Rnordman

If you’re a manufacturer or distributor and you haven’t already adopted B2B eCommerce, you have a lot of catching up to do. According to a recent Accenture report, 86% of survey respondents (B2B organizations with at least $500 million in annual revenue) currently have an online B2B portal where customers can place orders online. That statistic alone should be impetus enough for you to look into B2B eCommerce for your business, whether you’re at the enterprise, mid-market, or SMB level.

When businesses first begin considering possible B2B eCommerce software solutions, however, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Some companies use platforms originally designed for B2C eCommerce and attempt to “Frankenstein” them for B2B. Others invest in costly on-premise solutions, while some choose more flexible Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions.

To determine what B2B eCommerce software is right for your business, you should be asking yourself a few key questions.

Choosing B2B eCommerce Software: 5 Questions to Ask

1. What does your business need to get out of a B2B eCommerce platform?

Having a clear handle on the goals of your B2B eCommerce implementation will guide you through the vetting process, helping you figure out exactly what you’re looking for in a B2B eCommerce software solution.

If, for example, your priority is to make your B2B customers’ ordering experience as intuitive and familiar as a B2C eCommerce experience, you can be sure to concentrate on the user interface. If you want customers to be able to place orders from within the aisle of their store and stay in regular contact with them on new product additions, promotions, etc. you may be looking for a B2B eCommerce software vendor that also offers a mobile component.

It’s also important to think about all the B2B-specific functions that you want on this platform. Was the solution designed for B2B transactions? Can you offer customer-specific discounts and pricing? Will the checkout process include the ability to add ship dates and seller review? While you might have been considering a B2C eCommerce platform for your B2B channel, you may discover that it is unable to accommodate the needs of your B2B business.

2. What IT resources do you want to dedicate to the maintenance of your B2B eCommerce site?

There are different software delivery models available to businesses today, which may require more or fewer resources during the implementation phase, as well as differing levels of ongoing maintenance. Some companies with extensive IT resources choose to develop and host their own solution, while others license software and host it internally. Others work with SaaS vendors that take care of all hosting, maintenance, etc.

For SMB and mid-market companies with fewer IT resources, the SaaS approach minimizes startup costs and risk while maintaining flexibility. As defined in this previous article, “SaaS is defined simply as a software distribution model that involves software that’s hosted and maintained by a vendor, run in the cloud, and essentially ‘rented’ to the user.” Even larger enterprise-level companies are considering SaaS vendors to free up internal resources and streamline business processes.

If your goal is to have your IT staff make modifications and upgrades to the software themselves, an on-premise software delivery model may be what you’re looking for.

3. What are your integration needs?

Integration will be important to the success of your B2B eCommerce platform. Think about how eCommerce orders will get to your back office for processing. Will you need to integrate your platform with an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or accounting system? How can you consolidate your eCommerce and field sales channels to provide as much visibility as possible into your customers’ ordering activity?

Understanding your current technical environment, and how you envision B2B eCommerce fitting into that environment is key.

4. How does the vendor’s pricing structure work?

When considering a software vendor’s pricing, be sure to look at the fine print. According to Forrester Research, online retailers and web sellers can spend almost 5x their initial eCommerce investment on continued maintenance and other services. The same can go for B2B.

Some vendors focus on value-based pricing models, charging as a percentage of sales or by number of orders. Others charge a plethora of extra fees for servers/bandwidth, certain features, etc.

5. What is the vendor’s vision for the future?

It is important to know where a vendor’s technical trajectory is headed, not only so that you can determine whether or not certain features will be available down the line, but also to determine if your vendor’s vision for the future aligns with your own.

Looking for a B2B eCommerce software vendor? What does your business need in a solution? Let us know in the comments!

Most business owners would agree that it would be beneficial to be able to turn their customers into sales people who go out and help bring in new business. The idea sounds complicated, and even expensive, but it may not be that difficult to use your marketing programs to turn your customers into your own sales force.

Reward Customers For Sharing

Many car dealerships bring in a significant amount of referrals by offering existing customers a cash reward for referring new business. If your company has a mobile app, then reward your customers who get others to download the app. Something as simple as an in-store discount on a future purchase can often be enough motivation for your current customers to bring in new business.

Video Testimonials

Getting people to trust testimonials on the Internet can be difficult, but you can add credibility to your online testimonials when you put them in video form. You can consider rewarding customers for agreeing to give a video testimonial, which will significantly increase the number of customers who would be willing to do it. You will notice that video testimonials filmed in your store and posted on your website will be perceived as being credible, and they will bring in revenue.

Maintaining Contact

If your business is able to collect birthdays from your customers, then be sure to send out cards to each customer on their birthday. If you collect email addresses, then use those addresses to let existing customers know about new products being released, and any new pricing promotions you have coming up. Another popular tactic is to do a special product release party that is only for current customers and one guest. This allows you to make your current customers feel special, and it also brings in new customers.

Your current customer base can be a treasure chest of referrals as long as you utilize it properly. You do not want to bombard your customers with messages and phone calls, and you want to make every contact something special. When you go out of your way to maintain quality contact with your customers, they will start sending their friends and family members to your business.

Go Above And Beyond

Going above and beyond for your customers means much more than just offering them great customer service. For example, many training companies help its graduates to find work in their fields. One such example comes from ITIC – after their students complete the course, they’ll still continue to receive support from ITIC who’ll provide advice on resume writing, interview skills, coaching and internship/work, experience program and helping them find jobs to start their careers.When those graduates are out there making a comfortable living thanks to their IT training, they will start recommending ITIC to their friends, coworkers and family members.

If you want your customers to refer your business to others, then you need to go out of your way to help your customers succeed. A recruiting firm could offer industry-specific training to employment candidates, or an electronics repair company could offer discounts on popular online services. Go above and beyond for your customers, and you will be repaid with referrals.

Games

Promotional games can be a great way to build a customer base, and drive more revenue. The games that reward customers for collecting a series of game pieces that go to a game board are extremely popular. You can attach your games to specific products in your store, or you can base participation on general purchases. If you offer special bonus prizes to current customers that get other people involved in the game, then you will see a growth in revenue.

Before you try a promotional game, it is always a good idea to consult an attorney. Some areas frown upon these types of promotions, while other regions require you to follow special rules. But if you can arrange a game for your customers, then you will see a significant return.

Each time you close a sale with a customer, you should look at that customer as a source of new business. There are plenty of programs you can put together that will inspire existing customers to refer your business to the people they know, and the cost to you would be minimal. Investigate your marketing options and find new ways to turn your customers into your own sales force.

Amazon's editors selected their 100 favorite books on leadership and success.

We've highlighted 25 below, including books by psychologists, economists, and competitive athletes. Each one offers a unique look at what it means to be truly successful and how you can achieve your full potential.

Read on and start stocking your shelves with inspiration.

SEE ALSO: 33 business books every professional should read before turning 30

DON'T MISS: 23 books Mark Zuckerberg thinks everyone should read

'Getting to Yes' by Roger Fisher, William Ury, and Bruce Patton

Based on the work of the Harvard Negotiation Project, this 1981 best-selling business book — the second edition was released in 1991 — offers strategies for dealing with personal and professional conflicts. Those include separating the people from the problem and focusing on interests, not positions.

Find it here »

'Getting Things Done' by David Allen

Thirteen years after its first publication, productivity guru Allen released the second edition of "Getting Things Done."

The book teaches readers the basics of time management at work and at home. The idea is to come up with an organizing system for daily to-dos so you free up mental space for focusing on big-picture goals.

Case in point: the "two-minute rule" to keep an overflowing inbox under control.

Find it here »

'Getting More' by Stuart Diamond

In this best-seller, Diamond turns traditional negotiation strategies on their head, instead suggesting that it's important to value your partner's emotions and perceptions.

As Diamond wrote on Business Insider:

The more important the negotiation is, the more emotional people tend to be — whether diplomacy, a billion-dollar deal or my kid wants an ice cream cone. Pay attention to this! The world is not rational.

The book is based on Diamond's course at Wharton Business School, and Google has even used it in its employee training.

Find it here »

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Setting or negotiating a marketing budget can be a rather odd experience.

For some reason, the good sense that most of us apply to budgeting and setting goals in our own personal lives is often overshadowed by corporate mandates, historical practices, time constraints, or just plain laziness. If you’re an entrepreneur, you may not have a frame of reference to use in either the establishment of budgets or selection of tactics.

A basic undergraduate course in marketing strategy will discuss the most common ways to budget: percentage of sales, competitive parity, affordable method, and objective/task, among others. The reality is that most companies use a mixture of these techniques to arrive at a budget or several mini-budgets.

The soundest technique is objective/task, which forces you to actually identify what you want to achieve and then plot out what it will take to get you there.

Using the objective/task method is fairly straightforward. You first identify the business objectives you wish to achieve from your promotion. These may be a subset of objectives from your strategic marketing plan (such as a revenue or sales volume goal) or they may be smaller objectives that each support the attainment of a larger goal (like the number of subscribers for an e-newsletter or sales emanating from specific channels).

Here is an example of how you can build each element of your plan from the ground up:

Say that your goal is to achieve $6,000 in sales directly from email campaigns. Next, you’ll have to gather information about the available universe of recipients (either from your own list or working through third-party opt-in lists). Then, you can overlay some benchmarks and assumptions based on your own data or outside industry information. Conduct a calculation similar to this example:

One email blast	10,000 recipients
10% open rate	1,000
4% click through	40
5% make a purchase	2
Typical purchase value	$300

One email blast should yield revenue of $600.

Given your revenue goal of $6,000 from email campaigns, you’ll need to do 10 blasts to reach your target. If each blast costs $300, then you’ll need a marketing budget of $3,000.

This is not a science, but when you build up your budget this way, it gives you a better window into what level of investment may be required to achieve your objectives.

At this point, you will probably either be trying to fit your plan into a budget that was given to you to work with, you will be asking for your proposed budget, or you’ll be deciding for yourself if you can afford what you think is required.

If your projections are making you squirm a bit, it’s time for a reality check. Do you need to alter your objectives or realign expectations around what is possible with the budget you have? Can you select different tasks that may have higher impact? Are your assumptions correct?

For more on this topic and other techniques to help you create effective marketing plans, get The Product Launch Primer, available on Amazon now.

This post originally appeared on launchcatalyst.net

I have been thinking about writing this for a long time. Swagger is such a powerful word, yet often times misconstrued. The definition by Merriam Webster is the following: “to conduct oneself in an arrogant or superciliously pompous manner; especially: to walk with an air of overbearing self-confidence”. My question to you is this – is swagger pompous or does it define a successful person?

The way I see it is that sales people with swagger typically win. They may not be the most popular people when it comes to the way they win, but they don’t like losing and usually are successful at winning. Our world is crazy competitive. In sales, everyone is trying to sell someone something. We all believe we have the superior product. Let me put it this way. The people with the most confidence win. The people with the most knowledge about their solution win. Without these two key attributes, you are destined to fail.

Swagger doesn’t come overnight. Swagger is something that is embedded in our “core being” but doesn’t come into full fruition until you have seen both success and failure. If you haven’t seen what failure looks like, you won’t fully appreciate what it is like to win. Once you win, and win over and over, then and only then, will you appreciate what it takes to be successful. When this happens, you start building the confidence or the “aura” that is perceived as swagger.

You have to know what you are doing to have swagger. You have to know the product inside and out when you are selling. You have to know your competition. You have to know confidently what will happen if a potential customer goes with another product. You have to be bold. You have to say things that are uncomfortable. I have read more “success” books than I care to admit and the people who have achieved greatness all say and do things that make me feel uncomfortable just reading them!

Swagger is imperative to win. Swagger separates you from the competition. People with swagger may not win a popularity contest. In the end, who really cares? If you can’t win, then your product won’t sell and your company won’t succeed.

As a recruiter, I look for people with swagger. Sales people with swagger can confidently tell me what they have sold, how much they have sold and what they are worth because of what they have achieved. Pompous? Maybe. Is that someone I want on my team? Is that someone I want to represent? Yes!

As part of my vetting process, just being confident and having accolades is not enough though. Candidates must show me what they know. They must show me what failure looks like. They must want to learn more about the products or solutions they will be representing. If they don’t ask basic questions, I don’t want to hire them. People with swagger understand that if they are representing a solution that doesn’t add value then they won’t be successful. People who have swagger want to be successful and sell a product that will enable their success.

So in conclusion, having swagger is essential. If you don’t have it, you haven’t been at your company long enough and you need to stick around a little longer to get it. Once you have swagger, the competition better watch out, because you are going to win. You are going to win every time. When that happens, let’s talk. Until then, work on sharpening your sales skills.

A discerning reader has probably spotted the potential oxymoron in the very title of this post. Namely, if you’re a devotee of the theory that a natural link by definition is completely organic, the logical question to ask is:

Is there a way to influence the generation of natural links other than by creating awesome content? (highlight to tweet)

To answer this, we’ll need to delve deeper into the very definition of natural backlinks.

What Are Natural Backlinks?

Link diversity is one of the key features of a Google-friendly backlink portfolio. Yet, the very definition of a “natural” backlink still seems vague for many.

Given that the closest Matt Cutts has ever got to defining natural links is saying they “are better than non-natural,” you can’t really blame SEO experts for interpreting the term differently. A logical assumption is that if you are able to create content that is attractive and relevant enough to inspire people to link to it, you’re done with the natural link creation.

However, even the best piece of content can remain forever hidden from the targeted eyes if it’s not strategically distributed. Now, whether such an approach should be adopted in relation to natural links is a matter of dispute in the SEO circles. To figure this out, the team at topdraw interviewed six important SEO figures and came up with some interesting answers.

As you’d expect, no unanimous definition of a natural backlink is given, but a variety of conclusions could be drawn from the discussion. Whether you favor the view that “all links you pursue are unnatural” or tolerate the opposite extreme (“any meaningful link is natural”), you’d probably agree that the most valuable backlinks are those that:

• Are in a natural context: The content surrounding the link is relevant to that on the target page.
• Provide value for the readers: They actually offer additional information about a certain topic.
• Have an anchor text: The text is integrated with the page contents in a meaningful way.

 

Of course, these are just some of the features by which you can determine the relevancy of a backlink for your website. Based on the goals you set for your own business, you should be able to easily determine whether a link is worth pursuing and whether its final creation is actually natural.

Supposing that you support the view suggesting that even a pursued link could be seen as a natural one, you should consider deploying the following tactics. (Even if you don’t, we encourage you to scroll down and consider whether any of these may work for your website).

1. Offer Value Instead of Asking for Links

In the topdraw post mentioned above, Eric Ward gave an excellent example of a natural link building strategy that included some form of outreach. Namely, after creating a relevant post, Ward reached out to an industry professional whose interest in the topic was easy to discover. What followed was a backlink, as well as some form of word-of-mouth marketing for the content itself.

Here, Ward actually took some steps towards encouraging the creation of backlinks, and there was nothing unnatural about it. Similarly, Julie Joyce suggests:

“…putting a link in a place where it adds value as a relevant resource. I don’t care if you pay for it, ask for it, tweet a link to it, or get it any other way. If it’s a good addition to someone’s work, it’s a natural link to me.”

Paid links have always been a gray area in the world of SEO, and Google has advanced algorithms that keep track of this, which is why this option is generally not recommended. However, the point of the statement remains: whenever a backlink has an actual value, it can be considered natural.

Therefore, reaching out to people who might be interested in sharing the content should not be separated from the notion of natural links. On the contrary, this can be a more effective strategy than simply creating content and waiting for the audience to notice and link to it.

2. Make Your Content Targeted and Purposeful

Before you set out creating content, you may first want to check if anyone might be interested in republishing or linking back to it. Recycling the same old topics can be useful for maintaining the consistency of publishing, but the creation of natural backlinks requires you to offer something new, something juicy.

Therefore, you may first want to make a list of websites that gather your target audience and consider the types of content they might find interesting. For example, if you want to be featured on a website that publishes industry news and research, consider developing a newsworthy research on the burning topic.

This is, of course, easier said than done, but approaching content creation this way can get you much farther than sticking to the same content forms all the time. A single white paper or ebook can bring you more natural backlinks than any of the generic 500–1000 words post that can entertain your audience only for a limited period of time.

3. Build Something Better

This technique also requires you to first identify the target and develop content based on the opportunity discovered. Building upon someone else’s content is particularly useful for controversial topics. If the story is relevant enough, other people will consider taking your point of view when they decide to relate to the story.

This is known as the Skyscraper technique, which suggests finding a popular post and building something even better. Namely, if everybody else in your industry is offering “10 Tips to Managing Personal Finance,” you should consider creating “50+ Tips for Managing Personal Finance.”

Afterwards, however, you still have to reach out to the right people in order to get results. Brian Dean, who coined the term and was the first one to talk about this strategy, highlights three essential steps:

• Step 1: Find link-worthy content.
• Step 2: Make something even better.
• Step 3: Reach out to the right people.

 

Clearly, the third step is critical here. However, it is also most frequently overlooked by creators of awesome content, who tend to believe that great content is all you need to have people linking back to you. If this was true, the skyscraper technique wouldn’t be a technique at all, but rather a lucky shot.

4. Collaborate With Influencers

Once you discover (and make a list of!) influential people or companies in your industry, you can collaborate with them on creating amazing content. Many companies in your industry have a dedicated press section in which they feature news somebody else has written about them. Watch their pages for important updates, and then cover the story on your blog. Of course, you still need to make sure they won’t miss it, so it pays off to consider reaching out to them to inform them. Chances are both of you will be happy, so go ahead!

5. Entice Influencers With Ego Bait

Interviews are an excellent, general-knowledge type of content that can be interesting for both you and your interlocutor. Doing an interview may require you to do extensive research and contact multiple people, but the eventual results should translate into a highly linkable and relevant unique post.

Bonus tip: If you include more people in a single topic interview, you increase your chances of being shared by them.

This form of content is popularly known as “ego bait” and relies on providing benefits for all the parties involved. You reach out to influencers for expert opinion to get material for awesome content, while they get an opportunity to increase their own visibility. Creating such a piece of content typically requires extensive research and can take a while, but the results typically translate into several natural backlinks from the interviewees’ blogs.

If you wish to learn more about doing this, here’s an ego bait on ego bait!

6. Search Q&A Websites for Potential Topics

Of all the techniques covered above, one thing is essential: finding the right topic. If you want to deliver something extraordinary, try finding the burning issue first. Websites such as Reddit and Quora can direct you to a number of unanswered questions.

The great thing about doing research on Quora, for example, is that you can find quite a few influencers along the way! Here, you can even learn more about their area of expertise to find the right question to ask them. If you do your research right and let them know about it, you increase your chances of having your content linked to from other pages.

7. Diversify Your Content Types

Natural backlinks often come in a number of different forms and from websites that operate in different ways. This is why you want to provide several link options by creating as many content forms as possible. From classic how-to posts to infographics and ebooks, you should consider producing everything you can and promote accordingly.

In order to determine the content forms you should work on, examine this chart, regardless of the actual industry you operate in.

This chart includes six distinct types of posts that work great for most industries. How many of these are you creating for your website?

Every content creator’s dream is to achieve virality across multiple channels, but the truth is that different forms of content are treated differently on each online channel. This is why you should never simply assume what may go viral, but rather explore the topics and ways to actually achieve this.

8. Invest in Visual Content

Visual content is often regarded as the most effective content form a marketer can create. 52% of marketing professionals say that video is the type of content that brings the highest ROI, while the SEO world recognizes its value for improving search rankings.

Given that everybody seems to love them, videos should constitute an important part of your natural link building strategy. Additionally, posting visuals such as infographics on infographic submission sites can immediately bring streams of interested visitors to your site, some of which may even decide to republish your great visual.

9. Identify Your Audience’s Favorite Channels

Identifying the right channels is essential for encouraging organic content promotion. For example, posting a research paper on Academia.edu can generate you 75% more citations in the course of five years, according to the website.

Sometimes the best way to tell certain people about your content is to reach out to them via email, but this never guarantees your email will be opened, let alone answered. This is why you should consider utilizing other communication channels, of which social media is often the most efficient.

Set aside time to explore the relevant hashtags and Twitter chats that gather your industry leaders. Some of these chats announce their future topics in advance, which can be yet another great opportunity for you to create purposeful content and have a promotion channel ready at your disposal.

10. Optimize Content Across Multiple Channels

Most people offer a single piece of advice when it comes to content creation, and you’ve probably heard it multiple times: Create content for people, and not for search engines. However, these two are not necessarily mutually exclusive, meaning that you should take into account several different factors before starting content creation.

Organic search is one such factor. By giving your post a search-friendly title, you’ll enable more people to find it on Google. If it answers a question that has a large number of monthly searches, that’s already a great opportunity.

News sites are another factor. As mentioned above, in order to get to the news website, you should definitely first ensure you have a story worth reading. However, this doesn’t mean that you should make a scandal in order to get to the front pages; oftentimes, simply announcing your future strategy or business results with proper commentary is a good way to catch the attention of the relevant media.

If you’re planning to do industry research, for example, find websites that might be interested in sharing this type of content. This will help you understand the topics they typically deal with and if there’s anything that has been left unsaid.

11. Ask Others to Share

Encouraging social sharing can help you get noticed and eventually linked to. This doesn’t simply mean you should share and tweet; ask others directly to recommend your posts publicly. However, make sure you’re consistently reaching to the people that actually might be interested in what you offer, rather than spamming everyone on social networks.

12. Focus on Long-Term Benefits

Finally, it’s worth noting that most of these techniques work only if you’re persistent. Sometimes, your initial target may fail to link back to you, but this shouldn’t discourage you from doing another similar research next time. After all, you get to keep the awesome piece of content on your website, so this can never be a waste of time. Connecting all the dots (including finding the right target, the right topic, the right form, and the right channels) may be difficult to get right the first time but will bring benefits in the long term.

With a strategic perspective on content creation presented above, natural link generation no longer seems like an oxymoron, does it?

Get more content like this, plus the very BEST marketing education, totally free. Get our Definitive email newsletter.

Startup events like Startup Istanbul, "The Leading Startup Event in Eurasia", are great places for founders, executives, and investors to meet and share great ideas and stories about startups.

Watch this quick 15-minute speech by Steli at Startup Istanbul to learn the 3 steps to produce hustle greatness and why success in startups and businesses is simpler than you imagine.

Transcript

All right, guys. Do me a favor. Just everybody, for just one quick moment, raise your hand as high as you can, right now. And now raise it a little bit higher.

What the fuck? See? Usually when you ask people to do this, the implication is I'll raise it as high as I can comfortably, after having lunch, which is just about this. And then you're like, as high as you can, a little higher. All right. A little higher. All right. A little higher. All right, motherfucker.

All right, so with that being said, now that we know how to raise hands, raise hands if you have no fucking idea who the hell I am. Must be most of you. Just raise your hands if you don't know who the fuck I am. Thank you very much.

How I became a serial entrepreneur

This is the kind of energy I need, you know, after having my lunch, to be able to perform for you people. There's still a lot of work to be done.  Most of you don't know who the fuck I am or why you should listen to me. So let me give you a little bit about my background.  

Originally, I'm Greek, but I grew up in Germany, and not just any part of Germany, the southern part of Germany, the most conservative part of Germany, right?  So I had a pretty schizophrenic upbringing because Greek culture and southern German culture are not really aligned in the same direction. And growing up, I hated fucking school. I hated growing up in Germany, and I hated pretty much everything about my upbringing, until I discovered this thing called entrepreneurship.

And then I was like, holy fuck, there's a thing where I could be hugely successful, make tons of money. I need no certification, nobody's permission, sign me up. That's what I'm going to do with my life. So I dropped out when I was 17, 18, to start my first business, and ever since then, I've been running my own businesses my entire life.  

People ask me sometimes, "Steli, what made you become a serial entrepreneur?" And I go, "Lack of options." Really. I mean serial entrepreneur is just a fancy word for completely and utterly unemployable. I have zero credentials. None of you would ever give me a job, so I had to create businesses to hire myself so I am able to make a living. Right? So when I dropped out, I did a few small businesses back in Germany.

And then about nine years ago, I decided to sell everything I have. I bought a one-way ticket to San Francisco, and I followed the dream of building a company in Silicon Valley. And I was so clueless back then, you wouldn't even imagine.  

I arrived at San Francisco airport, and I literally asked somebody, "How can I get to Silicon Valley?" For those of you who don't know, it's not a city or place, it's just a generic area. It's like saying, "How can I go to the south of Turkey?" Like where the fuck exactly do you mean?  

So somebody was nice enough to go, "I don't know. Do you mean Palo Alto, Stanford?" I was like, "Stanford, I've heard of that. Yes." And he put me on a train, and I dropped out on California Avenue versus University Avenue, where Stanford is really at, because California sounded good to me.

And I walked down the block and there was Hotel California. And I was like, "All right, this is where I'm checking in." This was nine years ago. To be honest, I had only two simple goals when I arrived in Silicon Valley. No. 1 was to change the world completely, and No. 2 was to be Time Magazine Person of the Year within 18 months of arriving in Silicon Valley.

I don't want to kill the suspense, but both these things didn't quite work out the way I imagined. So my first startup was a soul-crushing defeat. It was a company that was dead after Year 1, and I continued carrying it around, pretending it's alive, for another four years. By the end, it was just a skeleton, and I was just walking around being like, "No, no, it's fine. It's fine. It's fine. It just needs a little bit of funding so we can eat together. Just find a – it's going to be okay."

But it was really just fucking dead. And then the second startup I started, funny enough, that one, with a few twists and turns, arrived at something that's pretty fucking successful today. I'm very proud about that. And that's part of why they invited me to come here and speak to you people.  

So what I'm going to talk about today and what my entrepreneurial super power has been my entire life, has been the hustle, is doing things that are outside your comfort zone to accomplish outsized results. I'm going to teach you a few simple philosophies, and I'm going to share some stories with you if that's cool. Is that cool with you guys? So this is yes, this is no, and then this is I don't give a fuck. I just need a place to rest after lunch. I'm just waiting for the panel that's coming up.  

One of the best-kept secrets in Silicon Valley

All right. So let me give you a little context of the last company, the company that I'm running right now. We started originally as the idea of running an outside sales team on demand for B2B startups. So in Silicon Valley, when you were running a B2B startup that was venture funded, if you had tons of millions and you needed to sell to other businesses, you would employ our company called ElasticSales, for us to scale up your sales processes.

We would sell for your business. And we did this for 200 venture-backed companies. We were subleasing office space from Google. Imagine like a huge open office space, full of fucking salespeople doing sales for 200 different companies.

So at a certain point in time, we were one of the best-kept secrets in Silicon Valley. We knew every B2B CEO, we knew every B2B investor, we knew every B2B startup problem, the things they were doing right or wrong. We kind of amassed all these unique insights on how to do sales specifically for new technology companies.

Pivoting from ElasticSales to Close.io

As part of what we were doing from Day 1, we developed an internal piece of software that was called Close.io, that we just utilized to empower our salespeople to do really, really well. Eventually the product got so high in demand that we decided to release it, and since January 2013, you were able to buy it.

Today that's all we do. It's called Close.io, and it's an inside sales tool that empowers startup around the world with thousands and thousands of customers all around the world. Some of the fastest-growing startups are using us. We help them to close more deals and make more sales.

We are a tiny team. We're just ten people. And our nearest smallest competitor is 150 people, and we're crushing them. We're making more revenue and a lot more profits than them. We're one of the fastest-growing CRMs on the planet right now, making millions and millions and millions. All right, I hope this is enough credibility. Let's move on. Oh, one more thing.  

The Startup Chat

For those that, at the end of my talk, go, "Oh now I feel a little bit awake. I can listen to the next talk. Shit, I want a little bit more from Steli," just go to thestartupchat.com. Twice a week, I release a podcast with my great friend Hiten Shah, founder of Kissmetrics. He's a marketing genius, and he's kind of the quiet, yoga-like master, and I'm more of the loud, obnoxious Greek. So together, we make a pretty good duo.

We talk about sales and marketing, but we also talk about how the deaths of our parents affected us as entrepreneurs, how to be depressed, religion and entrepreneurship, all kinds of shit you usually don't hear people talk about. So check it out, if you like, to have that kind of content.

The hustle is simple. People are difficult

All right. So I'm going to teach you everything I know about the hustle. And to me and to many people here, especially if you have some of the 500 Startup folks and a mentor there, we've gone through Y Combinator, so I have the incubator badge of honor, if you want. But in Silicon Valley, there's only really three people, and in startups in general, that I believe truly add value.  

You either design products, you build products, or you hustle. One of these three things. Anything else and you're really just destroying value in the early days of the startup. So I'll teach you everything I know about hustle in just a few minutes. Because this shit is not difficult. This stuff, just in general – actually startups, businesses, business is not difficult. It's people that are fucking difficult. Right? It's yourself, your own emotions, your doubts, your fears, your hesitations, your ego.

That's what's fucking you up. That is what slows you down. That's what makes you make poor choices. It's not that it's so fucking complicated. We'd all like it to be like this, aw, this is so hard. It's not fucking hard. There's jobs that are hard. This is not hard. This is just challenging.

So, all the stuff that I'm going to teach you, everything that we're going to talk about is not hard to do. It's very easy to do. But you know, just in terms of like what it is that you have to accomplish or execute on. But that's going to make it very fucking hard for you to actually follow through with my advice, is your emotions because it's going to be uncomfortable.

And what you want to do – what we all want to do – I like to do it too – is just to do this. Right? Yeah, me too. We don't like to do this all the time. Right? This is fucking uncomfortable. I can't do this for hours. I do this for 2 seconds and I have to go down again. That's the shit that makes it hard. It's outside your comfort zone.

If you remember only one thing ...

If you only remember one thing from today, I want you to remember this one single thing. It's a mantra you can repeat to yourself every single fucking day, as you're running, working and hustling in a startup. And that's pain and discomfort is the signal. Say it with me, pain is the signal. What signal? That I'm going in the right direction. Whenever you're uncomfortable, you're going in the right direction because it's outside your comfort zone.  

Anything you want to accomplish, anything that you desire to accomplish with your startup, you haven't accomplished yet, which means it's going to be outside your comfort zone. It's going to require you to grow and do things that are not within the ease realm of things that you already accomplished and mastered.

All right, so we'll start with the first step. There's just three simple steps to becoming a master in hustling. No. 1, you have to show up. No. 2, you have to follow up. No. 3 you have to go for the close. Again, not rocket science.

Show up ...

What does showing up mean? Showing up is actually the easiest exercise. It translates into all kinds of forms. Showing up could be coming to a conference like this. Showing up could mean picking up the fucking phone and calling somebody.

Showing up can mean sending that email. Showing up is meaning you make that first step to connect with another human being or group of other human beings in order to be able to start a relationship and make something happen. It doesn't matter what that relationship is. It could be to sell to a customer, get an investor, get somebody to write about you in press coverage, hire someone.

Whatever it is you do, you're always going to need to reach out and show up to a group or an individual human being to accomplish something together. Or influence them in a way where they move in the direction you want them to move into.  Very, very simple.

Showing up is the simplest thing to do, but it's still very fucking hard. I'll tell you one simple story of my first intern that I hired – or he hired himself, very, very quickly. When I was running that first startup in Silicon Valley, I had this kid, he was in university in Germany, and he loved my product and my platform, and he wanted to Skype with me.

And one day I took a quick Skype call with him. And at the end of the Skype call, he goes, "Steli, just before I hang up, are you really busy?" I was like, "Of course we're really busy. Of course. Of course we're really busy. All day long we're really busy." He's like, "Okay, cool. Bye." And he hangs up. I was like, "All right, whatever."

Three weeks later I get an email from him. "Hey, Steli, since you're so busy, I decided to drop out of school. I bought a ticket to San Francisco. I'm arriving tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. and I'm starting my unpaid internship with your company. You can pick me up from the airport, but you don't have to because I know my way to your office." I'm like, holy fucking shit. This kid just hired himself. Right? Well if he has the balls to show up, I'm going to go and pick him up, right? It's the least that I can do.

This kid hustled so fucking hard every single fucking day in that startup. He never asked for anything, not for a salary, not for equity, not for a title. He did not give a fuck. All he wanted to do was to create value. All he wanted to do was help me accomplish my goal, and in the process, growing himself.

I had other people on the team. They constantly came to me, "Steli, I need a better title. If I only was the founder, I could do more for you. I could help me. But I'm constrained by my title. I just can't do anything." That kid didn't give a fuck. He was going everywhere, hustling everywhere.

I would go to events, and people would go, "Oh, you work at this company? Oh yeah, I met the founder, Bjorn. Oh it must be awesome to work for him." And I was like, "Yeah, he's pretty dope." I knew he was not introducing himself as founder, but they saw him everywhere, and he always represented the business, and at point, they went, I guess he's the founder.

Eventually he became the cofounder, and then eventually today, he's running his own business very successfully in Silicon Valley as the CEO. Because he never bothered to ask for permission because permission is for suckers. He just went and took what he wanted, created a shit ton of value, and never looked back.

Let me tell you the most valuable piece of advice that I give all around the world on being invited to rooms like this, and I always teach one simple thing. And this simple thing is that is just insanity, and I have proof – I'm writing a book on it. It's going to be full of case studies, and if you want, we could add a few more case studies from this room in the book.  

Then follow up and through

Because every day by this point, I get about five emails from people telling me how they closed multi-million dollar deals, how they raised millions of rounds, how they got press, how they hired these senior hires, all just by following this simple advice. Showing up is hard. But most people know they need to show up. But you know where fortunes are being made, where you crush the competition? Is in the follow-up and follow-through. Because there you're the only one competing.  

Most people, they start a relationship, we talk, we like each other, you say yes, you might buy my product, yes, you might invest. Then I go back home, I send you an email as a follow-up. I send you another email. I don't hear anything from you, and I go, oh, I guess he thinks I'm ugly. 

I guess he doesn't like me. I guess – I just make up a story of rejection. Well, I have news for you. Silence does not equal rejection. And I'm not a mind-reader. You know what my hypothesis is on your silence? You're busy and you have a life. Maybe your kid got sick. Maybe something happened at work.  I'm just not a priority for a minute. When I have a positive direction with you, I will – and I email you and I don't hear from you, I will follow up indefinitely.  This means forever, until I hear back from you.  

Now some of you might think, Steli, forever? And I say, yes, forever.  I have a simple example. One billionaire founder from Silicon Valley, I got introduced to him early on when we were raising our round. He replied and said, "Yes, sure, I'm going to take a meeting with Steli."

I emailed him once and I didn't hear anything back. I emailed him twice. I emailed him, nothing back. I emailed him three times and I heard nothing back. Forty-eight emails later, I got a reply.

You know what the reply was? "Thank you, Steli for the follow-up and follow-through. We had a crisis overseas. I had to leave the country. Some other things came up. I'm going to be tomorrow in San Francisco, 1:00 p.m. at my office. Do you want to drop by and meet me?" And I was like, "Fuck, yeah, motherfucker. Why do you think I sent you 48 emails? Because I don't want to meet with you?" Right? And he ended up investing in our company.

This is not a single story. I'm telling you, every day somebody emails me and says, "This follow-up shit works." I'm like, yeah. You don't have to be intellectual. You don't have to be crazy. Just keep following up and following through when nobody else does, and you're going to crush it.

The secret of closing

And the last piece, in terms of closing, here's the whole secret of closing when it comes to sales and startups. You just have to ask for it. Most people never do. Don't finish the conversation just going, "I hope they're going to buy." Just go, "Hey, are you ready to make this happen? Do you guys want to invest? How big are the chances of you investing? Hey, do you have your credit card with you?" Create a moment of truth.

Don't just go, "They really liked it. They smiled so I'm going to go back to my team and go, 'They really liked it. I think they're going to buy.'" No, don't shy away from this shit. It's uncomfortable. Most of us don't ask for the close because we don't want to hear no. I want you to embrace the no. Ask for the close early. Ask often.

Expect the yes. Embrace the no. Somebody tells you no, go, "Awesome. What's missing? What do we still have to do? What did I mess up? What's missing for this to happen, for us to make this shit happen? What do we need to do?" It's not rocket science. All it takes is emotional strength, not physical one. You know, one of my favorite quotes from Warren Buffet is, the one single thing he looks for in CEOs, is not intellectual strength, it's emotional stability.

I love that. Emotional stability. Somebody that's able to manage their own emotions, especially through the highs and the lows and the fucking freaking peaks and valleys of running this wild roller coaster ride called the startup. Right. When you learn to overcome your fears, go outside your comfort zone, ask for things, although you expect somebody to tell you something you don't like, magic happens.

Yes is good. And I'll leave you with this thought. In startups, when you ask for something – it doesn't matter if it's a customer or an investor or whatever it is – yes is great. No is good. Maybe is where your startup is going to go to fucking die. That's the place where your company is going to fucking die. The more business relationships, partnerships, press conversations, investors, the more shit you do that's all busy, busy, busy, but in the maybe space – we don't know, we think it's going to work out, we hope, we wish, we dream – that's where you're going to go fucking die.

Your job is create moments of truth every single day. Get the yes, get the no. Learn from it, improve, iterate, move on. But don't shy away from anything that's outside your comfort zone because the more comfortable you are, the faster you're going to die.

With this positive and uplifting note, I'm going to leave the next speaker to go and give you a nice message. If you want to get in touch with me, then shoot me an email, steli@close.io. I've written about tons of things. I've written a bunch of books about startup sales. If you're in the middle of doing that, happy to send you the book and help in any way I can. Thank you so much so sharing the 15 minutes with me. Thank you so much, guys.

Recommended reading:

The follow up hustle: How I got Gary Vaynerchuk to do an interview
Here's how I got a the internet's own superstar Gary Vaynerchuk to dedicate an hour of his time to me, even though I had little to offer in return (hint: follow up hustle)

Hustle Hard: Pioneers 2014 startup sales talk
Watch Steli Efti's "Hustle Hard" talk at Pioneers Festival 2014—the ultimate startup sales inspiration talk.

Lean sales: How to validate your SaaS idea with the power of hustle
Discover the four steps you need to follow to validate your SaaS idea via sales before building any product.

If you’re not turning your company into a “math house” you’re headed for serious trouble. Every industry will soon be driven by digitization and every winning company will be using algorithms, or mathematical rules for processing information, to shape the end-to-end customer experience. Any advantages you have now will pale in comparison with a great set of algorithms that differentiates the customer experience. It is the algorithms that will create value for the business.

This is not guesswork. Sensors, the cloud, mobile and broadband wireless, and other such technologies are increasing the flow of digitized information exponentially. Algorithms, run on ever faster computers, can do amazing things with that information, from detecting patterns and making predictions to solving complex problems. They can even modify themselves as new information comes to light. In the hands of a “catalyst,” such as the late Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, or Mark Andreessen, algorithms can radically alter the consumer experience.

More such catalysts are entering the fray every day. Venture capitalists have their radar out for and provide ample resources for the catalysts to scale up very quickly. The result is the reconstitution or destruction of industries, creation of new market spaces, and reshaping of old industry ecosystems.

Some leaders will ignore the trend, as happened at Nokia, or remain on the defensive, as reflected in Walmart’s delayed response to Amazon. But others know it is not going away and that they have no choice but to transform the company. That realization creates more anxiety than insight into what to do. CEOs are on the hunt to understand who has done what, and who has succeeded. They want to know, does a legacy company really have a chance of transforming itself into a math house? Can it do so at the speed of a start-up? Yes. On both counts.

Insight Center

It is possible to transform a big company, and a roadmap has been laid by one of the most established companies in the world. GE, the only surviving member of the original Dow Jones Index of 1896, is reasserting its pre-eminence by reinventing itself in the context of the newly emerging digital space. It is shaping the new game of industrial businesses on a worldwide basis and showing other companies, regardless of their size, complexity, and history, how to proceed. Here are several lessons that leaders of legacy companies can draw from GE’s transformation:

1. Think like a large-scale entrepreneur. The new game is to think about the business model and strategy for not just the company but the entire ecosystem. You have to conceive and build a new platform and reshape partners in the ecosystem in ways that would not be possible without digitization and algorithms. For example, GE has created a digital platform in the energy sector that its own and third-party software developers can write applications to. The platform allows the exchange of digital information, services, and products across the power grid, allowing much greater efficiencies industrywide. The platform can bring wind, solar and other renewable energy producers — even individual homes equipped with solar panels — into the same ecosystem.

2. Recruit a digital leader from outside to spearhead the initiative. It will be a bold choice to choose the correct person, because you will be selecting someone with a new kind of expertise and bringing that person in at a high level. In 2011 GE, the company famous for exporting great leaders, imported one when it recruited Bill Ruh from Cisco to lead GE’s push into software and analytics. He built a team to develop Predix, a cloud-based platform that underlies all of GE’s industrial businesses. Three years later, GE hired veteran software engineer Ganesh Bell to be chief digital officer of GE Power and Water. Many such leaders are relatively young and highly sought after. GE’s ad campaign showing GE as a good place for millennials to work is part of its effort to be a talent magnet.

3. Focus where domain expertise and digital expertise intersect. Domain expertise at an automaker includes things like mechanics, telematics, structural engineering, design, and so on. Elevate the power and status of digital leaders and create mechanisms to bring them together with the domain experts. The leader of a financial services firm created a mechanism to bring together the experts in software and data analytics with people who knew the specifics of the business and consumers. They met once a week to hash out the details of how the digital platform should work to transform the consumer experience. “We had to get both buy-in and understanding of how the pieces of the strategy were going to be integrated,” she explained, “and we had to road test them, so we wanted the chief marketing officer, the chief digital officer, the head of distribution, the CFO, and so on all talking about it simultaneously to make sure all aspects were being considered.” When she sensed that the experts were not listening to each other, she intervened. Those sessions produced a highly sophisticated system that achieved the end goal: a wonderful end-to-end experience for consumers.

4. Change the dialogue in the senior leadership team to focus on the end-to-end customer experience. How can algorithms be used to create a better or entirely different kind of experience? This should be the dominant theme of discussions at the highest organizational levels in place of things like product quality and sales. CEOs cannot manage their silos via hub-and-spoke and expect digital expertise to be properly incorporated in key decisions. They have to integrate various perspectives and not give algorithms short shrift for lack of understanding them. It may mean spending some time in Silicon Valley to learn. Tom Watson, Jr. spent an enormous amount of time at MIT, the Silicon Valley of his day.

5. Radically cut costs in the old business to fund the new game. Balancing the short-term and long-term is a dynamic leadership challenge. Find the proper pace for extracting resources from the legacy business. GE has been steadily reducing its ratio of SG&A expense from 18% in 2011 to a targeted 12% in 2016, and in fall 2015 CEO Jeff Immelt told CNBC he planned to take out $1 billion in costs in the next two years on slightly declining revenues. Many leaders err on the side of slow change, which can be a killer, especially when a competitor from outside the industry jumps in. Don’t blindly accept assumptions about Wall Street myopia. As BlackRock CEO Larry Fink has said, “One reason for investors’ short-term horizons is that companies have not sufficiently educated them about the ecosystems they are operating in, what their competitive threats are and how technology and other innovations are impacting their businesses.”

6. Make the tough calls on people. Radically reduce people dedicated to the old business. Find new ways to motivate the legacy people. Redefine criteria for officers and move out those who cannot be “digital heads.” Immelt elevated marketing and digital media when he promoted Beth Comstock to vice chair, while other positions, including that of the CFO, are at the senior vice president level. He also removed a layer of vice chairs to make room.

7. Make the organization team-based and fluid. Cut layers. Change the mindset from “span of control” to “speed and collaboration.” GE adopted its FastWorks initiative, based on lean startup principles, to cut bureaucracy around innovation. Drastically change the operating mechanisms to allow adjustments in real time; for example, eliminate annual strategic planning and annual performance appraisals in favor of ongoing assessments and feedback. Keep information and communications flowing internally and externally so people know how their work links to the overall company direction. Get people aboard through short duration training programs. GE trained some 40,000 employees on its FastWorks initiative.

8. Communicate often so the board, investors and the media understand the steps you are taking to become a new company. Connect with major shareholders and potential activists to explain the reasons for shifting resources. Immelt reached out to activist Nelson Peltz before Peltz’s Trian Fund had invested in the company. Soon after, Trian did due diligence on the company and bought a $2.5 billion stake. While Peltz made suggestions to divest a bigger piece of GE Capital and increase leverage, he generally supported Immelt’s efforts to steer GE onto the new track. Dialogue took place without major upheaval to the business.

The key lesson from GE is that transforming a company for the digital age cannot be delegated, outsourced, or done piecemeal. Rather, it involves many steps that are interconnected. The CEO should spend at least 50% of the time on the transition to transformation. The CEO must have the imagination to conceive the reconstituted business and the scope to manage the broad range of elements in and outside the organization that must change.

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.)  

On September 20th 2013 at 2:30AM, tech writer Stewart Wolpin arrived at Apple’s flagship store on 5th Avenue in New York City. His goal; be one of the first to purchase the much-anticipated iPhone 5S, going on sale the next morning. Stewart likely felt his early arrival would help him secure front-of-the-line status. He was 300th.

By now we all know that Stewart’s story is not unique. In fact, it’s amazingly consistent with what we have come to expect from Apple product launch days. Events that have become synonymous with overnight camp-outs, grown-up giddiness, and massive customer fanfare. But what’s so magical about Apple that makes consumers react that way?

In his book, Start With Why, noted author, Simon Sinek, asserts that customer reactions like these are rooted in an organization’s ability to tap into the shared values and beliefs of their customers. In short, people react that way because they “don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” To explain the concept further, Sinek introduces a codified approach called, the Golden Circle. The approach uses a simple diagram consisting of three concentric circles to describe the level of awareness an organization (and to a great extent, their customers) has with its purpose or value system. Specifically, their What, How, and Why.

Sinek explains how every organization in the world understands What it is they do; the basic principle of their business. e.g. We manufacture ball bearings. We bake delicious cupcakes. We provide investment products and advice.

He goes on to describe how fewer organizations know How they do what they do; the functional nuances that separate them from the competition. e.g. We use a unique and proprietary manufacturing process with a carbon-neutral footprint. We make our products by hand in small batches to preserve quality. All of our advisors undergo a rigorous 15 week training process.

Finally, he asserts that very few organizations understand Why they do what they do; their intrinsic motivation, their core values that drive the organization’s behaviors and decision making process. But indeed nailing the Why is the key to disrupting your audience’s inertia and driving massive amounts of Apple-like customer affinity. The easiest way to describe the galvanizing power of Why is with a concept I call, the belief statement.

For Apple, most of their product launches in recent years feature slick videos with commentary from Apple Chief Design Officer, Jony Ive. These videos, while camouflaged as beautiful product showcases, are actually packed with statements not about what the products do, but the design thinking behind them; in essence, the tightly-held beliefs with which Apple’s design team operates.

“We believe our users should be at the center of everything we do.”

“We believe that a piece of technology should be as beautiful as it is functional.”

“We believe that making devices thinner and lighter, but more powerful requires innovative problem solving”.

These belief statements are so compelling because, as buyers, they resonate with our personal belief systems. They help us align and validate us, even if those beliefs are aspirational. For example, if I see myself as someone who should visit the gym and lose some weight, a well-timed ad from a health club or fancy kitchen blender evangelizing the benefits of a healthy lifestyle may be enough to quickly convert me. In the case of Apple, the same phenomenon results is mobs of smitten consumers arriving at stores in droves, braving long lines and paying premium prices, as if to say “Yes! I DO believe I should be at the center of everything you do! Technology SHOULD be beautiful! Thinner? Lighter? More Powerful? Of course! We share the same vision! We’re both cool!” (although these actual words are likely rarely spoken)

Many sales methodologies focus on uncovering a buyer’s personal and emotional motivations for the very reason that those elements inspire the quickest and most decisive action. But belief statements aren’t limited to the consumer world. In the context of how great leaders inspire action, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s now famous “I have a dream” speech is a perfect example of how deep conviction around a set of beliefs can quickly galvanize a massive audience.

So how can your business harness the power of values and beliefs to engage your target customer? Simple: Lead with what you believe! First, think about what it is your organization believes that differentiates it from your competition. Next, craft a statement (or series of statements) you can use across your sales and marketing efforts. For example:

“We believe you should be able to run your business from your phone.”

“We believe that traditional performance reviews are old and outdated.”

“We believe that eating healthy, organic food shouldn’t cost more.”

Here are three tips to making belief statements work for your business:

• Point to a specific well-understood challenge. Don’t force your customers have to make huge mental leaps in their own belief systems. Simple, polarizing, and customer-centric messages are great places to start.

• Don’t refer to your products or services directly. Nothing kills the mood of a lofty, altruistic, belief statement faster than mixing it with a blatant pitch. For example, “We believe our Acme Co. mobile app is the best way to run your business from your phone.” Keep it all about the audience and their opportunity.

• Asking yourself “would my target audience be smiling and nodding?” If you want a quick litmus test to determine whether or not you’re on the right track, ask yourself if a typical member of your target audience would immediately smile and nod when they hear your belief statement. If the answer is no, you have more work to do.

Disrupting your customer’s inertia and moving them to act in a world full of distractions and flashy messages can be tough. But when it doubt, leading with what you believe is one of the most powerful ways to build massive amounts of fast and long-lasting affinity.

Want more sales tips for 2016? Download the free e-book for 100 of them!

Every established brand should have a clear understanding of its brand equity. The Blake Project’s BrandInsistence brand equity measurement system measures the five things that cause customers to insist upon specific brands: awareness, relevant differentiation, value, accessibility and emotional connection.

Here is an overview of each driver.

Awareness

Awareness is the cornerstone of strong brands. Awareness must be present for all of the other factors to come into play. Awareness is strongly correlated with brand preference and brand quality perceptions. We have found that open-ended questions measuring first recall and other recall top-of-mind brand awareness within specific categories are the most predictive measures of awareness. We can also measure brand awareness associated with delivery against specific customer benefits. We also ask the close-ended brand familiarity question.

Relevant Differentiation

Most brand equity measurement models measure relevant differentiation and ours does too. We measure relevance within particular product categories and we can measure relevance against specific customer needs. We also measure the importance of up to 24 customer benefits and shared values. The benefits can be functional, emotional, experiential or self-expressive. We also measure the brand’s perceived delivery against these 24 benefits and shared values. We then plot benefit importance versus delivery on a radial coordinate chart creating a brand positioning map. We overlay the same information for up to three of the brand’s most important competitors to identify brand positioning opportunities and threats. Further, because brands are owned in the minds of customers, we ask an open-ended question or two about top-of-mind brand associations and differentiators. We hand code and quantify the responses for highest accuracy.

Value

Few other brand equity measurement models measure this. Value has a numerator and a denominator. The numerator consists of the bundle of benefits the brand delivers. The denominator recognizes that there are financial, time and other costs to receiving those benefits. Value can be understood as the ratio of these two. We measure perceived value of the brand. We also measure perceived quality of the brand.

Accessibility

Accessibility is most important for location-based brands (retail, restaurants, etc.) but is important to some degree in every category. Accessibility comes into play when a customer has to decide between a preferred brand that is less accessible and another brand that is more accessible. When the difference in accessibility between brands is significant, people often choose the more accessible brand.

Emotional Connection

Many academic disciplines have demonstrated that, even though we might consider ourselves to be highly rational, we are still largely driven in our decisions by our emotions. This is true not just for consumer brands but also for business-to-business brands as well. We have four distinct measures of brand emotional connection. Each one measures a more intense emotional connection.

These five brand insistence drivers work in the following way. Brand awareness and relevance may lead to the brand’s inclusion in the consideration set. Brand differentiation and value may lead the brand being preferred. And brand accessibility may lead to brand purchase. Emotional connection to the brand may lead to brand loyalty and advocacy.

Amazon.com is perhaps the best example of a brand that does most everything right. The brand delivers a superior user experience and has addressed each of the five drivers of customer brand insistence—awareness, relevant differentiation, value, accessibility, and emotional connection.

Here are a few of the things that Amazon does right in each of these areas:

Awareness. Amazon established unprecedented buzz when it was first launched, and an affiliate program creates links throughout the World Wide Web. All of this leads to extremely high search engine rankings for the site whenever any one searches for a product that it offers. And Amazon.com makes it easy to share one’s purchases through email, Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.

Relevant Differentiation. Nearly half a billion different products are available, including Partner Count merchandise, with superior search and browse technology. This creates the ultimate convenience of one-stop shopping.

Value. Amazon offers low prices (often, the lowest available anywhere) and free shipping options and helps shoppers find the right product through recommendations based on past purchases, user reviews and ratings, and suggested complementary purchases; it lets customers “look inside” and listen to books.

Accessibility. There is 24/7 access, with one-click ordering and quick shipping options.

Emotional Connection. Customers can personally connect with Amazon.com through user profiles, reviews, ratings, wish lists and Listmania lists for recommending favorite products. Authors have their own Author Pages and can access detailed sales information through Author Central. Amazon also provides three ways for authors to self-publish using an Amazon-related platform: Kindle Direct Publishing (eBooks), CreateSpace (print books) and ACX (audiobooks).

When we measured Amazon.com’s brand equity using our BrandInsistence system it was one of the very few brands that had high scores across all five drivers of customer brand insistence. No wonder Amazon.com ranks tenth in brand valuation (at a value of $37.9 billion) according to Interbrand’s 2015 ranking of global brands.

The Blake Project Can Help: Contact us for more on BrandInsistence brand equity measurement

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

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

Word of mouth advertising, stories passed from one person to another, is the pinnacle form of marketing for any business. It doesn’t come with a direct fee and it’s highly effective; people are more likely to listen to their friends or peers than your business. For several years, marketers have viewed social networks as a way to tap into word of mouth. Places like Facebook and Twitter present a measurable, recorded environment of word of mouth endorsements. Users ask friends for recommendations, others simply proclaim a love for a product or business.

Book reviews are a great example of online word of mouth. A visible indication with a star rating of what the buyers, rather than the sellers, think of a product. Research shows that an increase in positive reviews has a direct impact on book sales, as does an increase in negative.1

The user contributions that you witness when scanning a social network represent organic word of mouth. The same type of word of mouth that has always taken place offline. Do social networks provide a genuine opportunity for marketers to steer or accelerate word of mouth around their business? Technology hasn’t invented word of mouth marketing, but does it offer alternative opportunities to marketers looking to engineer recommendations between users?

Attaching followers to social ads

Social advertising, specifically Facebook advertising, provides the best tactic for tapping into digital endorsement. The goal of a marketer is to tell a story that a tribe will share and spread. The marketer wants followers to shout about their mission, product and business. Tweet about it, blog about it, proactively share the message. A Facebook ‘like’ in isolation is a somewhat passive brand approval, nowhere near as powerful as something more active. Nonetheless, it does represent a form of appreciation, and it’s something that marketers can use in an attempt to ‘influence’ word of mouth.

Through Facebook advertising, you can create ads that target friends of followers. These ads display a form of social endorsement where the name of the friend who likes our page is displayed beneath the ad. This form of minor personalisation and direct advertisement improves the chances that the target will click through your ad. Research shows that when you target Facebook ads solely at users who are friends of your page followers, this form of social advertising is more effective than traditional forms of display advertising, as well as social advertising without ‘social approval’.2

When personalization goes too far

This use of passive endorsement can help engineer word of mouth, but too much personalisation can have an adverse effect. The same research that finds the benefits of ‘friend-approved’ social advertising also finds that personalisation within the ad can have an adverse effect. If the copy specifically implies that a friend of the user has liked or endorsed your brand, the success rate (measured by click-throughs) is inferior to traditional display advertising. An explanation of this may be that, when the user views a faceless and somewhat impartial party (Facebook algorithm) to be presenting the endorsement, the endorsement provides reliability and trust to the ad. When that endorsement appears to be manipulated and controlled by a person or business, with a self-serving purpose, it lacks authenticity and acts as a real turn off.

Research also shows that our perceptions of how much control we have over privacy has a significant impact on how likely we are to click on a personalised social ad. If we’ve had some level of input and control over what messages are allowed into our feed, we’re then much more likely to click on an ad which appears personalised. Presumably, if we control settings, we think that the ad has passed our own filter, rather than Facebook’s. In the past, after Facebook announced a shift in policy that gave users more control over their personal settings, personalised advertising suddenly became twice as effective as it was prior to the announcement.3

With perception of privacy, there’s a delicate line to tread, getting as close to personalised ads as possible without giving users the impression that you’re (or Facebook on your behalf) collecting too much private information and abusing the privilege. This is an important point to consider for remarketing too.

The perception of how much personalisation is too much will vary from country to country. Broadly speaking, research shows that users are receptive to obtrusive ads (i.e. pop-ups, flashing banners, etc.) as well as context-based ads which are clearly personalised when each are used independent of one another. But, if we combine the two ads, like a bold eye catching image alongside a personalised message with personalised social endorsement, the ad tends to fail. It leads people to believe that you’re overstepping the mark and taking an unwanted dip into their personal information and space.4

You can’t tap into word of mouth before you have word of mouth

The findings to date suggest that you can use passive social endorsements to spread your story, but you can’t manipulate word of mouth, on Facebook or otherwise. People support or endorse a brand because of a personal, positive experience. That’s essential, regardless of how that person shares their seal of approval.

Marketers can use social ads to try and give the word of mouth a shot of adrenaline. Speed up the process. But ultimately, your focus should be on giving people a reason to shout about your product in the first place.

For starters, if you don’t have a reasonable sized following on social, you have nothing to tap into. If you believe in word of mouth marketing and you want to encourage it, you need users to transfer any following of your brand from offline to online. You need to encourage people to like your page, so in turn you can use that to launch ads at users who are friends of your followers. You need to get active on Facebook, and that means working with the channel to provide your followers something of value. Before you look at what followers can do for you, you need to consider what you can do for your followers. You need to use the channel as a way to deliver a mission. If that mission is to bring exquisite dining to Leeds, figure out how Facebook helps you do that.

All research around social advertising focuses on its success when measured against traditional advertising, or how many click’s the ad earns. Does this measurement capture an action that represents a strong form connection with its target? Do users clicking on your ads really go on to become customers or advocates? Do they genuinely take a Facebook like to be a brand endorsement, or are they simply intrigued to see what their friends are up to on Facebook?

I’m not convinced that users place any true value in Facebook likes or Twitter follows. It’s cheap and easy for a user to dish them out, and so the value of either is questionable. If you have a clear mission and a growing tribe, then social advertising could help you speed up the growth of your tribe. But, you need to get your house in order first before testing the water with social advertising. Seth Godin’s take on Tribes is a good steer.

This article originally appeared on LiamCurley.co.uk

Sources

1Trusov, M., R. E. Bucklin, and K. Pauwels (2009). Effects of word-of-mouth versus traditional marketing: Findings from an internet social networking site. Journal of Marketing 73, 90-102.

2Tucker, C (2012). Social Advertising. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1975897 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1975897

3Tucker, C. (2011). Social Networks, Personalized Advertising, and Privacy Controls. Mimeo, MIT.

4Goldfarb, A. and C. Tucker (2011). Online display advertising: Targeting and obtrusiveness. Marketing Science 30, 389-404.

I attended the Flip My Funnel conference in San Francisco today, which was exciting in that it was the first conference I have attended that was completely dedicated to Account-Based Marketing (ABM) – a topic I am very passionate about. There were a lot of people talking about their experiences around ABM, a few folks trying to shoehorn their solutions into an ABM box, and a genuine interest in this rising B2B marketing trend focused on identifying and then targeting the companies that you think are most likely to actually become customers of your products and services.

In case you are new to the ABM trend, I have written a few blog posts on account-based marketing and you can find the event organizer’s explanation of the ABM funnel-flip here. In a nutshell, however, Account-Based Marketing moves away from a focus on generating a large volume of individual leads, which are then sorted in order to identify interested individuals from companies that might buy your products and services. Instead, B2B marketers decide which companies you think have the highest likelihood of buying and trying to generate interest from multiple potential buyers at those companies.

Image source

The entire event was highlighted by having the speakers provide their definitions and examples of how they “flipped their funnels,” focusing their marketing efforts on select accounts instead of traditional lead-based marketing. I am mostly on board with the “flipped” funnel, but with a few exceptions and adjustments…

At the top, you have “Identify,” which is really the heart (to me) of account-based marketing. The creation of the target account list is the first, vital step that you need to take in order to succeed in ABM. As I wrote in a blog post called What Sales is Really Asking for When They Want More Leads:

Take a look at your best customers, and identify what they have in common. Are they all from a select group of industries, with certain minimum revenue thresholds? Are they all using the same CRM system, or ERP? Did they just receive a round of funding, or report earnings that were in line with expectations? Identify their common ground, and then search for more companies that share similar characteristics to build your target account list.

That account list will drive everything you do, and if you have not spent the time on creating the right list you are stuck in that same cycle of generating leads from companies that are never going to become customers.

Next up you have “Expand” and “Engage,” although to me these might be better served by reversing their order in the funnel. These steps signify the difficult process of generating interest from the accounts on your target list, but not just from individual leads at those accounts. The most effective Account-Based Marketing campaigns take the entire buying committee into consideration. B2B buying decisions are so rarely made by individuals, and true ABM needs to account for large buying committees, create and serve content that serves the diverse and different needs of every member of the committee, and then work to connect with multiple contacts at every target account. You need to expand beyond that initial engagement with a singular lead from an account and expand your engagement across the entire buying committee.

The next stage in the Flip My Funnel diagram seems a bit premature to me … “Advocate.” I’ll be honest, I’m a little confused here because I so routinely associate that advocate stage with existing customers, getting them to become so invested and excited by your products and services that they tell others. In reading the definitions on the Flip My Funnel blog, they definitely seem to be talking about creating customer advocates … but in the context of my “flipped funnel” I feel like we haven’t even closed the deal yet.

In the context of Account-Based Marketing, there could be some definite pre-sales applications of this “Advocate” stage. When you try to cast a wide net across a single account, engaging them with content that appeals to every member of the committee, then you may create those pre-sales advocates that will share and spread the word across the buying committee. If that happens, you are really doing something right.

All in all? A fun event, an exciting topic, and some great speakers. Interest in Account-Based Marketing is on the rise, as more vendors are trying to figure out how to best serve the needs of marketers looking to focus on accounts instead of leads. Check them out at http://flipmyfunnel.com/roadshow/.

Author: Jason Stewart @jstewart_1 Vice President, Strategic Content for ANNUITAS 

The post What Funnel Flipping Means to Me appeared first on ANNUITAS.

Author: Ed King

Does your MarTech stack look like your kitchen drawer? If so, think about what that means for your data as a B2B marketer.

I recently realized how many gadgets are in my kitchen drawers and cabinets, particularly the ones sitting in the cabinet informally designated as the “kitchen graveyard.” It includes a few popcorn makers, juicers, and all kinds of widgets for chopping, slicing, dicing, squeezing, and other tasks that I can’t even recall. Being a big fan of Alton Brown of the Food Network, I have a whole bunch of what Alton likes to rail about: the “unitasker”—a device with only one function.

So what’s this got to do with marketing? My realization reminded me of recent conversations with many of our customers whose marketing technology (MarTech) stack is starting to look like my kitchen drawer—full of unitaskers, acquired through a variety of circumstances, without any real thought about how they fit into a well-functioning kitchen. These customers lacked a technology roadmap and hadn’t fully anticipated how these systems would integrate across their MarTech stack.

The Explosion of Unitaskers

With the explosion in MarTech solutions over the last five years, the number of unitasker solutions available is overwhelming. To get a picture of this trend, take a look at Scott Brinker’s Marketing Technology Landscape Supergraphics, which shows a crowded market with 1,876 vendors in 43 categories.

At the recent SiriusDecisions Technology Exchange Conference, one of the major themes from the analyst presentations highlighted the need for marketing to beware of the temptations of “shiny new objects,” and the majority of these shiny objects are unitaskers that fill missing functions in the core MarTech stack. Some of the hottest unitasker categories are:

• Predictive lead sourcing
• Predictive lead scoring
• De-duplication
• Attribution
• Data enrichment

It’s clear that solution vendors are pioneering wonderful technologies and solving real-world problems for marketers. However, without a technology roadmap and careful consideration into how the different solutions and their data integrate into the core MarTech stack and with each other, marketers can easily end up with a system integration and data unification problem: the classic trap of the solution to one problem creating another problem. While these problems are not new to IT professionals, they maybe unfamiliar to marketers. Below, I will discuss some of the common problems of a poorly integrated MarTech stack and how to avoid them:

Challenges

1. Data and Process Integration + Integrity

While most unitasker solutions provide seamless integration with CRM and marketing automation systems, each still introduces a new set of data unique to the solution. This data often can’t be leveraged by the core platform and by the other unitaskers in the stack. And as a result, the number of custom data fields in the CRM and marketing automation system can become unmanageable, sometimes even exceeding a thousand. The database can get cluttered with duplicate data fields, and it becomes almost impossible to remember what the data is, where it came from, or how to leverage it. Additionally, because unitaskers leverage different integration technologies, such as form plug-ins, web hooks, and platform native integrations, haphazard adoption can also introduce unintended interference and risk process integrity.

Without a carefully thought-through data unification strategy and technology adoption roadmap, data quality can deteriorate rapidly, resulting in difficult data integration and transformation, and making it challenging to de-duplicate and standardize data from the different sources.

2. Measuring and Attributing Return-On-Investment (ROI)

Every solution promises a significant return on investment (ROI), with increased and higher quality leads or faster lead flow. What we hear from our customers is while they can see anecdotal evidence these solutions are working, it’s usually difficult to measure and track their impact and ROI. For example, what portion of funnel improvement and closed deals can you confidently attribute to each new solution? If multiple solutions are involved, what portion of development and ROI should be credited to each solution? And how much of the return is due to improvements in people and process vs. the technology?

3. The Unknown of the Black Box

Many of these solutions advertise a proprietary algorithm or predictive engine that makes predictions and prescriptions based on your private and public data. While there’s much excitement about the new capabilities unleashed by these artificial intelligence solutions, there’s also fear of the unknown surrounding these “black box” solutions. At the end of the day, there is no magic dust. Any algorithm or engine is a set of programming code based on a model, and every model is based on a set of theories and assumptions. With this in mind, marketers should consider if the assumptions and theories associated with the “black box” model are consistent with their business plans both now and in the future. Other questions to consider when adopting “black box” solutions include: how do you know if the assumptions are sufficient? How do you know when the assumptions are no longer good enough? Do you know whether you’re getting positive results or false-positives, and why?

Recommendations

So how can a marketer make informed decisions in this fast changing technology landscape? Here are three recommendations for evaluating your MarTech stack:

1. Address the Root Causes Before Taking on New Technologies

During the SiriusDecisions Technology Exchange conference, one of the key takeaways for marketing was to focus on people, process, and technology—in that order. I would suggest adding data into this framework, so focus on people, process, data, and then technology. Problems with people and process are real, as are issues with data and technology, so don’t rush into new technology adoption when your problem could be more fundamental. In fact, adding new technology without addressing the root causes in people, process, and data can mask or even further exacerbate the problem.

2. Develop a Technology Roadmap and Integration Strategy

Before rushing to buy the next new shiny object, have a plan first. Develop a technology roadmap that specifies what core components you need in your MarTech stack. Once the core stack components are identified, then identify what gaps you still have and plug each with the right unitasker. Along with the roadmap, have an integration strategy that addresses how data and process will flow through the stack.

While every company’s needs are different, in my opinion, here are the five essential components every B2B marketer should consider in their MarTech core stack:

• CRM
• Marketing automation
• Data management and integration
• Data visualization and reporting
• Content management and personalization

3. Determine How You Will Measure Before You Buy

Before you commit to a new MarTech solution, ask yourself: How will you measure and keep track of the performance and return on investment of the new solution? It’s important not only to demonstrate to your marketing and sales leadership that the new solution is effective and works as advertised, but also to ensure it’s producing the correct results without unintended side effects.

While there’s an abundance of great solutions out there, it’s important not to lose sight of the forest for the trees. Understand the root cause of your problems and whether a new solution will really address them, have a technology roadmap in place to understand where your strengths and gaps are, and understand how you’ll measure success before you commit to purchasing.

---

3 Ways to Keep Your MarTech Stack Tidy was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 3 Ways to Keep Your MarTech Stack Tidy appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Matt Taibbi is one of our decade's best observers of corruption and abuses of power, combining careful research with flamboyant, HS Thompson-esque verbal pyrotechnics, an absolute gift for coinages (Goldman Sachs will never fully shed his description of the firm as "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money"), matched by real insight into the American political psyche. (more…)

Transcend now offers a 1TB version of its MTS800 solid state drive, meaning you can count on finding gobs of ultra-fast storage in your next ultrabook.

The post Transcends builds tiny 1TB M.2 solid state drive for super-thin laptops appeared first on Digital Trends.

Forrester Research released their report “Your Digital Experience Technology Strategy Starts with a Customer Journey Map,” and after reading it, I felt like they had been crawling around inside my brain. No other report has resonated with me so much, hit the nail so rightly on the head, or so clearly stated what organizations need… Read More

A friend of mine recently retired. She was an English comp professor at a local university. She thought she might write a book in her retirement, and decided to find an author’s group or two to join. When she accessed a couple of these sites, she began to read the blogs that were posted. Then, she discovered that a lot of struggling authors actually paid their bills by writing blog posts on a freelance basis. From the posts she had read already, she figured this was an easy way to make some extra money and began to look for gigs in the industry. She submitted post after post that continued to be rejected. Finally, I explained to her that blog posts were unique “creatures,” requiring a very different writing style and skill set than she had practiced all her life. Ultimately, she realized that she would have to take a course in content marketing if she intended to do this blog-writing thing. We all laughed about the English professor returning to school to take a writing course, but, given the rising trend in both free and fee-based online coursework, she was able to quickly find a course, totally immerse herself in it, and in no time she was writing successful posts.

The Purpose of a Blog

The goal of a blog is to have published content that others want to read and share. In fact, if content isn’t shared, there is no reason to have a blog at all. Posts are shared when they are written for the reader not the person doing the writing. And there are certain writing skills that all bloggers must have is content is to catch on. Even if you are not an English teacher or professor, you may still struggle with the unique style of blog post writing for a host of other reasons. If you are, here is a list of 10 writing skills that you will need – some you may have mastered quite well; others you may need to develop some more.

1. Simplify

This was the biggest issue my friend had. She was so used to complex sentences, long paragraphs, and scholarly style, she did not know how to simplify her content. One of her course assignments was to read The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. Everyone who wants to write blog posts should re-read this book. It is the perfect example of simple clear writing with great messages.

2. Purpose

Every post must have a purpose. Of course, the ultimate purpose is to engage the reader and make that reader want to share the content. But, getting to the ultimate goal means that there has to be a clear purpose. You must decide if you are going to educate you reader with a “how to” post, or an answer to a question, or a solution to a problem. You might want to entertain your reader with some humorous story that relates to the company, product, or service. You might want to inspire the reader to become involved in a charity you are supporting. If you are familiar with academic writing, then you understand that every essay or paper has to have a thesis. The purpose of a post is its thesis.

3. Headlines

The importance of a headline cannot be emphasized enough. Just ask any journalist who writes news articles or editorials. Engagement of the reader begins with that title, and it has to be catchy and intriguing. Large numbers of visitors to a blog will scan down for those headlines. If nothing sparks an interest, they scan down to the end and then leave. No post is read, and no post is shared – epic fail.

4. Storytelling

This is a great way to engage readers in the beginning or for an entire post. Whether you tell a story about a customer who found a unique use for a company’s product, a person who found inspiration from watching a baby turtle make its trek to the ocean or a risk-taker who started a business and made it a success, people will read stories. This post began with a story and hopefully you were interested enough to read it.

5. Reading Level

This relates a bit to #1 but it deserves individual treatment. Think of a 7^th grader. What is his/her vocabulary level? What is the reading level of his textbooks? If you can’t remember from your own youth, go to the library and find a middle school text book and take a look. Do you have a relative with a middle school kid? See if you can read samples of his writing. And you can always use one of those free tools that will give you a reading level. Just paste you post in and let it tell you. You are looking for age 12-13 reading level.

6. Grammar

You are not writing an academic paper here. But that does not mean you can ignore grammar and mechanics. If you are famous for fragments and run-ons, you have to fix that; if you use the wrong forms of verbs, you have to fix that. There may be some people who read your posts who have a strong command of English usage and who will turned off by bad writing, spelling, and punctuation. There are editing tools and services to use – find a free one and let it fix your errors.

7. Format

If you have read enough other blog posts, you probably understand the format “rules.” Like an essay, a post must have an introduction, a body section, and a conclusion. All similarities end there. The body of a blog post is divided up into sections with bold sub-titles. And within those sections, paragraphs are really short. Lists are great, and they should be numbered or bulleted. This lets the reader scan through you post and decide if any of those sub-headings is of interest. If so, s/he may only read parts of your post, and that’s okay. If the parts that are read result in sharing the post – your goal has been met.

8. Tone

Above all else, a blog post has to be casual and informal. While you don’t want to overdo it, current slang is fine; serious cursing (the really bad words) and offensive terminology (racial slurs, insults, etc.) is not okay. As you write a post, use a tone that you would if writing a letter to a good friend or relative.

9. Visuals

One of the things you have to get over is the attitude that a visual is not writing. In the blogosphere, it is. And content with great visuals gets shared far more than those without. Cool images, photos, infographics, interactive stuff like polls and surveys, and videos all make content “catchy.” And generally, you should use color for these, unless something like a black and white photo is being used for a specific effect.

10. Content Curation

Some do not consider this a writing skill, but it is. When you find great content somewhere else, you may want to use it. Obviously, you are not going to plagiarize. But, you can think of ways to make it even better and you re-write it with that in mind. Or you may find content in text form that you can use to create an infographic, a slide presentation, or present to your reader in the form of a poll, survey or quiz. These are popular and, if done well, are likely to be shared.

Blog writing is a unique form. And, like any form of writing, it takes lots of practice. It takes creativity too, as you create headlines, tell stories, and solve reader problems. If you love to write, you can master the skill set. Use these 10 tips as your start point.

Which elements of customer service are very important to consumers? What are the customer service issues that frustrate people most? Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Competitive intelligence often takes a back seat to performance indicators that marketers are daily concerned with (open rates, social metrics, conversions...). But that solely inward focus can lead you astray. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Unlike texting while driving, texting while selling is not dangerous; in fact, it can be invaluable in helping sales teams meet their numbers. But before you fire off texts to all your leads, keep these tips and tricks in mind. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

HP CEO Dion Weisler has explained a disappointing earnings report with the claim that Windows 10 has failed to meet the company's expectation that it would stimulate PC hardware sales.

The post HP CEO claims Window 10 isn’t driving demand for hardware appeared first on Digital Trends.

Sales is a strange profession. On one hand, the role of a sales professional is that of a guide or trusted advisor. To altruistically help their customers improve their lives and grow their business by exposing them to new tools, services, and concepts. On the other hand, in the pursuit of these lofty goals, sales professionals are incentivized by lucrative compensation plans, the magnitude of which are rarely seen beyond the C-suite. For new sales reps especially, this dichotomy can create internal conflict when it comes to whose interest to prioritize.

As a former customer of the company I lead a sales team at, my goal has been to reduce the ambiguity of this dilemma for our new recruits. Despite my large quota and shared sense of urgency, I am very clear on this topic. “Guess what?!?” I typically begin when broaching the discussion with my team, “your customers don’t care about our solutions, our sales process, or whether or not you make your quota. They really only care about one thing; growing their business!”

A keen focus on your customer’s problems has many benefits including creating that critical initial interest and affinity. Noted author, Simon Sinek, summed this sentiment up perfectly in his 2011 talk, “If You Don’t Understand People, You Don’t Understand Business.” In it he asserts that most corporations in the world adopt a self-centered approach to sales and marketing; meaning, their efforts are largely focused on talking about the themselves, their solutions, and positioning them competitively against other corporations. Yet, transitioning to more customer or buyer-centric messages can have a meaningful impact to both your bottom line and your brand.

So what’s the secret to crafting customer-centric messaging that’s compelling enough to capture your audience’s attention? Here are three tactics guaranteed to get your customers to notice.

Tip #1: Pick an Enemy

Make your message polarizing and easy to get behind by focusing it on a single problem that is already well-understood by your target audience. For example, our last business was a feedback, coaching, and recognition solution designed to help people get ahead at work. As it turned out, people (especially millennials) love feedback but universally hated the old, antiquated annual performance review process. As a result, performance reviews became our enemy and we generated a great deal of high profile press that helped our target audience quickly understand how we could help their business.

Tip #2: Use the Right Words

Who is the target buyer for your product or service? Do you know? While many organizations feel their services have a broader audience base than they actually do, it’s often a helpful exercise to use data to understand the key demographic, role, and persona of your target buyer (i.e. What type of person is actually buying your solution? What type of person is responsible for the majority of your revenue?). But the exercise doesn’t end there! Once you zero-in on your target persona, engage them and listen to the specific words they use to describe their problems and the value they get from your solution. Then use those specific words in your sales and marketing efforts.

In a 2002 study, Dutch researcher Rick Van Baaren found that in one restaurant, servers were able to increase their tips by 70% simply by repeating their customer’s verbalizations back to them exactly. While this mirroring (or mimicking technique) may seem silly at first, using the same words as our target buyers promotes more rapid assimilation of our message and engagement with our brand.

Tip #3: Teach Your Audience Something

Helpful, insightful messages are great at engaging your target audience for three reasons:

1. They invoke the power of reciprocity. When you teach someone something and add value to their experience with you, you encourage them to respond in kind.

2. They build value in your brand. They substantiate your organization’s position as a thought-leader, making you a go-to resource for your target audience. They also won’t be so quick to delete new messages from you!

3. They can help uncover hidden pain. In many cases your audience may not realize how problematic their current state is. Showing them what the future could look like may create the awareness you need.

For sales and marketing organizations, cultivating a customer-centric approach that focuses on the key business challenges of your target audience is critical to achieving long-term success. While not always second nature, focusing on message that are polarizing, relevant, and insightful may be just the thing you need to both disrupt your customer’s inertia and raise their initial level of interest around your solution.

Want more killer sales tips? Download this free e-book for 100 of them.

The end is near for Sears, according to several analysts.

Sears said Thursday that its same-store sales fell 7.1% in the fourth quarter and revenue dropped 9.8% to $7.3 billion. 

The company reported a quarterly loss of $580 million, or $5.44 per share, compared with a loss of $159 million, or $1.50 a share, the previous year.

Sears stores "now seem to be in a perpetual state of decline," Neil Saunders, CEO at retail consulting firm Conlumino, wrote in a note to clients Thursday. "The underinvestment clearly shows and as such they are caught in a vicious cycle of seeing lower and lower customer traffic, which further weakens the case for investment and reinvigoration."

Sears said earlier this month that it would accelerate planned closures of 50 stores to cut costs.

"It is very hard to see and end game other than the continued closure of large swathes of the store fleet over the medium to longer term," Saunders wrote.

Sears Chairman Eddie Lampert says the retailer had a rough quarter because of warmer than expected winter weather.

"The weather conditions had a cascading effect on many retailers, leading to reduced spending and heavy discounting on winter clothing and related items," Lampert wrote in a letter to shareholders on Thursday.

Lampert also said the retailer has been unfairly criticized.

"Because of Sears and Kmart's longstanding history and cultural impact, we are targeted for criticism when our results are poor," he wrote.

He acknowledged the disappointing performance, however, saying, "We will continue to take strong, difficult but necessary actions to reduce losses. We will have to think, work and move harder and faster."

According to Evercore ISI analysts, a Sears recovery is unlikely.

Sears is no longer "viable as a retailer in its current form," the analysts wrote in a recent note. “Sears margins were worse than we thought as a tough retail climate accelerated margin decline. A liquidity event is a matter of when not if.”

The department store chain has been bleeding cash for years. It has been closing hundreds of stores and selling off real estate to stay afloat.

Sears' same-store sales, or sales at stores open at least a year, have fallen for the past five years.

The company's shares have lost 60% of their value in the last year.

Analysts say Sears' sales are declining because it's losing some of its most loyal customers.

The department store has traditionally attracted female shoppers aged 55 and older, but that demographic is now choosing to shop elsewhere, according to a recent study by Prosper Insights & Analytics.

In fact, most women would now rather shop at Goodwill than at Sears, according to the survey.

"Quite literally, Sears shoppers are a dying breed," Pam Goodfellow, an analyst for Prosper Insights & Analytics, writes in Forbes.

In women's clothing alone, the share of shoppers who prefer Sears has dropped 53% from January 2006 to January 2016, the survey found.

Sears is also losing considerable ground in categories like sporting goods, linens and bedding, home improvement, and electronics.

It's a "dire" situation for Sears, according to Goodfellow. As older shoppers leave Sears, the company is failing to attract new, younger customers, she writes.

SEE ALSO: See whether your local Sears or Kmart is shutting down

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The most surprising brands millennials love

B2B social media marketing has been slow to emerge. But it is now catching on and businesses who want to survive and thrive need to get “with it.” In fact, research from the Content Marketing Institute has reported that 92% of B2B marketers are using social media as a part of their total content marketing plan. Businesses have come to understand that, just as with B2C marketing, there is a great advantage to promoting a brand and building relationships with businesses that are potential customers. And, just as with B2C marketing, it is important that B2B marketers write engaging content, targeted to the right audience and then promoted/published on the right social media platforms. The following are just six ways to effectively move your content marketing into social media.

Connect with Your Potential Customers on Social Media

Cold calling is no longer an effective lead generation tactic. But human connection can still occur if social media is used correctly. It’s sort of like a “first date.” The idea is to allow potential customers to get to know you, to have your brand before them in as many ways as possible. Basecamp, a company that markets cloud-based project management software, has a website of course. And it has a business blog which is promoted all over social media – LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. If you access Basecamp’s Facebook page, you will see post after post of a variety of things that will put a human face on the company – press releases, the team, support for charities, customers featured with their comments about Basecamp products, videos, and promotion of posts that are on their blog. You will find a huge LinkedIn presence as well, and their Twitter feed promotes successes, specific blog posts of interest, etc. The goal is to get the brand in front of as many decision-makers in as many businesses as possible. And it is working, at very low cost.

Promote Your Content (and thus your brand) on Social Media

Crafting content that is of interest to potential customers is a strategy that is exploding. B2B content marketers are utilizing text, videos, photos, and more to educate their audiences, to showcase products and services, to tell their stories, and to drive traffic to their website. Here is a pie chart from Content Marketing Institute showing the increase in content creation during 2015.

The content you create depends upon the specific platforms you use. If, for example, you want to focus on specific aspects of your business with other professionals, then you join the most relevant groups on LinkedIn and participate in the discussions. If you want to highlight actual business operations, then create videos of production or your team engaged in project work. These can be accomplished through videos which are then published on a variety of platforms. Your content does not have to bore if you use lots of visuals and tell stories. If you want to see how a few companies are creating exciting and fun content, you can see their presentations here. Granted, these are big players (B.E., American Express Business, and Maersk Shipping), but you can model the same types of content, no matter what your business size.

Keep Track of Your Competition

You need to engage in “social listening,” that is accessing all of the social media platforms of your competitors. What topics are being discussed? What blog posts are being written that are promoting questions, comments and conversations? You take this knowledge and use it as you create your own content.

Use social Media to Drive Traffic To Your Website

No matter where you are on social media, every post, every tweet, every YouTube video, and every Instagram photo has the URL to your official website. Make it highly visible. If you have created specific videos that will be of interest to certain potential customers; if you have produced white papers; if you have e-books or case studies, promote them with links to the pages on your site where they may be accessed immediately. And you can always gate those items with an email registration form.

Use Paid Social

If you have the budget, you can really increase your brand visibility through paid messaging. This is especially effective on twitter and LinkedIn because you can reach your target audience much more specifically. Promoted Tweets will put you on the Twitter accounts of influencers in your niche; targeted LinkedIn ads can be made visible to specific targeted audiences, specifically the right departments and individuals within a company that you want as a customer.

Improve Search Engine Ranking

A lot of B2B marketing on search engines is through paid advertising. And it can be effective if you have the budget to keep it going over the long haul. But a much cheaper way to do this is to promote your content on your social media platforms. If your content is engaging, then viewers/readers will comment on it, “like” it, and share it with others. The more clicking, linking and sharing you get, the more valuable you will be seen by Google. And moving up on those page rankings is a huge benefit when a potential purchaser is searching for your product or service. This obviously requires the time to create that great content, but you will not have to worry about your advertising budget being depleted and having to suspend a search engine ad campaign.

The Big Three

The whole point of incorporating a strong content marketing campaign through social media is three-pronged.

1. First, you want to build brand awareness as widely as possible. This you do by having a presence on all of the social media platforms where companies who are target customers hang out.
2. You want to create such engaging content that readers/viewers will want to share it with their colleagues and professional acquaintances. You want to showcase your expertise; you want to showcase your team; and you want to showcase current customers who see the value in what you have to offer.
3. Make those contacts for potential sales. If you are doing the first two things right, you are going to have “nibbles,” from provided email addresses, from conversations in which you are engaged, from groups you have joined on LinkedIn, from promoted tweets, and from searches that are conducted.

Getting results from your social media content marketing takes time and a commitment to be consistent in your posting, publishing, and participation. It won’t happen overnight, but marketers who have been using social media for an extended period of time are getting major results.

I’m always surprised by the ability of roadside billboards to get my attention. Even in the worst weather, dodging tandem tractor-trailers, SUV-towing motor homes, and cars driven erratically by people catching up on their email, I never miss a message about the next roadside attraction.

There’s an important lesson that B2B marketers can learn from billboards: go for the visual.

It’s not exactly news that the human brain processes visual information faster than text. One data point has been cited hundreds of times on the web, but it is powerful nonetheless: the human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than it takes to decode text.

That’s pretty darn fast. MIT neuroscientists recently reported that our brains can process an entire image in only 13 milliseconds. Previous studies determined that it took our brains 100 milliseconds to recognize what we were looking at.

Considering the increasingly short attention span that people have for just about everything — the average person gets distracted in eight seconds — catching a customer’s eye with a visual image is the prudent thing to do. Consider this:

• Social posts that include images produce 650% higher engagement than text-only posts, according to WebDAM.
• Photo posts get 39% more interaction and images generate 98% more comments on LinkedIn, as noted by Quick Sprout.

If finding compelling visuals seems like just one more task to add to an already long of things to do, here are some ways to lighten the load.

Picture This

Depending on the size of your marketing team, you may already have access to a library of approved images and graphics. Typically, these images have been selected to align well with your brand. And if you’re lucky, the photos or images have already been cropped and sized for use on a variety of publishing platforms.

If your next-best option is to purchase photography or images from a stock house, here are some recommendations.

• First, reputable stock photography houses have search tools to help you find appropriate images. Use them, but keep in mind that other marketers do, too. Be careful not to present a photo or graphic so frequently used that customers confuse your message with those of other brands.

• Second, make sure any images you select are aligned with your company’s brand. While you may want to push the image envelope to capture more attention and generate more likes and shares, every marketing touch should reinforce your brand.

• Third, make sure the photo or image reflects the content it promotes. Be careful not to confuse your buyers with an image invitation that’s not rewarded with expected content.

Bonus tip: Kissmetrics reported that captions under images are read approximately 300% more than body copy. Drive your audience deeper into the conversion with a well-crafted caption.

You Can Quote Me

At C4D, we’re proponents of modularizing content to get more value from it. If your blog or the assets you’re promoting feature quotes or data points, dropping one into a simple frame is an efficient and affordable way to build a powerful visual element. The value of reusing quotes, data points and other existing content are clear: Users who tweet quotes can get 43% more followers, according to Quick Sprout.

Data points can be equally compelling, especially if related to proprietary research that you’ve done. A simple graph representing trending data can successfully attract your audience’s attention. But remember to keep charts simple, so that even the quickest brain can register the information and decide to dig deeper.

To make it really easy to drop quotes or data points into graphic elements today and tomorrow, ask your design team to build reusable templates for Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and any other publishing platform you use.

Why do some persist and some quit? Because… 

Is there a secret to follow-up? No.

Is there a best way to follow-up? No.

Why do people quit too soon? Big question.

Why do you quit too soon? Bigger question.

Have you ever read Think and Grow Rich? Biggest question.

Reason? Think and Grow Rich (written by Napoleon Hill 78 years ago) has an entire chapter on persistence that provides real insight as to the characteristics of what makes some stick at it until they win, while others stop either just after they start, or stop just before they are about to taste victory.

 

Rather than be so presumptuous as to paraphrase the great Napoleon Hill, I am going to give you the EXACT words of the master (now in the public domain).

Here are some excerpts (and insights) on persistence quoted exactly as they were written seven decades ago, and still applicable in your sales process today.

Persistence is a state of mind, therefore it can be cultivated. Like all states of mind, persistence is based upon definite causes, among them these:

a. Definiteness of purpose. Knowing what one wants is the first and, perhaps, the most important step toward the development of persistence. A strong motive forces one to surmount many difficulties.

b. Desire. Its is comparatively easy to acquire and to maintain persistence in pursuing the object of intense desire.

c. Self-reliance. Belief in one’s ability to carry out a plan encourages one to follow the plan through with persistence. (Self-reliance can be developed through the principle described in the chapter on autosuggestion).

d. Definiteness of plans. Organized plans, even though they may be weak and entirely impractical, encourage persistence.

e. Accurate knowledge. Knowing that one’s plans are sound, based upon experience or observation, encourages persistence; “guessing” instead of “knowing” destroys persistence.

f. Cooperation. Sympathy, understanding, and harmonious cooperation with others tend to develop persistence.

g. Will-power. The habit of concentrating one’s thoughts upon the building of plans for the attainment of a definiteness of purpose leads to persistence.

h. Habit. Persistence is the direct result of habit. The mind absorbs and becomes a part of the daily experience upon which it feeds. Fear, the worst of all enemies, can be effectively cured by forced repetition of acts of courage. Everyone who has seen active service in war knows this.

 

How to Develop Persistence.

There are four simple steps which lead to the habit of persistence, They call for no great amount of intelligence, no particular amount of education, and but little time or effort. The necessary steps are:

1. A definite purpose backed by burning desire for its fulfillment.

2. A definite plan, expressed in continuous action.

3. A mind closed tightly against all negative and discouraging influences, including negative suggestions of relatives, friends and acquaintances.

4. A friendly alliance with one or more persons who will encourage one to follow through with both plan and purpose.

These four steps are essential for success in all walks of life. The entire purpose of the principles of the (Think and Grow Rich) philosophy is to enable one to take these four steps as a matter of habit.

Now I will grant you that some people will have read this and spit the word “Hokey” at the end. Reason? It’s too simple and does not have an immediate “how to” answer attached to it. 

The secret of persistence is not an “answer,” it’s a “realization.” And if you read the above and didn’t “get it.” You will get beat by someone who did.

The Napoleon Hill philosophy of persistence is strong, yet soft. The only omission from the strategy is that it leaves out “what” to persist with. Let me give you that answer in a word -- value. Something more than you calling to imply, “I’m calling about the money, is it ready yet? Can I come over and pick it up now?”

 

Want a few value ideas? Here are four. You may not like them. They require work.

1. Get your prospect a sales lead or give them a referral. 

2. Give your prospect an idea how to serve his customers better. 

3. Give your prospect a list of things he or she can do to improve morale, productivity, absenteeism, or profit. 

4. Get your prospect some free publicity or social media exposure. Help them win.

Get the idea? See the work? Make your persistance pay dividends for the customer. Now look past the work to the victory. If you can see clear to victory, then the secret of persistence is at last yours. 

And add to that the final wisdom of Hill: What you need to develop persistence is will-power and desire. In other words, how bad do you want it? And how far are you willing to go to get it? Unless the answer is all the way, you will not persist, you will give up.

There is now an online course to master the principles of Think and Grow Rich. All you have to do is go to http://jeffreygitomer.com/napoleon-hill-special and register.

 

Jeffrey Gitomer is the author of thirteen best-selling books including The Sales Bible, The Little Red Book of Selling, and The Little Gold Book of Yes! Attitude. Salespeople depend on his real-world ideas and strategies available through online courses at www.GitomerLearningAcademy.com. For information about training and seminars visit www.Gitomer.com or www.GitomerCertifiedAdvisors.com, or email Jeffrey personally at salesman@gitomer.com.

 

I’ve been pretty tough on content marketers and marketing in a couple of my recent posts, “Are They At 57% Yet,” and “Opportunities We Are Blind To.” Beyond that, there are hundreds of articles and discussions on Integrated Sales And Marketing.

The discussions are powerful, the walls we erect between the functions, the fingers we point at each other are diminishing, albeit slowly.

We are realizing we have shared goals and must work together to optimize our abilities to attract, communicate, engage, and connect with our customers. There have been dramatic shifts in the type and relevance of content we create.

All of us recognize content focused on product/feature/function/feeds/speeds need to shift to focusing on the customer and their problems, challenges, and opportunities. Furthermore, we have to segment it by industry, market, role, maturity levels, and then tailor it to where these people are in their problem/opportunity solving journey.

Layer on top of this marketing automation tools, analytics, and other tools, we can further refine our ability to target the right customer with the right message at the right time.

But we still, tend to view the marketing engagement model and the sales engagement model as separate and sequential processes.

Caitlin Roberson published a fantastic article addressing some of these issues, “How Much Value Do Your Sales People Generate Through Thought Leadership.” But there was one sentence that captivated me:

“For content marketing to succeed in driving a sales cycle 60 to 90 percent of the way, it must retain the freshness and third-party validation of thought leadership”

The statement is indicative of the thinking most of us in marketing AND in sales have of the process. Every day, I’m involved in conversations with great marketing and sales professionals. They tend to be, “How do we(marketing) attract attention and create demand,” “When and what do we hand over to them (sales),” with sales saying, “What should we (sales) be doing with those leads?”

That is, it’s largely a sequential process, initiated by marketing and, at some point, handed off to sales. Whether it’s 30%, 57%, 90% through the customer problem/opportunity solving journey, it’s still a sequential process.

Generally, when we talk about integrated or interfaced sales and marketing, we focus on aligning goals, metrics, messaging, as well as smoothing that hand off from marketing to sales.

Based on this model, a challenge is finding, attracting and engaging the customer. If the customer has decided they need to change and is actively letting their fingers do the walking through Google, this model may work well. They will find our content, hopefully, it’s relevant, we can nurture them, score them, and at some time pass it to sales, saying “Tag you’re it!” Sales picks it up, and since we are integrated, they pursue it through the rest of the customer cycle, hopefully winning the deal.

But that’s probably not what the customer is thinking or how they are doing things.

In fact the majority of the time, they are just trying to survive and do their jobs. They don’t realize something might be done better, that there are opportunities they are missing. They aren’t out Googling for solutions. Even if they saw a billboard with capital letters, “You Need To Change Or Die,” they’d probably not pay attention because they aren’t thinking, “They’re talking about me.” They are just doing their jobs.

The challenge becomes, how do you disrupt them, how do you capture their attention, how do you get them curious to even think about something and go to Google? Our marketing can’t reach out, grab them by the collar and shout “There is a better way!”

Sure we can probably find them, email them, or do something similar, but since they don’t know they should be paying attention, they delete or spam those messages. Not because they are bad messages, but they aren’t relevant or on the customer’s radar at the moment, so they don’t care. We miss them, there is a real opportunity, but they don’t realize it yet.

How do we capture their interest? How do we get them to sit up, take notice? How do we get them to the point of saying “We need to change!”

I think one of the key ways is through sales (or the “New SDR“). People chartered with going out and disrupting, catching their attention, getting them curious. The customer might say “Tell me more,” the sales person can engage them carrying on the conversation, or point them to relevant content. We can probably accurately guess, that once we’ve gotten them curious, their fingers will start walking through Google, so we have to be there to intercept and engage them through Content, SEO, PPC and other means.

Now we start to see, the process is not sequential, instead it is interleaved. There are points through the process where the most appropriate engagement is with sales and then it is with marketing/content, and then it’s back to sales. As we map engagement models across a relatively Squishy Buying Cycle, it becomes clear that we need to look at sales and marketing in a very different way.

As we design our engagement models, we have realize they have to be very nimble/adaptive/agile. Each journey will be nuanced and we have to be able to respond to it.

In discussing this, I like to use basketball as a model. On a basketball team, we have differing roles–forwards, guards, and a center. We develop and run plays, mastering them in each of our roles. But because we have them well defined, because we have well defined plays that we have mastered, when we are actually in the game, we have the ability to be very nimble and adaptive. We switch plays, we change what we do to produce the best result.

To do this in our customer engagement, marketing and sales cannot be viewed as integrated but sequential processes, but we have to be interleaved. We have to clearly know our roles, and how we “play” with each other. We must have playbooks that we continue to refine with experience. Mastering these plays and our ability to execute then equips us to be nimble/adaptive/agile.

What do you think? When we talk about integrating marketing and sales, do we really need to be looking at interleaving them?

Turning visitors into leads is not a step, it’s a process that involves many steps. But it all begins with your content. Throughout the entire process, your content is what will keep visitors enticed and inevitable convert them into a lead.

The visitors to your site are at the beginning stages. It’s your responsibility as a business owner, or marketer, to take that visitor through an exciting, engaging sales journey that finishes with a conversion or a sale. How they get there is the process, and along the way, they will be engaging with your content.

Nurturing Your Visitors

You always hear about nurturing leads, but what about nurturing visitors? There really is no line that visitors cross that makes them a lead, so whether you’re nurturing a lead or a visitor is difficult to distinguish. But you should most definitely be nurturing both every step of their journey.

If you step back and look at the entire journey, you’ll see milestones that each visitor hits. After a visit to your site, they join your email list. Then they click on a coupon and finally purchase a product. If you’re really good, that customer will turn into a lifetime customer. This all comes with nurturing that visitor from the start to end. When you’re nurturing leads and visitors, you’re giving them exactly what they need.

Have Your Content In Place

Not only should you be creating great content, but you should have it ready. If you’re going to turn a visitor into a lead, you have to act quickly, or else you might lose that visitor. If a visitor clicks on a download, they best receive within a short period of time, or else, that visitor is long gone on to someone else.

This rule also applies to your email marketing strategies. You can’t create and send emails on the run. Instead, your emails should already be created and generated based on a visitor’s actions with your content. Then you set those emails on a schedule and let them do their work.

Don’t Just Sell, Educate

If all your content is just sales pitch after sales pitch, you’ll never get anywhere with your visitors. There’s a lot of hacks out there in just about every market, and people know this. So trust is a very important aspect of make a connection with visitors. If people don’t trust you, you can guarantee they won’t convert to a lead.

So rather than trying to sell yourself, educate your audience in order to build credibility. A great way of doing this is by having a blog. By writing strong blog posts, you’re showing that you are an expert in your market. This builds credibility for yourself and trust for your audience.

Content Is Everywhere

As I mentioned earlier, your content is there for every step of the buying journey. So it’s important to think about every little bit of content you are putting out there. Content is definitely something you don’t want to cut corners on because it’s your way of speaking to visitors and leads.