that are succeeding are doing a really great job of not only describing what they do and how they do it, but why they do it in the first place.

Pro Tip:

Make sure your message comes across loud and clear on all of your subscriber touch points, from your blog to your landing page to the content within the emails themselves. You have a passion for your business, share it!

(Oh, and don’t be afraid to take a risk. Startups have an appetite for risks.)

5. “Build a community of advocates.” – @Hootsuite

The people on your list are more than just subscribers. They are individuals with valuable opinions and insights that are crucial to improving your business. By building relationships with them, you’re opening the doors to a much bigger conversation.

A good start is identifying those key members of your community. These are the people that are engaging with your brand and sharing your content on a frequent basis. Nurturing and empowering these relationships will help build a solid group of advocates who will then spread the #brandlove amongst their networks.

Pro Tip:

Salute your super fans! Whether it’s sharing user-generated content or simply giving them a shoutout on your blog, a little acknowledgement can go a long way.

6. “It’s all about that data.” – @Seventeen

Data. We love it. It can reveal things about your campaign that your gut just can’t tell you.

That’s right – we can no longer trust our guts to drive when and where we place our marketing dollars when all of this juicy data is easily within reach.

From the best subject line to the optimal time to send your emails, we’re always looking for ways to improve our campaigns. And one of the easiest and most effective ways to do so is through split-testing.

Pro Tip:

Testing doesn’t have to be costly or time consuming. Check out this post for painless ways to set up a split test and ideas that you can start implementing today.

7. “Put the user first.” – @Spotify

How are you creating an optimal experience for your subscribers?

Think about every touch point that they have – from your signup form and landing pages to your newsletters and blog. Each of these should have a consistent look and feel.

Links should work. Images should load. Subject lines should not be forgotten.  (Who hasn’t made these mistakes at least once?)

While these might seem like little things, they’re actually a huge part of creating a great user experience.

Pro Tip:

Always go back and test before you send. Trust us.

8: “GIFs express things better than words or smiley faces can.” – @Giphy

A GIF can speak 1000 words – and delight your subscribers. They also lend an element of delight to your emails. The next time you launch a campaign, try adding a dose of personality with an animated GIF.

Pro Tip:

Looking to create your own? We love tools like DSCO, Boomerang and GifGrabber. And be sure to follow us on Pinterest for more great ideas on how to use GIFs within your emails.

9. “To be successful, you can’t be everything to everyone.” – @Refinery29

Sometimes we become so focused on latching onto “the next big thing”, that we lose sight of our original goals. Not only can this become totally overwhelming, but it can severely diminish the quality of the content we put out.

Pro Tip:

Instead of trying to have it all, focus your efforts on perfecting what you do have.

If you’re a vegan dessert blogger, own that niche. Expanding out into the world of hors d’oeuvres and beyond might seem tempting, but the market might be saturated. Set your sights on being the go-to blog for vegan desserts and ensure that your content is on par.

#WhatsNext

Are you going to try out any of these tips? Were you at Social Media Week? Leave us a comment or send me a tweet @oliviadello to keep the conversation going!

The post 9 Things Email Marketers Can Learn From Social Media’s Biggest Names appeared first on Email Marketing Tips.

In Paris for the UN Climate Conference, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced, to much fanfare, that Canada is back. Indeed, the Trudeau government reaffirmed Canada’s aggressive climate targets (30 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030) while intimating that Canada will do more.

To meet the 2030 target, Canada will have to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 240 megatonnes (MT). This is no easy task; it is the equivalent of eliminating all GHG emissions from Ontario, Atlantic Canada, Manitoba and the Territories.
If Canada were to do its share to ensure that global temperatures do not rise 2° C above pre-industrial levels, we’d have to find an additional 120 MT in reductions by 2030. Eliminating the oil sands would only net an additional 70 MT of reductions.

This Environment Canada chart tells the story.

There is little doubt that the new government is keen to meet Canada’s Paris commitments. Trudeau has announced a First Ministers’ process designed to create a Pan-Canadian Climate Strategy, and Environment Minister Catherine McKenna has attacked the issue with great energy. Yet the prevailing view in western Canada is that Trudeau and McKenna will blink before forcing the economic pain that would be required to meet Canada’s targets.

Maybe.

But what happens if they don’t blink? Which provinces will shoulder the burden of meeting the targets?

An old Japanese proverb comes to mind: The nail that sticks up gets hammered. This chart, which shows GHG emissions by province, makes it pretty clear which nails stick up.

If Trudeau wants to meet his aggressive GHG targets, then Alberta will get hammered. There is no realistic path that doesn’t include massive reductions in Alberta. Ontario will have to do more, too (but the Ontario government doesn’t seem to mind hampering its economy). Saskatchewan and British Columbia (especially if LNG actually happens) will also be pressured to do more.

Alberta and Saskatchewan, in particular, need to remain vigilant. The economies of these two Prairie provinces are more energy-intensive and trade-exposed.

This means that Alberta and Saskatchewan are more vulnerable to carbon pricing because they compete with jurisdictions that tend not to price carbon. Put simply, Saskatchewan cares if North Dakota and Texas price carbon (hint: they don’t), not if P.E.I. and Ontario do. If Saskatchewan makes itself less competitive vis-a-vis North Dakota, then carbon emissions, jobs and GDP will simply shift across the border. No wonder Premier Brad Wall is up in arms.

The Alberta government (and the oil patch) seem convinced that the combination of Alberta’s shiny new climate strategy (which made Trudeau look great in Paris) and ballooning deficits in Alberta (and Ottawa) may keep Trudeau at bay. They could be right.

But here’s the thing: If Trudeau is serious about Canada meeting its targets, there is no credible path that doesn’t go through the Prairies (or, more accurately, through the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin). Premiers Wall and Notley would be well-advised to bury the hatchet soon.

They might find inspiration in the example of two of their predecessors: Allan Blakeney (NDP premier of Saskatchewan, 1971-1982) and Peter Lougheed (PC premier of Alberta, 1971-1985), who succeeded in putting their ideological and partisan differences aside for the good of their provinces.

 

Trevor McLeod is director of the Centre for Natural Resources Policy at the Canada West Foundation.

The post What meeting Canada’s climate targets would mean for the Prairies appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Ever find yourself in the middle of the grocery store with two versions of the same product in each hand?

Which should you buy, the one that says "organic" or the one labeled "all-natural"?

The answer might surprise you. While many food labels sound similar, they can have vastly different meanings, both in terms of how products are grown or processed to how nutritious they are.

Here are some food labels to watch out for along with what they really mean:

UP NEXT: 17 'healthy habits' you're better off giving up

SEE ALSO: Here's the truth about 'healthy’ milk alternatives

"Natural" — total bogus

What you'd think: Free of artificial ingredients and pesticides.

The low-down: Not quite. The FDA "has not developed a definition for use of the term natural or its derivatives." In other words, it means diddly squat.

"Organic" — a little more complicated than you thought

What you'd think: Pesticide-free and superior to non-organic foods.

The low-down: The USDA uses three types of "organic" labels:

1)  "Certified organic" - can't contain GMOs and should minimize pesticides and anything synthetic

2) "100% organic" - can contain organics as well as any synthetics the USDA deems safe

3) "Organic" - must contain at least 95% organics by weight

Also, a recent review of the past 50 years of scientific articles stacking organic foods up against non-organics concluded that it "lacks strong evidence that organic foods are significantly more nutritious than conventional foods."

"Grass fed" — possibly healthier cows and people

What you'd think: Happy cows roaming green fields; healthier meat.

The low-down: Unlike conventional cattle, which are fed grains and corn, "grass fed" animals are only fed grass and hay. Plus, they're not confined — at least during the growing season. Plus, it turns out what they eat does affect the nutrients and fats you get from eating them: Grassfed beef typically has a greater proportion of healthier fats and is generally a bit leaner than conventional beef.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Are email deliverability issues keeping you up at night?

If so, the chances are better than 90% that your problem stems from an issue with your email list.

All it takes is one bad apple in your database to bring your email program to a screeching halt.

There are a variety of addresses that can undermine your email reputation in an instant. The end result is never good. Blocking or, worse yet, blacklisting problems that no marketer has time for. The prime offenders include:

• Spamtraps;
• Heavy spam complainers;
• “Role” accounts (like abuse@ or tech@ or info@);
• Mis-typed registrations; and
• Older bouncing email addresses.

What’s The Key to Email Marketing?

Easy. It’s ensuring that each of your emails reach their intended target. The best subject lines, email creative, promotional offers, and CTAs are of no value if your message doesn’t get delivered.

Some marketers invest a TON of time and money and still, their campaigns miss the mark. Why? They fail to keep their email databases clean and up-to-date. This results in email deliverability issues that require a lot of time and money to clear up.

The Ongoing Spam War

In the war against spam, ISPs continue to tighten the reins on email marketers. As a result, it’s getting more and more difficult to reach subscribers. ISPs rely on 4 factors in determining whether to let your emails through:

1. Spamtraps or honeypots: Deliverable but super damaging, spam traps can wreak havoc on even an honest e-mailer. Hit 1 or 2 of these and it could bring down your entire email program.
2. Excessive spam complaints: ISPs’ spam complaint thresholds typically hover around .3%. Exceed that and your emails will get blocked and won’t reach your subscribers.
3. Excessive bounces: ISPs’ bounce thresholds typically hover around 10%. If you exceed their threshold, the ISP will block your emails from and they’ll never make it to the inbox.
4. Engagement activity: ISPs have their eyes peeled for any sign that recipients don’t want your emails. Did you know that Gmail evaluates hundreds of signals when deciding if your email is inbox worthy?

3 Strategies for Preventing Email Deliverability Issues

As JFK said, “the time to repair the roof is while the sun is shining”. Why wait to get blocked or blacklisted before taking action? Here are 3 recommendations to get you moving in the right direction:

1.) Follow Best Practices for acquisition

Improve your tactics- Strive to acquire addresses that are permission based. You also want these addresses to be as free of typos and spamtraps as possible.

Don’t be shady – Think about the ways you are getting email addresses into your system. Some you trust. Some, not so much (are you still buying lists and harvesting emails, really?). The latter represents a problem. Deal with it before it’s too late!

2.) Conduct routine list maintenance

Remove Bounces & Inactives – First, get the bounces off your list. Next, develop a firm definition of an inactive email address. Set these aside and utilize Email Change of Address to find the current preferred email address for dormant subscribers.

Respect Unsubscribes – At least one Spamtrap provider intentionally unsubscribes from your list. They do this to confirm that you honor your subscriber’s wishes. Fail to respect the unsubscribe process and you’re destined to get burned.

3.) Partner with an expert

Team up with a trusted provider and run quarterly hygiene on every email address that you routinely send to. This will allow you to:

• Sniff out the deliverable but problematic addresses mentioned above.
• Remove more bounces and inactive email addresses that your own manual check-up missed.
• Get rid of any toxic yet deliverable typos you may have acquired.

REMEMBER, shopping for email database services by price alone is a losing venture. Download this whitepaper to learn about the dangers associated with selecting the wrong vendor.

On February 18, a throng reporters and cameramen gathered at the northwest corner of 16th Street and 3rd Avenue in Manhattan to watch New York City mayor Bill de Blasio make a phone call.

Leaning toward a sleek, metallic tower that looked more at home in "The Jetsons" than the streets of New York, de Blasio dialed "311" to showcase the free phone calling capability of LinkNYC, a network of free WiFi hubs that will eventually blanket the entire city.

"LinkNYC will be the WiFi network New York City deserves," de Blasio said during a short press conference after the demonstration. "It will be the biggest and fastest network in the world and completely free of charge."

Over a dozen of these hubs, or "Links," are already operational on street corners in Manhattan. There will be 510 Links installed in all five of New York City's main boroughs by July. And eventually there will be over 7,500 Links accessible to the 8.5 million citizens of the city that never sleeps.

"In 2016 internet access is not a luxury," de Blasio said. "It's not something optional. It's something everybody needs."

LinkNYC isn't the first project to bring free public WiFi to an entire city — cities around the world like Taipei and Helsinki already offer free public WiFi that's faster than the internet service many Americans pay for at home. But LinkNYC is the only public WiFi network of its scale that's promising gigabit internet speeds, the fastest kind of connection that's commercially available.

Gigabit is so fast — you can download an HD movie in 7 seconds — that the latest iPhone isn't even capable of accessing half of its available speed. "For the first time in the history of the internet, your device is the bottleneck," Jen Hensley, the general manager of LinkNYC, told Tech Insider.

Huge advertising opportunities balanced with privacy concerns

LinkNYC is set up to be completely funded by advertising and will cost nothing to the user or taxpayers. Hensley, who is employed by Intersection, the parent company of LinkNYC, stressed that the goal of the network is to offer a "pure internet experience," which means ads won't actually be shown on your device.

Instead, ads will be displayed on the two 55-inch screens on the sides of each Link. Hensley described the advertising model as "definitely a first of its kind." Over the life of its 12-year contract — which promises 4,500 Link installations in four years and eventually more than 7,000 Links total — LinkNYC expects to eventually generate over $500 million in revenue through ad partnerships and sponsorships. That's quite a bit more than the $40 million a year existing phone booth ads generate. LinkNYC's own network deployment costs are expected to cost $200 million.

The appeal for businesses, especially local merchants that wish to advertise a sale or happy hour down the block, is obvious. "We think it will work," Hensley said. "We think the scale of digital advertising in New York, one of the world's biggest media markets, is extremely compelling."

LinkNYC's network will help advertisers tap into foot traffic around specific neighborhoods. Hensley stressed that even though certain data is collected on an aggregate level, LinkNYC isn't snooping on all of the web traffic that goes through its network — for now.

"We have access to some, not all of that data," she said. "We're not monitoring what websites people go to right now. That's not currently part of the strategy. But we will gain insights into how people use the network and how people move through the city. And we think that's where there's a lot of value."

When pressed about exactly the kind of user data LinkNYC accesses, Miles Green, the director of infrastructure engineering at Intersection, said anonymous information will be gathered from devices that connect to the network to help inform advertisers.

"We will use anonymous, aggregated information from device IDs about area demographics to build profiles of specific locations that's valuable to advertisers," Green said. "We could understand if an area skews male or female, and we'll know, for example, if the Nets are playing or there's a Justin Bieber concert happening at the Barclay's Center. We will never sell personal information or share with third- parties for their own use."

Beyond advertisers, the data that will funnel through LinkNYC's network will be a gold mine for any company or hacker looking to get their hands on someone's personal information. 

That's why LinkNYC has a separate WiFi network it's offering that's encrypted. Anyone can join the main public network, but that runs the risk of having any non-encrypted web traffic (anything without the little padlock icon next to the URL in your web browser) exposed to others. "This is the risk of an open network anywhere," Green said.

Only iPhones and iPads can get on LinkNYC's private, encrypted network for now due to Android's lack of support for technology called Hotspot 2.0, which the network uses to authenticate with devices. Besides the added safety, another benefit of the encrypted network is that once you've joined at one Link, your Apple device will automatically connect whenever it gets near any Link in the city.

LinkNYC is able to facilitate this digital handshake by installing its own certificate on iPhones, which the user has to manually approve with his or her passcode. The certificate installation process used by LinkNYC may be convenient, but such certificates are capable of infecting Apple devices with malware, according to Will Strafach, an experienced iPhone hacker and CEO of mobile security firm Sudo Security. "It's not good for run of the mill users," he said. "You don't want them getting used to installing certificates. They should view any certificate that's trying to be installed as potentially sketchy."

Green, Intersection's director of infrastructure engineering, said that the certificate used by LinkNYC is safe and only intended to encrypt web traffic. "You do want to think twice when you're installing something on your machine, but we've done everything we can to ensure that we're doing it in the way that the internet secures itself," he said. "It's the same kind of process that you use when you visit a website to validate the authenticity of something." He also acknowledged that the need for a certificate to access the encrypted network will not be required as soon as it’s technically possible to remove.

The smart city of the future

34 million Americans, or 10% of the U.S. population, still don't have basic broadband access, according to the FCC. A 2014 study by the city of New York found that nearly 30% of citizens lacked internet connectivity faster than dial-up.

And LinkNYC won't replace broadband at home for most people. Each Link tower only has a signal radius of 150 feet, which means that the network is strictly intended for public use. But given how ridiculously fast and easy to use the network is, Links could become sought after pockets of WiFi that save people from cellular data plan caps and signal drop-outs.

When you begin to look at all of the players involved, making it easier for people to get online is only a piece of what LinkNYC is about. Mapping web traffic patterns and the ebb and flow of devices as they move through the city could inform everything from smart cars to law enforcement. "I really think it's about order of magnitude change in what citizens can expect from the streets of their city," Intersection's Hensley said.

All roads lead back to Google

The roots of LinkNYC can be traced all the way back to Alphabet, the multi-billion-dollar tech conglomerate that owns Google.

In May 2014, the de Blasio Administration announced a competition for proposals on how to replace New York's thousands of old payphones with state-of-the-art WiFi hubs. Six months later, it announced that the winner of the multi-year-long contract was LinkNYC.

At the time, the two main companies behind LinkNYC were Control Group, a tech and advertising consulting firm, and Titan, the outdoor advertising giant responsible for all of the ads on the city's existing payphones.

It wasn't until September 2015 that Sidewalk Labs, an urban development startup created by Google (before it was called in Alphabet), came into the picture. Under the leadership of Dan Doctoroff, who previously served as president of Bloomberg LP and was New York City's deputy mayor of economic development, Sidewalk Labs led the merger of Control Group and Titan to become a single entity called Intersection.

To add another layer of corporate complexity to the mix, Intersection partnered with CIVIQ Smartspaces, Qualcomm, and Antenna to create a consortium called CityBridge, a group directly responsible for everything from designing the Link towers to maintaining its robust network.

Within CityBridge, Intersection is responsible for the day-to-day management and deployment of LinkNYC's aggressive rollout.

Sidewalk Labs provides financial support — it remains a minority investor — as well as guidance from Doctoroff, who also serves as chairman of Intersection. And most importantly, the startup's staff can provide expertise in navigating the government bureaucracy and stringent regulations LinkNYC has managed to fly through in less than a year.

Sidewalk Labs is developing what Doctoroff calls the "completely connected streets" platform, "which would collect ground data from streets and sidewalks to inform decisions about things like parking, lane-changing, and traffic-enforcement," according to Business Insider.  

Outside of LinkNYC, Sidewalk is currently working with 10 cities on the U.S. Department of Transportation's "Smart City Challenge," which plans to fund "bold, data-driven ideas to improve lives by making transportation safer, easier, and more reliable." Links are equipped with Bluetooth beacon technology that can track phones and other devices as they move through the city (it's an opt-in process), which could eventually make Sidewalk's other initiatives smarter.

Alphabet's connection to LinkNYC may be distant on paper, but its involvement is obvious in the end product millions of residents and tourists will come into contact with on the streets of New York. Besides a USB charging port and phone number dialing pad powered by Vonage, each Link has its own Android tablet with free access to Google Maps and Google search.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here are all of Google's awesome science projects — that we know about

Everyone knows that the sales landscape has changed radically over the last few years. The technology that reps use, the customer expectations that reps do more than take orders, the research that buyers do—the sales cycle looks very different compared to five years ago, let alone twenty.

You might think that one part of the cycle would be relatively immune from this: the in-person sales interaction. After all, when we talk about technology changing how we interact with each other, it’s generally about how we spend less time with other people, not necessarily the nature of those interactions. But as anyone who has been out to dinner with a smartphone on the table can attest, things are different now.

Swapping out your PowerPoint deck for interactive guided selling isn’t the end of sales transformation. Here are a few best practices to help go beyond technology in your face-to-face sales meetings.

Tech Savvy, Not Tech Distracted

There’s a measurable reduction in the quality of our conversations because of the technology glued to our hands. Though, “No phones at the dinner table” doesn’t exactly work when you’re meeting with a customer. If you’re a modern B2B salesperson, you’re probably presenting from your tablet, and if you’re not presenting from your tablet, chances are you’re presenting your phone. It’s a fine line you have to walk, so follow these guidelines:

• Use your device to support the conversation. That’s it! Don’t check emails, texts and definitely don’t update their contact record—that should happen automatically. Don’t throw on a timed PowerPoint or a video. Face-to-face conversations need to add value beyond generic content.
• Don’t juggle multiple devices. If you’re using your iPad to present, keep your iPhone in your pocket. If you’re using your Samsung Galaxy, keep your Surface Pro in your bag. You’re going to want to take notes, so make sure you can do that from within your presentation.
• Don’t use your device as a crutch. Quick access to PowerPoints, videos and PDFs doesn’t mean you should hand over your tablet to your prospect and you’re set. Face-to-face conversations need to add value beyond generic content.

Listen up!

Being a good listener is a life skill that everyone should have. Saying all the right things only works if you hear what the right things should be. When a rep comes into a sales meeting, listening is more crucial today than it ever has been.

Imagine someone who found your website on Google. Because of how long the B2B sales cycle is, they could engage with your content and do research on your product for months before they’re ready to talk to someone. Five or ten years ago, there wasn’t anywhere near the level of case studies, white papers and customer reviews that there are now. So when you’re meeting face-to-face, it’s not about you or your competitors anymore. It’s about the customer and their needs. The conversation has to be in-depth and it has to be about uncovering their needs, and that can only happen if you listen and react.

Because you now have explanations geared towards all of their needs and rebuttals for all of their concerns at your fingertips, you have the opportunity to do a deep dive that couldn’t happen in an initial meeting in the past. But to make it happen, you need to really hone in on those needs and concerns. You might have gotten an idea of their individual needs from the content they consumed and your prior phone and email conversations—but face-to-face is when the cards come out on the table, and you need to be ready to pick them up.

Start with a Recap, Close with a Recap

If you walk into your meeting and jump headfirst into the details, you’re liable to lose your prospect real fast. Imagine how much of your content they’ve consumed before meeting with you. Got a number in mind? Now triple that number, and that’s how much third-party content they’ve consumed about you. Got that? Now, add in five competitors to the mix. Plus, you don’t know if the person you’re meeting with has seen any of that content or had a surrogate do research for them.

It’s best to start with some icebreakers, maybe some small talk, and then to walk them back a step. Go through your previous phone conversations and emails and summarize. As you’re giving a brief overview of your product or solution, weave in that summary. If you’ve sent some sales content or know what they’ve looked at from your marketing automation tool, highlight some of the key points to jog their memory.

The idea isn’t to go through everything over again. The idea is to capitalize on their attention and differentiate yourself from the other products they might be considering. You’ll contextualize the meeting not just for the prospect, but for you—so you know what questions to ask and what supportive content to have at the ready.

You would be well served to have one more recap at the end of the meeting, summarizing the pain points you’ve uncovered and how you’ll address those as next steps. If you’re running short on time, you can save this for an email (or do both). Because all the content you shared has been recorded, you can send annotated excerpts via (trackable) links to your prospects.

End with a Call-To-Action

This is one piece of advice you can pack away for almost any occasion or situation. Both marketing and sales know the value of a good CTA. People are wired for anticipation, so after you’ve crafted a story for why you and the prospect are a good match, they expect climax. This is especially true given that they’ve consumed so much B2B marketing content, which nearly always ends in a call-to-action. And that’s necessary because if there’s no action to take, they’ll just move onto someone else’s content who will give them a CTA and use it to nurture them as a lead.

For salespeople, that call-to-action can take several forms:

• Discuss next steps with their team
• Begin a software pilot or use a few sample products
• Review additional content to learn about things you couldn’t cover in the meeting

That last one is great to couple with other CTAs because how they engage with collateral is something you can track and add to your sales content KPIs [link to metrics blog]. It doesn’t matter if it’s something small because the meeting was shorter than you expected or didn’t cover as much as you planned—your goal is to always keep things moving.

The tools have changed, and yes, the sales meetings themselves have changed, but those changes offer massive opportunities for modern sales reps and sales leaders. The only question is whether they’ll get left behind or take hold of those opportunities.

Continue your sales transformation journey, modeled on thriving Fortune 100 companies, with the SlideShare below.

Image credit: How to Earn Customer Loyalty By Focusing on Customer Experience by Joe The Goat Farmer | Creative Commons

Marketers often pour their efforts, resources, and budgets into developing an e-book only to move on once the landing page is live. Your e-book could be the next game-changing, Content-Marketing-Award-winning, produce-into-a-major-motion-picture piece, but without promotion, nobody will click, download, read, or even see it.

Promoting an e-book goes beyond creating a landing page, tweeting a link, and emailing it to your customers. Those are the staple moves, much like serving turkey and dressing at Thanksgiving dinner.

Great e-book promotion touches all phases of the sales funnel and requires involvement from multiple teams within your organization. A collaborative, planned approach to e-book promotion not only generates leads, but it also catches the eyes of your best prospects. Here’s a look:

Top-of-funnel promotion

Your top-of-funnel efforts likely cast a wide net. You know some information about this audience so you can target accurately, but you don’t know them as well as you know your best customer. Therefore, this is the place to slice and dice your promotion the most. People digest content in different ways. The more you chop it up and share it, the more e-book buzz you’ll create.

Try these tactics, making sure that the e-book always is the call to action:

• Post the first chapter on SlideShare.

• Record someone from your team reading the e-book and launch it as an audio book.

• Launch a webinar with the author, featured thought leaders, or brands.

• Create an infographic with the e-book’s tips, tricks, or quotes.

• Create Twitter cards with quotes, stats, or tips from the e-book.

• Host a Twitter chat on the topic.

• Turn each chapter into a blog post.

• Contact influencers and ask them to share it (give them an exclusive sneak preview for even more exposure or buzz).

• Write a guest blog post for sites covering the topic.

• Include the e-book in two or three places on your website, such as the home page, resources section, and sidebar call-out.

• Print it or put it on a USB drive and give it away at conferences, booth exhibits, etc.

• Write email and phone scripts/outlines about your e-book for cold outreach by sales or business development representatives.

Middle-of-funnel promotion

If you generate a thought leadership, top-of-funnel e-book, you might think your promotion efforts stop at the top of the funnel. That is not the case. Other departments and audiences can benefit from your e-book, which will ultimately lead to revenue for your organization — which should be an end goal for you, too.

The middle of the funnel is where you get existing prospects to raise their hand and move closer to the sale. This is probably the toughest part of a marketer’s job. If you have great content and a strong reach, it’s not hard to get net new leads into your database. A simple download is all you need to get the process started. However, to get those leads to commit to a demo or free trial takes more work. Your e-book can help.

Consider these middle-of-funnel ideas:

• Work the e-book into your nurture program(s) or drip campaigns.

• Create a content pack for existing prospects, including a case study, e-book, one-sheet, etc.

• Include the e-book in your newsletters.

• Provide the e-book to employees in many ways so it’s easy to access and share, including:
  • Post or file on team collaboration platform
  • Link to landing page
  • Give direct link to e-book (e.g., after-form complete page or PDF link)
  • Shelve in content library

• Ask partners to send it to shared partners and networks.

• Print it or put it on a USB drive and include it in a care package to customers and prospects.

• Enter your e-book in marketing contests.

Bottom-of-funnel promotion

The bottom of the funnel is where sales takes the lead. Imagine the funnel as a road, and you’re driving down it. As a marketer, you’re in the driver’s seat for the top and middle of the funnel. You control the content, the message, the promotional approach, etc. When you reach the bottom of the funnel, the salesperson takes the wheel. The salesperson is in charge of closing that deal. However, you don’t hop out of the car, you get in the back seat. You can still help, and that e-book is your admission ticket. Here are some ideas to support bottom-of-funnel promotion:

• Attach the e-book to first-call presentation decks.

• Use it to develop email or phone scripts and templates for existing prospect outreach.

• Print it and give it to salespeople as takeaways or leave-behinds for meetings.

Don’t get overwhelmed – think of this post as a tapas menu, where you can pick and choose the tactics that work for you. As you promote your e-book, you’ll quickly learn what works (and what doesn’t work). From there, you can hone in and focus on the successful tactics. Soon, you’ll have a well-oiled machine for not only creating great e-books, but also for getting them out there for the world to see and devour.

We’re following Amanda’s advice. Check out a wealth of content marketing resources in the Content Marketing Institute e-book library, from The Essentials of a Documented Content Marketing Strategy to Digital Governance: A Primer for Content Marketers.

Cover image via pixabay.com

The post 22 Ways to Promote Your E-Book appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Events and conferences are a great way to get your business in front of a like-minded audience. Each event is different and is tailored around a specific marketing topic. Find one that’s a good fit for your target customer, sponsor a booth, and a flood of customers will head your way.

It sounds easy, but event leads tend to be some of the lowest qualified. Why is that and how can we better target the right people to turn events into a strong B2B marketing channel?

It starts with sales enablement and the marketing department’s role in event preparation.

Before the Event

The weeks, or even months, leading up to an event are some of the most important, and therefore most beneficial, in the sales enablement process.

After you’ve signed up as a sponsor, or even if you haven’t, it’s time to get to work preparing for the event. This is where sales and marketing alignment is key. The two need to work together to decide who the key targets are and how your company can stand out in a busy, bustling environment.

Targeted Ads

Through account-based marketing, the sales and marketing teams have “target accounts” they’re going after. If you know that those companies, or key individuals from those companies, will be attending the same event, use the time to your advantage.

Targeted, personalized ads can be run to prospects before the event. That way, once they get to the event they’ll already have a general idea of what your product does. Or, at the very least, your company will be one they’ve “heard of before.”

Through attribution and the tracking on the ads, you’ll know who has clicked and what else they researched on your site. Use this information to guide conversation during the event.

Meetings

In addition to advertisements, you can have your sales team call prospects in the weeks leading up to the event. Ask to set up a meeting during downtime at the event, or simply remind them to swing by your booth. Meeting spaces should be booked prior to the event. Whether it’s a conference room or a local coffee shop, it’s important to be prepared and have a set place in mind ahead of time.

Define the conversation. Are you having a general discussion about your product? Are you talking about why your product is good for their company? Are you giving a demo? Answering these questions before the meeting, will be beneficial to both parties and help to make the most of the available time.

Networking 101

Sales reps who man the booth during events can make or break the ROI you receive from attending. Before leaving for the event, it’s beneficial for the reps to meet with the event manager to discuss how to talk about your product. Who is the target audience of the event and how can you position your product within that?

Is your product something that can be easily demoed at your booth? If so, how are you going to set up the demo? Are you only going to demo to qualified prospects? All of these are questions that need to be answered by sales and marketing before the event. Having a game plan helps to make sure everything runs smoothly and your company gets the most bang for its event buck.

During the Event

During the event, marketing’s role surrounds product messaging. Because first impressions are important and time is short, it’s necessary to have the product pitch down pat. You may only get a few minutes with each prospect so the marketing team should work with sales to define which product features should be discussed or displayed at your event booth.

The Booth

The booth is the face of your company during events. It can draw people in from across a room, or it can cause them to skip right over you. The design matters. The events manager and/or marketing team should spend a good deal of time surrounding the booth design and how to set yours apart from the numerous companies that will be in attendance.

Marketers love free swag, but the purpose of attending the event is to reach an audience of potential customers. Giving away a Tesla may attract everyone to your booth, but how will you sort who is actually interested in your product so that you can have meaningful conversations?

The sweet spot is creating a piece of merch that will draw in qualified prospects and create deeper conversation around your business. Aim for quality over quantity.

Once you’ve attracted the right people to your booth, make sure you get information from them. Be it through swiping an event badge, or simply grabbing a phone number or email address, this is a huge part in determining the ROI of your event spend and will help in future attendance decisions. More on that later.

If you have a chance, jot down information about each person you talk to. No one likes a mass, blanket email so anything that will help you personalize outreach post-event is good information to gather.

And lastly, don’t forget to tweet with the event hashtag!

Steak Dinners

If there are target accounts or individuals you want to reach, one of the most effective ways is to set up a nice dinner during the event. Depending on how many targets are in attendance and what your budget is, each sales rep is given a specific number of “invites.” They then decide who they’d most like to sit down with and reach out to confirm attendance.

In addition to prospects, an invite should also be sent to key current customers or partners. Word of mouth advertising carries a lot of weight, so what better way to sell the prospects than to sit them next to a current, happy customer. Strategically setting the place cards is a necessity here so you make sure prospects are sitting next to customers, or certain customers are next to the CEO.

At Bizible, we create a Salesforce campaign for the dinner and add the names of everyone in attendance. That way we can track and see if the dinner touchpoint shortened the sales cycle for prospects, or helped with the upsell of a current customer.

After the Event

After the event is when the grinding really begins. Event leads should be ranked by a number of qualifications predefined by marketing and sales. At Bizible, we rank individuals as A, B, C or D accounts based on things like company size and if they’re using Salesforce or marketing automation. Tools like Datanyze simplify this process.

All of our leads are then uploaded to Salesforce where we use omni-channel attribution to track movement post event. Say a lead was already in your system, you talk to them at the event, and then a week later they book a demo and close as a customer. Attribution data would give a percentage of revenue to the event touchpoint.

This is important because it determines the ROI of your event spend.

Did prospects that you talked to during the event visit your website post-event? Did leads or opportunities move farther down the funnel after visiting your booth? Did the event play a role in converting any customers?

Using attribution to answer these questions can help you decide if it’s worth it to attend similar events in the future. If the benefit of attending, be it through revenue or brand awareness, outweighs the cost, the decision is easy.