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A plain Soviet-era office block squats on a residential street in the beautiful historic city of Lviv, Ukraine. The lobby is dimly lit and there is no seating, only a stern guard who points to the elevator to access local software engineering firm N-iX.

The doors part and the offices are an orange and white oasis, with lofty ceilings and light and young people working at clusters of desks.

This is Ukraine, a country of stark contrasts. Old Ukraine is stuck with antiquated businesses, methods, and corrupted leaders. New Ukraine is sunny, prosperous, and talented despite war in the east and scandals galore.

N-iX, for instance, employs 200 talented and world-class software developers who are working on projects around the world in offices in Lviv, Stockholm, and Sofia. I met its CEO and founder, Andrew Pavliv, in Silicon Valley two years ago and visited his operation in 2015.

“We are very proud of our company and our projects,” he said.

And he should be. He and the rest of the IT sector in Ukraine have become Europe’s largest software development industry. There are 100,000 Microsoft certified software professionals in the country and aggressive plans to double this number by 2020.

N-iX is rooted in Lviv but its market is global. Its cool offices could be in San Francisco or New York City and its workforce is just as brilliant. Walls are decorated with irreverent cartoon figures, funny quotations, and many flags representing their multinational clients.

There is also a large attractive kitchen and eating area, a gym, and recreation area with foosball and other games to provide a gathering place and break from intensive projects in multiple time zones.

During a tour of the premises, N-iX spokesman Halyna Dumych said that “Ukraine is now fourth in the world in the number of IT professionals after the United States, India, and Russia.”

Sanctions have cost Russia IT business and many have opted for Ukraine instead. In other words, Ukraine is winning the IT “war.”

Three recent and significant deals have turned the tech world’s attention toward Ukraine. In September, Snapchat paid $150 million to buy a two-year-old Ukrainian startup in Odesa called Looksery. The previous record was $45 million paid by a Google mobile division for Viewdle.

In November, financier George Soros made a big bet when his Ukrainian Redevelopment Fund acquired a stake in Ciklum Holding Limited in Kyiv, a successful IT firm with 2,500 professionals. “It is a very dynamic company in an industry that represents the future of Ukraine,” said Soros.

Analysts estimate that there are more than 2,000 startups in the country’s major cities. And some have already made their mark. Ukrainians are behind global success stories such as Grammarly, an online writing enhancement software, and Paymentwall, an online platform dedicated to selling digital goods and services.

Both those companies, like 100 other multinationals, have huge research and development operations in Ukraine such as Siemens, Samsung, Oracle, Cisco, SoftServe, Procter & Gamble, and Bioclinica.

Ukraine’s IT sector is proactive and is determined to transform the country from the world’s bread basket to the world’s “brain basket,” says Yevgen Sysoyev, managing partner of AVentures Capital in Kyiv.

In February, he published “IT Ukraine” that listed the sector’s growing achievements and impressive client base. To reach its goal of 100,000 more IT professionals with proficiency in English by 2020, the sector is signing on universities, local governments, and companies.

For instance, the Lviv IT Cluster, an organization run by Stepan Veselovskyi, has linked three universities, the city council, and thirty-four companies to build incubator facilities, host a large conference annually, and develop IT House, the first of several seventy-two-unit condo buildings on low-cost city land to help IT professionals relocate from war-torn areas or smaller centers. The first building sold out immediately last year.

There is a distinctive Ukraine advantage: A pool of talent well-versed in math and sciences, a desire to get ahead, and a competitive advantage for export of services because salaries are 40 percent to 50 percent lower than in the West. To boot, these companies are paid in foreign currency.

Young people are flocking to the industry because an IT software developer is the “highest paid job in Ukraine,” said Dumych. For instance, she said a railway engineer in Britain makes 1.5 times more than an IT software developer there, but in Ukraine a software developer makes 15 to 20 times more than a railway engineer.

Kyiv and Lviv are the main centers of activity but a robust tech sector exists in most of the country’s cities. But Lviv is growing quickly because of its location, furthest from the violence in the east, as well as just three hours flight from Vienna or Warsaw.

“The headlines look bad, but this is an exciting time for entrepreneurs,” said Lenna Koszarny, CEO of private equity firm Horizon Capital in Kyiv with hundreds of millions invested in the country in many sectors. “We are bullish about Ukraine.”

First published by Atlantic Council Feb. 26, 2016

The post Atlantic Council: Ukraine booming IT sector winning despite the war appeared first on Diane Francis.

Depending on where you are in your marketing journey, digital marketing is either a voodoo-like superstition or a teachable science anyone can master. If you’re in the former camp, you’re probably struggling to master your metrics; measuring results is the difference between wishful thinking and actual return on your marketing investment.

To be sure, there are literally hundreds of numbers, statistics, and analytical combinations you could track to give you insight into your marketing efforts and customer behavior, and not every metric is relevant to your marketing plan. That said, there are a few key metrics in three broad categories (traffic, conversions, and revenue) that are universally applicable to judging your digital marketing success. Here are 18 important numbers to watch.

Traffic Metrics

Image via Flickr by BlueFountainMedia

1. Total Site Visits

This is the big-picture number you should monitor and track over time to give you a rough idea of how effective your campaigns are at driving traffic. This number should grow steadily over time; if it drops month to month, it’s time to take a hard look at your marketing channels to identify the problem.

2. Traffic by Sources or Channels

This is useful for segmenting your traffic sources to pinpoint which ones are over and underperforming in your overall marketing campaigns. In general, you should break these down into the following four channels/sources:

1. Direct Visitors – These are the ones who come to your website by typing your URL into their browser.
2. Organic/Search – These are visitors who arrive at your site based on a search query.
3. Referrals – These visitors arrived at your side from a link on another website or blog.
4. Social Media – If you have a social media presence (and who doesn’t?), you’ll want to measure the visitors who arrive at your site from your social media platforms. Social traffic also gives you some general insight into the overall effectiveness of your content marketing and other digital campaigns, as well, since social traffic is a good indicator of engagement and awareness.

3. Number of New Visitors versus Number of Return Visitors

This is an important distinction to track; return visitors give you an indication of the usefulness and quality of your content—whether it’s “sticky” enough to attract multiple visits. Tracking this ratio week over week and month over month shows you how your new content is performing. For example, if you have a high ratio of new visitors to return visitors compared to a previous month, it’s an indication that new content is doing its job driving traffic, but the rest of your website doesn’t meet the needs of these new visitors.

4. Interactions Per Visit

This is a more detailed analysis of your website traffic, but it yields actionable insight if you know how to interpret it. You’ll want to look at variables such as how many pages a user visits, how long they stay on individual pages, and what they do on each page (leave a review, for example).

Don’t confuse interactions with conversions, although the ultimate goal is to have your interactions lead to more conversions such as downloads, subscriptions, purchases, etc. An analysis of your interactions per visit gives you the opportunity to discover which activities and behaviors are keeping visitors on your site and what you can do to encourage more of them.

4a. Time on Site

This is a corollary to interactions per visit and gives you insight into the level of interest and engagement of your website visitors. This is a good all-purpose indicator of how well your site is performing, since visitors who spend a lot of time on your site are finding useful content. Visitors who spend a lot of time on your site are also most likely to be your most committed customers; knowing where these visitors spend their time interacting with your site helps you optimize content for these customers to increase their lifetime value.

5. Bounce Rate

The bounce rate is the number of people who visit your site and leave right away without performing any meaningful action. A high bounce rate can point to several flaws in your digital marketing: Poor campaign targeting, irrelevant traffic sources, weak landing pages, etc.

If you have an e-commerce site, your bounce rate is synonymous with the abandonment rate and this usually indicates problems with your checkout process. Is pricing transparent? Do you load people up with last-minute offers? Spend some time evaluating how to improve the checkout experience.

6. Exit Rate

This is a helpful metric, especially for websites that have a multi-page conversion process. The exit rate differs from the bounce rate in that the exit rate measures the number of people who left the site from a particular page as a percentage of all people who viewed that particular page. This helps you identify drop-off points in your conversion process so you can optimize accordingly.

7. Mobile Traffic

Mobile Share of Organic Search Traffic

With the rise of mobile dominance in content consumption, it’s almost negligent not to track your mobile visitor metrics so you can understand your mobile customers and increase your conversions. Here’s what you need to know:

1. What percent of your traffic is mobile?
2. What devices and browsers do they use?
3. Where are they coming from (direct, organic, referral, social, etc.)
4. What content are they consuming?

Finally, you should take a look at your site speed because slow load times actually affects pretty much every one of your mobile marketing metrics, from SEO to conversions.

8. Cost Per Visitor (CPV) and Revenue Per Visitor (RPV)

These broad measurements give you a simple formula for the profitability of each marketing channel: If your RPV exceeds your CPV, you’re on your way. These numbers also help shape your budgets for certain types of paid campaigns.

Take AdWords, for example. Imagine that for a particular month, you attributed 10 sales with a value of $15,000 to your AdWords campaign. During that same period, AdWords generated 1,000 visitors to your site. This means that your RPV for your AdWords campaign last month was $15 ($15,000/1,000=$15). This gives you a hard ceiling ($15 per visitor or less) for your marketing budget in this channel before you start losing money.

Your CPV is calculated by dividing your total investment in a particular channel by the total number of visitors it generated. You should run these numbers for each of your traffic sources (search, social, email, etc.) to give you a rough basis to measure success for each channel.

Conversion Metrics

Image via Flickr by SEOplanter

9. Total Conversions

One way to define conversions is the number of anonymous site visitors who become digital records in your CRM or marketing database, whether by making a purchase, downloading an asset, or subscribing to a mailing list. This is the number your financial department will be most interested in, the ultimate measure of success for a marketer. Low conversion rates are indicative of any number of problems, from poorly designed websites to unattractive offers.

10. “Micro” Conversion Rates

Pretty much all marketers track overall, or “macro” conversions, but to really drill deep into your mobile marketing metrics, it’s a good idea to track conversions at the campaign level, or “micro” conversions, to ensure that these smaller KPIs are contributing to your overall marketing strategy.

For example, if you have very high conversion rates pushing a new lead magnet such as an e-book, but an extremely small number of leads move to the next stage of the funnel, you’ve got a problem. Even though this campaign is posting good metrics, it’s really not advancing your overall marketing goals, and tracking these micro conversions can help you identify the source of the problem.

11. Conversion Funnel Rates

Rand Fishkin, the “wizard of Moz,” considers these metrics one of the three most important overall for digital marketers. He defines them as “knowing the percent of potential customers that make it through each step of a given conversion process, and which channels or behaviors predict that they’ll make it further.” Inherent in this is a deeper understanding of how each stage of the funnel affects your ultimate ROI and where to direct your resources.

12. Click Through Rates

Measuring click-through rates (CTR) is essential for email marketing and paid ad campaigns. For PPC campaigns, a higher than average CTR can dramatically decrease your cost per click (up to 50 percent on AdWords, for example), while a lower than average score can drive costs through the roof (up to 400 percent higher on AdWords).

13. New/Unique Visitor Conversions versus Return Visitor Conversions

The way a new visitor interacts with your website is very different from the way a regular visitor behaves. For many marketers, tracking these numbers yields useful information for reducing your bounce rate and increasing your return visitor rates, conversions, and customer lifetime value through upselling and marketing automation, for example.

14. Cost Per Conversion

Depending on how you define conversion, this can be called cost per lead, cost per referral, etc., but the overall metric is extremely important, because it ultimately determines your margins. Why? A high cost per conversion can turn a high conversion rate into a negative if the costs are so high they drop your net income too much.

15. Lead to Close Ratio

This is a simple metric to compute: Divide your total number of leads by your total number of sales/closes. Although this is more a measurement of your sales efficiency—and you’ll want to investigate a low close rate—you’ll also need it for your marketing ROI projections.

Revenue Metrics

16. Value Per Visit

This isn’t necessarily simply a revenue metric; it’s actually tied to your interactions numbers. It’s also a difficult value to quantify, because your visitors add value every time they come to your site or read your blog (think page views and traffic for cpm advertising). Obviously, in e-commerce, tangible value is added when dollars are spent on a purchase, but intangible value is also created if a customer leaves a review or shares a product on social media.

Many marketers assign an arbitrary value to these customer actions and then calculate a total value, including purchases, for a set period of time. They then divide that number by the total number of visits to arrive at a VPV metric.

Tracking this metric over time gives you insight into how successful you are at getting customers to perform a certain value-added action, such as writing a review, leaving a comment, socially sharing, or otherwise interacting with your site.

17. Cost Per Acquisition

Cost per acquisition (CPA) differs from cost per conversion because CPA is all about revenue; this metric kicks in once someone becomes a paying customer, the Holy Grail of marketing. CPA tells you exactly how many marketing dollars you have to spend to get someone to open his wallet.

Sometimes it’s tempting to focus on metrics like cost per click, which you must track in paid campaigns, but it’s a short-sighted metric. Imagine you’ve developed a new PPC campaign and it seems to be performing well—CTRs are up from previous campaigns and your CPC is lower.

But then you track revenue and discover you’ve only acquired three or four paying customers, meaning your entire marketing spend on that channel added virtually nothing to your bottom line. In this case, your campaign metrics look great, but your CPA is astronomical. Your CPA keeps the big picture always in focus.

18. Return on Investment (Real and Projected)

This is the ultimate measure of your marketing success: Are your marketing technologies and efforts profitable and delivering results to your bottom line? Here’s where your lead-to-close ratio comes into play to help keep you on track. If you’re spending $25 per lead and your closing rate is 25 percent, it costs you $100 to acquire a new customer. If your average customer value exceeds that amount, you’re in the black on projected marketing ROI.

Depending where you are on the digital marketing spectrum, you may or may not want to formally track each of these metrics, but doing so will give you a pretty accurate view of how you’re doing, what channels are effective, and where your efforts need improvement. Ideally, you’ll get into a rhythm that lets you easily identify trends and variances—and make rapid adjustments to ensure a steady stream of leads and paying customers.

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Ten years ago, Gary Vaynerchuk took a Flip cam and created the first episode of what would eventually become a popular online show called Wine Library TV. In the time since, he has built not one but two multi-million dollar companies. That, along with his trademark “hustle” and charisma, means people tend to seek his advice about entrepreneurship, leadership, attaining social media prowess, and more.

There’s only so much time in the day to respond to questions, even for Vaynerchuk, who seems to need little sleep, if his “DailyVee” video blog is any indication. That’s why he has penned a new book, entitled #AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness. It’s a collection of answers to nearly 370 questions he’s received, similar to those you might see during a Reddit ‘Ask Me Anything’ session. Vaynerchuk wants this book to provide “practical, tactical information” that an entrepreneur or business person can quickly apply, adapting it to their needs.

For anyone looking for a “Getting Started” book, this publication is going to be your go-to guide. Think about this: For about $17.99, you’re getting advice about how to start a business and adapt it to the rapidly changing media landscape from someone who charges brands thousands of dollars for a consultation.

If you’re familiar with Vaynerchuk’s “AskGaryVee” video podcast, then you’ll have a pretty good idea what to expect from #AskGaryVee. It’s a print version of questions that are answered throughout the show’s first 157-plus episodes but organized in a way that doesn’t require you to watch every video. Some of the topics covered include how to deal with platforms, Facebook advertising, influencer marketing, getting started, the value of education, leadership, investing, public speaking, sports, and wine.

As Vaynerchuck’s fourth book, #AskGaryVee has a similar feel to his earlier works: Crush It, The Thank You Economy, and Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. It’s an advice book that gets you to think about ways to do things, rather than dictating how you should do them. The nearly 350-page tome is designed with what Vaynerchuck calls a “360-degree entrepreneurial mindset.” He has said that he has “zero interest” in telling people how to do things, preferring to share his own experiences — offering a guiding light, if you will, that gives entrepreneurs a point of reference from which they can navigate.

Looking through the answers in #AskGaryVee, it’s difficult to not hear them read aloud by Vaynerchuk himself. He enjoys feedback from his fans and says at one point, “Comments are my oxygen.” His responses aren’t sugar-coated, nor does the book feel “templated,” even though some of the questions are fairly standard. What you’ll find are the very real and boisterous thoughts you’d expect from Veynerchuck when he’s, as he might say “pumped up.” Case in point, here’s an answer Vaynerchuk gave to a 14-year-old fan who asked how to become an entrepreneur:

Wanting to be an entrepreneur and being one are two different things. If I were you, I’d sell the shirt off your back to another kid. I’d find some rocks and sell them to a nine-year-old girl. The best way to become an entrepreneur is to behave like one. Entrepreneurs sell, so start a business or start selling things….There’s no reading about this stuff — only doing. Drop this book or Kindle right now, kid, and look around, pick something up, and post it on eBay…Go!

This book isn’t geared solely to entrepreneurs — it doesn’t train you in the specific art of selling or tell you how to build something. Instead, Vaynerchuk gives general insights into a wide range of topics. There are questions and answers about what you should look for in a cofounder; how Vaynerchuk avoids procrastination; whether he’s a morning person; dealing with burnout; advice to a salesperson on how to adapt to social media; how to use Facebook advertising; working with platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, Meerkat, Twitter, and Snapchat; metrics; company culture; working with friends; and more.

Vaynerchuk is certainly not short on accomplishments. Along with his successful wine business, he’s also the cofounder of VaynerMedia, a company that consults with brands like Budweiser, Sonic, Dove, MasterCard, and Mountain Dew to implement non-traditional marketing campaigns. He’s also a venture capitalist, having invested in companies like Twitter, Tumblr, Wildfire, Birchbox, and Uber, either personally or through his partnership in the $25 million VayerRSE fund.

The book can perhaps be summed up this way: If you ever had the opportunity to interview someone who was a proven leader and successful entrepreneur, what would you ask them? Well, #AskGaryVee takes all those questions, filtered through Vaynerchuk’s very personal point of view and years of experience, and asks you to come up with your own solutions. The rest is up to you.

#AskGaryVee: One Entrepreneur’s Take on Leadership, Social Media, and Self-Awareness goes on sale March 8 and is available on Amazon.

More information:

The Only Social Media Strategy You Need to Grow Your Brand.

This is the only strategy you’re going to need to build your brand. It doesn’t matter what social media platform you are on. Whether you are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat, Periscope, Vine, or ANYTHING else.

This is the only social media strategy you need to grow your brand: depth over width.

What is “Depth over Width?”

It’s a simple philosophy that states: the number of followers you have doesn’t matter. What matters is how engaged they are with you, and how DEEP of relationships you can create with those people.

Take the majority of your energy and focus on creating deep relationships with your current followers.

If you focus on creating real value with those people, then your follower count will grow and consequently—you will have width. By this method, you could have 100,000 Twitter followers who share your content, buy your book, go to your concert, and build you into a real brand.

This is the same principle as Kevin Kelly’s 1000 true fans. 1000 true fans will buy everything you create and will drive for miles just to see you. 1000 true fans who spend $100/year on you will create a lifestyle of $100,000 a year.

Depth over Width is a mindset. Once you start thinking this way, your social followings will explode.

What is “real value?”

Ever heard the phrase, “Cost is what you pay, value is what you receive?”

If people aren’t buying or engaging with you—then you are not adding enough value to the deal. This is the case whether you’re in a business transaction for money, or a transaction for attention.

We’ve heard time and again to “add value” but know one has said exactly how. This is because VALUE is completely subjective. Value can only be defined as helping an individual in some way that is “meaningful and significant.”

Meaningful and Significant.

Meaningful is expressing an emotion or idea without words.

Significant is to be large enough to be noticed or have an effect.

To create real value, we have to express an emotion or idea without words and create a large enough effect to be noticed.

To create real value, we have to express an emotion or idea without words and create a large enough effect to be noticed.

How to add “Real Value” on Social Media.

95% of people are on social media to take. If you don’t believe me, follow 200 random people. Then see how many of them send you an automated direct message that say “like my facebook page, buy my book, here is a free offer for you.” All of these people are “takers.”

They want to take your most precious commodity: your time. They want you to be on their agenda. They want you to sign up to their mailing list, read their blog, buy their product.

I completely get it. They want to grow their business and they need people to join their mailing list, read their blog, and buy their products.

The question now is, “How do you get that to happen without being a taker?” The answer?

Add real value. Do something that is meaningful and significant.

The way you win in social media and in business is to do something different. The goal is to stand out from the noise, be different and innovative and disrupt the normal. That’s how you get attention.

Enough theory, let’s execute on this idea.

Depth over Width on Twitter:

Since we have been using Twitter as our example, this is how you can add real value and create deep relationships with your Twitter audience.

Whenever someone follows you, shares your blog post, likes your Tweet create a personalized native video message JUST FOR THEM. The message is pretty simple. It’s just a: “thanks for the follow, share, like, etc.”

Doing this is meaningful and significant.

It is meaningful because you are saying “I value you so much, that I will take time out of my day to personally thank you.” It is significant because NO ONE ELSE IS DOING IT!

Seriously, I can not stress enough how powerful this tactic is. By doing this, you are focusing on depth over width.

Depth over Width on Instagram:

To create real depth in Instagram, you must leave comments. Instagram is hot right now—blazing inferno type of hot. That means there are tons of people trying to game the system. Those people will leave a comment like “Nice pic”, copy the comment and leave that same comment on 100 other users profiles. They want to put the minimal amount of time in to get you over to follow their account.

To create real depth in Instagram, you first have to make Insta-worthy content. If your account sucks, don’t even try this.

The next part is to leave real comments: about the user, about the photo, or whatever you can. The comment can’t be generic. It must be specific and relevant to the user.

Better yet, send a personalized video to your Instagram followers!

Depth over Width on Pinterest:

Pinterest is one of the few social medias that has no video capability. It is also one of the few social media’s where following a user doesn’t mean jack. You can’t game the system by following and unfollowing. It just doesn’t work.

The way to create real depth in Pinterest is how you engage.

For instance, every few days, I check who is pinning from my website. To do this go to https://www.pinterest.com/source/insertyoururlhere.com/ (https://www.pinterest.com/source/dscience.co/) our page for example.

I then go to each of their pins and thank them for pinning. I make sure to follow them and share their content if I can.

Every time I see someone pin many of our pins, I reach out to them in the messenger system on Pinterest to thank them, personally.

This drives really deep relationships, and usually nets me more repins on my articles. That’s a double whammy!

Depth over Width on Snapchat:

Snapchat not only allows you to send personalized videos to people like Twitter. Snapchat gives you direct access to exactly what is MOST important to them. It shows you what is “valuable” to your audience. It shows you what they do on their free time, and what their hopes, dreams and aspirations are.

Snapchat is an amazing tool to listen to your audience and engage with them on a deep level.

For example, a Snapchat friend (@blakec432) created a new goal to write every single day and blog every single day no matter how much he dislikes it. He set a goal, and is setting out to master writing.

Now…I write every day.

I blog three times every week on our website, and I have a few tips and tricks to writing. Seeing as I could help Blake, I shot him over a bunch of mini videos giving him some tips.This was catered, and personalized content.

What I did, in a matter of 45 seconds is build a DEEP relationship, with a Snapchat user. One who happens to have a lot of social clout in this space. Because I created a piece of content that not only helped him be a more effective writer, it said “you are important, and I support you.”

Depth Over Width on any platform is simply done by having the right mindset.

Instead of trying to figure out how to sell your agenda, you simply look at how you can add real value to someone else’s life. In the end, they naturally will want to give back and join your community, share your content, buy your book, or whatever you need.

Love the strategy? Think there’s more to it!? Let us know in the comments!

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Tony Fadell has had a storied career in Silicon Valley. He grew up in Michigan and took to building things early, thanks to a grandfather who gave him lots of tasks — like changing electrical sockets at the age of four. He became tech savvy, moved to Silicon Valley, and got a job at General Magic, a 1990s company that was trying to beat Microsoft in operating systems and portable hardware. It failed miserably, but Fadell took his ideas for portable hardware first to Philips Electronic and then Apple.

At Apple, Steve Jobs eventually supported Fadell’s attempt to create a music device, and, later, a PC-compatible music device. And so the iPod was born. Fadell’s team created 18 versions of the iPod and helped cement Apple’s turnaround. Then he went on to lead the team that created the first three versions of the iPhone.

In 2010, he and Matt Rogers cofounded Nest Labs, which made the Nest smart thermostat. In 2014, Google acquired Nest for $3.2 billion, and since early 2015, he has been leading Google’s efforts in smart glasses. Fadell now has more than 300 patents, and he wakes up early every day to exercise before heading into a day full of meetings. Las week, we attended the SV Forum Visionary Salon Dinner honoring Fadell for his many accomplishments. He was interviewed on stage by Kevin Surace, CEO of Appvance and chairman of the nonprofit SV Forum.

Here’s an edited transcript of their conversation.

VentureBeat: People attain a certain number of patents, a certain amount of notoriety, and they lose that humility, lose touch with their friends and their community and their office. Tony has never been that way. Tony is the most humble gentleman in technology I’ve ever met. Anyone who knew Tony 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, they’ll tell you, call him and he’ll get back to you. He will help you. He’s there. Very few people will do that. So thank you for being who you are and that side of you.

Tony Fadell: Thank you for saying that, and thank you all for coming out. One of the big reasons I do that is because I believe if I don’t help other people, I’ll miss out. When I started, the lowest guy on the totem pole at General Magic in 1991, I was 22 and just came out here. Everyone around me helped me to get to where I am. It’s all about giving back and helping others. That’s where the greatest value is. It’s not just about building a great company.

When you read that list of accomplishments, the first day was complete and utter failure. It was a ton of work. But what comes around goes around. If you help others, they’re going to help you. That’s why I love the Silicon Valley community. We can build so many successes and do it together.

VB: You were in electronics and computers early on. What drove you to technology as a kid?

Fadell: I didn’t start with electronics, per se. It started with my grandfather. My brother and I, at the ages of three and four, he started us painting walls and pounding nails and building things. Even changing electrical sockets, at four years old. My mom would say, “What are you doing?” The ability to use your mind and your hands and create stuff, that was given to me by him.

That led me to be curious about all kinds of different things around me. And then the Apple II came out. You saw it all around. It was Time Magazine’s person of the year. I’m really dating myself. But that got me saying, “Here’s another thing to be curious about.”

I took a summer school class in third grade. It was bubble cards and a paper printout. Not even a monitor. That’s what got me hooked. That’s where it first started. Then after that, the Apple II and a Tandy. I worked to earn the money to get that first computer. But that’s where it all started. First learning from my grandfather about how to use my hands and then leveraging that to build stuff on computers.

VB: What was it like growing up in Michigan?

Fadell: The thing is, I went to 12 schools in 15 years. I was all around the U.S. In certain times I’d be in Michigan, but other times I was in Texas, New York, all these other places. That was the other thing about technology. I couldn’t play sports, because there’s no way to get on a team when you’re only in the city for a year or two. I kept moving, and so what I brought with me was my Apple II. Then I started communicating with my friends in the cities I left on BBSes with a 300 baud modem. That’s what I had. That became my lifestyle.

All I’d do in my life was those kinds of things. I knew I had to come out here as soon as I got out of college.

VB: People get up every day and say, “Oh, God, another day.” And then the other half go, “Yeah, it’s another day!” When you get up, how do you look at the day? What drives you throughout the day?

Fadell: My day really starts, first and foremost, with some sort of workout. Something around five in the morning, I have to work out for about an hour. Whether it’s yoga or running or lifting. Start there, take the kids to school, and then go right into the first meeting of the day. Sometimes I can’t wait to have that meeting. Other days, “Oh, we’ve got to talk.” But that’s how you start the day. Try to process what you’re going to do.

At night, I go to bed and I’m exhausted, and I just fall asleep. But in the morning, I wake up and I think of all the things that are going to happen today…Whether it’s running or yoga, it’s like moving meditation. I let the thoughts just wash over my brain and think about how to react to the day and come up with some ideas and problem-solve. After that, I’m in meetings with people all day long, just brainstorming, problem-solving, new designs, five days a week.

At night and on the weekends, I can’t stop. My wife says I’m diseased. I can’t stop thinking about fixing problems.

VB: You graduated and came out here to General Magic, at the time. It was one of the first concept IPOs. General Magic went public in 1995 with a billion-dollar valuation. Crazy numbers. They had every partner in Japan, every partner in the U.S. It was an amazing company with an amazing 400 or 500 people. In the end, it didn’t succeed. Could you tell us a bit about those early days, when you were learning about how to bring products to the market, learning how to design computing and handheld products?

Fadell: First I had to get to General Magic. I started a company in high school and college. I always had this yearning, where I felt like the biggest fish in the very smallest pond. I was always trying to learn more, and even at the University of Michigan, I couldn’t get that practical experience of creating companies and knowing who to call if you had an issue. You were all alone. I knew I had to go and work with people who had that experience. I wasn’t getting it at school.

Today, you go to school and you can learn a bit about startups and stuff like that. Back in the day, there was nothing. I wanted to go to a company where I could learn a lot. Where are my heroes? My heroes were at General Magic, because they had the team that created the Macintosh. I wanted to go work with them — Bill Atkinson, Andy Hertzfeld. And so to get in the door at General Magic, it’s like my eyes were wide open.

You knew what kind of software it was, but you didn’t know how to build software, how to test software, how to design software. You didn’t have any of those concepts in college. Every day I was learning. I was working 18- to 20-hour days, because I had to learn and do at the same time. Just trying to keep up. But I had my heroes next to me, and I was trying to impress them. I’d begged for a job, and they gave me a job at $28,000 a year. I was like, “All right! I’m in California!”

I was just scraping by. But to be around those people every day and learning from them about so many aspects of startups. What about the market? The thing you learn very quickly is that you can build anything, given enough time and money. But can you actually sell it? There are some hard lessons we learned at General Magic and beyond about — can you actually sell it? Because it was a disaster, I learned how hard …

VB: What did you learn? What would be two or three takeaways from that project?

Fadell: The first thing was, stick to your milestones, and do not have a project that takes more than a year to a year and a half. You cannot keep the team together longer than that. I look at these civic works projects, like building bridges and stuff, and it takes 10 or 15 years. The team turns over three or four times! But in these kinds of designs, if you go more than a year and a half, it’s taking too long, especially in the Internet age.

It’s hard for me to even convince people to spend a year doing something. A four or five-year project to build a new operating system? Nope. Nowadays it’s hard to plan more than three months out without dedicating to shipping something. But if you want to do something great, that takes more than three months. So make sure you have a really good time schedule and you stick to it and you ship. You need to know what your milestones are, and the team needs to know what your milestones are.

When I joined, the line was, “We’re gonna ship in one year!” And then it was another year and then another. It was a five-year project and it just kept getting bigger and bigger. We kept saying, “We forgot this! We gotta add that!” No, we have to ship. Great artists ship. Even if they’re not perfect, you gotta ship. That’s one of the biggest learnings. We might not have failed if we hadn’t taken so long.

That was one big thing. The other one is, really understand what you’re trying to develop and how you’re going to market. Do that before or while you’re designing. When you’re designing that feature, what’s the tagline? You should have a list of features, but when you communicate with consumers or business owners, you can only tell them about three or four things. You better understand what those things are. That’s all you need to focus on. All the other stuff, no one’s ever going to get around to selling it.

General Magic’s device had everything in it. It had mobile email. It had downloadable games and shopping and all kinds of different stuff. This was in 1994. We all understand what that is now, but then? It took four hours to explain to people! “That looks really cool. I don’t know if I need it.” And because it was 1994, there was one major thing that was missing, too, which was coming in 1995. We call it the Internet. Instead we had the whole proprietary network with AT&T.

So when they finally launched the product, Netscape went public around the same time, and they didn’t talk to each other. We were the biggest concept IPO to date, and then the very next concept IPO after that? Netscape. Netscape took off and we just got buried.

VB: Turns out the Internet was a pretty good bet. So you got some learning out of General Magic, and then you went on to Philips. Tell us about what you did there and what you learned from a big company.

Fadell: Just back then, it was 375,000 people at Philips. So how did this all happen? Philips was actually a licensee of the General Magic technology. I had been working with those teams to help build chips and possibly devices and all these other things with Philips.

General Magic was an utter failure. I saw it happen. We shipped the device and no one cared. We thought, “Oh my God, we have to design some other device.” So I started designing a device I thought was the right thing. I showed it to Andy and Milton and Anna, and they said, “That’s really nice, but that’s not what we’re going to do right now. We have to do this other thing right now.” I thought, “Why? This is the thing!”

I knew in my heart that we were going to fail here. So I went to go build a device, a General Magic-based device, and do it in the right way and convince General Magic that they had to support it. I went to the CEO of Philips and pitched him this idea. 25 years old. I had never done anything like this before. I was just an individual contributor, an engineer. I pitched him this thing and he said, “This is great! Now we’re going to hire you and I want you to build it.”

So be careful what you wish for. The next 48 hours of my life, I was crumpled up in a corner thinking, “What did I just do?” But we came out with a critically successful device. It wasn’t a market success, not a business success, but the critics all loved it. It was a pocket computer with a keyboard and mobile email. It used Windows CE back in the day, because General Magic had failed by then, and it turned out pretty well for Philips. But again, you can build anything. Can you sell it?

The sales teams, the marketing teams at Philips, we didn’t own those teams. They just wanted to sell TVs. It was nothing like a startup. But now where’s Philips today? It’s less than 40,000 people now. They’ve sold off everything. It’s a fraction of a company, and now they’re actually going to get rid of lighting, the whole reason for them being. They’ll be a 20,000-person company. Huge change.

VB: Let’s move on to Apple. What took you from Philips to Apple?

Fadell: I went to go and work for RealNetworks for six weeks. Then I said, “I hate this. I’m gonna start my own company.” It was the very beginning of digital imaging. This was in 1998. I was a DJ at the time. I hated carrying around all my CDs. I wanted to carry around one box with me that had all of my music on it. We were creating, at this startup company called Fuse, a CD ripper. You’d put a CD in it and then it would put it on a big hard drive. It looked like a stereo. We were building that. That was the initial thing. I wanted to build this cool music jukebox.

Then the Internet crunch happened. The bottom fell out of everything. A hardware startup doing digital music? “I want software only! I don’t want hardware! Hardware’s over!” I went to 80 VCs, did 80 pitches, and got turned down 80 times. You have no idea how hard it was. Nobody was opening their wallets. They didn’t want anything to do with what we had.

Ironically, when we couldn’t get any more money, I got a phone call from Apple saying, “Hey, come on in. We want to talk to you.” It turned out to be, we have iTunes, we’re making mix CDs, and these MP3 players out there are really bad. We think there’s a way to make an Apple version. Come on as a consultant for eight weeks, see what you can design, and we’ll see what we like. That was it.

VB: Eight weeks turned into …

Fadell: Eight weeks turned into 10 years and 18 generations of iPods and three generations of iPhone. Apple was crazy.

VB: When you go to launch the iPod, this was a moment in time when Apple was not quite failing, but a challenged company.

Fadell: The company had $500 million in debt, $250 million in the bank, and less than one percent U.S. market share. There was nothing left to sell.

VB: You’re there, Steve’s back, and Steve supported this. He had this idea to support a music player. At some level, any rational board would say, “Your company is about to die. You have tons of debt. You have no market share. And you’re going to come up with the 50th MP3 player in the world?” Any rational board would fire the CEO. It was a very unique time when a CEO could get away with doing absolutely ludicrous things by most standards.

Fadell: It was crazy. I’d go around to other people in the company because I needed their help. Jack Williams, the COO, he was in one of the very first meetings I was in. I didn’t know who he was. I turned to him and said, “I need you to do this.” He said, “What is this?” “I’m making this music player!” No one believed it. People did not believe it. We’re fighting for our lives here. What are we doing with this little toy? That’s what it looked like.

VB: No one else had had huge success.

Fadell: The market was littered with junk. I almost didn’t take the job. We had the General Magic tale. We had the Philips tale. I turned to Steve and said, “We can build anything. Give it enough time and money. But how can you guarantee to me that you can sell and market it? Look at Sony. They own every audio category. How do we go up against that?” He said to me, “Look. You make it, and I guarantee I’ll use every marketing dollar I’ve got. I’ll starve the Mac to do it.” I said, “Okay, you do what you want.” He was really passionate about it.

He was crazy. It wasn’t just me. I had to hire a team. I had to convince them to come to this dying company that might get shut down at any time. Most of the other people in the company didn’t believe in it. It was quite extraordinary.

VB: How did you feel the week of launch?

Fadell: It was interesting. I’ve been on the stand, because the lawsuits, the trials over the iPod, the infringement… You know you have a success because everyone sues you. That’s what always happens. I’m on the stand and this attorney comes up and says, “You knew this was going to be a success! You absolutely knew this was going to be successful!” I’m like, “No, I did not.” Look, dude, after a decade of failures, I was hoping it was successful, but I was tempered. I understood. I’d seen so much failure. I had no idea.

At General Magic, we all inhaled our own exhaust. All the press were saying we were going to take down Microsoft.

VB: Well, General Magic had a bit of the Google play. You had the great operating system and a great hardware design and you could license it to the entire world. How would you not be successful? Turns out to be the wrong place at the wrong time. Hardware wasn’t fast enough. No Internet. Everything.

Fadell: Being a kid, being in my 20s, I believed all that. I knew it was going to be successful! Everyone said it was going to be successful! Then, with the iPod, I’m not breathing anything. I’m not listening to anything. I hope I’ll do a good job, but that’s it.

VB: When did you finally wake up and realize it was a success?

Fadell: It took two and a half years. Really. The first one was awesome. Every Mac owner bought it. But there weren’t many Mac owners! Then, flatline. This is where the arm-wrestling happened with Steve. I had a team making it compatible with the PC and Steve’s like, “OVER MY DEAD BODY! Never! We need to sell Macs! This is going to be why people buy Macs!” I said, “Steve, the iPod is $399. But really it’s not. Because you have to buy a Mac!” We had to give people a taste.

We had this knock down, drag out battle. We’re all sitting around and saying, “Look, Steve, we need to get this on the PC. That’s where the biggest set of people are.” And even Bill Gates goes, “Why did you decide to put it on the PC?”

VB: Who said it first? Because I have to imagine, if you say that when Steve’s in the room, a frying pan comes flying at you.

Fadell: The way this normally works is, you have a little pre-meeting before the meeting with Steve. I’m gonna say this, then you say this, then you say that. Sometimes it works. That time, though, everyone got scared. We showed up and I’m like, “Who’s gonna take the first step?” Everyone’s shutting up.

This time, though, I think it was Bill Schiller who said, “We gotta get this thing on the PC!” And I’m like, “Yeah, I’ll get the team working on it!” We let it sink in. This was like the fourth time it had come up, and he hadn’t wanted to hear it. But enough quarters had passed with nothing really happening. Like I say, it was a critical success, but not a business success.

He finally said, “Okay. But under one condition. We’re going to build these and run it by Mossberg. And if Mossberg says it’s good enough to ship, then we’ll ship it.” He wanted to divorce himself from having to make the decision. But Walt said, “Not bad. I’d ship it.” That’s how we actually shipped on the PC.

VB: What happened to sales after the PC? Straight up.

Fadell: Straight up. And then what happened was Mac sales started taking off. People got a taste of Apple. It was good on a PC, but it was great on a Mac, so let’s go get a Mac. That was the drug, like people talk about the gaming drug.

VB: I remember iTunes entering, because it was controversial for a computer company to do all these deals with the music labels. Then we had other crazy thing, because music was free at that point. You’d get it from Napster or whatever, steal it. This idea of charging 99 cents a song …

Fadell: It was the convenience. People would pay for that.

VB: So where did iTunes enter into this, both on Mac and PC, so that it all worked?

Fadell: At the beginning, the reason why the iPod was needed — revisionist history, you know, everyone goes back and thinks there was a grand master plan at Apple. There was no master plan. We were living day to day. We started with iTunes, so you can rip CDs and make mix CDs. Then people want something more than a CD, something convenient to put their music on. Then they’re ripping CDs to get their music, so there has to be a better way. That was when digital downloads and then iTunes Music Store happened.

It was this continuum of hit a wall, fix it, hit a wall, fix it. That’s how it all came together.

VB: In the midst of that, somewhere along the line, you decided to take this concept, build more of an OS, add communication, and you have a phone.

Fadell: It wasn’t that easy.

VB: At that point a computer company building a phone was unheard of. Phones were from Nokia and Ericsson and other people. How did you get from a music player to a phone?

Fadell: We had the music player doing video and audio and photo. We had iTunes. Then futurephones came out. They started playing MP3. This is a holy shit moment. Phones could steal everything we were doing. What could we do to counter this?

The first idea was to do a deal with Motorola called the Rocker and put music on a phone and see if we could get iTunes there. We tried to hold those guys at bay. It was a complete disaster. We knew we’d have to build our own phone.

Everybody in the futurephone world was trying to crank out as many phones as they could every year. Samsung had a different model of phone every day. Each carrier had its own set of rules. It wasn’t about the consumer. It was about what you could sell to the carriers. The Rocker was poorly designed. There was no way we could work with another company and get the right experience.

We started out by making an iPod phone. It was an iPod with a phone module inside it. It looked like an iPod, but it had a phone, and you would select numbers through the same interface and so on. But if you wanted to dial a number it was like using a rotary dial. It sucked. We knew three months in that it wasn’t going to work. Steve said, “Keep trying!” We tried everything. We tried for seven or eight months to get that thing to work. Couldn’t do it. We added more buttons and it just became this gangly thing.

That was the iPod phone. At the same time, we were trying to build a touchscreen Mac. We were also trying to do better video on an iPod. We had a real screen, but people didn’t like to watch videos on their iPod. So how can we get a really big screen, but not have the click wheel involved? Instantly, we knew we needed a virtual interface on top of a phone. We wanted to make this touch Mac, and we knew the iPod phone wouldn’t work, but we knew we needed to make a phone.

Steve’s like, “Come over here!” I didn’t know about this at the time, but he showed me a ping-pong table that was the first multi-touch screen. It was a ping-pong-sized table. It had a projector of a Mac on top of it, and you could interact with it. He said, “We’re going to put that in an iPod!” “Steve, it’s the size of a ping-pong table!”

In the end it was clear that we needed to build a phone, and we needed to build a touch screen company on top of it. That’s exactly what we did. We created a touch screen company to build the multi-touch display. Then we needed a better operating system, so we brought a bunch of pieces of the Mac, a bunch of pieces of the iPod, and bolted them together. That was the first version. Then we threw that away and made the second version of the iPhone. That was the one that shipped. It took two and a half to three years, depending on how you count it up, from the time we said we needed to do a phone to the time we actually shipped.

I told you that three months is what people want. Good luck trying two and a half or three years and keeping people together at such intensity. People asked me why we didn’t just buy a cell phone company and use them to help build the phone. But we weren’t making a cell phone with a little bit of music technology. We were building a computer with a little bit of cell phone in it. We had to start with a handheld computer team and add a little bit of the cellular thinking. Not the other way around, which was the way all the cell phone companies were trying to do it.

VB: The iPhone launches. I’m sure you were wondering if anyone would buy a phone from Apple. It was a very big secret until it launched. When did you finally realize that was a success, a change-the-world success?

Fadell: The second generation. The first one was a lot of learning. We had the wrong business model with carriers. We didn’t have apps yet. It was our first learning device. The second one was where it took off, because the carriers could subsidize it. We had the right carriers. We had apps. It was so powerful.

The thing is, a lot of times … back in 2005, 2006, 2007, Blackberries were everywhere. At Apple, we didn’t use Blackberries. We didn’t have any mobile stuff. But as soon as we had the iPhone, you could see the entire company transform. Overnight. Everyone was using them. That was very different. They couldn’t put them down. That told us to invest more, invest more, do whatever it takes.

VB: You saw that once you saw it among yourselves.

Fadell: Oh yeah, we all saw it.

VB: You waited a little bit and you started Nest. Tell us about that.

Fadell: My wife and I, we had two young kids, and we took a year off and traveled around the world with them. We just wanted to spend time with them. We lived in these houses for two months or three months around the world, and we were building a house in Tahoe at the same time. I was encountering certain problems around building this green, connected house.

I thought the world was going to change when your interface with the world was in your hands all the time. As we went from place to place, and I’m using email and designing this house online and everything else, I’m also seeing the same problems in all these homes. We were in Spain and France and Hawaii and here. All the homes had the same exact problems. They’re not green. The thermostats suck. The smoke detectors suck. Everybody had these problems. I thought they were just U.S. problems, but in fact they were everywhere.

The volume of smartphones was taking off. The prices of components were dropping dramatically. We could start to use these components in all these different devices in the home. What’s the first and best one to do? It’s the thermostat. That’s where it hit me. I had been spending 10 years just trying to control the thermostat in our house in Lake Tahoe. I spent hours and hours cobbling these things together and they never worked. I finally decided to make one for me.

I needed it to be green. It should turn off when you’re not home. It should be able to learn your preferences. That’s what happened. There was a need.

VB: It seemed like an easy thing and it turned out to be a lot harder than you thought.

Fadell: Way harder. Getting it to connect to 50-year-old furnaces … When you’re trying to get the thermostat to talk to all of this old equipment, there are no standards. There’s nothing. It’s ancient. Then to have it talk to the Internet and make it low power so you don’t have to run wires to it … all these are difficult problems. If I’d known then what I knew after it was done, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I said the same thing about smoke detectors. You have no idea how hard those are.

Each time, ignorance is bliss. We didn’t know enough about the markets, but we got in.

VB: What did you take away from the Nest experience so far? You had some great product successes and the company was acquired by Google. What did you learn?

Fadell: That even the most unloved, most ignored, most despised thing in the world, you can reinvent it and make people love it. You can change the way people think about something by putting all your love and passion into it. Not just the product, but the marketing and everything else. This is what I learned from Steve. If you lead it and put your heart and soul into it, and you can sell it because you know every single bit of it, that will resonate with people, because you’re solving problems both for yourself and for a lot of other people who see the same thing.

If you do that, you will be rewarded. You take a risk. You take that unloved thing and reinvent it. People will come, and they’ll follow you. It will build a movement if it’s done right.

VB: Were there other people interested in buying the company at the time?

Fadell: Yeah, there were others interested in buying, but a lot of others just wanted us to keep on going. It was designed that way. I designed it so we were running both tracks. You always want leverage. We wanted to have every option available to us. We wanted to make sure we made the right decision.

VB: I know we can’t talk about specific projects you’re working on right now — one of the biggest things that was shown recently from several companies was VR and AR. The technology is coming along. We’re not as able to talk about content so much. But what is your vision of where that goes?

Fadell: Truth be told, I started working on VR at the University of Michigan. I went to the very first cyber-posium in San Francisco in 1989, before General Magic. I’ve seen the wave of hype around VR twice already in my lifetime. To see it again … We’re just at the cusp now, the early Apple II days, or the early General Magic days for the iPhone —  10 years too soon. It’s going to happen. But there are so many tools, so many technologies, so many things that still need to get built.

I’ve seen compelling use cases for AR and VR in industry, in virtual activities, in medical. I see a lot of it. I see a lot of consumer possibilities. But we’re still in the very early stages. Some people will tell you otherwise, but you see the prices of what’s going on with Oculus today. Everybody thinks that all of a sudden, it’ll take off. When the iPhone came out it was $700. Certain people could use it, but a lot of people couldn’t get access to it. Now, eight years later, everyone can have one.

We’re in those stages with VR and AR today. It’s going to continue. We need to learn so many things. For me to tell you what I think it’s going to look like, I really don’t know. But I do see that there are tangible applications for it. I just don’t think the way we think of it today …There won’t be all these fun-and-games kinds of things. There’s a lot of real work that will accomplished with this – medical, manufacturing, construction. That will be more important than consumer applications, which is different from the way people are thinking about it now.

VB: You worked for many different bosses, including Steve and Larry, two very different people. How would you describe their management styles?

Fadell: Larry’s an incredible scientist and technologist. He respects product and is fascinated by product. Steve is an incredible marketer who loves product and wasn’t necessarily so involved in technology. They come from very different places. Larry has more of a research background — small teams thinking about things but not necessarily all the business concepts. Steve was all the marketing and all business. It’s very different. Not that either one’s bad or good, but they’re very different.

I’m a product guy. I love technology, but I’m not a guy who’s going to sit in a lab and be a scientist. I love marketing, but marketing is not the only thing I do. I leave a lot to marketing experts. I sit in the middle. The style is very different, because one is about how far you can push the technology, thinking about 10 years out. The other is about the two things you really need to do and marketing them exactly right and getting them out the door to do great business. It’s two different ways of thinking and approaching a problem.

VB: The Steve movie created a lot of controversy. Some people say that’s kind of him. Others say it’s not him at all. What are your thoughts?

Fadell: I didn’t see the movie. I didn’t need to. I lived it. Steve was an amazing guy. He was a human. He had amazing talents, and he also had drawbacks. I would never change my working for him or my history at all. I don’t regret it in any way.

What happens is, a lot of the negative stuff that comes across in books and movies and wherever else … What I’ve always found with Steve is that the people who talk negatively about the experience they had with him, it’s because either, one, they couldn’t keep up, or two, they didn’t bring their best to the table and he saw that, or three, they thought he was in the way. They thought they should be Steve, that they had the idea that they deserved more credit for. All the people who complain in the books, it’s usually one of those three reasons.

The ones who saw the benefits of Steve, they’ll say, “He was a balanced person. He wasn’t always perfect. But he was an amazing genius at the same time.” His style was amazing for the right people around him. If you were not the right person, you got [not sure of the punch line here – 57:05]. Which you could have. It’s just sour grapes.

VB: A lot of work is going on in AI and robotics now. A lot of people are afraid of AI and robotics. What are your thoughts?

Fadell: We made robots every day at Nest. Our thermostats were robots. Everybody thinks of a robot as being this humanoid-looking thing like Boston Dynamics, which are fascinating. They’re wonderful. They’re really cool, like science fiction coming alive. But we have robots all around us. We just don’t call them that.

I believe there’s so much we can do with computers as intelligent assistants. Everyone knows AI. Artificial intelligence. Human replacements. But then there’s IA, which is intelligent assistants. Augmenting humans and making us better with computers. I’m much more a believer in IA than AI.

I’m not scared like some fearmongers are. The AI we have is really good at logic, but it’s horrible at emotions. It’s horrible at gut instincts. I have not seen a computer be creative like a human can be creative because it’s not about logic. It’s creativity. If you’ve never read the book by Dave O’Connor, Thinking Fast and Slow, it’ll teach you a lot about what we can and can’t do with AI and how we think every day.

There are two systems in our brains that O’Connor talks about. We only know how to use one of those with a computer. We don’t know how to use the other. We have to use both of them to make the creative leaps that happen in our society. So yes, I think logical AI and IA assistants are going to help us get more in touch with our guts because we’ll be able to run more logical models that help us find the next global maximum instead of getting stuck.

VB: How did you recruit, motivate, and win the respect of people smarter than you? Assuming there are people smarter than you.

Fadell: There are a lot of them! First and foremost, it’s that passion and vision. It’s being able to tap into that and communicate it to people, whether they’re a marketer or a technologist or a customer support person, or whoever they may be. You make sure they understand the mission. You’re going to do something that’s bigger than yourself. You’re going to do it together with these people. Here’s the reason why.

It’s not about the latest game or social network. We’re going to save energy. We’re going to turn things around in the home with these kinds of things. You sell them based on that. Then you ask what they can bring to the table, how they can help. They see in that vision, through that vision, what they can bring to augment it and make it better. The more you communicate that vision, the more ideas you get from other people, and the more they’re going to believe in it. And not just believe in it, but own it.

That’s another big difference between Steve and Larry. For Steve, most of the ideas, whether they were his or not, were his. It worked. But it didn’t always work. We didn’t really feel good sometimes. But the big thing is, when you give someone your mission and they have an idea, call it out. Say, “That’s an amazing idea! That’s awesome! We gotta do that!” The more you make people own that mission – not just assume the mission from someone else, but own the mission – the more you get done.

VB: What’s the greatest lesson you learned from your biggest failure?

Fadell: I mentioned the one from General Magic, which is setting a time limit. People need to see something. That’s one thing. The other big one is making sure that wherever you start, when you get to milestone break, either you ship it, or you learn so much that you know how you’re going to continue to a new direction off that. At Philips, one out of 10 products that was in design made it to market. Imagine what the teams were like. They’re getting assigned to a product, and they know there’s a 90 percent chance that product is going to get killed. No one was passionate.

At Apple, 99 percent of everything that was started would ship. Now, with the iPhone it took two and a half versions to finally ship it, but you knew it was going to ship. That’s a very different thing in your culture. If people know it’s going to ship, they invest in it. If you have a culture where you kill stuff all the time, you won’t get the best out of your people, and the best people are going to walk.

VB: How are you innovating around security?

Fadell: We’re using all kinds of new hardware techniques, software techniques, all those kinds of things. I’m not saying we have a new technology. It’s just applying it appropriately and making sure we test it, making sure we have the right teams testing those things, and communicating what we do to the consumer so we can earn their trust.

We’re not going to get it right 100 percent of the time. There’s no such thing as perfect. But it’s also knowing that you’re there to fix it immediately if something does happen. There was a big glibc thing that happened last week. We had fixed it. We found it and fixed it four weeks earlier before it hit the rest of the world. When it hit it was already done. It’s having that kind of diligence. That’s what people trust. Yes, there will be problems, but will you catch them and fix them and address them?

We’ve applied all the best technology we can, applied the best processes, but nothing today is secure. Absolutely nothing. I don’t know how we’re going to get past it except for the fact that we have a team, and we fix things when problems arise.

VB: Is it true that when you worked at the Country Club of Detroit, the caddymaster — I don’t know how someone knows this — told you that you couldn’t hit or find a golf ball to save your life and suggested you enter the foreign service?

Fadell: Yeah. This story has to be from Jim over there. We went to the same high school and worked at the same country club. He was a tennis instructor and I was a caddy, much lower on the totem pole. But yes, I couldn’t hit a ball to save my life.

VB: Should tech companies build automobiles?

Fadell: Automobiles … Remember the analogy I just made about cell phones and the iPhone? It’s a computer with a phone in it. Guess what? Cars, especially self-driving cars, are increasingly computers with a bit of a motor to provide the battery. If anyone thinks that tech companies can’t do this, you’re crazy. The auto companies are really worried.

In the ‘40s and ‘50s, that’s how Motorola got started. They were all about putting radios in cars. The car manufacturers wanted nothing to do with electronics. They wanted to outsource it. They just wanted to build carburetors and engines and wheels and brakes and style. The thing is, the technologies that become competitive differentiators aren’t going to have anything to do with sheet metal or drivetrain in the future. It’s all going to be about self-driving and those kinds of things. Tech companies can dramatically change the innovation tool sets that they have today.

They’ve been outsourcing it for years. I don’t know how the auto companies are going to do what they think they’re going to do, because this is a new era of computers with wheels.

VB: The electronic calculator was the end of the mechanical calculator. The mechanical calculator companies had absolutely no ability to compete, not any of the skill set. Do you see this being that kind of disruptive change?

Fadell: Yeah. It’s that big. It’s that disruptive. If you look at the contents of a car, the building materials, the amount of sensors and computing and all those things, it’s going to fully go in that direction where 70 percent of what you build, outside of the batteries, is the computing infrastructure. The Ford board was just asking me the same question. [punch line drowned out by cough – 107:30] You could see the fear in their eyes. Oh boy. But yeah, should tech companies make and sell cars? Yeah, they should. And I’m from Detroit. I hope the car companies win out. Detroit is trying to come back up.

VB: What leadership lessons, bringing people together, leading them to terrific products, would you leave to this audience today?

Fadell: I talked about mission and getting people on the team. But it’s not just keeping people on the team. It’s keeping them engaged and moving ahead all the time. The other one is, I’m from the old school of leadership, which is to lead by doing. Be involved.

A lot of people tend to say, “Let the team figure it out!” I think that even though that seems appealing, most of the younger people who really want to learn, they want to learn. They want to be mentored. You need to be there to mentor them and go through these things. They can’t just be learning by themselves. They need leadership. They need mentoring.

I try to bring a lot of young people onto a team, but also to invest in them. Now, some of them walk out the door because they don’t have a lot of commitment to you. It’s a little different now with the Tinder generation. But there are a lot of people coming from other countries, from other perspectives, they’re just happy to be there. They want to be mentored. They want to learn. Those are the ones that we invest in. We give them a lot of leadership courses. We have them be part of the design phase, part of the design sessions, even though they might be an individual contributor on this part, to make sure they can learn about all these different things and make them multidisciplinary.

If they have a mission and they’re growing themselves and they’re doing something really positive that they can invest in, that’s when the relationship builds with that person. Not just with that company, but the company after that. These people are going to be the next leaders of the Silicon Valley. Hold people to high standards, but invest in them.

When top sales managers are asked what advice they would give to someone wanting to improve their coaching, a pervasive answer is – stop trying to teach your sales team and start trying to help them learn.

This is hardly new news. Back in the day, 400 BC, Socrates is reported to have said to one of his Athenian colleagues – “I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.”

Now, history is unclear as to whether he was chatting with an aspiring salesperson. Whatever the case, the point still holds. Great teachers and coaches withhold their opinions and solutions because they recognize, in the end, the best ideas often come from the person on the other side of table.

As one sales manager put it, “Effective coaches ask, listen, and then tell.” The simple but powerful idea of ask, listen, and then tell applies across a wide spectrum of coaching situations – from call debriefs in the field to one-on-one sales strategy coaching sessions.

Like most good ideas – ask, listen, and then tell is easy to say, but not so easy to do. Believing in the power of the idea is the first step, but execution requires developing the skill set to ask the right questions.

A good starting point is developing a shared vision with the sales rep as to the purpose of a sales coaching session.

Sales managers should ask questions that help salespeople generate an awareness and self-assessment of strengths and weaknesses and expand options for improvement – help them think versus simply telling them you should do more of this and less of that.

Being clear about purpose is important, because there is a difference between the type of questions one asks to solicit information and questions that help an individual expand their awareness and options. For example, when attempting to expand awareness, questions like, “Why are you planning to take a basic refresher in negotiation skills?” are of limited value in broadening the other person’s perspective.

In fact, “why” questions like these tend to beg justification and usually generate defensiveness. To expand awareness, a more helpful question might be, “What new skills do you think you need to grow your sales revenue next year?”

In general, the most effective coaching questions are ones that raise awareness – beginning with words like: What, When, Where or Who.

Questions that begin with Why or How are likely to be less effective because they often put the person being coached in a defensive position since they imply a right or wrong answer.

12 Questions Sales Managers Might Ask

What are some specific questions that might generate awareness and expand options? The best questions are open-ended and are intended to help salespeople gain a broader perspective. They help salespeople assess where they are and what they should do next. Some examples are:

• What if that doesn’t work?
• What did you do that was particularly effective?
• What do you think was the customer’s reaction to that?
• What did you have the most difficulty with?
• If you could do it over again, what would you do differently?
• Do you think that will be true in the future?
• What is your assessment of our chances?
• What other options could you pursue?
• Could you share an example of that?
• What will happen if you continue to do what you’re doing?
• What do you need to do to make that happen?
• What could you do to parlay your greatest strength?

Successful Sales Coaching and Accountability

One more significant purpose of using questions in sales coaching has to do with accountability. The purpose of sales coaching is not only to help salespeople improve their skills – the ultimate measure of the success of any sales coaching relationship is whether it drives business results. To accomplish this, accountability must be an integral part of the sales coaching relationship. 
Four questions that can help establish that accountability are:

1. What will you do?
2. When will you do it?
3. What support do you need?
4. What is the best measure that you have done it?

Sales coaching is a vital piece of the puzzle if your objective is to develop a world-class sales team. A great recommendation for developing better sales coaching skills is to: ask more than tell, and listen more than talk. Getting better at asking the right questions is one of the important skill sets for applying this concept.

Sweden's economy is on a massive tear, but for the country's central bank, that's actually pretty awful news.

Sweden's economy grew by 4.5% on an annual basis during the fourth quarter of 2015, according to figures published on Monday.

That's far ahead of the expected 3.6%, and well above the 4.1% figure from Q3 last year.

On a quarterly basis, GDP grew 1.3%, nearly double the 0.7% expected by economists, and once again, well ahead of Q3's number.

On the surface, a major, well-established Western economy growing by 4.5% in a year is absolutely fantastic, but for Sweden, and its central bank, the Riksbank, that's not necessarily the case, and its all to do with inflation.

The stellar GDP numbers have sent Sweden's krona soaring against the euro on Monday morning. The krona is up by nearly 0.5% against the euro so far today. Here's how that looks:

The bank is incredibly worried about the inflationary impacts of a strong kroner, saying in January that "the value of the Swedish krona in relation to the most important currencies is an important factor in assessing inflation. A rapid strengthening of the krona may therefore need to be counteracted by an even more expansionary monetary policy."

Essentially, the bank doesn't want the kroner to increase in value— at least until 2% inflation has been reached — and is prepared to intervene to stop it doing so. High inflation is a fair way away, given that right now it sits at just 0.8%. 

The logic behind using a low valued krona to boost inflation is simple. Generally speaking, weak currencies lead to cheaper exports and more expensive imports. Cheaper exports increase competitiveness, therefore boosting demand and helping to stimulate inflation. Likewise, expensive imports generally help to push inflation upwards.

The Riksbank has, as asset management firm GAM puts it, an "obsession with inflation" with virtually everything the bank does geared towards bumping up inflation in the country.

In its quest to grow inflation, the Riksbank was one of the first central banks globally to push base interest rates into negative territory, something that until recently, looked to have totally failed to help inflation.

The country has been steadily cutting rates since going negative in February 2015, and currently stands at -0.5%.

But the latest numbers, released on February 18th, showed inflation at 0.8%. This marked a first increase in more than a year, and a substantial movement towards the Riksbank's 2% target.

That jump was something of a boon for believers in negative interest rates, which have consistently been touted as having failed in their purpose so far. HSBC, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch have all pretty much said that negative rates have failed, and Business Insider's Jim Edwards recently called the negative rate experiment a "devastating intellectual defeat for conservatives."

Join the conversation about this story »

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  I’m always amazed at the number of salespeople who don’t ask for referrals. You can ask for referrals any time you demonstrate value!  Yes, any time! And the more you discipline yourself to do this, the stronger and fuller your pipeline will be. Check out the video to see what I mean:       […]

Are you a B2B company struggling with customer experience challenges?

When I go to customer experience conferences, B2B companies are under-represented, both in attendees and speakers. When clients look for benchmark data, B2B reports are few and far between.

Those are just a few examples of why I wanted to revisit a question I posed in a post I wrote two years ago: If you work for a B2B company, is customer experience still an important focus? In short, yes.

Clearly, there are differences between B2B companies and customers and their counterparts on the B2C side. There are other differences, too: different challenges, different approaches, different personas, different stakeholders, different customers (partners vs. end-users), and different desired outcomes. The B2B customer experience proves to have its complexities. But that doesn’t mean we should throw our hands up and ignore this important business type and its customers.

I think B2B companies clearly need more guidance than they’ve been getting about how to address the customer experience challenges and how to become customer experience leaders. It can be done! So it was interesting to see the findings of some research that Accenture published in their report, Managing the B2B Customer Experience. They’ve got some thought-provoking findings, starting with some of the outcomes they uncovered…

• Only 23 percent of B2B companies achieve strong returns from their customer experience initiatives.
• 20 percent (despite stating customer experience’s importance) generate low or even negative returns.
• 57 percent are in the middle, idling in customer experience mediocrity. They lack a sound customer experience strategy and/or the ability to execute well.

Something’s missing here. They know that: B2B companies that consistently and significantly outperform their peers stand apart by having both strong strategies and execution capabilities.

What’s the strategy? And can you execute? Accenture has identified three key areas on which B2B companies need to focus:

1. Start from the back… to get to the front
Leaders don’t view service as a separate and final phase of the customer lifecycle. They combine product and service to drive outcome-based growth.

For B2B customer experience leaders, the customer service touchpoint is the most important point in the customer experience lifecycle. They also know they will need to redesign and reinvent the service and support experiences to keep up with customer expectations. Accenture notes that, for customer experience leaders, service has been repositioned as: (1) the gateway to the outcome economy, (2) a channel for proactive engagement, and (3) the new sales.

2. Over-invest in traditional
Leaders invest twice as much as their peers in offline capabilities such as contact centers, field service processes and tools, and legacy CRM systems.

Leaders understand that traditional, offline channels are critical. They invest double their peers in traditional post-sales capabilities, e.g., contact centers, field service processes and tools, service talent development, etc. And they believe they need to have the right people, tools, and resources to achieve their customer experience objectives.

3. Over-invest in digital
Leaders devote two-thirds of their customer experience budgets to digital. But these investments aren’t made in isolation. Digital augments physical experiences to deliver omnichannel customer experiences that customers notice and value.

B2B customer experience leaders believe their digital investments will positively affect customer interactions and translate into a competitive advantage.

Accenture wrapped up the report with some key differentiators of B2B customer experience leaders:

• Rather than improving experiences to reduce costs or to keep up with peers, they capture new revenue with products, services, and business models that customers notice and value.
• Rather than taking a broad approach to investing or allocating resources, they identify, understand, and continually improve their strengths and spend wisely.
• Rather than waiting to be disrupted, they use customer experience to produce disruption and growth.

Definitely an interesting report. If you work for a B2B company, which of the three key areas above has your company adopted?

In the age of the customer, executives don’t decide how customer-centric their companies are — customers do. -Kate Leggett

Image courtesy of Thomson Data LLC

It takes more than just a fancy name and awesome services/products to develop the kind of lead generation required to skyrocket your brand as the next billion-dollar company. With traditional cold-calling running out of style and a push for inbound marketing on the rise for the past decade or so, it’s all come down to content capable of bringing in leads.

Not every brand has an access to the same kind of content, and even then, not all forms of content will be entirely successful. You want to be able to implement the kind of content that not only performs well, but consistently.

Today, we’ve rounded up some of the best lead generation ideas available out there that you could integrate into your marketing strategy; seven to be exact. Several of them you might be familiar with already, but there just may be a few that you might not have ever considered before.

Let’s dive right in.

1. Newsletters

If newspapers are still in circulation today, then by golly their digital counterparts should be just as effective online. The newsletter is one of the most common ways to generate leads. Most websites today automate popups within a few seconds after stepping foot on their landing page, prompting you to subscribe to a weekly update. It’s simple, yet effective, but at the same time something that we aren’t already well-acquainted with.

If you’re looking to play it safe, offering the idea of keeping your audience updated via newsletters is a good way to grow your email list. Newsletters establish a captive audience, and there’s nothing wrong with setting up some email pathways. The intensity of how often you send out these newsletters will range from frequent (every single day at a set time) or infrequent (at least once a week on a specific day and time).

How effective your newsletters are will be based on how valuable content you can provide and how good your headlines are. If you regularly put out brand new information every single day, keep your audience updated with frequent emails including your newsletter. If you want to round up all of the best information you’ve provided throughout a week, send a weekly newsletter to highlight all of that.

The best recipients are the ones most interested in your brand or topics your brand already covers. Relevant topics about your brand will keep your audience engaged, and your leads warm. Using plain email is fine, but most email marketers today will utilize HTML to add a little bit of flare to their automated newsletters. Consider what works best for the kind of audience that you’re catering to.

This also doesn’t mean you should restrict yourself to newsletters alone, though. It’s more than feasible to tie in newsletters with other forms of content to increase the amount of value you’re willing to provide for leads. You should make an effort to drive newsletter signups whenever possible.

2. Blog Posts

Going off the notion of pairing content together, blog posts and newsletters pretty much go hand in hand. You can easily include new articles in your newsletter. Heck, the entire newsletter could be a compilation of all blog posts published that week or month!

Blog posts are a brand’s way of relaying any and all kinds of information to the undivided attention of their audience. Of course, it would be a good idea to place an emphasis on what the brand is up to, but touching base on other trending topics keeps things fun and interesting.

With marketing automation, increasing visibility on your articles gets even easier. If you’re looking to generate leads with your post, be sure to bring your A-game. If you deliver fresh, new content without having to rehash anything that’s already posted online, you’re sure to bring in a new crowd every time. Ask them to sign up so that they’ll be alerted every time a new post goes live. Be consistent, and the lead flow will do the same over time.

3. eBooks

So far, both ideas we’ve looked at for lead generation are related to one another, and ebooks are no exception. If you’re going to write an extremely long blog post that breaches the 5,000-word mark, go ahead and turn that into an ebook for your active audience. As with pairing content with more content, feel free to offer your ebook as an added incentive along with other content your brand is providing.

Ebooks work extremely well for B2B companies or brands that work in technical spaces. People adore reading and gaining more insights about their industry.

While it doesn’t hurt to highlight your brand, try not to promote overly your services or products. You don’t want to sell through an ebook; you want to inform through one. Try to take a neutral standpoint. The more unbiased you are in your ebook, the broader your reach will be.

In most cases, where ebooks are offered, you’ll essentially want to set up a separate page for it. In exchange for your free ebook, ask for some basic contact information. As your audience obtains a gateway to knowledge while you acquire the leads you seek.

4. Giveaways

Who doesn’t like winning free stuff? Giveaways are an amazing way to generate leads. Not only do they require basic contact information that allows brands to get in touch with the winner, but you’re collecting the very information you’re looking for when it comes to lead generation. Opting in allows an audience to exchange their contact information for a chance to win a prize, and after agreeing to the terms and conditions, are more than happy to exchange such information for this opportunity.

Giveaways are simple in nature. You offer a chance to enter by inputting your contact information, maybe throw in the ability to increases your chances by sharing on social media (which in turn will get others to enter your giveaway) and viola! You’ve just created an engine for generating leads until the giveaway is over.

Most brands have some leeway regarding what they can offer as a prize, but on the off-chance that you don’t have that much room to give, you always have your ebook as an extra prize.

You can also implement giveaways with the other types of content we’ve mentioned in this list. Anytime you request your audience’s contact information, feel free to let people know that they’ll instantly be entered in a giveaway. It’s a nice little incentive to get people to sign up to your email list.

5. Quizzes

Who would’ve thought you could use a quiz to generate leads? They’re already incredibly popular on social media, so why not use them? Quizzes are fun and engaging. You could set up a quiz to revolve around your brand. You could even turn that quiz into an assessment test and see how much your audience knows about your brand or its products. If you wanted to, you could cover any of today’s trending topics, but personality quizzes seem to be the best since that’s what’s common on social media.

As far as a formula is concerned, typical knowledge tests that assess how much someone knows about certain things are fine and dandy, but most audiences experience the most amount of fun and engagement when taking a personality quiz. Why? Because of something called the self-serving bias, people typically like to hear good things about themselves. Personality quizzes aim to stroke the egos of various audiences based on the results that they get. Of course, if they’re happy with their result, they’re more than likely to share it with family and friends.

Regardless of the type of quiz you choose, its questions, any images involved and the results will entice your audience. 96% of people complete quizzes, so you’re looking at a relatively high chance of generating leads through them.

So how do quizzes generate leads? The lead capture form that gates it towards the end is your ticket. You might’ve seen it before, but have you ever come across a quiz that requested your contact information in exchange for your results? Rather ingenious if you ask me. Most lead capture forms express a brand’s marketing strategy and what they’ll do with someone’s information through a “privacy policy” of sorts. You don’t want to spam someone with emails without their consent now do you?

Now then, let’s get to the fun part. You could easily pair any of the other forms of content we’ve mentioned so far with a quiz to make the most out of your lead capture. Here’s how you do it:

Newsletters – This one’s a given. As soon as someone opts in (with their consent of course), you most certainly want to sign him up for your newsletter.

Blog Posts – When you’ve acquired your audience’s email address, consider sending them updates. For instance, if you have a new article up, send them a friendly reminder.

eBooks – Remember that eBook you wrote? Why not give it away as an incentive for opting in? It’s a nice little gift for anyone that exchanges their information with you.

Giveaways – Just like the ebook, use giveaways as an incentive for opting in. When someone gives you their contact information to access their quiz results, enter them into a giveaway for a chance to win something.

6. Videos

As interactive as quizzes can be, videos are another great way to engage your audience. First thing’s first, do not, I repeat, do NOT create a commercial. There’s enough of that on TV and major sites like YouTube.

People want entertainment. They want something they can get a lot of value from, so you want to create videos based on great ideas that promote your brand and engages your audience. A good example would be those one-minute tutorials on social media networks on how you can cook certain recipes. They’re fun, engaging, and there’s a relatively actionable takeaway that goes along with it. That’s what your video has to achieve.

Spend time formulating something people would watch. Vlogs are always popular. While your audience can read articles on your blog, why not engage with them through a video blog?

The ball starts rolling once your video is live, so be sure to promote it to the rest of the content you’re pushing out. Don’t be afraid to include a call-to-action in the annotations in the video, or even down in the video description. This is what will direct people back to you for your business.

7. Webinars

If you have a rather firm grasp on the concept of making videos, let’s take that step further by setting up a webinar. Webinars are an inexpensive solution that gets your message out there to the public. If you have customers who are on the fence about your product or your services, use a webinar to inform them how you could be a good fit for what they’re trying to do. Below is a great example of Positionly SEO webinar about backlinks:

The most important part of a webinar is the end. At this point, you have an opportunity to talk with your audience. Ask anyone that showed up to your webinar to go ahead and download your ebook, take a quiz to enter for a chance to win a fabulous prize in a giveaway, or to sign up to your newsletter. As we’ve mentioned several times already, all of these types of content can be harmoniously sewn together for greater effect.

Let’s Wrap Things Up

So today we took a rather extensive look at some of the most clever ideas when it comes to generating leads for your online marketing campaign. You have several options available to you, and a handful of them are capable of being paired with one another. If you’re in the market for generating leads, highly consider these methods for your brand’s strategy.

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How are your content marketing campaigns going?

If you’re like most businesses, you’re finding it difficult to create quality content at the level needed to maintain the momentum of your marketing initiatives.

Don’t worry though – you’re absolutely not alone. According to one study, the two biggest problems facing content marketers are:

• A lack of time or bandwidth for creating content (51%)
• Producing a wide enough variety and volume of content (50%)

As content marketing continues to grow in popularity, brands are investing more money in content development:

• 70% of marketers are making more content than they were a year ago.
• The most effective marketers are spending 39% of their budget on content marketing.

This means it’s more crucial than ever to ensure that you’re producing as much quality content as possible. Failing to do so may mean losing out to more proactive competitors.

Reusing Content

So what’s the solution? It’s certainly not a good idea to reduce quality:

• 69% of brands struggle to maintain a high quality level.
• Cranking out content without worrying about quality can seriously damage your brand’s reputation.

If you’re wanting to maximize your content production without reducing quality, you’ll need to work smarter, not harder.

By recycling, reworking and reusing content, you can turn a single blog post into over fifty different pieces of content.

• Some will be large, while others will involve a lot of smaller snippets.
• This way, the same content can be reused across a variety of mediums.
• Through careful planning, you can make the most of every single content idea.

So, let’s have a look at some of the most practical ways to expand a single piece of content into a variety of different marketing pieces:

Straight Conversions

In order to get the most out of your content, you’ll likely need to do some editing. This helps to produce:

• Multiple ‘new’ pieces of content’.
• Different content for a variety of platforms.

That said, there are plenty of ways to reuse your original text without much editing at all.

Content Pieces #1-2: Free Ebook and White Paper

By giving away a free ebook or white paper, you’re catering to an audience that might not have bothered to read your blog.

After all, according to Neil Patel, ‘…white papers are really nothing more than repurposed blog posts especially if you have some really good how-to blog content’.

It helps that research has shown that these forms of content appeal particularly to prospective clients:

• 83% of B2B clients say have used white papers to make purchasing decisions within the last year.
• 68% have used free ebooks.
• This compares with just 56% who used blog posts.

There are plenty of online templates available to quickly and easily turn your blog post into a white paper or ebook, making this a simple way to get more out of your content.

Content Pieces #3-7: Five-Day Article Series

Long-form content offers substantial digital marketing benefits, but that doesn’t mean that all of your readers have time to sit down and consume thousands of words every day.

Instead, reach a different demographic of readers by breaking things down.

This first step in transforming your single blog post into multiple pieces of content may take a while, but it’s important to help you get the most out of your content.

Start by breaking down your article into bite-size chunks.

Instead of posting one long article at first, take it apart and develop five articles from the points contained within.

• With a little embellishing, you can turn a single article into five different articles.
• Each article can offer a slightly more in-depth look at each point.

Smaller articles might not be quite as good for SEO, but they still serve a purpose:

• Rapid fire shorter content means more articles on your site to link to.
• An article series gives site visitors something to keep coming back for every day.
• Each can serve as the basis for more content.

Break It Down

What else can you do with five short articles?

Content Piece #8: Email Newsletter

Considering the importance of a strong email newsletter, you’ll want to have some some solid content to share with subscribers.

Your five articles make up a great collection of content snippets to add value to a week’s worth of emails – all you have to do is upload the shorter posts you’ve already created to your email service.

Content Piece #9: New Subscriber Drip Email Perk

Alternatively, your five well-written short articles are the perfect fodder for a drip email campaign for new subscribers that will:

• Promise subscribers the perk of a short email each day for five days.
• Increase the subscriber’s brand engagement, as you’ll be on their minds every day when they first sign up.
• Demonstrate what kind of quality content users will get from your site.
• Drive a 12x increase in click-through-rates (for sites that use drip email campaigns for new subscribers).

Okay, so you’ve got your five articles. But what if you break them down to even smaller chunks?

Content Piece #10: Fact List

The internet loves a good list – a collection of short, sweet factoids that are easy to digest and are a godsend for anyone who’s researching the topic you’re writing about.

• This of course means that anyone writing an article on the same subject as yours will link to you, which is good for a huge number of reasons.
• Primarily, it’ll help build your authority – giving site visitors no mess facts helps the accessibility of your content.

Content Piece #11: Fact Tweets

‘Did You Know’ facts do very well on social media – you can use a variety of the facts from your list to produce short posts.

• Considering that the best average tweet length is around 100 characters, these small snippets make perfect social content.
• Snippets from your fact list can also be used on other social media such as Facebook – I’m just splitting the difference here.

Content Piece #12: Key Quotes List

Quotes stand out, especially if they use bold visuals and funky fonts.

Sometimes, it’s better to give readers a big list of easily shared quotes rather than a full-text article.

• This keeps people reading.
• It helps users to spot the most important points.
• A quote list can easily be reworked into a variety of social media posts and other content.

A list of quotes also helps because, as with facts, when other people who are writing articles on your subject matter come along, it’ll be quick and easy for them to grab a quote from your list to lend authority to their research.

This helps further increase your authority, and generates more traffic for your site.

Content Piece #13: Quotation Facebook Post

As with factoids, simple quotes can make excellent little pieces of social media content.

• You can fire out several over the course of a day, or post one a day for an extended period.
• Every additional post will link back to your original article or your quotes list, to help drive further traffic to your content.

Distributing your killer quotes through Facebook can add variety to your social media content and can help to build your perceived authority on the topic at hand.

Content Piece #14: Quizzes

‘How well do you know X? Text yourself with this online quiz!’

Did you know that the number one most read piece of content on the New York Times website in 2013 was an interactive quiz?

A quiz is a fantastic way to draw users to your site, while also making use of your existing content. People love a chance to test themselves.

Even better, once you’ve created a broken down list of factoids, turning each key element of your article into a quiz question is extremely simple, and doing so helps further develop your authority – especially as you can link to your own five articles as information sources in the answers.

Being Helpful

Good content is more than just thinly veiled advertising.

You want your content to help people with a problem. Doing so:

• Makes your content more valuable to users.
• Builds trust in your brand.
• Convinces potential customers that your products will meet their needs.

There are a variety of ways that you can adapt your content to meet the needs of online

Content Pieces #15-16: How To Guide and Checklist

How-to guides are a fantastic way to rework old content with authority, as they appeal to users who are looking for specific instructions on how to complete a particular task.

• If they’re after learning more about how to do the things you’re blogging about, chances are they’re also excellent customers in the making.

Checklists are similar to guides, but they’re the bare-bones version – kind of like the facts lists and quizzes above, they give specific instructions to anyone who wants to get things right.

In practice, they’re more likely to appeal to audience members who are worried about missing a crucial step in a given process and want to interact with the guide on an ongoing basis (and who are, again, perfect potential customers).

Content Piece #17: Quora Post

Chopping apart the advice given in your blog post even further, you can use it to answer questions on Quora.

• Doing so will help build your brand’s authority on the subjects you’re talking about.
• It’ll also help subtly draw people to your website.

Just don’t make sure your answers aren’t simply blatant advertisements for your products – nobody will respect that, even if your answers are good.

Content Piece #18: FAQ

By this point, after working through your various forms of content, there’s a good chance that people will be asking questions about your blog post.

• Some points may need further clarification.
• Sometimes readers will have questions about how to implement ideas.

To help address these points, you can write a follow-up article addressing the common questions and concerns that have arisen from your original article.

Not only will readers appreciate you clarifying any points of confusion, but this gives you an opportunity to help site visitors who are a little further down the conversion funnel and are thinking about the practicalities of your product.

Images

Just because your original content is all text doesn’t mean that there aren’t plenty of ways to create image content as well.

The internet loves images.

• They slow down users enough to grab their attention.
• They help users to grab a message as quickly as possible.

Here are a few ways to quickly put images to work for your content:

Content Piece #19: Viral Images

Remember our lists of facts and quotes from earlier?

It doesn’t take much effort to place them on a colorful background and turn them into perfect visual content:

• Recite turns quotes into images with a few clicks
• Over puts text on top of photo backgrounds
• Quotes Cover allows you to turn quotes into perfectly sized social media profile pictures and page covers.

These pieces of visual content go great on blogs, as well as being useful to use as promotional materials and to make your social media profiles informative as well as visually impressive.

Content Pieces #20-24: Image Tweets, Facebook Pictures, Instagram Posts, Pinterest Boards and Tumblr Posts

Among the best ways that you can use the new images you’ve created is on social media.

• Twitter loves images, and tweets with pictures perform significantly better than posts without.
• Instagram is the second largest social media platform, and is entirely image-based.
• Pinterest is used by a variety of businesses, and using your images to create your own personalized image boards can help develop your following.
• Tumblr has a relatively small user group, but it’s perfect if your target demographic is young and tech-savvy.

Each social media platform has its own unique quirks, so you’ll want to tailor your images to each one. But making content for each of these social media spheres can help get your message out to as many people as possible – as quickly as possible.

Content Piece #25: Infographic

A good infographic is one of the best pieces of content you can produce.

According to research:

• 39% of B2B buyers regularly share infographics on social media.
• 52% of B2B marketers used infographics in 2014.

Infographics draw in readers thanks to their engaging visuals and rich, useful content. Adapting your blog post into an infographic can make a huge difference in your website’s performance.

Content Pieces #26-30: Infographic Collection

Why stop with just one infographic? If you’ve expanded your article into a series, it’s easy to adapt all five of the new articles you’ve created into infographics that cover each of your main points in depth.

Content Piece #31: Slideshow

Cutting up your infographics lets you turn them into a slideshow.

And in my experience, sharing content on Slideshare makes sense:

• The site receives over 60 million visits per month
• One marketer received a 50x return on investment just from slideshows.

Slideshows provide quick and easy facts in a compelling visual presentation, and are excellent for drawing interest from potential customers who are grateful for free access to the slides.

Content Piece #32: Instructographic

Much like an infographic, an instructographic communicates a message visually.

The difference is, it teaches the reader how to do something – rather than just giving them information.

• Instructographics can be easily made by combining visuals from your infographic with your how-to guide.
• Instructographics share particularly well on Pinterest.

As with the various forms of text content described here, an instructographic helps you to reach out to different groups of clients than the ones who would be drawn in by your infographic.

Content Piece #33: Video

One of the most popular forms of content on the internet is video.

• 100 million internet users watch online videos every single day.
• Online video makes up 50% of all mobile internet traffic.
• Video ads lead to a 97% increase in purchase intent.

Your blog article already lays the framework for a video:

• It provides the transcript.
• It can be easily combined with visuals from your infographic.
• You can use it to quickly and simply create a video with strong production value that does a fantastic job of selling your product for you. All you need is a smartphone and some basic lighting.

Content Pieces #34-39: Web Series

Why stop with just one video?

(Are you seeing a theme here yet?)

As with your infographic, the series of text articles you’ve created are also perfect for adaptation into a video series.

A video series offers several benefits:

• It keeps site visitors returning to your site for more content.
• You can lead viewers organically from one video to the next, keeping them watching for longer.
• A series of videos can address concerns that viewers have at different points on the conversion funnel.

Content Piece #40: Vines

Vines are tiny videos that are only a few seconds long.

• They work best when they’re short and to-the-point.
• As such, they’re the perfect way to adapt your factoids for video.
• You can make loads of quick vines out of your video content.
• Each one serves as an advertisement for your full video series on the subject.

Content Pieces #41-45: Podcasts

Podcasts are useful for users who want to enjoy your content while performing other tasks, such as driving, exercising, or tackling dull paperwork.

You can use the audio from your videos, based on the text of your original article, to make a series of quick and easy podcasts that can be listened to by brand followers anytime, anywhere.

Creating podcasts helps further the reach of your content, no matter what their preferred media choice is.

Content Piece #46: Webinar

This one might take a little more work to adapt your content, but it’s possible to use your text to produce the basis of a webinar which teaches viewers the lessons covered by your article.

Interestingly, webinars have been ranked among the most effective content marketing techniques by today’s marketers:

• In one survey, 92% of marketers said that they considered webinars effective.

All you need for a webinar is a series of slides (which you already have) and someone to stand in front of a camera to teach the points in your article.

From this, you can drive a tremendous amount of interest in your brand and your content marketing efforts.

Content Piece #47: FAQ Webinar Follow-Up

In a similar way to how writing a follow-up FAQ for your article can help address issues and concerns for readers while helping to produce more quality content, you can use the same webinar setup to deliver responses to the questions viewers have about the topics you’ve discussed.

When you respond directly to a viewer, you help to build a relationship of trust with them that encourages them to refer to you for information, advice, and product help.

This can lead to greater sales, and as it’s a subject you’ve already thoroughly researched, it doesn’t take much effort for you to answer questions your viewers might have.

Re-Releasing Content

Remember the Special Edition Star Wars movies?

Back in 1997, George Lucas re-released the original movies with some added special effects and deleted scenes.

This helped get fans back into the movie theaters and generated hype for the upcoming prequel films.

By making a few simple changes, you can rework older articles to make them relevant for a whole new generation of potential clients.

Content Piece #48: Updated Article

Perhaps it’s been six months or a year since you originally posted your article online.

Now’s the time to revisit it, adding an additional few paragraphs about the developments in your field since it was originally written.

• This helps bring your old, well-written content back into relevance.
• It also helps prevent your content from appearing out of date when anyone comes across it in a search.

You can similarly update many of the above content pieces – web videos, infographics, ebooks and white papers – to reflect these changes, creating even more content at your disposal.

Content Piece #49: Guest Post

Okay, so one thing you can’t do is submit an article that you’ve already written as a guest post for another site.

But by rewriting the article from a slightly different perspective or with a slightly different focus, you can rework the original text to produce fresh content that will make a big splash as a guest post.

What’s more, you can link back to your original post within the guest post to support those who want to know more on the same topic.

This is a great way to make the most of your existing article’s potential.

Putting It All Together

Content Piece #50: Resource Pack

By this point, among other things, you’ve turned your single blog post into:

• A white paper
• An ebook
• Several infographic
• Various images
• Videos
• Podcasts

Now, it’s time to bundle everything together and offer it as a downloadable or members-only access resource pack for anyone looking to learn more about the subject.

These resource packs are useful for anyone who wants to learn more about the subject, as well as anyone who’s performing research for producing content of their own.

This means that:

• You develop your reputation as an authoritative and helpful source for prospective clients.
• You can convert other content marketers into proxy salesmen as they go about using (and referencing) your resources.

Well done – you’ve turned a single blog post into fifty pieces of useful content that’ll help you take your content marketing efforts to new levels.

Using the ideas I’ve discussed will help you to get the most out of every single piece of content and help you to increase the amount of content that you produce. But this list certainly isn’t comprehensive.

If you have another strategy you’ve used successfully to transform one piece of content into another, I’d love to hear about it. Share your best tips and tricks by leaving a comment below:

Images:

Flickr, Slideshare, Flickr, Pixabay, Pixabay, New York Times, Quora, Pixabay, Pixabay, Slideshare, Pixabay, Pixabay, Pixabay, Flickr, Wikipedia.

Expect to see more vendors exit the highly-competitive Cloud market in 2016, due to their inability to clearly differentiate their capabilities. As the cloud computing market matures and buyer preferences evolve, basic cloud infrastructure offerings reach commodity status — with common technology and similar product features.

When vendor services are virtually identical, buyers will seek to place increasing emphasis on factors that extend beyond the basic product. However, when the internally-focused ‘me-too’ vendor fails to translate their capabilities into business outcomes, they more than likely will be judged based upon price.

How to Survive the Cloud Wars

According to the latest worldwide market study by Frost & Sullivan, an enterprise buyer’s choice of cloud service provider are influenced by criteria that are the primary responsibility of the marketing organization — including provider cloud pricing, service level agreements and developing meaningful brand equity.

Frost & Sullivan’s latest analysis, entitled “To Win the Cloud Wars, Invest in Marketing, not Technology“, examines several service characteristics that shape buyer perceptions of cloud infrastructure services, as revealed in their 2015 Stratecast Cloud User Survey.

In these early days of the hybrid cloud computing era, businesses are still trying to understand how to leverage the cloud model; how it can help solve chronic IT delivery or business process-related problems, but also how it can create new digital transformation opportunities.

As cloud service providers focus their technology investment on higher-value services, it will be up to the marketing department to be sure their substantive message is heard and appreciated by informed buyers.

Cloud Market Development Upside Opportunity

“In our observation, many technology companies continue to underestimate the importance of marketing; instead, relying on their technology research and development organizations to introduce innovations,” said Lynda Stadtmueller, vice president at Frost & Sullivan.

According to the Frost & Sullivan assessment, cloud service providers have a huge opportunity to differentiate their services by alleviating some of the known complexity that CIOs and IT managers associate with hybrid cloud computing deployments.

Providing clear information about pricing and SLAs, offering value-added services to help with planning and migration, and providing access to knowledgeable pre-sales consultants are examples of marketing tactics that cloud service providers can adopt to attract and retain savvy enterprise customers.

“The future of cloud will play out not just in the research lab, but also in the marketing department. Marketers will help to redefine how we purchase and utilize cloud-based IT resources,” notes Stadtmueller. “To do so, they will need to engage in a continual dialogue with potential buyers — both following the market (understanding buyer needs and preferences) and driving the market (educating buyers on the unique value of their own services).”

If you think the old ways of marketing engineering firms are sufficient to meet the challenges of the Internet age, you’re likely to be disappointed.

These statistics from Engineering.com clearly demonstrate that engineers and their clients gather information just like regular consumers:

• More than 42% of engineers use social media and read articles related to work.
• Engineers are nearly twice as likely to find information online than at trade shows.
• 93% of engineers describe websites and search engines as “valuable sources” of information related to their jobs.
• Up to 84% of engineers consume work-related content on desktop computers.
• Up to 69% of engineers consume work-related content on mobile devices.
• 79% of engineers regularly conduct Google searches to find engineering content.

Without an inbound marketing strategy that incorporates this new reality, you risk losing business to more progressive competitors.

Understanding the Engineering Client’s Buying Cycle

Before developing a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy to attract, convert and close new engineering clients, you need to understand how those clients buy. Specifically, you need to familiarize yourself with their buying cycle. Although the timeline of the buying cycle is likely to vary by buyer persona, you can expect your prospects to follow four major steps:

1. Recognizing the Need: The phase during which the prospect first realizes that they have a need for your services.

2. Research and Education: The phase during which the prospect outlines the problem or need in more detail and begins researching solutions, including your specific services.

3. Comparison and Validation: The point at which the prospect begins directly comparing and narrowing the available choices.

4. Engagement or Purchase: The point at which the prospect chooses a “winner” with which to engage and ultimately close the sale.

If you haven’t already done so, you should gather and analyze data on past and current clients. You can use it to segment your ideal buyers into distinct personas that encapsulate their demographic profiles, company roles, personal motivations, pain points and other characteristics that can influence the buying process.

“Engineering” an Inbound Marketing Strategy

Now that you have a better sense of your prospects’ respective personas and the likely paths that they’ll take as they determine how you can meet their needs, you need to formulate – or “engineer” – an integrated inbound marketing strategy that generates quality leads and moves them along the buying cycle.

Ultimately, the goal of your marketing plan is simple: to turn more interested prospects into committed clients who are willing to sing your company’s praises to anyone who will listen.

The key to a successful inbound marketing operation is a well-oiled lead-nurturing machine that harnesses the power of content marketing at every turn. This operation follows four integrated actions:

1. Attracting your ideal client to your website, which requires a variety of content marketing tools, including:

• Optimized blog posts that rank highly for relevant key phrases
• Social media ads and posts
• Local search marketing that draws prospects in your geographical area
• Pay-per-click and display ads that appear next to relevant search results and on relevant webpages

2. Enticing your prospects to take a positive action, such as signing up for a newsletter or downloading a white paper, case study, report or other high-value piece of content. Conversion-centric material thrives on optimized landing pages that guide prospects into your integrated sales pipeline for further follow-up.

3. Nurturing your prospective clients through targeted email marketing and social media to keep them engaged with your company and informed of your services. Depending on the nature of your sales process, the closing stage may involve upselling or cross-selling initiatives that boost revenue per client.

4. Delighting your existing and new clients by continuing to provide them with content and intelligence that helps them enhance their operations in some way. You can achieve this through informative newsletters, new case studies, updated eBooks, etc. It is an ongoing process designed to keep your company at the forefront with your current clients, transforming your clients into committed brand evangelists.

Learn How to Market Your Engineering Firm from the Pros

The good news is, many engineering firms are still vacillating between their old reality and the new reality of marketing. By delaying the inevitable, they are being left behind by innovative firms who are ready to sprint ahead of their competition with the revolutionary opportunities open to them through inbound marketing.

Sales reps have a lot to contend with. They need to crush their quotas. They need to advance their careers. They need to convince prospects to speak with them, and ultimately to buy.

These three goals -- stellar individual performance, career development, and successful sales -- are all admirable. But reps who think about their goals in the terms outlined above are thinking about the profession all wrong.

That’s because these three goals place the salesperson at the center of the equation. It’s all about how the rep makes quota, how the rep can be promoted, and how the rep can get people to buy.

Listen up, salespeople -- sales isn’t about you anymore. It’s about the buyer.

Start thinking, “How can I help this prospect?” and stop asking yourself, “How many more deals do I need to win this month?”

This isn’t to say sales performance doesn’t matter. It absolutely does, and it always will. But to be truly successful, you have to transform your entire approach to sales.

If you start thinking about sales this way, everything else -- promotions, quota achievement, and maybe even a ticket to President’s Club -- will follow.

That’s because approaching sales through the lens of helping ultimately makes it easier.

Helping transforms how you qualify prospects. 

Do they truly need your help, or are you trying to manufacture business pain that isn’t there to get them to take your call? If you prospect by identifying potential buyers who are actually suffering business pain instead of cold calling the decision makers with the deepest pockets, you’ll be able to establish relationships from a place of trust, not annoyance.

Helping transforms how you run discovery calls.

If you’re genuinely trying to uncover business pain instead of figuring out how you can squeeze money out of your prospects, the conversation will naturally be about your prospect. They’ll tell you about what keeps them up at night, what they’re trying to achieve, and where they’ve failed before. You’ll be able to give them better recommendations, better advice, and increase your chances for a second call because you listened and tried to help.

Helping transforms the way you demonstrate your product.

If you design the presentation with helping in mind, it’ll be immediately obvious you’re putting the prospects’ needs first because you won’t be touting some magic, universal benefit. You’ll be walking your prospect through an incredibly personalized, tailored plan that shows how your product will help them achieve their specific goals that you’ve already discussed.

In short, helping changes your entire outlook on sales. If you don’t waste your time trying to convince prospects you can’t help that they should buy your product, your effort goes toward deals with prospects who genuinely need and want your help. If you only spend time speaking to prospects who are hurting, you’ll close more deals. Your improved sales performance will better position you for a promotion.

See what I’m getting at here? If you place the buyer at the center of your world, all those things you care about (and rightly so) will fall into place. If you help buyers, you end up helping yourself.

That’s because sales isn’t about you anymore -- it’s about your prospect. There has been a revolutionary shift in power between buyers and sellers, and reps who are unable to adapt will find themselves phased out of the profession. You’re no longer the sole keeper of information or even the only reliable voice of truth. Your prospects are perfectly self-sufficient and can find out most of what they need to know themselves.

But prospects still need you. They still need experts to synthesize all the information they’ve gathered themselves into a coherent strategy that’s applicable to their business. They still need advisors who have seen their problems before help them formulate an attack plan to solve them.

What prospects don’t need are old-school, pushy, transactional salespeople. They don’t need to be sold a product -- they want to buy a solution. And the sooner salespeople realize that and adapt accordingly, the better sales becomes for buyers and sellers everywhere.

Once upon a time, it was possible to scale a sales organization by being strictly top-line revenue focused. Many highly successful companies followed the approach of throwing as many bodies as possible onto the sales floor and experiencing hyper growth. But with the advent of sales automation tools, it’s become possible for small teams to do what required larger ones in the past.

Now we face a different challenge. Personalization of cold emails has become as simple as [first_name], and it’s easy to spam thousands of prospects in a single click of a button. I know  --  I get spammed every day with “personal” emails that are replete with tokens and poor formatting. They are just as ineffective as if you had never emailed me in the first place; perhaps even less so, now that I have a negative opinion of your company for wasting my time.

Sales automation tools are making it easier to reach more prospects with fewer sales development reps (SDR). That means that employing a large SDR team is no longer required to scale your sales efforts, but it also creates an interesting dilemma. The ease of reaching more prospects with click of a button hasn’t translated to an increased ease in converting those same prospects into appointments. Today, rather than hiring for headcount volume, companies should instead focus on headcount quality … and that requires an entirely different approach to the SDR recruiting process.

Quality Over Quantity

If you hire SDRs for quality over quantity, then regardless of which tools you give them to use, they will find success. Too often sales leaders are lazy and only hire for the bodies instead of truly vetting an SDR candidate the same way they would vet an enterprise sales rep. But this makes no sense  --  a great SDR gets you great meetings with great companies. That expensive enterprise sales rep you spent all that time hiring is wasted if you can’t get that person clutch at-bats.

In the baseball analogy, SDRs are your leadoff man. If a team has a weak top of the lineup, but great mashers in the middle of the order, they struggle to score runs on days they don’t hit four to five home runs. And no team hits four to five home runs every game, just as no sales team closes tons of massive enterprise deals every month.

If you need a consistent, scalable sales process, invest in great top of the lineup SDRs who set the stage for success. Think Moneyball for sales. Most of us are the Oakland A’s when it comes to budget, so we need to be scrappy.

Here are three tips to ensure you hire the best SDRs possible.

1) Hire for intelligence.

Too often I see SDRs who are aren't the sharpest tool in the shed get hired into an organization simply because SDR is the most junior sales position on the team. Your typical profile of “used to sell Cutco knives” or “captain of rugby team” gets hired into an organization as an SDR with virtually no screening, since many sales leaders see SDRs as high-volume, low-risk hires that can quickly be weeded out if they struggle.

Here’s the problem: if you are selling a mid-market or enterprise solution, your buyer is savvy and can sniff BS from a mile away. And the unfortunate harsh reality is if the SDR you’ve hired isn’t able to understand the nuances of the industry they are selling to, hold an intellectual dialogue with your buyer, or articulate your offering's value proposition within the context of each prospect’s business , they will not be able to excel at their jobs. Instead, they'll burn hundreds of potential customers with poor messaging and earn a reputation that your business is immature in its customer-facing efforts.

How do you test for this during an interview? Simple  -- give the SDR enough time and information so that they can prepare a mock pitch of your services. Have them present to two to three folks within your organization that closely match your typical buyer. Ask them tough questions during the mock pitch that force the SDR candidate to showcase their ability to take disparate pieces of information and apply them to handling a customer’s objections.

The SDR who can do this  --  and warm the crowd with her personality  --  is one who is highly likely to succeed.

2) Hire for industry passion.

If your SDR candidate could easily jump from your company to another that does something totally different simply because the other business pays more or their friends work there, then they’re a poor fit. You need SDRs who are missionaries and who will strive to learn about their industry, inside and out.

It’s always a good idea to hire an SDR who wants to work in your industry. At SalesPredict, one of the first questions I ask every candidate is what they think about the future of machine learning and predictive analytics. Anyone who gives me a half-baked, generic response that belies an understanding of my industry gets a very short interview.

How do you test for this during an interview? Grill the candidate on why they want to spend the next three to five years in your industry. Ask them industry-specific questions throughout the process. If they don’t already have passion for your space, or at least an understanding how your company fits into their long-term career plans, they are going to flame out. They simply won’t be motivated enough to go out and gain the understanding necessary to set great appointments with top-tier buyers.

3) Hire for ambition.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve “stolen” a great SDR from another company because I lured them with the promise of doing more in six to 12 months. They’re willing to take a lower salary and “start over” to come work on my team simply because they believe that if they succeed here, they will get to tackle a bigger challenge.

Here’s the reality, folks  -- being an SDR is not sexy work for someone who fits the two criteria above. Anyone you hire who is intelligent and passionate is going to want more in six to 12 months … and that’s great!

How do you create opportunity for upward mobility? Be prepared to promote star SDRs into SDR management or inside sales roles, and hire more to replace them. If you don’t, you are going to lose them to another company. Be proactive, and get them into more challenging roles before they ask. You’ll be glad you did.

Editor's note: This post originally appeared on Medium, and is republished here with permission. 

Buyers today are more educated than ever. They’re aware of their pain points and already have an idea who can help them before sales even builds a pitch. In fact, today’s buyers do so much research on their own that they don’t engage with sales until late in the buying cycle. But by implementing lead nurturing strategies into your marketing campaigns, you can create an ongoing dialogue with your qualified prospects, leads and existing clients.

Not only can this build valuable prospect engagement, but better sales opportunities, too. In fact, effectively nurtured leads produce a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities.

So what’s the catch?

Bridging the concept between lead nurturing and developing an effective marketing program is challenging. Also, marketers often don’t realize that lead nurturing isn’t a one-and-done single follow-up. It’s not constant email blasts. And it’s not a few social media posts directed toward your prospects and buyers.

Lead nurturing is, however, the process of building relationships between marketers and their audiences. This exchange of information between the two benefits both parties. For example, a company might offer a relevant eBook in exchange for some basic profile information from a prospect. It’s this valuable interaction that builds brand preference and provides insight.

But since no two organizations are the same, no two solutions are the same. That’s why lead nurturing takes a variety of forms. On a tactical level, there are multiple types of lead nurtures—not just your basic top-, middle- and bottom-funnel nurtures. To drive serious conversion rates, you need to implement the basic nurtures, as well as advanced nurture programs.

Here are four advanced nurtures that can help your team drive leads throughout multiple touch points.

1. Perpetual Nurture

A perpetual nurture is an ongoing communications strategy designed to keep brands top of mind. Examples include strategies such as annual event marketing, monthly social media campaigns and weekly blog posts. Each of these tactics can be designed to reach your prospects and existing buyers at multiple touch points (top, middle and bottom of the sales funnel).

For example, annual event marketing can help you reach new prospects that attend annual events as a means to “shop around” (top of funnel). Or your presence could position you as a thought leader, encouraging interested leads in approaching your team for more information (middle of the funnel). But more than anything, event marketing is an excellent way for your sales team to close deals (bottom of the funnel).

If you need something less demanding on your resources, consider implementing social media elements into your monthly marketing campaigns. In this blog post, HubSpot outlines eight simple ways to integrate social media and lead nurturing.

2. Mid- to Bottom-Funnel Nurture

A mid-funnel nurture is one of your biggest opportunities to accelerate your interested prospects into buyers. At this point, you have their attention and you likely have some data on them, allowing you to better segment and test your prospect list for the future. However, effectively nurturing mid-funnel leads (nearing the bottom of the funnel) is challenging—that’s why it’s critical that you reach them with relevant content at the right time and the right place. But keep in mind that this content needs to show them how your solutions can solve their problems.

Mid-funnel is where leads are introduced to your brand and develop an affinity for it over your competitors. That’s why you should offer up a piece of high-value content. Strong examples of content at this stage in the funnel include offers such as case studies, buyer assessments and reviews and testimonials—all of which can be deployed through an email marketing campaign (and marketing automation) or a social media campaign. Creating content like case studies and buyer assessments is an advanced technique. It requires data, benchmarks and customer success stories that show true ROI.

Case studies are powerful because they show your prospects your solutions have in fact helped others. Buyer assessments are valuable because they help you and buyers define their pain points, allowing you to offer a solution that’s relevant to their business needs. These assessments help buyers—and your organization—because this insight into a prospect’s pain points can help you inform your messaging down the road.

3. Peripheral Nurture

These nurtures sometimes fall outside of the traditional marketing and sales responsibilities, relying on other functions within your organization. Peripheral efforts can include speaking engagements—perhaps from a creative director, an account manager or even a director of finance. These nurtures also include case study opportunities, focus groups and other peer events where thought leaders can gather and swap challenges and ideas. If your organization attends industry events, leverage the opportunity to host a roundtable discussion or even deliver a presentation. The Q&A sessions alone can be valuable to your organization because you’re gathering real-time data from valuable industry members.

Another notable tactic for peripheral nurtures is training. The sky’s the limit with this approach because no matter what your organization sells, your buyers will need to know how to use it. Whether it’s a SaaS platform, social media tool or health record software, a training session can go a long way in connecting prospects and your brand. In return, you obtain information from your subscribers or attendees—allowing you to customize solutions aligned to their pain points.

4. Post-Sale Nurture

Most marketers stop nurturing after a deal closes. But what they fail to remember is that existing buyers are the strongest brand advocates—which is why it’s crucial to keep the dialogue going. Post-sale nurtures are built to leverage existing solutions and products. This helps organizations avoid shelf wear of their offerings while providing customer value.

With post-sale nurtures, organizations can cross-sell and upsell their products. For example, a Web-based software company might sell a contact dashboard designed to help clients organize and grow their contacts and database. A few months down the road, that same platform might be even more successful by adding customizable features like calendars and reporting.

Training programs are also useful tactics for post-sale nurtures. For example, a medical device company could sell a patient identification scanner to a hospital—then offer a quarterly training program for new employees. A SaaS company could sell its software platform and offer discounted training for every new license a company buys. It’s here, at the post-sale nurture, where companies can sell their complementary features and tools to buyers who already believe in their solutions.

Lead nurturing helps both parties. To keep the dialogue going with your prospects and buyers, start with an overall marketing strategy, develop valuable content and ensure you have the data and technology in place to execute these advanced nurture programs.

Need more inspiration? Check out these companies that excelled at advanced lead nurturing in 2014 and 2015, then share your best ideas for lead nurturing in the comment section below.

How These Tools Can Strengthen Your Lead Generation Strategies

Every sales team loves to get those hot leads who are chomping at the bit to purchase. And every marketing team wants to be able to confidently deliver those leads who will turn into “Closed Won” deals easily. Generating highly-qualified leads makes everyone’s job easier.

But how do you get those highly-qualified leads from your marketing efforts?

In order to quantify your marketing efforts and prove your department’s ROI, you need to be able to generate MQLs, or marketing qualified leads.

According to HubSpot, a marketing qualified lead is someone who is more likely to become a customer than other leads, based on lead intelligence gathered by closed-loop analytics.

Gathering Lead Intelligence

Gathering lead intelligence is easy when using a system like HubSpot, Marketo or Salesforce that tracks a lead’s interaction with your website, their demographics, or overall consumer behavior.

To begin, sit down with your sales team and identify the factors they find most important in a qualified lead. Consider such qualifications as:

• Budget (Can they afford your product or service?)
• Company Size (Can they benefit from your solutions?)
• Job Title (Is the lead a decision-maker within their company?)
• Purchase Timeline (Where are they in the buying cycle?)
• Content Consumed (What content are they interacting with most on your website? Have they requested a free demo or just read a few blog posts?)

Use Google Analytics, your marketing automation software, or your CRM tool to analyze the data on your prospects’ behavior. By paying attention to pages visited, time spent on your website, content that is being consumed or forms being filled out, you can determine how your prospects are interacting with your website and your content. Even looking at email open rates and click-thru rates can help you gather adequate lead intelligence.

Armed with your list of what is most important to your sales team, you can develop a lead scoring system to assign a numeric value to these leads to help you determine the right time to send a hot MQL over to your sales team.

Developing Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a somewhat more advanced strategy that helps you deliver MQLs to your sales team to avoid going after the wrong targets. Implementing a scoring system to assign points to each of your potential prospects can help you identify the strong leads who are more likely to become customers. Your sales team can then spend time following up with those leads who are truly interested, instead of spending valuable time and resources chasing after those people who are never going to become customers.

To set up a lead scoring system, you will need to gather the following information:

• Your target buyer personas
• The buying cycles of these personas
• The most critical criteria your sales team needs to close the deal
• The perceived value of these criteria

Once you know what is most important for your sales team in a MQL, you are ready to set up your lead scoring system.

First, set a threshold for what determines a marketing qualified lead. Is it a score of 50 points? 100? Maybe 500, if you really need to qualify your leads. Consider a starting threshold of 100 for easy math.

With your list of criteria, such as demographics, budget, title, etc., assign a point value to each based on the desired answer.

For instance, a lead may get a score of 75 points if their purchase timeline is 0-30 days but only 25 points if their timeline is 90-120 days.

You may also want to assign points each time a lead interacts with a piece of your content, opens an email, subscribes to your blog or downloads a white paper.

Using Progressive Profiling

More than likely, your leads are not going to meet the threshold upon their first conversion. (Unless your scoring threshold is set really low, in which case you may need to adjust your numbers.)

Those leads who visit your site multiple times, who continue to come back for more content, are more likely to become MQLs and customers than those who don’t. In order to track your leads as they interact with your site upon multiple visits, you need to continue to score them upon each visit.

You don’t want to make your leads fill out the same form every time they want to convert on an offer on your website. Asking their name, email address, company name and budget each time gets you no closer to cultivating MQLs.

This is where progressive profiling comes into play.

Progressive profiling is the act of collecting particular information from leads based on what you already know about them. Meaning that if someone has already provided you with their information in the past, each subsequent time they visit your site, they will be prompted with new questions instead.

Progressive profiling allows you to replace the omitted fields in a lead generation form with new ones that obtain fresh information from your website’s visitors. This allows you to gain more knowledge of a potential customer while also ensuring that you aren’t serving up stale, redundant information to returning visitors.

When you set up progressive profiling, you replace known information with new questions using dynamic form fields. So, instead of the five questions new site visitors see on a form, your returning visitors only have to answer three questions. And shorter forms often lead to higher conversion rates.

Using this technology allows you to spread out the questions you need to evaluate your leads over time in a way that better aligns with your lead’s place in the buying cycle.

Start by collecting critical information upon the first visit (name, email address, phone number, company name, etc.). Then, ask more detailed questions each time the person returns. On the second visit, you may want to ask about budget or solutions. After several repeated visits, you can start to ask more specific questions about your product or solution, such as “What other products are you using?” or “When do you expect to implement a solution?”

Using progressive profiling can help you shorten your sales cycle, since you will be able to more accurately identify sales-ready leads over casual visitors. Combined, lead scoring and progressive profiling can help you develop a list of highly-qualified leads that you can deliver to your sales team on a regular basis.

Complex B2B sales are usually characterized by lengthy, high-value buying decisions that involve multiple stakeholders and frequently end in a decision to do nothing and stick with the status quo. But that doesn’t mean they have to be complicated – far from it.

Over-complicated responses to managing the complex sales process have a woeful success rate. Sales people simply don’t see the value in having to enter reams of information into CRM systems that they doubt management will ever pay proper attention to – or conform to processes that they see as doing nothing to increase their chances of winning. And they are right to rebel.

I believe that the evidence is clear: mastering three deceptively simple principles turns out to be critical to winning the complex sale…

1: FOCUS

First, and at the risk of stating the obvious, your sales and marketing activities must be laser-focused on identifying, engaging and qualifying the opportunities that are most likely to want to buy from you. It sounds like a simple principle, but many sales people and the organizations they work for nevertheless manage to squander enormous amount of time and energy pursuing “opportunities” they have little chance of closing.

Focusing on the right issues requires that you identify and target critical pain points that – once they recognize them – your prospects will be forced to address, and for which you have a demonstrably superior solution.

Focusing on the right organizations involves much more than the classic demographics of size, sector and location: it requires a profound understanding of the common characteristics of your most promising prospects and the trigger events that will cause them to act.

And focusing on the right stakeholders involves identifying and targeting the people who are most likely to act as catalysts for change (also known as “mobilizers”) within these target organizations.

Any failure in any aspect of focus simply sets the foundations for failure.

2: SYSTEMS

Even if you’re focused, you can’t afford to leave sales success to chance. That’s why today’s most effective sales organizations have defined dynamic sales processes that mirror the way their prospects make buying decisions. These systems reflect the winning habits of top sales performers, and offer a simple but effective guide to all sales people as to what they need to know, do, use, share and avoid at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

This emphasis on the buying decision process is critical: it forces the sales person to think about what the prospect needs to achieve in order to achieve consensus around the need for change.

The best of these sales systems are based around simple, flexible frameworks rather than rigid guidelines – and they dynamically evolve to reflect the latest learning about how sales success is best achieved.

It’s hard to overstate the importance of having an effective sales process – they can help to dramatically bridge the performance gap between the best and the rest, and ensure that new hires become productive quickly.

Over-complicated or inadequate systems inevitably mean that your sales people will spend much of their time on things that fail to advance the sale.

3: TALENT

This leads neatly to the third key principle: no matter how clear your focus, and no matter how effective your systems, you can never achieve your full potential without the right people on board.

It’s disturbing to observe how often new hires with apparently highly relevant experience fail to make their mark in their new organization. It’s particularly apparent when people get hired out of large corporates into start-ups or expansion-phase companies – the cultural differences often prove to be unbridgeably wide.

Hiring for experience alone clearly isn’t enough. In fact there’s a wealth of evidence to suggest that, faced with a choice between hiring for aptitude, attitude or experience, experience is the least reliable predictor of future success.

In fact, aptitude and attitude turn out to be so important that they simply cannot be left to chance – and this explains the dramatic rise in assessment solutions for both hiring and employee development.

Without the right talent, any complex sales environment will surely fail.

ELIMINATING AVOIDABLE ERROR

When you think about it, these three principles are less to do with striving for perfection than they are about eliminating avoidable error: they are about not pursuing opportunities that are a bad fit, they are about not doing things that fail to facilitate the prospect’s decision process, and they are about eliminating poor hiring or staff development decisions.

Striving for perfection may be an inspirational goal: but eliminating avoidable error (and simplifying your focus, systems and talent management) is usually a far more practical – and effective – strategy.

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GUEST:

The line between marketing and sales is getting blurrier by the minute. Sales reps are leveraging new sales acceleration tools like Tout, Yesware, Sidekick, and Outreach, and it feels like a new one comes out every quarter.

These specialized apps have become so sophisticated that they’re enabling sales to run their own campaigns and sidestep marketing automation. They help teams increase response rates through more personalization and control, a 1:1 touch, simple plain text messages, and more follow up vs. blanket general marketing blasts.

As the go-to-market (GTM) technology stack expands, sales is taking marketing into its own hands, and marketers are being asked to give up some turf at the top of funnel.

Sales acceleration vs. marketing automation

There are two main camps of emerging sales apps: email tracking and triggered workflows. Both typically come as Google Chrome extensions that override your Gmail experience. Most tools fall into the tracking category: They tell reps when people click on their emails, attachments, and links. However, many apps, like Outreach, are moving more towards the workflow camp and are chipping away at the territory of marketing automation. They help reps set up their own templates and drip schedules to plan sequences of sales touches – like call, LinkedIn, email, Twitter, etc.

These tools can even automate email sends or designate a custom touch by the rep. They define what action should take place at each step, which is great for establishing processes and training reps.

As a result, we’re seeing more personalized emails coming from sales reps. Text-based emails receive much higher engagement than beautifully-designed blast emails with banners and images because people take comfort in talking to a person vs. a mail bot. In its own A/B tests, HubSpot found that using HTML actually reduced open rates by 25-37%.

5 lessons for the next-gen GTM stack

Will these developments just deepen the sales and marketing divide? Does it really make sense to have so many GTM tools? And which team should own and manage them – sales or marketing? As your sales stack inches toward marketing automation, here are some tips for getting sales and marketing in lock-step:

1. Nail down marketing and sales goals. At the end of the day, all of this technology change should lead to shared goals around driving revenue for the business. More and more companies are closely aligning their sales and marketing objectives, and I’ve even seen several cases where marketing co-owns the revenue number with sales. If both groups care about driving more responses to meeting requests, for example, and if sales-driven personalized messaging gets higher response rates than marketing blasts, then marketing should encourage this shift.

2. Clarify marketing’s swim lane. It’s critical to define specific jurisdictions for sales and marketing, and smart companies are refining responsibilities so that marketing is focused on creating messaging and content, while sales reps are the voice of the company. Reps should test out marketing assets with their accounts and provide feedback that informs future content. Marketers will need to give up responsibility for delivery and correspondence and instead work on better enabling sales. If your GTM teams can get behind this role adjustment, you’ll improve message governance and achieve more holistic communications with less risk of reps going off message.

3. Adopt hyper-segmentation techniques. Marketers should focus on carving up the prospect world for reps, which they’ve been doing for decades and are expert at. It makes sense for marketing to own and deliver these insights to reps. They can do this by developing personas and segmenting accounts using firmographic, technographic, and behavioral signals for advanced market planning and prospect management. This approach will improve targeting, increase engagement, and boost conversion rates – as opposed to relying on the gut instinct and blunt instruments common among many sales teams.

4. Up your nurture game. Of course, when leads get stale, marketing should nurture them with thoughtful drip schedules that deliver personalization at scale. Unlike the sales team, which has to focus on an immediate number and tends to hone in on shiny new objects and the warmest accounts, marketing can take a more strategic, long-term approach to nurture programs. Marketing also has better visibility into clicks and web behavioral data and is closest to the content that will hopefully resurrect old leads from the nurture pile. They should monitor for leads that heat up and send them back to sales while managing the larger group of cold leads.

5. Establish a centralized hub for lead data. I would contend that the value of CRM and MAP systems comes not just from automation or workflows anymore but from centralizing data. In today’s environment, customer data is often spread across Salesforce, Marketo, a content management system, Google Analytics, and new sales acceleration tools. While it’s key to get all of a user’s clicks housed in one place, that is increasingly difficult because a lot of the data resides in other apps’ servers. A good best practice is to pull all relevant data points into your CRM and use that as the source of truth for both sales and marketing whenever possible. Be aware of closed sales development platforms that trap your data. Rather, consider tools that write richly to Salesforce, so you can maintain one primary system of record for business reporting.

Companies should give marketing as much control over this data as possible. It’s helpful for nurturing, segmenting, and knowing where to invest marketing dollars. When your marketing team manages the full spectrum of information across the stack, it can learn everything there is to know about contacts and accounts, define ideal customer profiles, and pass the relevant insights to sales.

Getting a step ahead

It’s also important to keep in mind that these sales acceleration tools are still early – there will be winners and losers, consolidation, and even more new platforms will emerge. Things are going to get hairy, especially given the fragmentation of tools and different servers that are housing data about your customers and prospects in this new world. If you work to solidify your goals, unify your stack, and establish which departments own which data and workflows, your GTM culture and targets will stay intact regardless of which new tools come and go. That’s the best way to stay ahead of the curve as market dynamics evolve.

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

Demand generation is the lifeblood of a strong revenue engine. B2B marketers have developed a honed set of best practices to target, engage and convert relevant leads.

As data continues to transform B2B marketing from an art to a science, demand generation marketers are feeling the pressure to be more aware of their customers’ behavior than ever. Incorporating analytics into demand generation processes is essential to achieving this goal. Buyers’ activity on your site and their search patterns on 3rd-party publisher sites provide a wealth of data that can help improve your ability to capture demand and generate revenue.

Here are four questions you need to consider in this new age of data-driven demand generation.

Question #1: Can we identify prospects early in their buying process?

Today’s customers conduct research independently before getting in touch with vendors. The earlier you can enter the conversation and earn your role as a trusted advisor, the better.

Demand gen marketers can no longer wait until a prospect raises their hand and requests a product demo or engages with a requisite amount of content on your site. Doing so excludes your marketing and sales team from the formative part of a prospect’s research process – missing the opportunity to shape the scope and direction of their project.

Early, proactive customer engagement during the research and awareness stages drives higher conversion rates and larger deal sizes. The ability to anticipate when an account will enter a buying cycle will separate successful demand gen marketers from the rest.

Question #2: What is the prospect’s buying stage?

Companies used to impose their sales process on the buyer. Today, that approach no longer works. Buyers expect you to meet them when they’re ready, and via their preferred channels.

Marketing automation and CRM can be a great help when it comes to tracking the buyer’s journey and accommodating buyers’ communication preferences. Where both technologies are lacking is in maximizing the value of the data they capture. Existing tech stacks simply do not identify where a prospect sits in their buying journey until there has been direct contact between the prospect and your sales team. Using predictive modeling, modern marketers are empowering their sales development teams with buying stage information, allowing them to prioritize and customize their outreach.

Question #3: When will we open an opportunity with this account?

Time is a salesperson’s most valuable resource. Nothing is more demoralizing than spending a significant amount of time chasing a lead or an account that was never in market to begin with. Most companies have developed clear lines of communication between sales and marketing to create mutually agreed upon marketing qualification rules to avoid just such an outcome. While these are good first steps, they fall short in a increasingly data-driven world.

Predictive lead scoring is a step forward as it puts mathematic analysis behind the rules-based approach of demographic and behavioral qualification rubriks. However, these technologies have inherent drawbacks, because they rely only on data generated by your individual website and pre-existing records in your system.

Predictive intelligence taps data external to your website in order to identify—with a high degree of accuracy—where there is actual buying intent. The result is that demand gen teams pass much stronger leads to sales, while disqualifying those that are unlikely to become customers.

Question #4: Who are the real decision-makers on an account’s buying committee?

If salespeople can’t access a decision maker, they’re likely to lose a deal to someone who can. As the buyer’s journey becomes more circuitous, marketers must give sales teams the most clear and accurate portrait possible of contacts and decision makers in potential accounts.

Predictive intelligence can help you identify the key contacts, influencers and end-users for each account, based on historic opportunity data and each individual’s online activity.

B2B customers demand customized engagement with highly knowledgeable sales and marketing teams. In this new environment, your data and how you use it will determine the level of success that your marketing and sales organization can achieve.

Pivotal customer data won’t come just from your website, CRM and marketing automation. After all, your prospects are conducting research on multiple websites across the entire B2B web—not just yours. Increasingly, it will be important for you to have a tool that rolls up predictions based on the digital footprints that prospects are generating across the greater B2B web.

The bottom line is that great marketers never assume they know everything there is to know about their customers. Instead, they ask the right questions that help them target the best leads possible.

Interested in learning more about how demand generation leaders are using marketing automation and predictive intelligence? Join our webinar Making Account Based Marketing Work with Marketo’s VP of Demand Generation Heidi Bullock.

If you’re searching for a “silver bullet” to magically solve all your problems, you’re probably going to fail.

Even if you’ve found an effective tactic that can give you a strong advantage, that advantage won’t last long once a million other people have learned of that tactic. This is why even the best tactics and sales or “growth hacks” are always only temporary.

This is true for just about everything in life, but especially sales prospecting emails.

I get emails, comments, tweets and Linkedin messages every week from people asking the same thing: “Can you post some of your actual cold email templates online?”

Although I regularly critique cold emails to educate people on what mistakes they should avoid, I intentionally try to avoid posting simplistic examples of “what you should do/write” because people tend to misuse and abuse these examples.

About a year ago I was helping Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin edit and wrap up the sequel to Aaron’s best-seller, “Predictable Revenue.” One of the things Aaron asked me to add was a section on cold email copy, in which I supplied one of my client’s real email templates that actually got them at least 16 customers.

Here’s the “winning email template” I wrote:

Please note that this template was designed for a very specific use case: It was written for a B2B company with sales acceleration software who was targeting VP Sales and Directors of Inside Sales.

My company, Salesfolk, designs email templates as part of campaigns that our clients send to their prospective customers in order to start conversations. All of the templates we create for clients are 100% original and unique. We don’t reuse templates or generic formulas for anyone, but rather rely on a variety of carefully tested and proven copywriting principles that aim to evoke our clients’ prospects’ emotions and build rapport so that they will engage in a thoughtful conversation.

Part of why our emails are so effective and beat the industry standard by 3-10x, consistently getting response rates around 16-35%, is because none of them are ever generic.

Ironically, this means that when people try to rip them off and reuse them, it will backfire and fail, unless they are used by a close competitor targeting the same buyer personas.

Why Cheap Copycats Will Always Fail At Sales and Marketing in The Long-Run

Aaron later republished the section I wrote for the book on Hubspot to drive additional traction to his pre-launch. I didn’t mind this because I had already given it to him to use as he liked, and it did generate qualified leads for me. However, since then I have seen that same exact email template copy and pasted dozens if not hundreds of times.

It became rampantly overused, like Aaron’s “who’s the right person” email.

Not only did almost every direct and indirect competitor of my client start using that email, companies who weren’t even in that space started using it too.

I know this because not only did I personally receive that same email from ZoomInfo and a dozen of their competitors in the lead space, but so did my clients and everyone else.

At first, I didn’t mind this, and found the whole thing kind of amusing and flattering.

But eventually, I started to get a bit annoyed.

I wasn’t annoyed because people were ripping off our templates without paying us, but because people were being so lazy and foolish to try to just “copy-paste” an email template that clearly wasn’t relevant to their business model or their audience.

Not only will these people not be effective with cold email, and will not get many responses to their cold emails, their spam is irritating the market of prospective customers and teaching them to hate sales prospecting emails.

And all this really pisses me off.

I don’t want to see my own email templates going up on our Hall of Shame, but if people keep spamming and abusing them, they will.

Please Don’t Be A Sheep: Stop Copy-Pasting Generic Emails And Spamming Them. Instead, Be A Goat And Adopt An “Original Approach”

I have a big orange goat on the back of my business card. It looks like this:

Sure, it’s memorable and makes a good conversation starter, but it’s more than that to me.

There are two things I fiercely believe in and live by. They are that:

1. Cold email is a powerful tool that can change your life and business, if used correctly and thoughtfully to start intelligent conversations with the right people who you can add value to.
2. You cannot get far in life by being a “sheep” and blindly following people and copying other people’s work and tactics. Instead, I believe people should always be “goats,” and strive to think critically for themselves and come up with creative and original ideas. (Sheep follow blindly, and goats lead independently.)

So how does this apply to cold email, sales and marketing?

The only real “winning sales strategy” is by continually seeking out effective tactics and strategies that others have not yet realized.

The way to find them is to have a mindset where you are constantly testing new strategies to find out what works and what doesn’t, and then iterating upon them once you’ve found the winners.

Anything less, such as blindly copying basic tips and tactics from some mainstream source, such as a blog post or book, won’t ever be nearly as effective.

There’s a lot of great content out there, and you absolutely should read it and think about it, but the key is to think critically and skeptically about any information you absorb, and test it out for yourself to see if it works for you or not.

When it comes to lead generation, you hear the same things over and over again….

You have to drive people to landing pages on your site and have them register with an email address, in order to receive your gated content. You hear it all the time because it works.

Once you get an email address, then you can begin to “court” those leads, and you keep in touch.

But what if there were other ways to get leads – ways that you may not have thought about yet?

Well, there are.

Here are 13 clever lead generation tactics for you to consider, so you don’t leave any leads on the table.

1. Use your email signature space

Turn cold leads into warm and even hot ones, by using that empty space below your signature.

You can actually change the message in that signature space to do all sorts of things, and make sure that your team members are using the same one, depending upon what type of lead generation you want at the moment.

• Insert a message about an amazing new post with a link to your blog. On that content page, there can be an optin to receive all future posts. Now your lead is getting emails and posts (Note: the post needs to be amazing, you have to make your blog rock!)
• Double up on CTA’s in your email. Your email may be an offer of some sort. You can have another CTA in your signature space that will take a lead to another landing page. The British Red Cross does a great job of this, and you can read the case study here. But to give you a quick example, here is an email it sent out with an offer for readers to make a will. Note in the signature area, there is a CTA to join their network as well, along with sharing options.

• Another way to use your email signature space is to place an offer right there. It could turn a lead into a buyer on the spot.

2. Create a poll/quiz

Of course, you see these on Facebook all the time.

And admit it, you do take those quizzes and you participate in polls. You, like everyone else, like to see which “Frozen” character you are or have your opinion count somewhere.

But if you are going to use one of these “hooks,” create one that relates to your niche. Why? Because people who participate are likely to be much warmer leads – they have an interest in your product or service already.

Here is an example of Z Gallerie’s quiz on interior design preferences. The company sells products to interior designers. The quiz was gated, and the company was then able to follow-up with the quiz taker and make recommendations for products based upon their personal style preferences.

You have two options to turn the quiz and poll takers into leads.

• You can “gate” the quiz or poll, once readers have linked to it.
• You can promise to send the results via email, once the polling event has ended.

3. Use the byline on every post

You already have share buttons on your posts. And that’s a good thing. But unless you are doing something more that will actually generate leads, you are leaving some on the table.

Your post may be shared, and a new reader may find it fun or interesting. But you want that reader to do more than just share it with others. You want that reader to optin. So, under your byline, offer a “free updates” link, so the reader can opt-in to all of your future posts. Now you have another email address to add to your database.

4. Use white space on your rails

There are a couple of things you can and should do here;

• Install sticky widgets that follow the content as the reader scrolls down. You want a constant reminder to click to a landing page for a free e-guide or trial offer, so that you can capture an email address.
• On the right side rail, place a small box about you, with perhaps a small photo. Have offers on that rail side too. Neil Patel does a great job of this on “Quick Sprout.” Here is an example of some things that are on the right rail of all of his posts.

5. Give bonus information

Here are the 4 steps of this tactic:

• Use Buzzsumo to find the most popular articles on a topic related to your niche
• Review the article and then write a better one
• Offer the reader even more information on the topic in exchange for an email address

Warning: Don’t Bait and Switch. If you are offering bonus information on a specific topic, no fair switching topics – you’ll just make readers angry.

6. Hold a contest

The entry fee, of course, is an email address. Here, you must be certain that the winner will receive something of real value – a free product is the best reward.

ModCloth does a great job of this. On any given day, you can access their Facebook page and find great stuff. They feature their own customers modeling their clothing, and conversations abound. But they also run contests to “name” a clothing item that they have just acquired. (They do name each piece they carry). The winner receives that item, but, with each contest they generate new leads.

7. Find groups and engage

Locate online groups where your target customers hang out, and join a few.

• Hang out for 10-15 minutes a day. Scan the recent posts and comment on them
• Start posting 1-2 times a week. Get some kind of theme for your posts – perhaps something humorous or inspirational – jokes, quotes, etc.
• Post at the same time and same day and build a following
• Eventually drive them to a landing page with an offer

This is just one of many lead generation tactics offered by Noah Kagan of okdork.com.

8. Use product videos on landing pages

The majority of internet users are now visual learners even if they were not before. Use a video to explain your product or service, using good tools such as Animoto.

Keep that video short but put a CTA at the end. Many marketers are not aware that they can actually embed CTA’s in videos, but it is really effective. People may not read a post to the end, but they will watch a video to the end.

9. Get rid of the word “Spam”

Mike Aagard, author for ContentVerve.com did some A/B testing on conversion forms.

Here’s what he found: When the phrase, “We will not spam you” was removed from the form there was an increase in conversion rates. Using that phrase reduced conversion rates by 18%. There is just something psychological about the word “spam” that readers do not like (for obvious reasons)

10. Experiment with CTA buttons

There is a lot of research out there about those CTA buttons and what appeals and attracts.

Here are just a couple of pointers:

• Have rounded corners – it drives eyes inward rather than out and away
• Put an engaging phrase on the button or right around it – keep it short
• Orange and Green colors do best

To get a full explanation of the power of CTA buttons check out this Wordstream post.

11. Use segmented storytelling

Telling stories is always a great way to capture readers, especially if the stories are compelling in some way.

Jack Daniels does a great job of this with their reader-submitted weird bar stories. Readers continue to access their landing page with these stories. You can use stories, if you are creative enough (boring stories will have a reverse effect). And, if you publish your stories in segments, and the reader has to optin – you’ll get those conversions.

12. Use Quora

Quora now has a search feature. You can search for topic keywords, and get into feeds that relate to your niche. Start answering questions and create a profile with backlinks.

Eventbrite has used this tactic quite well to link back to its specific events. You can use it to link back to your landing pages.

13. Use SlideShare

There are now over 60 million visitors to SlideShare every month. Think of the potential leads that can come when visitors search for keywords that relate directly to your slide presentation. But you can go further than that:

• You can add a link to a landing page on every slide
• You can sign up for the pro plan that lets you collect leads from those who have viewed your slides.

Here are only 13 options you have for lead generation. There are many more, of course.

Just begin with 3-4 of these tactics – those that you find easiest to implement right now. Test their effectiveness, keep those that work, dump those that don’t, and move onto the next few tactics. Eventually, you will have a great repertoire of lead generating tactics that work.

Recruiting is the #1 priority for a VP of Sales. Getting the best people and enabling them to succeed is a fundamental part of this job description. It should take up at least 20% of their time.

That makes the current economic climate tough to take. One of the first things to happen in lean times is a hiring freeze. As the company takes stock of what it can and can’t afford with reduced cash flows, something as expensive as a new hire — in any department — is given second thoughts.

VPs of Sales will need to do more with less if there is such a squeeze on capital. But this can be a blessing in disguise. As they can’t increase the headcount to hit their numbers, to still achieve growth they’ll have to look for other ways to improve their sales process.

With less resources forcing VPs to be more efficient, they should look thoroughly at where in the sales cycle enhancements can be made. Sales leaders can push the business to be far more resilient — better able to deal with both the current lean times, and in a more powerful position to take advantage of the markets once the financial situation improves.

Here’s why you should consider slowing down your sales hiring, and what you can do to mitigate cuts to your company, still achieve growth, and make more money available to get the reps you really need.

Slowing Down Sales Hiring

When you hire a new salesperson, it’s not just their base salary and any commission that you’ll be paying every month. There is an entire infrastructure that supports each member of your team to ensure they get leads and then close deals successfully. If you are hiring a new account executive, then they become part of a group of people and departments moving the customer from prospect to success. They need:

• Marketing, to develop leads.
• Sales Development Reps, to qualify leads.
• Customer Success, to make their sale successful.
• Consultancy, to upsell and provide post-sales services.

Each AE might only take up a fraction of the resources from these team members, but when everything is totaled, this investment could come to close to $1M per AE. In his presentation on The Key Drivers for SaaS Success at SaaStr 2016, David Skok showed this point excellently. As they are still ramping up, new sales hires are highly cash flow negative in their first few months. You are investing more in them than they are returning in sales. This leads to a cash trough:

Cumulative Net Profit With 1 New Hire / Month

Based on The Key Drivers To SaaS Success, slide 51B

Eventually AEs will pay that money back and start to become profitable for the business, but the length of the trough means that you’re spending a significant amount of time in the red. It could take 3 to 6 months for them to ramp up fully, then another 10 months to pass the payback point and be net-positive contributors to the company. During that initial period, you’re continuously losing money.

If you’re well-funded and flush with cash, then this shorter-term loss is acceptable for the long-term gains. But in leaner times, when cash flow is tighter, it can be difficult to sustain this type of loss for this period of time.

The problem just compounds with more hires. Though the payback period will be the same, the cash trough would be twice as deep with another hire:

Cumulative Net Profit With 1 or 2 New Hire / Month

Based on The Key Drivers To SaaS Success, slide 52

The long-term gains of 2 new hires per month would usually make this an economic no-brainer. But if you can’t afford to get through that cash trough, then you’re not going to get to enjoy the increased gains on the other side of the payback period.

This is why it’s important to consider slowing sales hiring during economic downturns. The more sales reps you hire, the deeper that trough gets. You might not be able to survive the initial outlay of capital before you get to the profit.

3 Ways To Get More With Less In Your Sales Process

If you still want to increase your headcount, or at least not decrease it, then there are some other ways you can improve your sales process to cut costs and increase cash flow. These options can not only cut back on the spend in your sales and marketing bucket, but also improve your short-term cash flow, which is exactly what you need if you still want to ramp up your sales team.

Collect Cash Upfront with Annual Contracts

SaaS is a great model, but all customer acquisition costs (CAC) come up front, whereas the usual monthly recurring payment model has you recovering those costs incrementally over time. Having your payback period spread over a year constrains your own growth spending. For instance, say you have a product priced at $1,000 per month. If your CAC is $12,000 then for an entire year you’re paying back this CAC with your incoming revenue:

Net Profit & MRR

This means that you’re cash-flow negative for all this time. Once you pass that 12-month marker, then the deal becomes profitable with positive cash-flow. But before that, you’re funding CAC with either investment dollars or cash from other customers further along their lifetime. Switching to an annual, upfront payments can negate some or all of this problem. If you invest $12,000 in CAC and then immediately recover this cost through a one-time payment from that customer of $12,000, it allows you to become cash-flow neutral immediately, and cash-flow positive through your other customers.

Net Profit & Revenue

Additionally, tying customers into an annual contract will help decrease churn, increase ARPU, and give your customer success team more opportunity to promote the core values and upsell your customers.

Fix the Leakiest Part of Your Funnel

Making your sales process more efficient is one of the most effective ways to cut costs. There will be dozens of marginal gains to be made all across your sales organization. Improving efficiency in each of these by just a few percentage points can compound to significant gains and savings throughout your entire funnel.

The best place to start is to find where you’re losing the most customers from your funnel, and experimenting with ways to shore up those losses. SaaS Venture Capitalist Tomasz Tunguz specifically suggests that fixing this “leakiest part” of your lead-to-close funnel is the quickest way to save money.

For instance, if you are losing the most people between your initial email campaign and qualification, then increasing this conversion rate will lead to an increased number of closed deals, compared to trying to improve a more efficient phase, such as the demo-to-close step.

In this scenario, improving the email-to-lead conversion rate by 5% leads to a 33% increase in closes. This is because the larger gains earlier in the funnel cascade down, leading to more opportunities at each step. Improving demo-to-close by the same amount, 5%, only improves outcomes by 8%.

Improving Conversion Rates in Your Funnel

Experimenting with email services such as Customer.io for personalized acquisition campaigns can easily increase this number. This is a quick win, and there is still plenty of room for growth.

Reduce The Length of Your Sales Cycle

By reducing the length of the sales cycle, you can bring more customers in more quickly, leading to a jump in revenue.

In this case, if your sales cycle is usually 4 months long, and your average deal size is $100K, then you’ll be making $300K per year per cycle. If you can shorten the cycle by just 1 month, to a 3-month cycle, you’ll make an extra $100k per year per cycle. This is a matter of increasing efficiency to cut costs.

All it requires is the ability to dive deep into your sales process, analyzing it from many angles:

1. Slice it up: Your sales cycle isn’t one big number — it’s made up of a variety of different metrics. You need to split it up by stages, reps, and lead sources to determine exactly where the bottlenecks are in your cycle.
2. Tweak it: Once you know the where, what and who of your slow cycle you can start to take action. Run experiments to see if you can improve individual aspects of your sales process. For instance, if sales demos are causing slowness, you could:
   • Schedule demos earlier in the process
   • Improve training to enhance demo presentation
   • Automate some of the demo phase to free reps for other sales tasks
3. Lose deals faster: A great way to increase the efficiency of your sales cycle is to weed out the non-buyers early in the game. The fewer drop-offs you have later in your funnel, the more time your sales reps can spend with the prospects that really matter—the ones that are going to become customers.
4. Calculate your loss cycle: Instead of analyzing how long it takes to make a deal, look for how long it takes to lose a deal. If you then compare it to the cycle for deals you won, you can look for differences in the two, and nail down those leading indicators of non-buyers. Non-buyers spend longer in the funnel as they drag their heels and string along sales reps. If you can identify these early, you can look for ways to either move these prospects faster, or move them on.

Slowing down your sales hiring doesn’t necessarily mean stopping. Depending on your cash flow you might still have the money to push through that cash trough to profitability. But by taking pause and looking at your financial situation you can find out exactly where you can optimize your process, where you can find efficiencies, and build a stronger, more resilient process.

In mid 2015, Datahug began the process of transitioning its sales team to an Account-Based Selling model. We know our market well, and wanted to capitalize on this understanding as fast as possible. The primary goal was to minimize friction in our pipeline by focusing on prospects that would get the most value from our product, while requiring the shortest sales cycle to close.

Selecting Target Accounts

To start, we had to identify what this sort of customer looks like. For Datahug, this means tech-forward North American companies with between 200 and 2000 employees, a sales team of 25 people or more, an average sales cycle of 45 days or longer, and average deal size of $30,000.

Next we had to create the list of Accounts we’d prioritize over general prospecting. There are a few places to source this data. We’ve been in business for a while and are transitioning to an Account-Based selling model from a more conventional inside sales setup, so we had an entire CRM of information to pick through.

We’ve also used Linkedin, Crunchbase and ZoomInfo, all great resources for market data. If these aren’t enough, you can always resort to buying information from proprietary databases that sell lists based on your criteria, but this is not as cost-effective or targeted as other methods.

Once we segmented our target Accounts from the rest of our pipeline, it came time to build a process for addressing them.

Re-engineering the Workflow

Prior to making the transition to Account-Based selling, we were operating a typical inside sales model, wherein SDRs would conduct prospecting to set meetings, which would be taken by our AEs. We shifted the order of operations in our Account-Based model so that Sales Ops starts the workflow.

Sales Ops selects priority Accounts from the target list, which are given to the SDR team. The SDRs then prospect into these Accounts, but in a much more deliberate, high touch manner than we previously used for outreach. More on that later.

Wrestling with Salesforce

One of the first challenges we encountered when adopting an Account-Based selling model was how to reflect our work in Salesforce. Due to the way Accounts, Contacts, Opportunities and Leads are recognized and related, it isn’t immediately obvious how to automate activity tracking or which leads can be confidently followed up on by the SDR team without duplicating  the efforts of the AE team. So Salesforce does not natively support the Account-Based selling model efficiently.

When a new Lead comes in, Salesforce has no native functionality to automatically associate it with an Account. Unless you’re using 3rd party software, you have to go through and manually convert Leads to Contacts so that they’re visible in Account view.

But in an Account-Based Selling model, you want to respond to target Accounts as soon as they engage with your marketing. So any time spent slogging through new Leads and sorting them into Contacts for Accounts or merging duplicates is time wasted. Anyone trying to run an Account-Based sales team from Salesforce will run into this issue.

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In ABS, you want to respond to target Accounts as soon as they engage w/ marketing.
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There are a couple ways this can play out. It’s all too common that sales teams simply accept this state of affairs and press on despite the lack of visibility. The presales team will continue working from Leads, and the AE team from Contacts. Each team will have a list of the priority Accounts, so in theory, everyone should be able to stick to their own territory and not have any overlap.

But because of the lack of native visibility available in Salesforce, it’s inevitable that a Lead will come in from a target Account and be contacted by the SDR team before they realize outreach has already begun by the AE team. If it’s not caught before the AE team reaches out, this can lead to overlapping outreach, which makes your team look unprofessional externally and can be frustrating internally.

To operate a truly agile Account-Based Selling strategy, it takes more insight than a basic Salesforce deployment can provide. This is where our own product came in handy. (Shameless plug alert – we have to talk about ourselves for a moment).

Datahug’s software includes an Account matching algorithm that automatically converts Leads to Contacts for existing Accounts, making them immediately visible from the Account view in Salesforce and notifying the proper Account team. It also populates the Account view with all emails and meetings by pulling data directly from the email server.

By eating our own dogfood, everyone gets visibility into a deal’s activity. We’re able to see when a new lead comes in for a target Account immediately, and don’t have to worry about overlapping communication between AEs and SDRs.

Measuring Success

We figured out the structure of our outreach early on and our own software proved an easy fix for immediate, common CRM issues. The more complex piece to figure out was optimizing for productivity, specifically with regards to measuring effectiveness and compensation.

So we developed a new set of metrics to measure the effectiveness of our reps. From the outset, we wanted to align this high quality approach with high quality metrics. Instead of emails/calls per day, we started measuring things like:

• Percentage of emails/calls into target Accounts versus total addressable market (TAM)
• Number of two-way conversations (not just single response) per rep per week
• Pipeline generated, average deal size and win rate for target versus TAM Accounts

When coaching reps, we focus on making sure their prospecting is spread evenly across Accounts so they regularly touch each company. If they are having a lot of conversations, but not setting meetings, we examine the messaging and see what’s going wrong.

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We make sure prospecting is spread evenly across accounts to regularly touch each company.
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We also encourage them to set multiple meetings at Accounts, or group meetings, because we know that if they can hand an Account to an AE with multiple senior contacts engaged, it almost doubles the win rate.

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If we hand an account to an AE w/ multiple senior contacts engaged, it almost doubles win rate.
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Adjusting Compensation

One of the biggest levers you can pull to change behavior in a sales team is compensation. Incentivize the behavior you want to see, and results will inevitably follow. But there can always be unforeseen pitfalls when adjusting compensation.

For our Account-Based Selling model, we started out by counting meetings set with target Accounts as double for our SDR team. They’re still allowed to pursue meetings with non-target Accounts, but they’ve figured out that they’re able to hit quota far faster by spending more time on fewer Accounts, creating customized messaging for each prospect.

They can spend 1.5x the effort and get 2x the outcome. Quota attainment has increased while more meetings have been set with sweet-spot prospects.

For the AEs, we haven’t changed compensation, simply limited available territory to our target Account list. This has reduced the amount of low-hanging fruit available, and forces them to work more meaty, higher-value deals.

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Limiting AE territory reduces amount of low-hanging fruit, forces them to work higher-value deals.
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After a couple months, we found that companies on the smaller side of the target list were being prioritized. The AEs were concerned that they might not make quota if they only hunted the elephants on the list; they take down the small game first, ensuring that they land something for the quarter, and then they target larger deals.

Lessons Learned

This project has taught us a lot about how to manage our team and achieve specific results. The more targeted you want to be, the more complex the rules you’ll need to impose on your sales team. To compensate for the added complexity, you must re-examine the way you go about communicating and managing. Everyone has to be onboard not just with the rules, but with the motivation behind them.

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Everyone has to be onboard not just with the rules, but with the motivation behind them. @donnyo
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Our goal for the near term is to optimize our sales process to alleviate some of the stress on our AE team. If they’re not as concerned with the possibility of missing revenue from smaller deals, they’ll be more willing to spend time taking on the meatier prospects.

We’re also going to prioritize getting the most value possible out of our lead-gen efforts. We noticed that worthwhile inbound leads can go unaddressed if they fall outside the target Account list, so we’re starting out our new SDRs as inbound-only. Once they’ve worked the leads that have already demonstrated interest, they move on to target Accounts.

We’ll continue to publish the results of our Account-Based selling story. Stay tuned for more insight into sales management and pipeline optimization!

The post One Sales Team's Road to Reinvention with Account-Based Selling appeared first on Sales Hacker.

How you wake up in the morning could make or break your day. In a new LinkedIn post, psychologist Dr. Travis Bradberry, a coauthor of "Emotional Intelligence 2.0" and president of TalentSmart, has revealed the eight things he believes successful people do before 8 a.m.

Here we go.

1. Drink lemon water

“Drinking lemon water as soon as you wake up spikes your energy levels physically and mentally,” Bradberry wrote. “By improving nutrient absorption in your stomach, it gives you a steady, natural energy buzz that lasts the length of the day.”

Does lemon actually boost mineral absorption? According to Dr. Mike Roussell, a nutritional consultant at Shape, it could due to its high levels of Vitamin C, but so would any food with Vitamin C like kale or bell peppers.

The more important component here appears to be the water, which many successful people like NextDesk Director Dan Lee start their morning by drinking.

But unless your stomach lining is sensitive to citrus fruits, a squeeze of a lemon certainly couldn’t hurt. 

2. Exercise

Exercise in general is healthy for you, and getting it out of the way in the morning is a smart way to start the day.

“A study conducted at the Eastern Ontario Research Institute found that people who exercised twice a week for 10 weeks felt more competent socially, academically, and athletically," Bradberry wrote. "A second study conducted by researchers at the University of Bristol found that people who exercised daily had more energy and a more positive outlook, which are both critical for getting things done.”

There are lots of benefits to exercise and famous CEOs who also work out in the morning include Disney's Bob Iger, Virgin Group 's Richard Branson, and Apple's Tim Cook.

3. Disconnect

"When you wake up and dive straight into e-mails, texts, and Facebook, you are far more likely to lose focus, and your morning succumbs to the wants and needs of other people,” Bradberry wrote.

Instead, read a book like AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, meditate like the CEO of Twitter and Square Jack Dorsey, or spend time with your family and pets like director of NextDesk Dan Lee.

4. Eat a healthy breakfast

Eating a well-balanced breakfast will not only help you stay focused, but also improve your waistline since you’ll most likely eat less throughout the day.

“People who eat breakfast are less likely to be obese, they have more stable blood-sugar levels, and they tend to be less hungry over the course of the day,” Bradberry wrote.

Not sure what to eat? Here are some healthy ideas.

5. Medidate

Bradberry said practicing “mindfulness meditation” can be good for your productivity and stress levels.

According to Harvard neuroscientist Sara Lazar, it can also increase gray matter concentration in areas of the brain, which can lead to less stress and more awareness of both yourself and outside forces.

CEO of Twitter and Square Jack Dorsey meditates every morning at 5 a.m. — maybe you should, too.

6. Set goals for the day

Benjamin Franklin was obsessive about planning his days,” Bradberry wrote. “When you plan out your day as carefully as possible, your chances of successfully accomplishing your goals skyrocket.”

Science supports this. Checking off goals is a mini reward and can help you be more productive, according to Kelly McGonigal, a psychologist at Stanford University.

7. But make sure your goals are realistic

Look no further than studies on New Year’s resolutions to find that we all have a really hard time keeping lofty goals.

Being realistic about your daily goals will help you feel more accomplished and get more done, according to Psychologist Peter Herman, because you won’t be setting yourself up for “false hope syndrome.”

“There’s no point in setting goals if they aren’t realistic,” Bradberry wrote on LinkedIn. “Take the time to ensure that your schedule for the day is doable by assigning times to your to-do list. A good rule of thumb is to make your day as top heavy as possible.”

8. Say "no"

“No is a powerful word, which will protect your precious mornings,” Bradberry wrote, adding that you’ll be less likely to “experience stress, burnout, and even depression.”

Science may support this — researchers at the University of Californina in San Francisco found you’ll be less stressed and less depressed if you say no and don’t over-commit yourself.

Read more of Bradberry’s insights on LinkedIn.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Tony Robbins has an unusual morning ritual that keeps him at the top of his game

This year, the annual trust and credibility survey conducted by global PR firm Edelman showed that people place more trust in their peers and company employees than CEOs and government officials. There’s a flipping of the pyramid of influence, as peer-to-peer discussions prevail over the influence of leaders.

But despite the skepticism, the public’s trust in CEOs has actually been improving: It’s increased to 49%, compared to 41% a year ago. Edelman says that can be credited to CEOs who are stepping forward on important issues, including Howard Schultz of Starbucks on youth employment; Cyrus Mistry of Tata on education; and Jack Ma of Alibaba on inclusion.

Here are four ways CEOs can win the public’s trust and admiration, according to Edelman’s survey of more than 33,000 respondents in 25 countries, including Canada and US:

1. Create social impact in addition to profits

Currently, CEOs underperform in all of the 16 trust-building leadership attributes that Edelman measures. Their treatment of employees and customers falls short of the public’s expectations, and they are perceived to lack integrity in their business conduct by focusing too much on short-term financial results. The public wants companies to be more involved in their communities: 80% of survey participants believe businesses can both increase their bottom line and improve the economic and social conditions in the communities they operate, and respond positively to CEOs who do. Businesses can find a local issue meaningful to their customers and work to ameliorate it. 

2. Express your values and share your story

Most CEOs (apart from young tech founders) are perceived to be too distant and hard to read. The public expects them to be more visible, and engage directly with them. They want to learn more about the CEO as a person, not just as a business figure, and hear them share their personal values and stories.

3. Turn your employees into the company’s advocates

It turns out that a company’s employees are its most trusted spokespeople. That remains true whether the topic is financial earnings, business practices or the company’s treatment of employees and customers. Media spokespersons and activist consumers, on the other hand, are least trusted to deliver the company line.

4. Engage with your stakeholders authentically and attend to their interests and concerns

In order for CEOs to engage with their company’s stakeholders in today’s media landscape, they have to extend beyond traditional media, to include social media and online media as well. Consumers are shown to rely on their family and friends when making purchase decisions. They trust these people have their best interest at heart, and will warn them about the risks of a product or service. CEOs are more likely to win their customer and stakeholders’ trust, if they engage with them in an honest and authentic manner, and address their interests and concerns during conversations, instead of promoting their business.

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MORE ABOUT CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY:

• What is the true purpose of corporations?
• Companies’ social licence is built slowly—but vanishes in a flash: Paul Klein
• Here’s the right way for companies to donate to charity
• Three questions to ask yourself about corporate social responsibility
• Canada’s Top 10 Socially Responsible Corporations

The post Four ways CEOs can win back the public’s trust appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

We all have that coworker who seems to have discovered the secret to manipulating time. There's simply no way she can get the amount of things done that she does in 24 hours. The only logical explanation is that she has a time machine that allows her to stretch her hours across space and time. 

... Right?

Well, maybe not. Although it might be tempting to think otherwise, each of us has the same 24 hours to work with in a given day. Some people are simply better at juicing the maximum value out of their hours.

Wish you could get as much done in a workday as your uber-productive colleague? The following SlideShare from Officevibe reveals eight productivity secrets of some of the world's best leaders, such as Richard Branson and Jack Dorsey. (Spoiler alert: Neither of them have a time machine ... that we know of.)  

Everywhere you look, inbound marketing is identified as the ultimate lead generation tool. While its popularity isn’t without merit, this marketing strategy is not the end-all for lead generation. In fact, it’s one of the reasons why some head executives don’t hit their revenue goals.

Don’t let your bottom line fall victim to overpromising and under-delivering inbound programs. In order to mind the revenue gap, companies need to be designing a comprehensive “allbound” marketing approach that embraces inbound marketing, lead nurturing or prospect development, and outbound marketing tactics to optimize revenue growth.

Inbound Helps Fill Your Revenue Gap, But How Much?

It’s hard to find any recent marketing industry publication that doesn’t jump on the inbound marketing bandwagon. For those that don’t already know, inbound marketing is a methodology founded on the idea of drawing people in toward your brand through the use of form-gated content. Ideally, the perceived value of the resource should be such that the individual is compelled to submit their contact information in exchange for the offer.

Outbound marketing involves the use of advertising, trade shows, and other methods of pushing a message “outward” to generate a response.

While it’s true that inbound marketing does bring some fruitful lead generation benefits, we have seen a negative aspect of this methodology. Because inbound marketing produces more leads in less time than ever before, it is hard to ensure all leads are interested in your business. The dangerous part of inbound marketing is that it can be difficult to diagnose if it is hurting your organization.

If you’re witnessing the following three things, you might be experiencing “inbounditis”:

• Deal sizes slowly decreasing as inbound leads increases
• High-performing reps avoiding inbound lead follow-up opportunities
• The percentage of sales accepted leads decrease while lead quotas increase

When used as a solo strategy, inbound marketing has a tendency produce more lesser-quality leads, it can be detrimental to your marketing and sales collaboration, and it can be harmful to the overall company.

The Key: An “Allbound” Marketing Approach

When you become overly reliant on only one method of lead generation, you run the risk of: a reduced level of marketing ROI, an increased opportunity for your competitors to get ahead, and a jeopardized revenue backbone. Why? At best, a well-run inbound marketing campaign can realistically deliver 35% of your enterprise level sales leads. Where will the remaining 65% of your leads come from?

In addition, the quality of your sales leads is significantly lower because of the marketing automation tools that are used to manage the inbound leads—they’re not built to properly develop or filter leads before sending them off to your sales force. Furthermore, the financial and time cost of a raw inbound lead can be double or more the cost of a qualified outbound lead.

When you combine the power of inbound and outbound marketing, you will be able to account for any gaps in your predicted revenue. An allbound approach enables prospects to engage with your company in the way that works best for them while targeting the right market or markets. Most importantly, you will achieve or exceed your ever important revenue goals. (Click here for an extended look at the Outbound vs. Inbound debate.)

Nurturing is the Secret Ingredient

Regardless of the strategy, nurturing is essential for successful lead generation. Marketing, not sales, should be targeting the right market(s). This is probably one of the least common marketing activities, but it is almost always well worth the time, effort, and cost.

A typical non-allbound lead generation program produces, on average, 50 leads for every 1000 prospects. Lead generation programs that actively nurture produce three times as many leads. The numbers speak for themselves. Creating and maintaining a proven lead generation strategy that includes nurturing will not only improve conversions, it will give you the peace of mind that your company is on track to being self-sufficient and allow you to focus on other pressing aspects of the company.

The unfortunate reality of inbound marketing is in its inability to deliver even half of a company’s overall leads. However, if you combine inbound with outbound marketing and add in lead nurturing, you will be able to fill in your revenue gap.

The data is out there to help you recognize the right marketing mix for your business. It’s up to you to determine where that gap really is, so you can generate leads in a smarter way to drive revenue.

So far in 2016, we’ve heard a lot about Big Data, the Internet of Things, and the hottest new marketing technique on the block: ‘hyper-personalised’ marketing. Marketers are increasingly interested in focusing their efforts on individuals, not database segments, because that all-important personal attention is shown to increase engagement, inspire customer loyalty and deliver a more targeted message.

To hyper-personalize down to an individual level, we ironically need massive amounts of data. We need to follow the buyer’s journey, and the technology we use must be able to track them across different devices. This is a highly sophisticated form of marketing that relies on the accurate, real-time processing of data, which is why quality is so important in making those split-second decisions.

2016 is an important year for marketing. It’s the year where guesswork and approximation are being consigned to the recycle bin forever. For the first time, the sales and marketing department are being driven closer to functioning as one unit, sharing clean, meaningful and timely data to understand what their buyers want and need.

Sales, meet marketing

We often see sales and marketing as two very separate departments. Traditionally, they have been separated by task, but also by time.

The marketing department has an educating function, while the sales department is there to close the deal at the right time. But there is a common thread: both departments contribute to the nurturing process.

Data is changing the way we nurture a lead and close a deal, because marketers are reacting more quickly to consumer behaviour. As such, the time delay between marketing activity and sales activity is closing.

Sales and marketing need to be absolutely aligned in what they are trying to achieve, and that means a combined and continuous focus on the quality of the data they share.

Why personalisation matters

Businesses know that marketing is most effective when the customer is directly targeted with a message. That’s why travelling salesmen have been used to demonstrate products for many years.

Hyper-personalisation is the logical evolution of this process, but on a much larger scale.

Thanks to the abundance of data flowing in from numerous sources, we know both existing and prospective customers more intimately than ever. We can follow their movements across a website, and we can see when they jump onto their phones or tablets to conduct additional research.

Hyper-personalisation is an evolution from ‘regular’ personalisation, because it relies so heavily on data. Now that we can pool data from different sources, and cleanse and manage that data very quickly, we can see where customers are open to engagement, which means content and messages are more likely to strike the right tone at the right time.

The key message here is that the business is actively listening, and is ready to respond quickly and accurately. It’s gathering data from social media, from support and from website analytics, and the quality of that data is critical to results.

Data: the missing link

We already know that a clean CRM is a boon to any business, as it holds accurate and timely data that every department can use. As departments become more reliant on data, the CRM becomes more important.

If you’re going to rely on data to make real-time sales and marketing decisions, particularly with activities like hyper-personalisation, you need that data to stand up to scrutiny at any given moment. If data is unclean, out of date, duplicated or otherwise unreliable, hyper-personalisation becomes something of a pipedream.

It’s almost impossible to deliver a relevant message if you’re basing your messaging on incorrect data. Equally, it’s impossible to align sales and marketing activities productively, and in real time. That’s why it’s essential to put some kind of safeguard in place, whether that’s data quality software, or a Chief Data Officer that is responsible for prioritising data as an asset across the business.

Improving sales and marketing ROI

Our increased focus on data in business can help to improve ROI. Targeting existing customers is a very good way to achieve this, and it proves just how critical data is in that process.

When we delve into accurate data held within our CRM, we can market to people that we already know. Hyper-personalisation lets us track those people across social channels, websites and even in retail stores, so we have a huge amount of insight into what they want. We can then increase spend per customer, and engage that customer for repeat purchases, which is a lot cheaper than converting new customers. A loyalty programme can boost engagement even further.

Even when we look at brand new, fresh leads, sales and marketing are now able to combine their efforts to leverage data in a much more effective way. This may mean:

• Using a common analytics tool or marketing platform, which integrates with the CRM
• Upgrading to marketing automation software
• Sharing terminology between departments, and agreeing on baseline measurements
• Developing shared KPIs that take combined sales and marketing goals into account
• Where data quality is lacking, creating a culture of positive change in every department – not just the marketing and sales departments in isolation
• Giving sales and marketing a voice at boardroom level, so data quality is awarded the appropriate investment
• Using improved efficiency to reduce waste and deliver more rapid results

It’s time for a data revolution

Many businesses see data quality as a slightly nebulous thing, or an improvement that would be welcome but is not yet a budget priority. Some businesses expect that data quality will somehow remedy itself.

But as sales and marketing become more reliant on data, there’s an urgent need for quality.

If we are to bring these functions together, and improve the way they work with shared data, we simply cannot expect them to use data that is not fit for purpose. Data quality has always underpinned accurate and timely decision making, and as hyper-personalisation takes hold, the need for real-time data cleansing is greater than ever.