The recent backroom bilateral talks between the United States and Russia about Ukraine have caused anxiety in the region, raised hopes that sanctions could be lifted and elevated Russian President Vladimir Putin’s status to superpower level.

All are counterproductive.
Since the bilateral talks and optimistic statements by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry about possible peace in Ukraine, Russian proxies in Ukraine responded by moving people and weapons westward from Donetsk and re-escalating violence near Mariupol, according to the Ukrainian Defense Ministry.

Clearly, offering an olive branch doesn’t work. Only tightening the noose will.

“European and American sanctions must remain in place,” said former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine John E. Herbst in an interview. “The United States should also provide Ukraine with defensive lethal weapons to protect itself against Russia’s cease-fire violations and to emphasize that another offensive could be easily achieved.”

In addition, future talks involving Ukraine should involve Ukraine. Europe’s largest and besieged nation should not become a pawn in some two-way geopolitical chess game concocted by Putin.

More important, Washington must not fall for Russia’s attempt to conflate the Ukrainian and Syrian crises. Russia is not a solution in either conflict but an aggressor, directly in Ukraine and indirectly through its support and arms sales to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s murderous regime.

The West must not waver when it comes to sanctions. They are working and undermining Putin’s support at home. His cronies and corporations are denied access to credit. The ruble has cratered, along with oil prices, making imports and travel unaffordable for Russians. By 2017, the country will go bust, experts say.

“Russia’s attempt to have Western sanctions removed over Ukraine is a ‘race against time,'” said billionaire George Soros recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Russia is in a very, very weak position. It has enough reserves that it can last a couple of years…and in 2017 a lot of debt comes due.”

Moscow’s budget deficits soar, and social spending has been cut, leaving only shrinking foreign reserves to keep the lights on. Soros says there is $360 billion left; others say only half that amount is left.

The current situation “actually violates the social compact that has made him [Putin] so popular, which is basically financial stability and a slow but steadily rising standard of living. He has to do something about it…[before] the impending collapse of the Russian economy,” said Soros.

Putin’s woes are why Kerry’s ebullient statement at Davos that sanctions could be lifted this year was unhelpful, handing him a victory at home without cost.

“Unfortunately, Kerry expressed this position in an upbeat way designed to make it appear more acceptable to Moscow,” wrote Herbst. “As we have sadly learned, since the invasion of Crimea nearly two years ago, conciliatory gestures and language have not persuaded Moscow to do the right thing.”

There are some faint signs of capitulation from the Russian side, he added. Fewer cease-fire violations have occurred since September, local leaders in the Donetsk and Luhansk breakaway regions have mysteriously died, and more moderate Russian negotiators with close links to Putin have been appointed.

“My sense is that the Kremlin will try in the next few months to insist on Ukraine’s passing constitutional reform that gives the Luhansk People’s Republic and Donetsk People’s Republic an effective veto over Ukraine’s foreign policy—a complete nonstarter,” said Herbst. “Once this gambit fails, the Kremlin will have to decide whether its goals in the Donbass are worth the economic pain.”

With Russia on the ropes, Ukraine and the West are well advised to simply play a waiting game and reinforce Ukraine’s military capability. Kiev must be able to better defend itself against an escalation or, alternatively, to start to claw back territory from a weakened adversary.

Clearly, now is not the time to placate Putin, especially since it appears that he has, at last, begun to corner himself.

Diane Francis is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center, editor at large with the National Post in Canada and a distinguished professor at Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management.

The post Newsweek: Putin on the Ropes, Tighten the Noose appeared first on Diane Francis.

Influence Scenarios

• Exploration stage: Exploration can be time-consuming. It's no wonder that staff-level "explorers" (both LOB and IT staff) do most of the work and thus have the most influence in this very early stage. The (LOB) executive who owns the problem is also very influential. IDC Guidance: Make a compelling case for change that will convince the executive who owns the problem. Also, educate the staff-level explorers so they can serve as internal experts. Spur the internal conversation with "shareable" content that says, "Hey, check this out. We really should be talking about this issue."

• Evaluation stage: Many more influential players, including the CIO and purchasing, are added to the team during the middle stage of the decision journey as the enterprise works through the complexities of consideration and selection. IDC Guidance: Since vendors are infrequently present at the table to explain their messaging during internal discussions, there is a premium on clear, complete, easily accessible, and shareable information.

• Purchase stage: Financial and contractual considerations are most important at this final stage. Purchasing function and even the CEO rise in influence, while other players move into spectator mode.  IDC Guidance: Marketing needs to help sales close the deal. But also stay alert to social buzz. The closer the deal gets to the wire, the tension rises. On one hand, the buying conversation gets very narrow, personal, and specific to the deal, and on the other hand, it widens out to intensely search for any final verification of a good choice or any final hidden reasons to divert the process.

If you’re in sales development, then odds are, you’ve read the first book by Aaron Ross, Predictable Revenue, as a part of your SDR initiation.

Having served as the incumbent instruction manual for building a sales development machine, Predictable Revenue has been dubbed by many: the “sales bible.”

And with everything from tips to generating qualified leads, a list of “7 Fatal Sales Mistakes CEOs and Sales VPs Make,” and strategies for forging predictable revenue pipelines, you can bet that Ross’s concept of specialization in sales organizations made it to your manager’s one-page strategic plan a time or two.

But what Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin hit the shelves with this week has us betting Predictable Revenue’s seat in the house isn’t quite so safe anymore.

Impossible to Inevitable is the newly minted playbook for all things hypergrowth.

What You’ll Learn

Detailing how to surpass plateaus and get off of the up-and-down revenue rollercoaster, the sequel answers three key questions about growing revenue by 10x:

1. Why aren’t you growing faster?
2. What does it take to get to hypergrowth?
3. How do you sustain growth?

And following in its predecessor’s holy-number footsteps, this manual covers the “7 Ingredients of Hypergrowth” in a sales organization.

These steps teach us that hypergrowth comes from focusing on where you have the best chances of winning customers, making them successful, and building a reputation of tangible results in an environment designed for revenue growth.

And the most important lever that drives revenue growth? Lead generation.

Spending your efforts on lead generation campaigns forces you to dive in headfirst with your customers to keep iterating who you’re going after, what they’re interested in, and why they should care about you.

But it’s not the leads here that are important. It’s lead generation knowledge. And the faster you learn how to generate leads, the faster you can prepare to grow.

With the help of co-author Jason Lemkin, Ross pushes sales development and lead generation out of their comfort zones by diving deeper into these key elements of sales development growth:

• The Leading Revenue Growth Metric: Pipeline Creation Rate. Too many companies obsess over a single form of lead generation and ignore the others. But the best metric for tracking growth in qualified leads and pipeline in real-time is the PCR.
• Nets & Spears: Inbound Marketing and Outbound Prospecting. Diving deeper into the driving forces behind inbound “lead commitment” and lessons in outbound sales that we’ve learned since Predictable Revenue, the focus here is on reps who are business people who can sell, rather than simply salespeople.
• Specialization as the Number One Sales Multiplier. In just about every sport there is, there are specialized rolls. Goalies. Forwards. Point guards. Catchers… Proving that in sales organizations today, SDR specialization is key.
• Doubling the Size of Your Deals. It may be the small deals that get you started, but it’s the big deals that drive growth. Bigger deals lead to better customer results. With bigger deals, you can focus on better customer service for fewer customers — ensuring the most value from your product.

Pro-tip: Many sales development organizations looking to double deal size are turning to Account Based Sales Development — and here’s why.

Why It’s Important

But why is it so important for you to read Impossible to Inevitable before your CEO does?

Because it’s modern.

Predictable Revenue was great — don’t get us wrong. We still enforce many of its ideals and practices.

But it’s old.

If we’ve learned anything during this rise of the sales development cloud, it’s that staying modern in your sales organization is the most important aspect to staying relevant, and consequently, growing. A modern sales organization is one that keeps up with the times, moving past antiquated behaviors of the past, and implementing new and improved processes.

Your CEO is going to read this new book with the same fervor that he did with the first (probably more so, after the hype), and it’s going to overthrow your entire sales development team’s dynamic.

So you need to read it first.

Growth isn’t just about cold calling, prospecting, and outlining your sales development goals anymore. It’s about going deep with the why behind each and every thing you and your team do on an everyday basis. By defining the driving forces by the leads that come in and the leads you go find, closing more business, and landing bigger deals — you’ll push further out of your comfort zone than ever before.

Comfort is the enemy of growth. And the irony is, what’s already worked best for you in the past. Dependency, complacency, or just plain business can turn lingering in the comfort zone into the enemy of hypergrowth.

If you’re not failing, frustrated, or disappointed almost every day about something — you’re too comfortable.

Your biggest competition here as a Sales Development Rep is inertia. But the best reps learn to become coaches, ensuring that prospects and customers receive what they need, resources are rallied within the company, stumbling blocks are uncovered and avoided, and surprises are illuminated.

And with these newer, fresher, more modern takes on everything Predictable Revenue preached, Impossible to Inevitable is going to be the next mandatory read for your sales development team to develop into champion sales coaches.

If you want to stay ahead of the curve, like a true business person who can sell, break free of your comfort zone and read it before anyone else in your organization does — especially your CEO.

The post Why You Should Read Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin’s New Book Before Your CEO Does appeared first on SalesLoft.

I’ve been in the sales business for many years, but even I can still learn something new about how to be a good sales person – and sometimes the best way to learn is by seeing an example of what NOT to do. We’ve all been in this situation where you get an unsolicited sales call – whether it’s at home or especially at work. Most people just hang up or ignore these calls, but I often take a moment to listen to what the caller has to say, so I can use the occasion as a chance to learn something new about the art of selling.

The other day I got a phone call from a sales person at an insurance brokerage who was trying to sell business group health, life and disability insurance. Naturally, the sales person had decided to call our company because they thought we might be in the market for a new insurance carrier, and they knew that we were, in fact, a business that might need business insurance. But that seemed to be the extent of the caller’s research prior to dialing.

The sales call was rather clumsy and awkward – the caller didn’t make any attempt to engage with me or ask me questions, and instead just launched into a sales pitch. The caller was speaking in a hurried, monotonous voice, as if he was reading from a script. The caller also didn’t seem to know anything about me, personally – he had gotten through and was talking to the president of the company, but he didn’t seem to be aware of what my name and job title were.

Finally, the sales person never made a clear “ask” to get me to commit to any further action – the call just kind of ended without ever asking me to agree to an online demo or price quote or any other “next steps.” I ended the call politely, but overall, this sales call was a strong example of what NOT to do in B2B sales.

Here are a few lessons from this bad sales call that other B2B sellers might appreciate:

1. Do Your Research: If you’re a B2B sales person who’s selling a complex, high-value product, service or solution, it’s worth investing significant time and energy upfront to really get to know your prospects – who you’re calling, what their job titles are, how they fit into their organizations, whether they’re the right decision makers, and so on. This sales call was a failure in part because the sales person didn’t really seem up to speed about who I was, what my company needed, or why the sales call should matter to us.

2. Ask Good Questions: This sales call was bad because the caller just launched into a script, without really making an effort upfront to engage with me and ask questions. A good B2B sales conversation needs to revolve around the customer and the customer’s needs. Ask open-ended questions, such as: “What is your biggest challenge right now related to your current vendor/supplier/solution?” or “How do you feel about your company’s health insurance situation?” or “How much time have you spent thinking about and worrying about your IT systems?” Try to build rapport with the prospect by getting them to think about their current business problems – and showing that you’re ready to listen and to offer solutions.

3. Make “The Ask:” Every sales call needs to have a purpose and a goal. Even if it’s just a preliminary cold call, your objective is to get the prospect to agree to have a further conversation. Before the call ends, you need to make “the ask” and invite the prospect to agree to talk further. For example, this could sound like: “Would you like to learn more about our product by signing up for an online demo?” or “Can I schedule you for a follow-up consultation?” or “Will you share some details about your company so I can develop a customized price quote?”

Every sales call – whether you’re the one making the call or the one on the receiving end of the sales pitch – is an opportunity to learn something new about the business of sales. By doing research upfront, by asking conversation-expanding questions, and by clearly inviting the prospect to commit to further action, your sales calls will become more productive and profitable.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gw-i_VKd6Wo

Gravitational waves are real, and scientists have detected them. In the video above, PBS Space Time explains the discovery by researchers at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO). From the New York Times:

A team of physicists who can now count themselves as astronomers announced on Thursday that they had heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light-years away, a fleeting chirp that fulfilled the last prophecy of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

That faint rising tone, physicists say, is the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, the ripples in the fabric of space-time that Einstein predicted a century ago (Listen to it here.). And it is a ringing (pun intended) confirmation of the nature of black holes, the bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape, which were the most foreboding (and unwelcome) part of his theory.

More generally, it means that scientists have finally tapped into the deepest register of physical reality, where the weirdest and wildest implications of Einstein’s universe become manifest.

Below, NASA's animated simulation of the black holes merging and releasing the gravitational radiation (background here):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1-3eClv_TY

above image credits: R. Hurt/Caltech-JPL

Whether you’re concerned about a weather-related disaster or a potential zombie apocalypse , if either comes to pass, you’ll be glad you had a plan. This infographic can help you gather the items you’ll need in an emergency.

Read more...

WASHINGTON – Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz is testing the limits of siphoning personal data from supporters, even as he campaigns to protect law-abiding citizens from spying by the government.

His “Cruz Crew” mobile app is designed to gather detailed information from its users’ phones — tracking their physical movements and mining the names and contact information for friends who might want nothing to do with his campaign.

That information, and more, is then fed into a vast database containing intimate details about nearly every adult in the United States to build psychological profiles that target individual voters with uncanny accuracy.

Cruz’s sophisticated analytics operation was heralded as key to his victory in Iowa earlier this month — the first proof, his campaign said, that the system has the potential to power him to the nomination.

The son of mathematicians and data processing programmers, Cruz is keenly and personally interested in the work.

“Analytics gives the campaign a roadmap for everything we do,” said Chris Wilson, data and digital director. “He has an acute understanding of our work and continually pushes me on it.”

Data-mining to help candidates win elections has been increasing among both Republicans and Democrats. Mobile apps by other presidential campaigns also collect some information about users.

But The Associated Press found the Cruz campaign’s app — downloaded to more than 61,000 devices so far — goes furthest to harvest personal data.

The Cruz app prompts supporters to register using their Facebook logins, giving the campaign access to personal information such as their name, age range, gender, location and photograph, plus lists of friends and relatives. Those without a Facebook account must either provide an email address or phone number to use the app.

The Cruz app separately urges users to let it download their phone contacts, giving the campaign a trove of phone numbers and personal email address. The campaign said that by using its app, “You hereby give your express consent to access your contact list,” but Wilson said the campaign will not do this to anyone who declines to allow it when the app requests permission.

Cruz’s app also transmits to the campaign each user’s physical location whenever the app is active, unless a user declines to allow it. Cruz’s campaign tells users it can share all the personal information on users it collects with its consultants or other organizations, groups, causes, campaigns or political organizations with similar viewpoints or goals.

It also shares the material with analytics companies. Cruz’s campaign combines the information with data from a group called Cambridge Analytica, which has been involved in Cruz’s efforts since fall 2014. A Cambridge investor, Robert Mercer, has given more money than anyone else to outside groups supporting Cruz.

Cambridge has a massive 10 terabyte database — enough to fill more than 2,100 DVDs — that contains as many as 5,000 biographical details about the 240 million Americans of voting age.

Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, has been outspoken about protecting American’s personal information from the government, including the National Security Agency. “Instead of a government that seizes your emails and your cellphones, imagine a federal government that protected the privacy rights of every American,” he said when announcing his campaign.

Cruz campaign officials reject any comparison, saying it’s different for the government versus a campaign to collect data.

The scope of Cruz’s system is formidable. Cambridge’s database of Americans combines government and commercial data sets such as voter rolls and lists of people who liked certain Facebook posts, along with consumer data from grocery chains and other clients that can provide a voter’s preferred brand of toothpaste or whether he clips coupons.

Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix said the company categorizes every American into one of five basic personality types derived from academic research and up to 50,000 questionnaires conducted each month.

For example, a Cruz campaign worker about to knock on the door of a house could access information about the household’s members through the Cruz Crew app, receiving prepared scripts about what issues each person was likely to care about, modified to appeal to their personality.

Cambridge and the Cruz campaign stressed that anyone providing personal information through the app does so voluntarily. Data uses are outlined in legal disclosures published on the campaign’s website.

The chief technologist at the privacy advocacy group Center for Democracy and Technology, Joe Hall, said politicians are unlikely to strengthen privacy protections as their campaigns become more and more reliant on mining personal data to squeeze out votes.

“This is a form of political-voter surveillance,” Hall said. “If people understood that this amount of fine-grained, sensitive data was being used by political campaigns, they would likely feel betrayed.”

___

Follow Michael Biesecker on Twitter at https://twitter.com/mbieseck and Julie Bykowicz at http://twitter.com/bykowicz

The post Cruz app data collection helps campaign read minds of voters appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Growth is hard.

From those of us starting from zero…

To those with a flourishing audience.

From a startup in a co-working space or an enterprise marketing team in global HQ…

From the greenest novice to the battle-tested veteran… Growth is hard.

And that’s because marketing has forever changed.

What used to be a simple one-way broadcast has turned into a continuous, asynchronous, amalgamous, voluminous, raucous conversation.

The end of the Industrial Age has shifted power to the consumer. And as a result, marketers are overwhelmed daily with the challenge of just keeping up with their audience, much less growing it.

Luckily, Lean Innovation can help.

Lean innovation sits at the crossroads between the inspiration of design thinking and the rigor of lean startup. It’s been successfully used by thousands of startups and is at the forefront of the transformation of many large corporations.

By mapping these three essential Lean Innovation skills to the practice of growth marketing, marketing teams can move faster, act bolder, and jumpstart their growth.

1. Get In Front of Customers

The first step in putting Lean Innovation to work in your growth marketing is simple – get in front of your customers and start having meaningful conversations with them.

You need to hear it straight from the customer’s mouth.

This requires you to listen, not to talk. To learn, not sell. To understand, not be understood.

The answers always lie with your customers, not within the walls of your office.

Learning to see your growth efforts through the eyes of your customer is a critical skill every growth marketer should possess. Gaining direct insights from your audience gives you a huge advantage over your competition.

The most successful Lean Innovation practitioners, from startups to the enterprise, don’t just talk about being customer-centric; they live it. They go beyond personas, customer journey maps, and big-data-demographics and instead try to walk a mile in their customer’s shoes.

There is no more powerful tool in your marketing toolbox than a cup of coffee with a customer.

To gain empathy it takes both practice and courage. The most important step in your customer development is simply getting started.

Schedule a chat. Go to a meetup group. Head out on a “customer safari.” No matter how you do it, if you want to grow, you must be in direct contact with your customers to learn from them as much as you can.

2. Experiment

Bet small, win big…

The infamous landing page, Mechanical Turk, Judo-Imposter, Dry Wallet, crowdfunding, paper prototypes, mock-apps and the list goes on… It’s likely by now you may be familiar with at least one (if not all) of these shorthand expressions for experiments. Although the idea of experimentation is simple, putting it into practice is not.

Experimentation is both a skill and a mindset.

The engine of Lean Innovation is rapid experimentation. Many product teams have nailed the art of experimentation and are able to produce evidence from their experiments to guide their development forward. Products developed using rapid experimentation are markedly better than their counterparts.

But over on the marketing side of the house, many of us are still stuck thinking that A/B split testing subject lines and running focus groups are the extent of experimentation. Doh!

As technology continues to transform our world, new channels arrive daily in droves, old channels evolve, and customer expectations rise; the opportunity to put the skill of rapid experimentation to work in our marketing efforts has never been bigger.

Your job is to experiment!

Run a meetup to test your customer assumptions. Use a Dry Wallet experiment to test your go-to-market pricing structure Refine your social ads with prototypes in two-week sprints. Launch a series of crowdfunding experiments to test new product positioning.

Truly, there is no right way to experiment. The goal of any experiment is to learn as much as you possibly can as fast as you possibly can learn it. The key is to define the customer behavior you’re trying to illicit along with the key metrics that will tell you whether or not you’re efforts produce actionable data.

This is where the terms minimal and viable come into play. What is the very minimal tactic, creative, prototype, etc. you can put in front of a customer to produce a viable behavioral response? Are you trying to get a customer to click? Purchase? Act as a referral? Watch the video? Walk through the door? Share on Twitter? Why would they behave that way? Is this tactic working? Are people responding to it? Why?

When you’re able to combine an experiment-first mindset with the skill to execute purposeful experiments, you’ll begin to see the results.

3. Flip Evidence Into Action

Using Lean Innovation techniques, growth marketing teams can engage a small group of their existing customers in new ways to produce evidence to propel their growth.

The ability to turn evidence into action is key.

The result of great customer development and well-designed rapid experimentation is evidence. Evidence is the combination of the raw data you’ve generated plus the insights about why the customer behaved in the way they did.

Tying customer insights to data is vital to producing results in your growth marketing efforts. A Must Have Score, Viral Coefficient, Daily Net Change, or activity heatmap are almost useless without the insights about why the customer is exhibiting that behavior.

Your NPS score may be 72, but if you don’t know why those customers have become promoters, you won’t be able to turn that score into action.

The goal in applying Lean Innovation to your growth marketing is to build a case over time. Using multiple rounds of customer empathy and continuous rapid experiments will create the level of evidence you need to prove the ______ (tactic, marketing product, strategy, etc) should be used.

If you’ve proven it’s effective, execute. If you still don’t know, experiment.

Growth marketing teams successfully using Lean Innovation have chosen to prioritize building their team’s skills to move fast, iterate quickly and act boldly in their marketing efforts.

When you spend the majority of your marketing efforts behind a desk planning out quarterly strategies, you’re essentially taking a big bet that your strategy will be right. Instead, bet small. Use constant Lean Innovation to test the most critical assumptions in your growth marketing efforts to advance your progress.

Three Questions You Need to Answer

1. How are you using customer empathy to inform your growth?

2. Which “big bets” are you making that could benefit from the rigor of rapid experimentation?

3. What is the threshold for evidence you’ve set in your growth marketing efforts?

When you answer those questions you will be primed for massive growth…

So what do you think? Are these the tactics you use in your business? Is there a customer development strategy you use that’s been working recently?

 Autodesk has been around the block a few times, having debuted way back in 1982 in the earliest days of the desktop PC. These days, the company is in the midst of a major transition from a licensing model to a subscription model, while juggling the assortment of challenges a change like this brings to a mature company. It would be wrong to characterize this is as a total cloud pivot, however. Read More

So you’ve probably heard a lot about how great customer service can transform your online store…

How if you retain the customers you’ve got, it will be a lot more profitable than trying to acquire new ones…

And you’d be right.

But what actionable tools can you do to improve your service? Take a look at these 5 customer service hacks to find out…

Hack #1: Set up support emails

Every online shopper is different, some like to visit social with their problems, some like to talk to you on the phone, and some prefer to email. Email is an ideal way of resolving shopper issues because it gives the customer the freedom to explain it in their own time, and it gives you the time to be able to look into their problem in depth.

So what does a good support email look like?

The first thing to do is acknowledge their email and reassure the customer that you are looking into their problem. Take this email chain below for example…

The first email was sent to H&M from an unhappy customer who did not receive a refund that she’d returned.

H&M then contacted the customer immediately to resolve the issue. The email was personalized, helpful and apologetic.

The customer then came back to H&M with the proof of shipping, and the advisor confirmed that she would be refunded the cost. The below email clearly explains when the customer can expect to receive her refund, and they also offer her a discount to use on future orders as a way of an apology.

By setting up support emails, you will be able to build a stronger relationship with each customer by resolving their problems, therefore turning a bad situation into one that benefits both you and the customer.

Our top tips for the perfect support email:

• Keep it personalized, use the names in all correspondence.
• If the customer is unhappy, take responsibility and apologize.
• Reassure the customer that you are dealing with their problem as quickly as possible.
• Give the customer exact times and dates as to when they can expect to hear from you.
• Offer a freebie to make up for the mistake and to encourage them back in store.

Hack #2: Reduce the effort in making the sale

In the world of Ecommerce, the competition is fierce. Your visitors probably could name a handful of other places that offer the same product as you, so it’s all the more important that you offer a flawless shopping experience and give them a reason to choose you.

Studies show that to be able to make a customer happy, you need to create an easy shopping experience from start to finish.

So how can you make life simple for your customers?

With cart abandonment averaging at around 67.91%, we believe that this should be a huge focus of your efforts. After you’ve let that shocking stat sink in, it’s important to understand why they are abandoning their carts.

This infographic shows that some of the biggest reasons for cart abandonment rate include:

• Unexpected shipping costs
• No guest checkout
• Insufficient shipping options

Understandably you want to encourage the sale by enticing customers in with a low price, but if they get all the way to the cart and find out that they have to pay a huge shipping and returns fee, then this is going to be a major turn off.

Related reading: A guide to ecommerce guest checkout best practice.

In this instance, we’d recommend highlighting the shipping fees next to your CTA button. So for example on Amazon, you’ll always be able to see the shipping information listed before you get to the checkout.

Another great hack would be to include the shipping label next to the product incase they want to return it. This further builds up reassurance that they can send the product back if they don’t want it, and that you’ve made it incredibly easy to do so.

A guest checkout – like this example from M&S below – is one of the most favored choices for shoppers. If you’re making your visitors sign up for an account before they’ve even bought your product, then it’s unlikely they’ll want to buy as it’s another obstacle that they have to overcome.

Alternatively, if you want to make it really easy for customers to create an account then give them the chance to do so via social media. This is something that Airbnb does very well. All it takes is one simple click for the customer to plugin to their social feed, and the account is automatically created.

Our top tips for a seamless checkout process:

• Be clear on pricing before the customer reaches the checkout.
• Include shipping labels for the customer to print out if they wish.
• Limited the amount of details a customer has to enter to reach the checkout.
• Include guest checkout and social sign up as viable options.

Hack #3: Implement live chat software

Why are your web visitors not converting? What are their biggest objections? Does your FAQ section answer issue they have?

As Bill Gates once said: “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning” and he was bang on the money.

If you don’t know why your visitors are unhappy, then you’ll never be able to make changes for improvement.

Live chat is an awesome tool to use because it gives you that insight to find out what’s going wrong on your site, and where. It also gives the customer the opportunity to instantly get the help that they need, and this tends to be most applicable right before the purchase.

Take a look at this study and you’ll see that people prefer to talk to you via live chat because:

• Questions are answered instantly
• The customer can multi-task
• It’s better information than email or phone
• The customer is in control of the conversation
• It can be used at work

Live chat really is a convenient tool to plug into your store and it can be used to encourage the sale. You can set it so that it pops up when a customer has spent too long on a product page, and ask them if they need help.

If you are there to help them answer questions right before they add a product to the cart, this could be the difference between making the sale and losing it to a competitor.

Or it could be that they’re not sure how to access something like this example below. The customer couldn’t work out how to make a booking and live chat offered an instant result to help that customer.

Our top tips for live chat:

• Automate the chat so that it appears on product pages.
• Keep it personalized and speak like a human.
• Provide all the information that you can to help move the customer towards the sale.
• Check out our app page for a Live Chat plugin to your store.

Hack #4: Create a dedicated social support team

Did you know that when companies engage and respond to customer service requests using social media, those customers end up spending up to 40% more with that company?

And 71% of those who experienced a positive social experience with a brand, are likely to recommend that brand to other people?

With pretty much every brand now establishing a presence on social, customers have started to use it as a way to get their questions answered. If you get many enquiries on social then we’d recommend setting up a dedicated support team that’s separate from your main social page.

For example, In addition to the main Nike account, they have one that focuses sorely on resolving customer problems.

This is great for two reasons:

• It’s easier for you to keep customer complaints and social media marketing separate.
• It keeps potential customers from reading negative comments on your main social page.

One of the biggest challenges with having a presence on social is that you don’t have control over what people say about you, which could be damaging to your reputation.

The best action you can take is to respond to every comment, and if it’s negative, work towards a resolution. For example, this customer made a complaint to Arby’s via twitter. The support team got involved, took responsibility, addressed the problem, and even gave away a gift card.

This speedy response and excellent service helped resolve the issue, resulting in not losing the customer to a competitor.

Our top tips for awesome social support:

• Set up a separate support page to focus on questions and complaints.
• Be quick in your response.
• Offer your email address to take the conversation off social media.
• Do everything you can to turn the situation around.

Hack #5: Continue to nurture after the sale

We’ve already mentioned how it costs more to attract a new customer than retain a new one, but did you know that the official cost is actually five times more?

Once your customer has made their purchase, their journey with you shouldn’t end there, it should have only just begun.

The steps you take after the sale are crucial for your business. With a little bit of nurturing you’ll be able to get those customers to come back for more – and if you’re lucky – turn your customers into raving fans of your store so that they do the selling for you.

One of the most popular examples of this is the one below from Jimyz automotive. It’s a simple gesture that made a lasting impression on the customer, who decided to tell the world about it.

If you don’t have the time to be sending out hand-written notes to every customer then email offers the perfect solution. When a customer purchases a product from you, send them a thank you email and offer money off their next order with you.

You could even follow up a few days later to see if they like the product and if they’d like to write a review for you, like this example email below.

So now you’ll not only have gained a review on your site, but the customer is more inclined to come back and shop with you again because you’ve given them a reason to.

Another great tactic for nurturing your customers is to send them relevant content such as blog posts, videos, or eBooks, that would be useful for the product they’ve just bought, or to help up-sell them to a different product.

Our top tips for nurturing customers:

• Send thank you emails to show your appreciation.
• Offer promotions or discount off their next order.
• Nurture customers with relevant content to up-sell or cross-sell

Takeaway

By plugging these 5 customer service hacks into your online store, you’ll be well on your way to keeping your customers happy and improving your bottom line. The key to keeping customers on side is to make their lives easier, apologize if mistakes are made, and show them the human side to your brand.

Here we are then. Young people born between 1981 and 2000 (aka millennials) are the largest workforce in the USA. By 2020, they will take 46% of US workplaces.

You’ve probably heard about millennials. They are lazy, narcissistic and irresponsible. They don’t stick with an employer for long – in fact, almost 60% of millennials (or Generation Y) have at least once changed their jobs. An average millennial spends ¼ of his workday absorbed in social media and other Web resources.

Prepare for the apocalypse.

I am a millennial. And if you’re reading this, the chances you’re also one are pretty high. We often live with our parents. The unemployment rate among millennials is almost 10% higher than that of other generations. We’re usually stuck in low-paid jobs and start looking for new job opportunities the very day we’re offered our current position.

But it doesn’t mean we don’t stand a chance in the real word. And here’s why:

• 79% of the Gen Ys have at least a Bachelor’s degree. That’s right, we are the most educated generation in the history of mankind;
• 66% of millennials want to start their own business, which means we’re ambitious and ready to take risks;
• Almost 50% of millennial households don’t own a TV. We do love our smart gadgets and social media, but at least don’t get brainwashed by television;
• Nearly 25% of US caregivers are millennials. We are more likely to take care of our parents and grandparents than Gen Xs and Baby Boomers.

See, millennials are not bad guys after all. We’re competitive, eager to learn and don’t fear responsibility. And if you own a company or work in HR, you’d better start taking notes now.

Millennials at work: here comes the change

• Be ready to adopt new technologies. I recently wrote a blog post about technology in the real estate. You would expect the industry which annually generates $ 200 billion in revenues to be high-tech to the bone, right? Not the case, though. Most real estate agents still rely on trusty pens, paper and Excel files. And it’s a common tendency for most industries out there. Employers don’t get the benefits of enterprise application integration. 68% of American companies store only one fifth of their data assents in the cloud. Businesses run outdated software and complain of low productivity. What did you expect, guys? Millennials cut their teeth on technology. Today almost any teenager can develop a mobile application. We cannot use the business software you bought 10 years ago. 44% of millennials plan to quit their current jobs within 2 years. And if you care about employees’ retention, it’s high time you started investing in IT;
• Promote millennials or let them go. We seldom stay with one employer for longer than 2 years. For example, our parents and grandparents dedicated 5-7 years of their lives to one company. It doesn’t mean we don’t know what we want – it’s exactly the opposite. We’re the Google generation. We’re effective problem solvers. 50% of millennial respondents who took part on the 2013 Deloitte survey were already working in leadership positions. If there are no chances of promotion in your company, don’t feed us with promises;
• Create a friendly working environment. We value democracy and want to be on friendly terms with our managers. We don’t work for you. We work with you. Millennials want their voices to be heard. 41% of millennials expect employers to provide regular feedback on their performance. We talk about personal issues with fellow co-workers and will easily quit a job that has a negative impact on our family life;
• Say “Adios” to fixed working hours. We don’t usually count the time spent on a project. Instead, we evaluate the quality of our work. 66% of millennials want to re-adjust their working hours, while 64% of Gen Ys would like to occasionally work from home. Is it the results that matter for you or the strict observance of the official 9-to-5 schedule? It’s up to you to decide;
• Make the world a better place. Older generations say we’ve got our heads in the cloud, but we’d rather take a reduced pay and work fewer hours that waste our lives in the office. We don’t want to work for the sake of working. What we need is purpose. An average millennial can wake up one morning and realize he doesn’t feel like spending his best years writing PHP codes. And it’s fine. We want to fulfill our dreams. We know we can leave a better world for our children. And if your company is not doing anything to improve the lives of others, you’ll get no sympathy from millennials.

If you want no millennials in the workplace, think twice. A recent Great Place to Work survey revealed that millennial companies score 14% higher than their Gen X- and Boomer-dominated rivals. We are the leading workforce. We prefer cooperation to competition. And large companies including LinkedIn and Tesla recognize our potential.

Editor’s note: You may have missed this article when CMI published it on another blog last year. We’re sharing it now because adaptive content holds more promise than ever for marketers who want to scale their efforts.

Hey, there. I know you. I understand where you are. I get what you’re going through. I just might have what you need right now.

If adaptive content could speak to its recipients, that’s what it would sound like.

Imagine your organization’s content serving people in such personal, useful ways that it stirs feelings for your brand. What impact might those feelings have on your business? (Hint: Consider this tagline, brought to us by the folks at Connective DX: “Companies that are loved win.”)

As you ponder the impact that more customer love could have on your business, allow me to give you a preview of this article’s sections:

• What does “adaptive content” mean?
• How is adaptive content different from responsive design?
• How adaptive content works with personalization
• How to get started with adaptive content

What does ‘adaptive content’ mean?

Adaptive content is content that can, at each instance of use, change (adapt) – not just in appearance but in substance – based on a number of factors. What factors? Consider this tweet from a talk by Karen McGrane.

---

Adaptive #content changes in more than appearance—the content itself automatically changes.
Click To Tweet

---

Karen McGrane’s slide lists more than a dozen factors that might determine the way content could adapt to a given instance of use.

Look at all the factors she lists:

• Device (operating system, mobile, tablet, desktop, screen resolution)
• Context (time, location, velocity, humidity, temperature)
• Person (age, gender, stage of life, language, relationships)

Does your organization’s content have the built-in smarts to adapt to all those factors? I think I can answer that question: No, it doesn’t.

Don’t feel bad; no one’s content does. It’s hard to conceive of any content needing to be that intelligent. Karen’s list isn’t a set of “shoulds.” It’s a peek into a realm of possibility, a set of things to consider – strategically – as you imagine the experiences you want your customers and prospective customers to have with your content.

How is adaptive content different from responsive design?

Adaptive content and responsive design are often discussed together, and they both refer to changes in the way content is delivered, but “responsive” and “adaptive” refer to different kinds of changes. Whereas “responsive” refers to changes in content layout based on the device (or the device’s orientation), “adaptive” refers to tailored delivery of the content itself.

Content delivered into a responsive design changes cosmetically, not adaptively. The content itself doesn’t change. It simply reflows to accommodate a device’s screen size and orientation, as shown in these screenshots of the agenda page from the Intelligent Content Conference site on a smartphone.

In The Language of Content Strategy, Charles Cooper defines adaptive content this way:

[Adaptive] content is designed to adapt to the needs of the customer, not just cosmetically, but also in substance and in capability. Adaptive content automatically responds to the screen size and orientation of any device, but goes further by displaying relevant content that takes full advantage of the specific capabilities of the device being used.

Here’s how Noz Urbina explains the difference in a slightly techier way.

Adaptive content doesn’t know if it’s in a responsive or nonresponsive website. It knows who it’s for and where/when it should be shown because it’s semantically/structurally rich and categorized (using metadata).

Examples of adaptive content

Here’s an example of content adapting for device types. For the same instruction – a single chunk of content in a content management system – people on the receiving end might read “click” on a laptop, read “tap” on a tablet, or hear “say select” in a car’s GPS.

Adaptive content goes beyond responsive design. The content itself changes according to a number of factors: The device, the context, the person. For example, an adaptive instruction might show up as “click” on a laptop, “tap” on a tablet, and “say select” from a car’s GPS tool. That’s content adapting for the device. To deliver adaptive experiences, you have to put all the desired content variations – in this case “click,” “tap,” and “say select” – into your content management system, and you have to give the system the clues (metadata) it needs to figure out which content to deliver where and when.

Here’s another example of adaptive content. Whatever you’re describing (a term, a product, a podcast, a tourist attraction … anything), you create both a long and a short description. The long description is automatically delivered to laptops. The short description is automatically delivered to smartphones. For these automatic deliveries to work, two things have to happen:

1. The source content has to include both descriptions, each one semantically tagged – maybe “longdesc” and “shortdesc.”

2. The content distribution system has to understand what to do when it’s time to send those tagged descriptions to a given device.

For yet another example, read Noz’s wine-tasting story, in which he declares, “Wow! I just lived an adaptive content moment!”

How adaptive content works with personalization

Adaptive content is often considered equivalent to personalized content. Kevin P. Nichols defines personalization as a way to get content to the right user based on one or more of the following:

• Who they are
• Where they are
• When, why, and how they access the content
• What device they use to access the content

Noz describes adaptive content and personalization in his article (from which I’ve drawn all of his quotations below), The 5 Ws of Adaptive Content: A New Look at Making Content Contextually Appropriate:

Adaptive content is a content strategy technique designed to support meaningful, personalized interactions across all channels. It is content that is conceived, planned, and developed around the customers: their context, their mood, their goals…

To be successful at delivering a personalized experience … adaptive content is a requirement. It’s content that is designed for both personalization and delivery across many channels, including print and beyond. It’s more than feeding product or content recommendations. It can be much more than changing some artwork based on user interests, and it has to be far more than reflowing web layouts so they are workable on a specific device.

Some people suggest considering ways to personalize content beyond the web – for example, in email campaigns or in old-fashioned, human-to-human interactions between customers and employees, including “support desks, retail sales staff, field technicians, sales and presales engineers, business development managers, and all the other consumer touch points,” Noz says. “They all own threads of communication that intertwine to sew the tapestry of brand experience for your audience.”

Why should marketers care about personalizing content? As Kristen Hicks says, “Businesses that have embraced adaptive content have seen huge returns. Website visitors who see content based on what the business already knows about them convert three to 10 times more than average. Those are the kinds of numbers of which all marketers dream.”

---

Adaptive (personalized) #content converts 3 to 10x more viewers more than average via @McKinsey
Click To Tweet

---

How to get started with adaptive content

Ready to stop dreaming and start doing? Here are some things you can do to get started toward your own goal of creating content that, as Ann Rockley says, “can be adapted with little or no human intervention”:

1. Pick your context factors. Prioritize one or two context factors that you want your content to adapt to. What kind of personalization would your customers most value? See Karen’s list above for some of the many possibilities.

2. Pick your content variations. Decide which content variations your content developers need to create consistently. For example, you might need “longdesc” and “shortdesc” text for every product or every podcast. You might need a set of device-specific terms, like “click,” “tap,” and “say select,” in every set of instructions. Start with the high-value variations; get those working before adding more.

3. Pick your business rules. Adaptive content “has to know when it should change,” Noz says. “That means defining rules that will tell your system when to display what content.”

Of course, you may have to pick your system, too. A content management system, that is.

A lot goes into creating meaningfully adaptive experiences with your content. Throughout the process of making decisions and implementing them, lots of people from various business and technical teams – and, wherever possible, customers – need to collaborate (as in debate, ignore each other, persist, bring donuts, listen, research, share, persuade, celebrate, argue, bring more donuts). You’ll need to test, train, fail, learn, and modify as you go.

You knew it wouldn’t be easy.

Summary

Your organization’s success may rest on creating content that can adapt to a variety of devices, to user-specific information, or to any number of other factors – content that basically says, “Hey, there. I know you. I understand where you are. I get what you’re going through. I just might have what you need right now.”

To create content that’s this easy and useful on the receiving end, you have to do a lot of things that may seem hard. The good news is that those hard things are becoming more possible to achieve. (Your competitors are figuring that out, too.)

Are you ready to take the first steps? Have you already taken some steps? If so, what challenges have you confronted? What success stories can you tell? Please let us know in a comment.

To hear Karen McGrane talk about adaptive content – and hear many other pros share their expertise on content strategy for marketers – register today for the Intelligent Content Conference March 7-9. Use code BLOG100 to save $100 off of the main event and all-access passes.

Want to expand your content strategy skills? Subscribe to Content Strategy for Marketers, our weekly email newsletter for forward-thinking marketers.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post Adaptive Content: The Way to Your Customer’s Heart appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Leaders recognize that lean and agile business strategies require new ways of accessing talent to fill critical gaps — without necessarily bringing on more full-time employees. But most organizations aren’t set up for getting the most out of non-traditional employment relationships. In this excerpt from their book, Agile Talent, Younger and Smallwood explain how to align your organization with the needs and expectations of a workforce that is increasingly external, project-based, and flexible.

Nearly all contemporary organizations are increasing their use of talent from the outside—by engaging individuals, teams, and even firms in non-traditional work relationships and alternate forms of employment. Google and Intel rely on experts in social science and biomechanics to develop transformative products by better understanding how people think about and use technology. McKesson, the US-based pharmaceutical and health-care giant, benefits from external expertise as a strategic extension of its resources in areas such as business strategy and logistics support. Managers in these companies understand that agile, fast, and lean strategies require that they think in new ways about accessing and leveraging key strategic talent and filling critical gaps in strategic capabilities.

Studies of the global agile-talent community vary in their estimates of the size of the population. In 2013, Accenture suggested that 20 to 30 percent of the total workforce falls outside the organization’s traditional full-time, permanent employment relationship. More recently, Deloitte estimated that 30 to 40 percent of corporate FTEs are supplied by external resources. And in a particularly interesting study, Freelancers Union, a US-based organization, reported that a quarter of the US workforce were project-based independents working for more than one organization.

Although executives want to get the most value possible from external strategic talent, their organizations are not set up for it. As more and more of them look to “the cloud” to access and leverage agile talent, they are increasingly bumping up against several big issues:

Relationship management. One of the main problems is decision making. Too often, purchasing departments manage the selection while operating managers—not involved in selection by fiat—are expected to make the relationship work. This arrangement is often complicated by inconsistent decision criteria: purchasing wants the lowest price and a fixed cost, whereas the business or operation wants the best resource, a good cultural fit, and enough flexibility in the contract to allow for changes in scope or strategy. But there are also extrinsic factors that complicate the relationship. For example, tax rules in the United States and other countries are biased toward full-time employment relationships. As a result, many organizations keep external resources at arm’s length to avoid potential legal problems and fines.

Internal-external competition. External talent can be a tremendous benefit to organizations, but may also be threatening to internal managers and internal technical professionals, especially agile talent that offers strategic benefits, is highly trained, and possess capability that internals don’t.

Clash of expectations. Externals may believe that the organizations for which they work are too slow, too bureaucratic, and too complex. Similarly, organizations view externals as clueless about the business and unwilling or unable to have a deep understanding of the organization’s issues.

Failure to deliver results. A fourth challenge is the failure to deliver expected results. A recent McKinsey global survey found that just 26 percent of surveyed executives say that key change initiatives were successful at sustainably improving the organization. Given that virtually all such projects deeply involve external resources, one aspect of the failure to meet expectations is no doubt rooted in how the organization selects, engages, and manages the performance of external resources and the quality of the internal-external partnership.

Organizations are having these problems because, historically, organizations have treated externals as “separate, and not equal.” Most managers would never dream of treating externals like internals. External agile talent is hired for expediency, for the short term, to fill a specific need. But as companies depend more on this agile talent for fulfilling strategic capabilities, that mind-set won’t cut it anymore. “Separate, and not equal” is precisely what is causing the problems just outlined.

Managers need to fundamentally change how they think about this population of talent and they should treat externals like internals: separate and equal. We have found that the organizations that get the most from agile talent—and conquer the four big problems described above—use the most effective managerial techniques in engaging, motivating, and building teams with internal staff. Like full-time employees, external resources want to do meaningful work; grow in competence and opportunity; be respected, trusted, and engaged; be treated as a part of the team; receive ongoing communication about the issues that bear on their work; and feel rewarded fairly and recognized for their contribution and effort. Too often, they feel, instead, merely tolerated or treated as suspect by organization employees with whom they work. They feel unappreciated by management and powerless in dealing with the administrative bureaucracy of partner organizations.

Adapted from

In interviews with corporate leaders, we’ve noticed that many executives initially don’t see the need to address how external resources are treated and managed. These business leaders are often ignorant about the details of how well their organizations are tuned—organizationally, administratively, and culturally—to create a positive and productive experience for agile talent. And in these discussions, most executives acknowledge the tendency to send mixed signals and the impact on the productivity and commitment of external resources. As one logistics company executive told us when we interviewed him:

“We know how to manage people in our company. And while we intellectually seek the benefits of a real partnership with external resources, the fact is that we generally treat them as a pair of hands and treat the relationship as essentially transactional—service for money. So we pay them a little late, tend not to think of involving them, et cetera. Interestingly, when we are working with our customers, it’s just the reverse. We want to be treated as partners, while they treat us as the pairs of hands. We ought to learn from this. Our customers certainly get more from us when we feel that the relationship is a partnership. The same ought to go for our use of our externals resources!”

The good news is that the answer to capturing greater value from your investment in external expertise is right in front of you: as the aforementioned logistics executive implies, all the management best practices that we already know to be effective for managing a traditional internal workforce need to be applied to this new and growing group of agile talent. But doing so involves some important twists, reflected in the questions below, for aligning talent with your organization. Use these questions as a guide for getting better at building and managing your agile talent workforce:

Strategic alignment. Is the organization disciplined and rigorous in its identification of areas where agile talent and cloud resourcing are required or potentially beneficial? Has the organization identified the critical capabilities it needs to establish? Are relationships well thought-through? Is the organization effective at defining the role, relationship, and scope of initiatives addressed by consultants, advisers, or temporary technical experts? Does the work have the right level of sponsorship? Are timing, budget, and resourcing consistent with what is required for a successful outcome?

Performance alignment. How well does the organization convert a plan or an initiative into well-defined, S.M.A.R.T. objectives and timelines? Are performance expectations clearly defined, established, and communicated? How often is performance assessed and feedback provided? What metrics are used, and are they reasonable? When performance problems arise, how promptly and effectively does the organization take the required action?

Relationship alignment. How much is cultural fit as well as technical expertise considered in the choice of external talent? Are externals thrown into the task or given a solid orientation to the organization and the people with whom they will work? How are issues between internal staff and external resources resolved? Are externals engaged and treated with the consideration and respect that any individual would expect?

Administrative alignment. Is the organization set up to work well with externals, or are they treated badly? Is the organization excessively bureaucratic in dealing with agile talent? Are the rules and procedures communicated appropriately? Are externals paid promptly? Is the orientation of the organization one that views external talent as a necessary evil or as welcome colleagues?

Agile talent is transforming and revolutionizing the traditional relationship between an organization and its workforce and is making new demands on managers and leaders. Innovative companies are leading the way, applying a broader palette of talent options and relying on more varied types of relationships. Leaders who embrace these changes and respond effectively to these challenges build more competitive organizations.

Adapted from the Harvard Business Review Press Book Agile Talent: How to Source and Manage Outside Experts.

We all know how important it is to analyse our marketing campaigns in order to guarantee they are performing. Google Analytics allows you to do exactly that. This fantastic free tool ensures marketers can make data led decisions to streamline their marketing efforts, increase their conversion rates and ultimately achieve their business goals.

It’s pretty surprising therefore, how many businesses we come across which are not making the most of Google Analytics. In this article I share some of my favourite advanced features of Google Analytics and some great set-up tips to give marketers some ideas of how they should be optimising their accounts and using this amazing tool entirely to their advantage.

Three views

For the average small or medium business, it is often fine to have just one property. However, it is absolutely crucial all Google Analytics properties have at least 3 separate views for each of their properties; a main view, a test view and a raw view. The main view is what you’ll use for day to day reporting and analysis; the test view is for testing new goals and filters, before moving them to the main view; and the raw view is a backup for all website data.

The raw view is particularly important. Imagine how disastrous it would be if you implemented a filter incorrectly on your account and corrupted all of your data!

Enable demographics

A really useful feature of Google Analytics is its ability to provide demographic information about website users, such as location, age and gender. This can help marketers understand their target audience. It is important that you enable this feature in your account otherwise you won’t see any data. To do this simply click into property settings, scroll down to the appropriate part of the page and toggle the enable demographics button.

Filters

It’s a good idea to set up relevant filters on your main and test views. One example of a filter would be your own IP address. If you don’t exclude data from your colleagues, it could be dramatically skewing your results, especially for low traffic websites.

You can also filter out spam from your account. In the past year, there has been a dramatic spike in spam referral traffic making it far harder to analyse traffic sources. After identifying the spam sites, simply create a filter excluding traffic from those domains.

Site search

If you have an internal search features on your website, you should be tracking this in Google Analytics to understand what content and products your visitors want, optimise their experience, and identify any gaps where no results are returned. Enable site search within your property’s view settings, remembering to put in your website’s search query parameter.

Enable e-commerce

This might sound pretty obvious, but it’s amazing how many e-commerce sites do not have e-commerce tracking set up in their Google Analytics accounts. And ecommerce tracking is not just about recording transactions any more. Enhanced Ecommerce can track so much more, including what products are seen, added to your cart, and how your internal banner ads are performing.

Tag Manager

If you don’t already use Google Tag Manager, why not!?
Google Tag Manager provides you with the ultimate flexibility to tweak and create tags without using developer time and money. GTM also ensures your tags are organised and archived. This means you can roll back to old versions at any time. Consider moving your Google Analytics implementation into Google Tag Manager.

Custom reports and dashboards

Imagine how useful it would be if you could quickly access your business’s key data in a simple format! Custom reporting in Google Analytics allows you to do exactly that. With three different custom report types; Flat Table, Explorer, and Geo Type, the reports have the same features as other GA reports.

Custom Dashboards also allow you to organise your key data effectively and access it quickly. Custom Dashboards display summaries of reports, as widgets on a single page. By organising your data in this way it is possible to see correlations. As with custom reports, you can use specific dimensions and metrics in your widgets and you can also choose a mixture of real time and historical reports in the dashboards.

Custom tagging

Although Google can tell you some stuff about where your traffic is coming from, it’s really important that you tag your campaigns correctly. Create a sensible UTM parameter convention (use the Google URL builder to help) and always include UTM parameters on link you post to third party websites.

Use the goal flow report

The goal flow report is a great tool which allows you to visualise the journey that each of your user takes to reach your goals. In order to access the goal flow report you must first set up the goal funnels which are based on destination goals only.

In the goal report, boxes represent each of your funnel steps, with the final node as the goal itself. Clicking on the nodes will allow you to see the percentage of people who dropped out of the funnel at that point. This will help you understand which parts of your site need improving.

There is also a table version of the goal flow report. Clicking into one of the rows in the report allows you to highlight the pathway of one traffic segment. This will indicate whether your conversion success differs by traffic channel, location or device type.

Multi-channel reports

By default google uses the last click attribution model to assign value to each of your marketing campaigns. However, it is important to take into account that a visitor may have visited your website multiple times via multiple touch points before converting. The multi-channel report allows you to understand this journey.

To see data in thee multi-channel reports you must have set up at least one goal or have e-commerce tracking enabled.

Summary

Google Analytics is an amazing tool which, when used correctly will give you the best insight into the success of your digital marketing campaigns and website performance. The above tips will help to supercharge your account and ensure you are using Google Analytics to its full potential.

Want to check your Google Analytics set-up is perfect? Download this handy cheat sheet audit now!

“The customer experience is the next competitive battleground.”

~ Jerry Gregoire, former CIO of Dell and Pepsi

Competition in business is fierce. No one needs to tell you that. Everywhere, companies compete based on product, technology, price. Even in advertising, witness the rise of content marketing – a way to beat out the competition in the rising roar of marketing messages.

There is another way to compete. It’s old-fashioned, but it works: Be good to your customers. Really, really good. Be good from the first time they encounter you to years after they’ve become your loyal, return customer.

That sort of holistic view – of ensuring customers are always well treated no matter what stage of the buying cycle they’re in – is at the core of the customer experience ideal.

Of course, none of this is new. And even recently we’ve seen several new-ish terms that describe what a great customer experience aims to achieve.

You’ve heard of “customer centric” companies, right? And of customer advocates? You might even have heard of the empty chair used at every Amazon.com meeting. The empty chair represents the customer. It’s there as a demonstration and a declaration that every decision is made for the benefit of the customer.

That’s the right headset to create (and assure ongoing) great customer experiences.

Delivering a great customer experience is good business

Companies aren’t embracing customer experience because it’s just a cute new marketing term. There are solid business benefits to delighting your customers. Here are just a few:

• When someone’s had a good customer experience, they’re more likely to say nice things about your company to their friends, family, and coworkers. This word of mouth marketing is probably the single most effective marketing channel around.

From SurveyMonkey’s research and blog post, Why Great Customer Service is Worth It.

• If someone’s customer experience is good, they might leave a nice review for you online. Those reviews can make or break a business, depending on what type of business you are.

Conversely, if someone has a rotten experience with your company, they might leave a review that could significantly affect your business.

• Happy customers – those who’ve had good experiences – stick around. The longer you can keep a customer with you, the higher their lifetime value is. High lifetime values have all sorts of excellent business effects, from how much you can spend to acquire a new customer to how much net profit your company creates.

• As this graphic from Watermark Consulting shows, good customer experiences even boost your stock value a bit. Or a lot.

• Good customer experiences open up the possibility for customers to respond to you on social media. That user-generated content is some of the best earned media you’ll get.

Your customers’ experience is part of your product – and a way to differentiate yourself in the market

There’s another reason to focus on customer experience this year. A customer’s experience with you is becoming as important as your products.

Customer experience is also a way to differentiate yourself from your competition. According to Gartner Research, “89% of companies surveyed plan to compete primarily on the basis of the customer experience by 2016“.

The classic example of this is in the hotel business. As everyone knows, there’s a vast difference between staying at a Ritz-Carlton and staying at a Motel 6. Sure, they both offer a bed. They both take reservations. They even offer something called breakfast. But all similarities end there. (No offense, Motel 6. Thanks for taking dogs!)

Customer experience is as important as product or pricing

Here’s what IBM and Econsultancy found when they did the research for their report, The Consumer Conversation:

Q: What did your new vendor offer that led you to switch? Which of the following best describes what your old vendor did wrong?

From IBM and Econsultancy’s The Consumer Conversation.

This echoes another study we’ve mentioned on this blog before. In Sherry Lamoreaux’s post, The Role of Emotions in B2B Marketing: Telling a Story, Making a Sale, she quotes a CEB/Motista study that shows how people are willing to pay a higher price when they see personal value in their purchase. That’s a key aspect of good customer experiences – they make you feel good. They engender positive feelings for the company. You might even say they build trust.

Customer experience is part of every aspect of your business

Here are all the different places customer experience can (and should) show up in a business:

• Research and development

How are your current customers using your product, and other products? What are they struggling with? Where do they go to try to solve their problems, and how do they describe those problems?

• Content marketing

Customer experience and content marketing are tightly woven together. But I’d say customer experience is even a larger issue than content marketing, simply because customer experience includes all the other departments listed here. So content marketing is just one aspect of customer experience.

• Social media

In the context of customer experience, social media is a customer service function and a content marketing function. There are plenty of stories of customers failing to get help via an 800 number, only to go to Twitter or Facebook and get their issue solved within minutes.

Here’s one story. A marketer was traveling on an overly hot Amtrak train. She couldn’t get anyone to help her on the train, so in desperation, she tweeted to Amtrak about the stifling heat. They tweeted back within minutes, saying they’d try to reach the conductor. And they did! The air conditioning the marketer’s train car was turned on. (Editor’s note: Last summer I tweeted to United about helping my son, who was stranded in Dallas by a flight cancellation, and they did come through. Coincidence? I think not. Don’t forget to tweet your thanks when social works for you.)

• Public relations

Does your company do good deeds above and beyond its business requirements? Getting the word out about those activities puts you in a highly positive light. Many customers really value companies with a mission beyond making money. Examples of this are almost any company with the word “organic” or “sustainable” in its mission statement, or companies that dedicate a percentage of profits to a charity or a community they do business in. Or outdoor outfitters like REI and Patagonia.

REI closed for Black Friday and urged its employees and customers to get outside instead. The hashtag they used for the campaign, #OptOutside, is still being used almost every hour.

• Your website design.

There are quite a few articles linking customer experience to web design. App design and other user interfaces are equally important.

This makes total sense to anyone who has ever gotten frustrated with a computer. I once heard an AOL executive explain the company’s early rise to greatness this way: “Ease of use is the secret sauce.”

Personalization also plays a big part in having a website with a great customer experience. Many of the recent articles about customer experience trends say personalization is one of biggest trends around. It goes hand-in-hand with automation.

Website performance is often the first place that companies try to improve the customer experience.

• Your mobile presence and usability.

It’s time to think outside the website. There’s more mobile traffic than desktop traffic, and that’s been true for a while. That means, at the very least, your website must be mobile-friendly. The forms need to work, and any other mission-critical functionality (orders? Calculators? Customer support?) need to work well too. Customer experience, to a large extent, requires that omni-channel marketing so many companies strive for. So as soon as you’ve thought about mobile, think about video. And in-store marketing.

Because interfaces and product design are so critical for customer experience, IT has as much a role to play in CX as any department. Even if they never directly talk to your customers.

Your sales department staff are basically the front-line emissaries of your customer experience. From the time they make a first connection on LinkedIn, to when they meet a prospect in person the first time, they are the face of your business, they are your customers’ experience.

• Post-sales, Customer Success.

Accenture’s 2015 B2B Customer Experience survey notes that while customer experience (CX) leaders achieve higher-than-average revenue growth, fewer than 25 percent of them excel. The leaders elevate service as a critical enabler of growth, the study states. This chart shows how leaders prioritize after-sales support and service.

• Human Resources and employee engagement

What’s the attitude of your employees in-house? How do they talk about your customers? Is there some grumbling and looking off? That’s going to show up somewhere. This is also critical because employee morale will be reflected on social media too. Even more importantly, unhappy employees just don’t deliver the quality (and quantity) of work that happy employees do.

This can also work in reverse. There’s nothing quite so bad for employee morale than knowing you work for a company that treats its customers poorly. Things like that tend to drive employees out, and the best go soonest.

Whether it’s a refund or a billing problem, how well your accounting department responds to customers can have a huge effect on their goodwill.

• Your executive team.

Customer experience is so critical that 59% of B2B customer experience leaders are appointing a C-level czar for it.

What makes for a great customer experience?

It largely depends on your company and your audience. For example, millennials may want more DIY customer service support, where Baby Boomers will want to get a real person on the phone. But here’s how customers from around the world answered the question:

Notice how six of the elements listed there refer to channels. Omni-channel marketing is already a required element of a great customer experience – at least in the eyes of customers.

Conclusion

Customer experience is no empty buzzword. It’s a view of the customer lifecycle powerful enough to differentiate companies, spike stock values, retain and attract better hires, and dramatically increase ROI.

Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut to building a great customer experience. It’s so embedded in company processes that everyone in the business needs to be in on the effort. But for the companies agile enough to work towards it – or for companies already doing it – the rewards are worth the effort.

Back to you

Does your company have a customer experience strategy? Are you seeing results from your work? Tell us what you think in the comments.

Happy, engaged, and loyal customers lead to a strong business – and more opportunities for growth. Keeping track of your customers engagement and their experience with your brand will set your company up for long-term success. Download Act-On’s eBook “Do You Really Know Your Customers?” to learn how marketing automation can help you build quality, lasting relationships.

Aristotle’s Advice for Salespeople Today: Logos, Pathos & Ethos

 

Twenty-four hundred years ago, Aristotle described the three elements needed to move an audience--logos, pathos, and ethos--the intellectual appeal, the emotional appeal, and the speaker’s character and charismatic appeal. These classifications are just as applicable for today’s salespeople as they were back then. In today’s marketplace, where little difference exists between products, Aristotle would advise salespeople to employ not only logos, but more importantly pathos and ethos to persuade today’s customer to buy.

 

Logos: The Intellectual Appeal 
All competent salespeople can recite their products’ features, benefits, and specifications. Their companies have trained them on the business reasons to select their products, identified processes to educate customers, and established procedures to determine customers’ technical requirements. Let’s emphasize some steps you can take to make an intellectual appeal more compelling.

• Provide independent confirmation of your facts wherever possible with quotes from authorities (customers, analysts, and the press).
• Quantify beneficial claims with specific numbers and use real-world examples, which are more powerful than hypothetical statements.
• Keep it simple. Remember the concept of Occam’s razor: the simpler explanation is always preferred.
• Be prepared for contradictory facts from other vendors and have factual responses ready.
• Create your own euphemisms that reflect the importance of your product or a particular feature. For example, a rubber band could be called a “multipurpose business instrument.”
• Quantify results from adverse consequences (for example, loss of revenue due to equipment downtime).
• Use alliteration--repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent words--so that concepts are more easily remembered (for example, Architecture, Applications, & Automation).  Or you can use words that bring rhythm to the flow of speech (for example, durAbility, dependAbility, and adaptAbility).
• Use the rule of three: whenever you make a claim, support it with three different facts.
• Brighten up the facts with interesting graphics that represent them pictorially.
• Become a storyteller, not a human dictionary. Use metaphors to explain concepts. Instead of saying “customers prefer us three to one,” say “Harris Poll surveyed four thousand buyers from across the country and found that three thousand, or 75 percent, thought our solution was far superior and here’s why…”

Logical arguments alone, no matter how well you present them, will not change skeptics into believers. Finessing customers to change their opinions requires an emotional appeal to their human nature.

 

Pathos: The Emotional Appeal 
Most salespeople equate the emotional appeal to viscerally trying to persuade prospective customers to buy from them. However pathos is far more complex. It is creating a favorable disposition in potential customers through an emotional or psychological appeal and thereby casting your competition in an unfavorable light.

The term “benefaction” refers to the psychological benefits that determine a person’s actions. Customers purchase products that increase their happiness, esteem, power, or wealth. They rationalize these psychological decisions they make with logic and facts. Four core psychological drives determine selection behavior. These four benefactions are physical well-being, pain avoidance, self-preservation, and self-gratification.

• Physical well-being, the will to survive, is one of our strongest desires. It weighs heavily in the minds of both customers and competitors. Making customers feel their careers are safe in your hands is a top priority. Ideally, you would like them to believe that the competitive solutions are actually threats to their livelihood.

“More than one hundred of their customers have moved to our solution because of their major security flaw.”

• When something is hurting you badly, the desire to eliminate the source of pain can be all-consuming. Pain Avoidance is one of the best purchase motivators because customers are forced to act quickly and decisively to eliminate it.

“We can eliminate that bottleneck and save you from experiencing that frustration ever again.”

• We naturally seek the approval of others. Self-preservation, the desire to be recognized for our unique talents while still belonging to a group, applies to customers and salespeople alike. Customers purchase items that they believe will enhance their stature and protect their group position.

“Ninety percent of the Fortune 100 companies use our solution.”

• Everyone has a selfish ego, and self-gratification is our desire to put our own needs before everyone else’s. Customers will go to great lengths to purchase something that makes them feel better about themselves and superior to others. Egos drive the business world. Unfortunately, most salespeople are taught to sell solutions based upon customer pain when, in fact, ego and self-preservation are the real motivators behind large enterprise purchases.

“I would like to arrange a visit to our worldwide headquarters so you can meet with our CEO and other key company executives.”

 

Never forget… It’s not solely your product’s performance, ease of use, or efficiency that customers will fall in love with. It’s you. In other words, you want customers to view you as the only person who can address their personal needs, solve their business problems, and help them achieve their career hopes and life’s desires.

 

Ethos: Character and the Charismatic Appeal 
All salespeople are trying to earn the customer’s trust. They’ll lend a sympathetic ear and try to become a trusted advisor. To prove they’re dependable, they follow through on their commitments. To show integrity, they will speak the truth.

The foundations of ethos are wisdom, virtue, and goodwill. When salespeople share their experience and opinions with customers, they are using their knowledge to their advantage. Ethos is charisma as well as character. The salesperson’s definition of “charisma” is “transparency,” the ability to be exactly who you are and the propensity to be perfectly frank about it. Here’s some examples of Ethos:

“Over the past ten years helping clients  for my company I have seen many different situations like yours, the course of action I would recommend is..."

“Based upon my experience working with hundreds of companies, I would strongly suggest..” 

“Our company has more than 10,000 successful installations around the world, what we’ve learned is…”

Twenty-four hundred years ago Aristotle wrote, “All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire.” Given the competitive nature of selling today, understanding the ancient wisdom of Aristotle is more relevant than ever. In fact, the only thing new is the history you don’t know. 

 

CLICK HERE FOR 50+ FASCINATING SALES ARTICLES

 

 

VANCOUVER – British Columbia’s housing industry has been jolted by allegations that real estate agents are taking part in so-called shadow flipping. The controversial practice involves brokers reselling a property multiple times before a deal closes and profiting from each transfer using the assignment clause in sales contracts. Here’s a look at the practice:

What is an assignment clause?

An assignment clause is a contract provision included in some real estate transactions that allows a buyer to resell or transfer a property to another buyer before the deal’s closing date.

———

Why was it created in the first place?

The assignment clause was originally intended to give buyers a legal way of backing out of a purchase if for some reason their circumstances changed after they had put an offer on a property, instead of having to surrender their deposit. The clause was also meant to protect sellers, ensuring a sale would still go forward as long as another buyer could be found.

———

What is the issue?

The assignment clause allows real estate agents to sell a contract for a single property multiple times at increasingly higher prices as they make a commission on each transfer. Buyers in the middle also benefit by pocketing the difference between what they paid and the resale value. They also don’t pay any land-transfer taxes because the entire transaction happens before the deal officially closes, so the property is never technically in their possession.

———

What is the end result?

The original seller receives less than what the property ends up being worth and the last buyer may be paying an inflated price, with the difference in value going to the real estate agent and the buyers in the middle.

———

A hypothetical example:

A real estate agent’s client reaches a deal to sell a property to an initial buyer for $1 million. The agent then takes that contract and resells it to a second buyer for $1.5 million. The agent in turn goes to a third and final buyer and sells the contract for $1.8 million. For each transaction the agent receives a commission. The initial seller receives $1 million minus the agent’s commission. The first buyer who bought the contract for the property for $1 million and sold it for $1.5 million pockets $500,000. The second buyer who bought the contract for $1.5 million and sold it for $1.8 million gets $300,000. The third buyer pays the land-transfer tax on the $1.8 million purchase price.

The post The obscure, legal loophole that lies at the heart of ‘shadow flipping’ appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

---

GUEST:

If you’ve been following the market for the last week, I’m sure you’ve noticed it’s been a pretty rough week for tech stocks. Two stocks, in particular, were hit unexpectedly hard this past Thursday: LinkedIn Corporation (NASDAQ: LNKD) and Tableau (NASDAQ: DATA) lost close to half their value over the span of 48 hours.

Misguided guidance

I’m not a financial analyst. I can’t advise you on stocks. But I can tell you that whatever financial analysts are saying is happening with tech stocks is a little off.

For starters, financial analysts tend to bundle anything that’s remotely connected to Cloud, Big Data, and So-Lo-Mo under the label of “Tech Stocks.” LinkedIn is a social platform. Tableau is an enterprise data software player. What’s happening to LinkedIn (and may be happening to Twitter if today’s fall in shares is indicative of a bigger drop to come) is different from what’s happening with Tableau. If you’re a buyer of technology, an entrepreneur or an investor, that’s important.

Analytics growth is far from over

Last week’s timing was particularly unfortunate for Tableau. The day the company took its most significant plunge, Gartner, a leading industry consultancy and analyst firm, released its iconic Magic Quadrant. (If you’re unfamiliar with the report, it is THE document of reference for buyers of Business Intelligence (BI) technology).

Tableau, which had reached exceptional levels in this report last year, was pulled down, closer to arch rivals Qliktech and Microsoft. One can only imagine how the story was spun in competitive circles, looking to point to Tableau’s weaknesses.

But take a closer look at the Gartner Magic Quadrant. Every vendor has moved down, including titans like SAP and IBM. Oracle is not even in the report this year. Microsoft has moved to the right, which, in Gartner’s vernacular, means they’re getting their strategy in order.

Why such a reset? The Business Intelligence and Data Analytics market is becoming intensely competitive, and Gartner is seeing a shift to bi-modal buying motions where both IT and business users are buying analytics solutions. What happens to a market when twice as many people participate? It grows! It has room to the upside, and Gartner had to clean up the top of the Quadrant.

It doesn’t take more than just reviewing Tableau’s earnings to see that the market has tremendous growth potential. The company, which beat its forecast estimates this past quarter, grew by close to 58% year-over-year. That’s more than 10 times the growth rate of the entire IT industry.

Business Intelligence might be one of the healthiest, fastest growing segments of the IT market. There is room for a massive upside. A potential upside could be using analytics tools in front of Hadoop. According to Forrester, 100% of enterprises will be onboarding Hadoop in the next 24 months. This market will be up for grabs soon. Don’t turn away from it too fast.

The Next Tableau?!

If you’re an entrepreneur, this should scream “business opportunity.” Enterprises have not been able to capitalize on the data stored in their databases. Business Intelligence helps solve that problem. According to Forrester, between 60% and 73% of data that enterprises have access to goes unused for business intelligence and analytics.

Every day we run into companies that claim to build a better Tableau or a “Tableau 2.0” (our company makes BI work on Hadoop).

There is a catch though. It takes a lot to build “another Tableau.” The company’s success didn’t happen overnight, and it certainly didn’t happen by raising hundreds of millions of dollars. It took Tableau 10 years to go public. The company raised $15 million in venture capital and is rumored to have spent very little of that money on its way to IPO.

When asked why, Tableau CEO Christian Chabot said that he had seen firsthand what happens to young companies that raise too much money too fast.

So, if you’re an entrepreneur and think that this downturn is your opportunity to build a “better Tableau,” just think hard about what you might be signing up for. It might be safer to simply buy some of their stock.

Dave Mariani is CEO and founder of AtScale.

If you belong to a B2B or B2C cloud-based companies, especially those in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry, you know how critical it is to get out in front of prospective customers during the fleeting decision-making stage.

It’s an industry of short sales cycles with complex products, acronym-laden jargon, freemium trials and ever-changing services that must be marketed precisely or you risk confusing your audience. It’s also an industry where inbound marketing can give you the strongest foothold for reaching your customers.

After all, if you’re marketing a SaaS product that isn’t tangible, your strategy shouldn’t be tangible either.

Who Should Your SaaS Company’s Inbound Marketing Strategy Target?

You’re communicating with IT Managers, IT professionals, CIOs and other decision-makers who are educating themselves and choosing which product or service will steer their organization’s latest business needs. To do this, a billboard or press release won’t be enough. You need to hit them where they live – online.

Inbound Marketing is, simply put, the antithesis of traditional (or outbound) marketing. Rather than buying ads or promotional space and hoping that someone calls, inbound marketing brings the visitors to the message. It revolves around creating interesting, educational content that attracts, engages and delights customers.

Inbound Marketing Keeps SaaS Companies in Front of Customers

HubSpot has determined that the worldwide software market has an estimated value of more than $400 billion. This is a huge customer base to reach by creating a well defined inbound marketing strategy for SaaS companies that has a careful balance of inbound content, product marketing and evangelism to help influence the buyer’s journey.

And don’t forget your current customers! Customer retention is critical in the SaaS industry. Gartner concluded that 80% of your future revenue comes from 20% of your current customers. Bain & Co did the math and realized that increasing your customer retention by just 5% can boost your profits by 75%.

So, how does a cloud company get the most from inbound marketing?

5 Key Inbound Marketing Features for the SaaS Industry:

1. Email Marketing:

A solid email marketing strategy is critical for nurturing your leads along the buyer’s journey. By qualifying your leads properly, you can send them the information they’re looking for and keep your blogs and newsletters on their radar.

2. Integration with Current Systems:

Whether you’re using Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM or another contact management system, make sure it can integrate easily with whatever platform you choose to manage your content.

3. Content Marketing:

You need to position your business as an educator and authority in the industry. Use your blog to publish helpful, optimized how-tos and guides while also providing commentary on updates and industry news. Your blog can carry the bulk of your call to actions like sign-ups, free trials, etc. Having an eBook library is another great way to share more in depth information and qualify your leads by gating them behind a simple form.

4. Customer Segmentation:

Also known as the right message for the right audience at the right time. Creating buyer personas that address your ideal customer’s motivations and values will help refine your content so it reaches the right audience and ultimately increases your conversions. Once those personas are defined, segment your lists and tailor specific messages to those groups.

5. Social:

You may not place much weight on social media, but your competitors do and they could be leading your customers and prospects towards the dark side. If you haven’t already, create a cohesive message across all of your social channels that ties to your overarching message on the website and blog. Show off your personality and expertise by communicating with clients and prospects within your industry community.

With each strategy, always be testing and retesting your approach.

The Dynamic Marketing Strategy to Satisfy a Dynamic Industry

Inbound marketing is the most cost-effective, efficient way to reach customers in the SaaS industry.

Besides improving your authority and creating more indexed pages across the Internet to garner positive search engine results, inbound marketing can be a great way to shine brighter than your competitors and extend your reach so you can change the conversation from how great your solution is to how it can benefit your prospects.

This post was originally published on the Leap Clixx marketing agency blog and has been republished with permission.

One by one, startups are having their strategic options taken away from them. 

A turbulent stock market means that it's a bad time for a startup, even a high-profile one, to hold its IPO. Meanwhile, venture capital firms are getting skittish about sinking more investment cash into startups, particularly those with more hype than revenue. 

There's always been a third option for startup founders: If you can't raise cash, and you can't go public, you can maybe sell yourself to a bigger company like Google, Microsoft, or Salesforce.

"Selling our company has always been a fallout plan, a plan B," said Todd McKinnon, CEO of $1 billion identity management startup Okta, on stage at an Andreessen Horowitiz-sponsored panel event today.

But fears of another recession means that even the biggest tech titans are hoarding their cash, and mergers and acquisition deals are on a serious lull until things work out. And even those that are still shopping (like Cisco and Salesforce) aren't going to be paying premium prices.

And other tech titans are distracted by mergers, such as Dell $67 billion buyout of enterprise IT giant EMC — a deal that is distracting big buyers like Dell, EMC and VMware these days.

This means a serious wake-up call for enterprise-focused startups, say the founders on the panel. 

Second option

As McKinnon explained, when Okta started in 2008 — with early funding from Andreessen Horowitz — it was one of a very few companies in its field, providing a way for businesses to give its employees one username and one password to log in to all of its various apps and web services.

Over the years, though, giants like Salesforce got into the market with a competing product to Okta. And Microsoft eventually grew out its enterprise-standard Active Directory tools to do much the same thing. 

"Oh s--t, at least maybe we can sell the company," McKinnon remembers thinking. 

Okta never intended to sell, McKinnon says. But when things weren't looking great competitively, he says that the executive team were always comforted that acquisition was an option that was pretty much always on the table. It took some of the pressure off.

"Well, at we have that M&A deal as a second option," McKinnon says. 

The changing market has taken that second option off the table, he says.

McKinnon marks 2014's IPO filing from cloud storage company Box as a watershed moment, when it was revealed that it was spending way more to bring on new customers than it was booking in revenue. The whole thing turned investors away from "people selling dollars for 80 cents," he says.

Box has had a strained relationship with Wall Street since that IPO, seemingly vindicating McKinnon's perspective.

The lesson Okta learned, he says, is that it needs to get its spending under control, trying to boost revenue while minimizing its spend. In other words, Okta had to stop acting like an outside company would save it, and to start acting like a company that's in this for the long haul, McKinnon says.

The benefit: In addition to generally being a much healthier company, Okta is now in acquisition talks with as many as four "little companies" whose price tags were too high before the market started to shift downwards.

Cockroaches

Suhail Doshi, CEO of $865 million data analytics startup Mixpanel, had a similar experience. Instead of asking how to keep growing, or how to raise cash, he says the real challenge at Mixpanel is figuring out "how to be a cockroach."

"The thing that happens when you're able to raise an ungodly amount of money," is that without discipline, "it's easy to spend a lot of it," Doshi says. 

Doshi should know: Mixpanel raised $65 million in late 2014, in a round led by Andreeseen Horowitz.

Amid the eternal talks over whether or not tech is in a bubble, Doshi says he went to a banker with whom Mixpanel had been doing business. He asked if he thought the financial world was heading for disaster, or if it were likely that Salesforce or Google would go on a spending spree and buy up Mixpanel if all else failed.

"Nobody is smart enough to recognize what is going to happen," the banker shrugged, Doshi recalls. 

What Doshi took away was that he couldn't plan for instant smash success, or for an acquisition, either. He had to get Mixpanel's spending under control, "bunkering in" for the long-term, and assuming that no reasonable option would exist in the short-term. 

Panel moderator Peter Levine, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, thinks that this actually makes for better companies, anyway. If your primary concern is building a company that looks good to a would-be buyer, you're probably neglecting other important aspects of the business.

"Whenever you build a company for [mergers and acquisitions], then guess what, it turns out to be a suboptimal company," Levine says.

SEE ALSO: If you're too young to remember the insanity of the dot-com bubble, check out these pictures

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Peter Thiel's 3 Keys For Building A Successful Startup

If you don't have goals, you are not doing digital analytics. You are doing i am wasting earth's precious oxygenalytics.

Let's back up. Let me start with a story.

[Sidebar] I'm experimenting with sharing short stories via an insightful newsletter. I'd love for you to sign up: The Marketing Analytics Intersect. Thanks! [/Sidebar]

Now, let's get back to the story.

We were brain storming about the next cluster of coolness for Analytics, the conversation quickly went to what Analysts need to look at on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. I started to outline a simple framework that stated that no one should look at anything daily (that should all be automated and run off automated or custom set thresholds – things don't really change materially on a daily basis), weekly should be based on stuff that borders reporting squirrel work and pinches of analysis ninja work, and monthly…. well super analysis ninja stuff. And, then I started to redefine what daily, weekly and monthly even means. From there, it is only a hop, skip and jump to the most deadly question in analytics….

What's the business solving for?

Everything came to a screeching halt. This beautiful daily, weekly, monthly blog post I was drafting in my head to share my excitement with you about thinking analysis differently went poof.

It pains me how critical it is to know what the heck we are solving for with our analytics, and how few people identify goals for their website (mobile or desktop). The reason is simple: If you don't know where you are going, you'll get somewhere and you'll be miserable.

We see this everyday. "Analysts" spewing data out left right and center, after spending so much time tagging and re-tagging and Google Tag Managering. Yet, few Marketers or executives take them seriously (because they don't know what the heck all that means to the business or their own paychecks!).

A vast majority of us out there are data rich, information poor.

: (

Starting today, let's renounce your citizenship in the land of nogloallandia! It sucks to be there.

I can report on pageviews and bounce rates and sessions and all the other lovely metrics we normally obsess about. Or, the foundation of my analysis for this blog can be this:

A much richer understanding about the eight things I'm solving for. Now, all those other metrics suddenly have a purpose and context. I can understand what I'm doing well, what I stink at and start making focused strategic choices about the actions I should take.

Amazing, right?

The number and type of goals we can set up for a business tend to be quite unique. Everyone, even direct competitors, are solving for something different. And, that is how it should be.

While I can't know all the goals you should set (and the economic value you should use for each goal), let me share with you five goals that every business, B2B or B2C, should set up in their analytics practice (in Google Analytics, IBM Analytics, Adobe Analytics, or whatever it is that you are high on right now). Starting today, no excuses for me to log into your Adobe Analytics account and see no goals and associated goal values!

Here's how this post unfolds…

In each case we'll learn in detail how to set up the goal, what type of data might we get from it that will be of value and get tips on what actions we can take.

Ready?

Higher-Order Bits: Location, Pan-Commerce, Re-framing.

Three important things to get going.

Location:

First, you'll need admin privileges for the GA account you have access to in order to create goals and input the goal values. If you do, click on Admin in the top nav in any GA page. Then click on Goals, and then on the red button that reads + New Goal.

You'll see this amazing screen where an entire world of possibilities awaits you!

We are going to use the standard choices above to set-up our Standard and Mandatory Goals for All Businesses (SMGAB!), and we'll also use the Custom option to set up some goals.

Pan-Commerce::

Second, very important thing to note is that you have to set up these, and more, goals regardless of if you have an ecommerce or non-ecommerce website. Most Analysts for ecommerce entities spend all their time with ecommerce data. The conversion rate for most website is around 2%. This implies that all that work, at best, solves for a local maxima – and with a short-term mental model. What about the other 98% that did not convert? Were they all wasted visits? No, of course not. Everyone is not on your website to convert instantly. Analyzing ecommerce conversions PLUS goals means we are going to solve for the global maxima.

Consider Macy's. Yes. They should obsess like crazy about ecommerce conversion rates. If that is all they do, they'll only solve for digital, only last-click and their website would be a constant garishness of BUY NOW WE ARE HAVING A ONE DAY SALE (everyday!). Yes, they would make money, but what's the difference between them and every other joe shomoe? If they solve for ecommerce conversion rates, and goals like requesting their catalog, signing up for their rewards programs, number of new accounts opened, product reviews written, credit card applications, wish-lists created….. I could keep going on and on, but I think you get my point.

Regardless of the type of website you have, you need to have goals set up and for each goal identify the economic value. If you don't, you are risking being prosecuted for criminal behavior!

[If you have an ecommerce website using GA, you should be usingEnhanced Ecommerce . It's a must.]

Re-framing::

Third, if you are a regular reader of this blog, you might have noticed that I don't use the term conversion a lot (unless I'm talking about ecommerce conversion rate). I like using the word outcome. This simple switchroo is to open your mind to all the possibilities that that word represents. I find the word conversions a bit repressive. Hence, analytics framework to represent end-to-end business measurement is called Acquisition – Behavior – Outcomes. Not Acquisition – Behavior – Conversions. You do the latter and the only thing people can imagine is ecommerce conversions. Lameness ensues.

Use the word outcomes.

Each site will have one big outcome that is more important than everything else. I call this the macro-outcome. I refer to other outcomes (think of the Macy's case above) as micro-outcomes.

With those two things out of the way, let's go have some fun.

1. "Destination Goal" (Leads, Email Signups, Etc.)

For ecommerce websites, the macro-outcome will be…. ecommerce conversion rate. Or, revenue or AOV, depending on what you've identified as supreme in your Digital Marketing and Measurement Model.

For numerous other types of websites, the macro-outcome will be a lead of some kind, or a contact us type form. Usually this is connected to the company making money, it might happen on the phone or via email or by someone walking into a physical location. It is imperative that we identify this as close to making money online as we can and set that as a goal. The goal type we'll use is technically called Destination Goal.

Here's the amazing thing, with Google Analytics you don't need to touch the javascript code you've set up to track your site. You can do it all in the Admin section (#freedomfromITteamisawesome). All you need is the destination to use in your goal, and it's quite easy to find.

Let's say you work at www.adobe.com and you've just started to use Google Analytics. Just go to the page where your company has the an important product, follow it to the lead-gen page , and fill out the form with any random information (as there is no in-line error checks):

Hitting the Submit button will take you to the thank you page. Just copy the URL of that page: https://www.adobe.com/products/request-consultation/thankyou.html?form_subtype=Request%20For%20Information

Now, go to the Admin section of GA, click on + New Goal and in the template choose Contact Us in the Inquiry section.

Give the goal a name you'll recognize.

And, here are the details that the Adobe team will fill out in their Google Analytics account…

They can simply hit Save and they are done! In a couple of hours, GA will start reporting incredible amounts of goodness around not just how many leads are being submitted, but what traffic sources those leads come from, how long does it take for someone to go from first visit to the site to submitting a lead, what content on the site is most likely to convince someone to submit a lead, and so, so, so much more.

Much better than guessing, right?

There is one item that should not be overlooked. You'll notice the button for Value is turned off. This is where the economic value of each lead goes. How do you get this magical number?

I have an extremely detailed post on the five detailed strategies you can use to calculate economic value. Applying the lesson from there…. The team at Adobe would get help from their CRM system to identify the conversion rate over the last, say, quarter of the digital leads. Furthermore, they will look at the average contract size for those deals. This then allows them to know the likelihood a lead will convert and for how much. It will allow them to identify the goal value of $1,000,000 for each lead submitted.

They'll simply turn the value button to On, and type the new goal value, and hit Save!

This is not a perfect number, every deal has its own nuance, every deal will be a bit more or bit less etc. Having an average goal value though helps us get to good enough. We could simply use clicks on AdWords ads as success or bounce rates or page views, but everyone of them is lamer than having access to datagasmic metrics like Per Visit Goal Value, Page Value and more. (Lots of detail on this in the last section of this blog post!).

That was not too hard, right?

Every website has this type of a macro-outcome. It is easy to identify, and setting up the goal only takes 90 seconds. You can go see how easy it is to find a destination URL on your website. Or, practice it on IBM, here's the lead-gen page.

Other macro-outcomes you can use, depending on the type of your business, are live chats, phone callback requests, downloads completed, wish-lists created, new accounts opened, and more.

Please ensure that regardless of the type of your website, you've identified a non-ecommerce macro-outcome and are tracking it with a specific goal value identified.

2. "Engagement Goal": Time Spent

As analysts we have an out-sized obsession with Acquisition and with Outcomes. Both are understandable (we have too many Marketers and the company wants money!). It does distress me a bit that we don't spend as much time analyzing Behavior. This the reason I love setting engagement goal types (remember though, don't call the metric Engagement, it's an excuse and not a metric).

Websites of all type should have a goal for a desirable (by the company) time spent on the site. If we have it, we can slice and dice it like crazy (where do these people come from, what content do they like, what internal searches drive more or less time spent, etc. etc.).

Setting a time spent goal is easy. Choose Custom in the goals template. Give it a name (I choose People We Should Love :))….

When you click continue, you are going to have to set a duration of time you consider to be desirable.

If you don't want to over think it, just go to the Overview report in Google Analytics and look at the trend for Average Session Duration….

You can do something as simple as choose a "little bit more than the average time". I know that sounds a bit cookoo, remember goals are not set for life and can change. Besides, you got nothing at the moment! :)

Just based on experience, and nothing else, I would simply add 50% more time to the average and use it as a goal. Path of least resistance.

Of course, we can always kick things up a notch. In your Audience folder in GA there is a Behavior sub-folder, and inside that you'll see the Engagement report. Checkout the wonderful distribution you see there for Session Duration….

When I'm setting a session duration engagement goal, I like looking for a point of inflection. Notice in my report above, three minutes seems to have some lovely happening. The pageviews ramp up quite a bit, and there is a big cluster of visits that also show that behavior.

This distribution allows me to set a much smarter three minutes as a desirable goal.

Of course, you can kick things up a few more notches. I'll usually create segments for the distributions you see above, and apply them to my Outcomes reports in GA to see if there is really a difference in the outcomes delivered to our business if people stay a longer or shorter amount of time. I always find surprises. Because I don't want to only solve for a local maxima, I also take into consider the impact of time on some of my main micro-outcomes. That helps me set a much smarter duration goal. In the above case, it turned out to be five and half minutes!

So. You have choices in how deep you want to go to get a more informed duration, but remember the most important part is to just get going and have a goal!

Here's the second part of my goal setting window….

You will notice I have identified an economic value for my duration goal. Remember to checkout my post on how to to calculate economic value.

The lesson applied in the above case was by leveraging AdSense revenue. In your case it could be tied to a number of other things that make you money on your mobile or desktop website.

Now that you have your goal set, you can look at trends and patterns in the data. For example, correlate this goal to others on the website….

Here's one thing you should be prepared for, if you put some thought into creating a duration goal: When you first plot Sessions and People We Should Love, you are going to cry. It is going to be very small.

The saving grace is, first, that you know and, second, while it won't be a lot of people, they are likely the most precious people. Prepare to wine and dine them.

3. "Engagement Goal": Pages Viewed

The third goal everyone should have is also an engagement goal, this time using pages viewed. While time is particularly important for sites with interactive elements, mobile apps and other such existences, pages is more accurate, and more relevant, for almost all types of sites. (Remember, time is not computed for sessions with just one hit and for the last page viewed in a session.)

You can use the same strategy as above to create a engagement goal based on pages viewed, by looking at the average trends for Pages/Session….

The other two recommendations above for duration also apply in this case.

Once you have identified the value you would like to use, if it it is I think I'll do 15% more than the average pages/session, just go the the Goal Details of this custom goal and type it in….

In so many cases, publishers for example, or this blog, I am very fond of pageviews as a goal to understand how many folks are exhibiting the desirable behavior. I feel that it is a bit more accurate representation of reality. And now that we can to Visitor based segmentation, we can do some really fun stuff once we have this goal set up.

4. "Micro-Outcome Goal": Key Events

This goal type is for those who have just a tiny bit more sophisticated implementation of analytics on their site. Events help us track so many things in a smart and scalable manner. Email sign-ups, comments submitted, video pay buttons clicked, add-to-carts, cross-word tiles moved, and on and on and on. The detailed Event Tracking Guide is a gift, digest it.

One micro-outcome that publishers, ecommerce sites, and I (!) can all track is comments submitted. They are incredibly valuable for some many reasons (loyalty, drive future sales, etc.).

It is pretty simple to set up the goal.

In the template you'll choose Custom and then choose Event…

As always the challenge will be, what goes on the next screen where you have to type the Category, Action or Label to use.

You can get this from your even tracking reports in the Behavior folder in Google Analytics….

In my case the label I'm using is focus comment. Type that in…. done….

For the events that I'm using I have also identified an Event Value, and I choose to use that as my Goal Value. The approach to calculate the economic value is the same as we did before. Don't let not being able to identify goal values as a barrier to not even setting up the goal (this is crazy important). I do recommend that you do it at some point soon after because the value is simply too big to ignore. Of my five recommended approaches to to calculate economic value, four and five don't even need all that much more work by you. Just do it.

Another event micro-outcome that is a fav of mine for many clients is tracking Live Chats…

Capturing this allows us to be immensely more clever about informing smarter Acquisition, Behavior and multiple-Outcomes for our businesses. Imagine just one as an example: Are your live chat agents more or less effective than your site by itself at up-selling and cross-selling? Every bone in your body is screaming: AGENTS! My dear, you would be surprised. Especially after you segment the data by Geo.

See what I mean, exciting analyses right?

5. "Macro-Outcome Goal": Outbound Clicks

We are back to macro, and a very good one (for publishers, non-profits, for-profits, and indeed everyone else).

But, first… I've tried really hard in this post not to make things complicated, I so badly want you to know how easy it is to get going, how very easy it is to unleash very smart data analysis using goals. I'm going to continue to do that by showing you the lamest way to track outbound clicks. Don't copy me.Track outbound links using the right way (automated via GTM or using hand-coded events). Do as I say, not as I do. :)

I love tracking outbound clicks. If people just exit our website, we know so little behind why they might have done it. But, if they leave following one of our links, that is either money for our business (from that outbound click directly or from where they are going), increased customer satisfaction, or at the very minimum valuable context related to their departure.

From those possibilities, one that applies to me here on this blog – surely you have similar use cases – are the links on the right (if you are using desktop, else bottom) that you click to exit to learn more about Market Motive (because you want a superb web analytics education and certification!) and my two books. In the simplest possible implementation of this, each time someone clicks on those links, it creates a pageview that it puts in a special folder (which can then be ignored easily in other analysis).

For me to track that click, all I need to do is create a destination goal…

I throw in the url of the pageview that is being collected, add the economic value that I've computed, and we are in business….

And how do we calculate economic value? You should read that post. :) But, summary…. You can see that those outbound links are tagged, in this case I'm connected to Market Motive and hence I can easily track the clicks and conversions happening online and offline (phone for us). That makes it easy to compute the economic value of each outbound click.

The links for my books that go to Amazon also have tracking parameters, in this case my Amazon affiliate-id. That then allows me to get the clicks, conversions, sales, and commission. I can use that to compute the economic value of every outbound click for my books. (As you all know, 100% of my proceeds from both my books, including affiliate cash, are donated to charity but that does not mean I don't track the success with total and complete passion.)

With my goal configured, I'm ready to step back and watch the money flow out. I mean in. I mean in! :)

Tracking outbound links should be default setting in your GTM account, and if you are not using GTM then leverage the manual firing of events (and use recommendation #4 above to set up your goals).

It is rare that we get to know where people go from our website, grab that info, you will find actionable insights in that data to influence both your Acquisition and Behavior strategies.

While we've covered five different examples of goals that should be standard on every single website on the planet. We've created them using four ways of setting our five goals. In them, it is my sincerest hope that you'll see in them all the permutations and combinations you can create for your own business. Without goals, you are simply messing around with data.

Benefits of Identifying Goals and Economic Value

I wanted to take a moment and share with you all the really cool reports you can get if you create the above five goals (or ones that resemble them for your business).

We all look at Visits and Visitors and our normal clump of metrics. Now. Now you get a lovely line to go with that. You can look at the Visits to your site (light blue) and compare that to the Economic Value (dark blue) created during that time period….

Outcomes, right there, with Acquisition.

In the case above, one does not seem to have anything to do with the other. That is bizarre, right? So, are you getting unqualified traffic? Or, is there something about your Paid strategy that seems to drive something different than your Owned and Earned strategies? Thus far, you would compare those three using impressions, clicks, bounces etc, now, even for non-ecommerce website, you have something material to compare them with, and dig deeper faster.

Because you've created relevant goals, you would of course start that journey by looking at your Owned, Earned and Paid media all in one place. Goal 6 below helps you understand something that you don't have access to by default in your standard reports. And, that last column, Per Session Goal value, is golden.

Suddenly you have something to judge the value of every visit to the site delivered from these sources. As you look at the distribution, you'll start to see clues as to where the pain and opportunities might be, giving the time you spend on analysis the most precious commodity of it all: focus.

As you contrast sessions, goal 6 completions, and PSGV, you'll likely want to understand the performance of the content on your site as there is such disparity across sources. This is when you'll need one of my favourite, and I believe under-used, metrics of them all, Page Value.

The simplest way to think about Page Value is that it measures how frequently a page appears in a session where goal, or ecommerce, value was delivered to your company. The more frequently the page appears, the postulation is that it must be a page that was helpful to the user. Not completely perfect, but I believe good enough to be of immense help to us all.

You can see above the disparities between each page. No, not using entrances of time, I mean in the Page Value. Finally you have a metric that looks at every bit of content with an eye towards the bottom-line. Thanks you having created goals and added goal values for them.

And if you are not excited about all this really cool stuff, I think I'm going to win you over with this…. Multi-Channel Funnel analysis! Yes! For you, even though you have a non-profit or non-ecommerce website! Pan-session analysis, baby!!

All you need to use the incredibly valuable MCF reports that focus on people and not on visits is…. Goals. :)

Start here, understand how every media channel plays ball with each other…

You can see that Direct and Organic Search work in conjunction, and almost all of the Social traffic you have seen before/after having seen them via Direct and a bit from Search. You finally have something to get your company to understand that obsessing about every visit is less productive, it is so much better to focus on every person and their behavior across sessions.

From there, it is a hop-skip-jump to perhaps my favourite standard report in Google Analytics, Assisted Conversions….

I adore this report because it is the only place in GA you'll see pan-session behavior of people across all of your Owned, Earned and Paid media channels in one place. The last column in this report is going to have a deep influence on your company's Acquisition strategy. From this report it is only one more step to multi-channel attribution analysis, and to using this information to change the messaging and sequencing of your messages across channels to deliver relevance to your current and future customers.

And, to think all of this comes from just creating a handful of goals.

That really is all it takes. Be expansive in that quest. For one of my medium-sized B2B clients, here are the goals we identified using my See-Think-Do-Care business framework. Using the framework makes it easier for us to ensure that we are solving for every cluster of intent out there.

I hope you can see easily how each of the gray box above uses one of the five strategies above to create all of them! For some of them we had to be creative, and it took some work, to identify the economic value. But, in a couple months everything was all set and the company is making smarter decisions. With the framing of See-Think-Do-Care we are solving for the customer, and yet you can see how deeply we are tying everything to the bottom-line. Win – Win.

Oh, one last thing, for the client above, a free gift from the Google Analytics team to us… Automated intelligence alerts when the economic value for each goal falls below the expected range of normal that GA expects….

How cool is it to automatically be alerted that economic values dropped by 22 and 20% respectively? Let me reframe that. How cool is it that GA can tell you that there is big trouble before your boss comes looking for you? Now, you can be prepared with causality answers before she shows up in your office all freaked out.

That my dear is how you get a raise. By having goals. :)

As always, it is your turn now.

Do you have goals set up for your website? Are they strategic or tactical? Do you have them clustered using See-Think-Do-Care? Would you please share some of your favourite goals? Do you have examples of how using goals transformed your ability to understand performance? Do all your goals have clearly identified economic values? If you've struggled with computing value for a particular goal, what was the goal? Any tips on how the rest of us can better at computing economic value?

Your kind guidance, feedback, tips, critique and examples will help all of us in the community win a little more, please share via comments below.

Thank you.

Rock Analytics More: Obsess About Goals And Goal Values! is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

In part one, we looked at how to encourage the prospect to share more meaningful information that leads to a mutually beneficial outcome. In this post we’ll look at two common, usually unintended mistakes sales people make. Today we’ll look at two other things to avoid.

Stop asking the obvious – While most sales people have bought into the idea that you catch more sales with questions than pitches, there is more to it than just “asking questions”. Buyers, influencers and executives are looking for different ideas and answers than the same old, we’ve all heard that they have more access than ever to information, what they are seeking is knowledge. The questions you ask, very much set the expectation of your worth and that of your potential offering. It is true that less sellers than ever are asking people what keeps them up at night, but many questions they hear over and over again, signal to them that they are speaking to someone no different than the last 10 sellers, even if the swag is better.

Many of the questions used by sellers, and encouraged by pundits, are very transparent in their nature and intent. All seem to be geared to get the prospect to yell “uncle”, and allow the rep to roll out their “solution”. Abetter course, is to formulate a set of questions aimed at identifying, understanding and addressing the buyer’s objectives. This however takes work, and is more difficult for many sellers and pundits, to leave your product or solution out of the entire discussion; to leave your product in the car, especially early when the buyer is evaluating you more than your solution.

The difference buyers look for is not in the product, but in how it is sold. If you are truly different, you can show it in your sales approach, but when you ask the same questions every other seller asks, what’s the difference?

Don’t focus only on the Grand Poohbah – Sales people are always told to focus on the decision maker, unfortunately that title does not appear on many business cards, directories or LinkedIn. As a result, many default to equate the executive ‘C Suite’ to decision maker. This of course drive behaviour. Sellers go hunting for executives, and when in a group or committee selling setting they focus a disproportionate amount of focus strictly on the executive, the senior person in the room, the Grand Poohbah, mistake.

There is no doubt you need to get their buy in and support, but there is a difference in approving a decision and making one, and with few exceptions, the Grand Poohbah is more likely to approve than make. They look to their teams to make the recommendation, in essence the decision, and often those people have teams doing the leg work and who have the understanding of what the product does and how. Senior people, being focused on objectives, are more likely focused on the outcomes, generally from an implementation that encompasses many products, most of which they are unaware of.

When presenting to a group, or working multiple conversations in a company, do over bet the executive, while they may like you and what you offer, they will look to their people to make a decision, and will rarely over rule them just because they like you or the colour of your widget vs. the next. Helping them understand that you can deliver outcomes that drive their objectives is great, but if the implementation team shows them they can deliver the same using something they prefer for whatever reason, you could be beat.

Think team coverage, think of selling to the organization’s objectives, and while you do what to acknowledge the Grand Poohbah and their importance, don’t forget the people who make the magic happen.

Become one of the thousands of sales professionals receiving my latest updates on sales execution, tools, tips and more.   

Join Now!

Legacy salespeople have always been too focused on closing the sale, and not focused enough on ensuring customer success. In days past, buyers had little recourse if oversold or under-serviced. But today, with the buyer's ability to publicly criticize poor service or product quality as well as go online and quickly find an alternative product or service, modern sellers must shift their focus towards ensuring customer success. Otherwise, buyer's remorse can quickly turns to seller's remorse.

So how do you ensure a positive customer experience -- or at least avoid a negative one? Sellers must take full responsibility for setting proper expectations during the sales process. Failing to set proper expectations is the biggest mistake salespeople make that leads to lost customers. 

That's easier said than done when trying to make the sale. But it’s not impossible. Below, I've shared four steps I recommend every seller take to set proper expectations. I've also shared two stories that reinforce the importance of this four-step process.

If you are routinely dealing with pissed-off customers, these steps might save your career or business. If you'd like to seriously boost your productivity and profitability, adhering to these steps should help you have longer-lasting customer relationships and earn you significantly more referrals.

4 Steps to Correctly Set Prospect Expectations in the Sales Process

 1) Define personas and identify good fits.

Your first step is to ensure you're focused on the right prospects. While this is important for all businesses, it's especially critical in a recurring revenue software-as-a-service (SaaS) business like HubSpot.

In our early days, we were hesitant to commit to one persona. Our product worked well for multiple customer profiles including very small business (VSB) owners as well as in-house marketers working at small and mid-market companies (SMB). But when the recession hit in 2007-08, our cancellation rate spiked among our VSB customers, many of them citing "business failure" as the reason. This forced us to put more energy towards our in-house marketer persona. We were lucky to have a fallback, but we may have avoided this scary situation altogether if we focused from the start on the persona that was a better fit for our service.

And you might not be so lucky if you don't deliberately define your ideal client profiles, and think about how to ensure their success. We've written extensively about defining personas, so I won't rehash that here. But if you haven't done so already, I highly recommend you grab the nearest marketer and this buyer persona template and get to work.

P.S.: If you're interested in reading more about HubSpot's persona decisions as you define yours (or pick the right ones to focus on), here's a fictionalized version of the scenario written as a Harvard Business Review case.

2) Make a checklist of disqualifiers.

There are some prospects you just can't help. Not every prospect should buy your product or service. That may sound shocking. But if you’re being honest, there are many reasons some prospects shouldn't buy from you.

They might be too big or too small, too beginner or too advanced. They might not have time to implement your solution or not enough time to wait to see ROI. They might have standards you can't match, or your product could be overkill for their simple needs. In short, your product or service just might not be the right one for their job.

Sellers who realize that signing a bad customer costs them more than it makes them take on the responsibility of determining fit. They know it's their job to figure out why a prospect shouldn't buy from them as much as they need to figure out why one should. They’re not afraid to disqualify prospects who won't be successful in the long run. 

In the early days of HubSpot, small business customers purchased our software and training program with the best intentions of learning and implementing inbound marketing for their business. But inevitably, for some businesses, things got in the way of them doing the work required to be successful.

After studying common cancellation reasons, we discovered three factors that prevented customer success. We called these the three C's: Content, Conversion, and Commitment [of time]. If you became a customer back in the day, you might remember getting a bit of a lecture from one of our salespeople that went something like this, "Let's not do this unless you're really ready. You must be committed to doing your internet marketing for at least 15 hours per week. You must be focused on generating conversions (e.g., leads) not just traffic. Finally, you must be willing and able to write quality content. Do you think you can handle all of that?"

As a salesperson, you might read that and say to yourself, "That's a sure-fire recipe for turning away prospects." And we certainly got some pushback when we rolled this out to our sales team. But the results were overwhelmingly positive. Not only did we scare away very few prospects, our honesty earned us respect from many customers. This was especially refreshing for prospects during a time when search engine optimization hucksters were promising riches from page one Google rankings they claimed they could produce overnight.

While most salespeople love the thrill of closing a deal, signing on the wrong customer often does more harm than good. To avoid this, make a checklist of disqualifiers and don’t deviate from them. You might even be able to determine if a prospect is qualified before you ever call, and in those cases, don't bother calling.

3) Discuss what a successful relationship looks like.

Most sales experts will tell you that it’s bad practice to sell against yourself by bringing up reasons a customer won't be successful. That might have been true when sellers had all of the control and buyers had few alternatives. But in today's seller-beware world, I completely disagree. Long-term trust is far more important than short-term sales. You can always get sales and referrals if you have trust, while poorly sold deals lead to distrust and a negative reputation.

At HubSpot, when we disqualified using the "three C's", it actually sounded a bit more tactful than the example paragraph I included above. In reality, we spent time educating prospects as to why the three C's were important. For example, before we told them they needed to be focused on lead generation conversions instead of just traffic growth, we'd ask them why they wanted to grow traffic in the first place.

It sounded something like the following:

Prospect: I'm trying to figure out how to get more website traffic.
Salesperson: How much traffic do you have now?
Prospect: About 2,000 visitors per month.
Salesperson: What do you hope your visitors do when they get to your website?
Prospect: I'd like them to reach out to talk to us about our services.
Salesperson: How many leads do you get per month from your website now?
Prospect: We don't measure it very well. But, I'd guess it's about five leads per month now.
Salesperson: We can talk about growing traffic, but I might have an easier way to help you. Would you be interested in learning about how you could generate more quality leads from your existing traffic?
Prospect: Yes.
Salesperson: There are a few steps to it that I can walk you through. But, before we do that, let me understand your goals a bit. If you do lead generation on your website differently, it should not be difficult to get at least 2% of your traffic to convert into qualified leads. So that would be closer to 40 leads per month. How would that impact your business?
Prospect: That would be game-changing for us.
Salesperson: I imagine it would. Do you think that'd be easier than growing your traffic to 16,000 visitors?
Prospect: That certainly does sound easier.

At some point, we'd walk them through exactly how they could generate leads more effectively. Many companies do this effectively now. But, in 2008, only a few knew about this approach, let alone knew how successful it could be.

My main point of telling this story is to impress upon you that prospects don't usually know best. This isn’t a knock on their competence -- it’s a function of practice. It is your job as a salesperson to show your prospects what a successful relationship looks like. They may have never hired a company like yours, or if they have, they may have gone through a similar buying process only a few times. You and your company, on the other hand, have most likely gone through the selling process hundreds or thousands of times.

Despite prospects having ample information at their fingertips these days, you're still in a much better position to define what a successful customer relationship looks like. So, learn how to have the conversation.

4) Ask your customers if they are happy.

This one is obvious, but it's frequently overlooked. Most of the time, salespeople are so focused on what's next -- next month's quota, the next new customer, the next promotion -- that they forget to make sure the last customer was satisfied. Salespeople forget to check in to make sure expectations were met -- or hopefully exceeded.

This leads me to a more recent story that demonstrates what happens when salespeople don't follow the four pieces of advice above.

Why I Fired My Snow Plow Company

We recently purchased a new home with a fairly large driveway; about 10 car lengths in total. Sans snowblower, we hired a snow removal service. After repeated late arrivals, horrible expectation setting, and a threatening note, I decided to fire the company.

Before we hired them, though, we contacted a few different snow plow companies. We hired these guys because they were the most responsive. To give us a quote, a young man (who I later realized was the kid operating the shovel) came out to inspect our driveway.

It was clear he wasn't there to close the deal. He simply asked enough questions so that the owner could come up with a quote back at the office. He asked me what needed to be cleared: The driveway? The cars? The sidewalks? He asked if we wanted salt. In effect, he was figuring out our scope of work so the company could provide a quote. To be fair, this was better than anyone else. Most companies didn't even get back to us.

When the first storm finished, hours went by … and no news from them. So, I started shoveling. They showed up when I was halfway done and finished the job. We paid their full bill promptly.

After the second storm, I had actually finished shoveling by the time they got there. Pretty pissed off, I waved them on. I yelled, "You're too late!" but I can't imagine they heard me as the driver barely pumped the brakes. No bill came.

The third storm came in the evening, so they showed up as I was just getting started in the morning. I helped do some shoveling as one guy shoveled and the other snowblowed most of the driveway. At this point, through some conversation with them, I found out that we were near the very end of their route, as I suspected. We paid their full bill promptly again.

In the most recent storm -- the heaviest of them all so far this winter -- my wife emailed to ask when they would be arriving at our house, but all we got was a vague “they’re on their way.” Five hours after the storm was over, I finished the job and emailed saying there was no need for them to come. There was a clear pattern here, and I was unsatisfied.

That's when I received a rather direct note.  

To which I replied:

And his response:

While his language is professional, his approach to selling is far from it. Also, he lost a customer that he could have made happy with just a few simple questions. He bypassed each of the four steps above.

Step by step, here's what he could have done do keep me as a customer. Perhaps this can provide a template for you to avoid the same mistakes.

1) Define Personas

Their ideal client profile seems to be someone who needs their service much more than I do -- someone with medical needs or who needs to be in the office every day at a specific time. Clearly, they prioritize these people, so perhaps that should be their sole focus.

Most likely, though, a small town plowing service cannot survive on emergencies alone. In fact, I'm guessing every job they do increases profit quite considerably since they probably need to amortize heavy upfront investments in equipment.

While I never thought of them as backup, I don't mind shoveling the driveway. It's good exercise. Plus, when I get started, I don't like to stop until the job is done. Maybe it's a bit of a stretch to suggest that a plowing service should define multiple personas, but my guess is there are quite a few people that might benefit from a "backup" plan. They might even pay for it just like I pay a monthly fee for priority service in case our heater breaks down. I would definitely pay more if there were a premium plan that offered me priority service.

I see three potential personas: Emergency Eddie, Backup Billy and Impatient Priority Pete. (In case you didn't know, the first rule of personas is that they must always have a descriptor and a first name that starts with the same letter.)

2) Identify Disqualifiers

When we initially met for a consultation, there was no mention of disqualifiers. I was not asked about my ability to shovel the driveway myself. There was no mention of a cancellation policy or a required payment per storm. This was not part of our conversation, nor was it part of the contract. When they came out to give me a quote and I said that I would clean off the cars, shovel the walkways, and put my own salt down, perhaps they should have realized I might be Backup Billy or Priority Pete and brought up these disqualifiers.

A simple explanation of their routes before we signed the contract probably would have solved the entire issue. Something like, "You are closer to the end of our route and we always prioritize emergency jobs over non-emergencies. Is it okay if we arrive four to six hours after a storm is over?" probably would have elicited a response from me to the effect of, "Is there any way I can cancel the service if I do the shoveling myself?"

3) Discuss Criteria of a Successful Relationship

Besides being unwilling (or unprepared) to disqualify me, they made no attempt to define what a successful relationship looked like. Clearly I pissed them off by shoveling my driveway myself. From my perspective , where they really screwed up was in not communicating that I'd be at the end of the route -- or how they prioritize their route based on need or requests. To me, waiting five hours to get snow removed from my driveway isn't acceptable. But if I could have requested priority service when I needed it or had the option to cancel when I didn’t, I'd probably still be a customer.

Defining personas and creating a list of disqualifiers are necessary steps to prepare for exploratory conversations with prospects. And during that conversation, it's critical to define what a successful relationship sounds like.

Here's the conversation the plow guy should have had with me: 

Salesperson: Hey Pete. I understand you're looking for a plowing service. Are you new to the neighborhood?
Me: Yes. We just moved into the house in May. We would like to hire someone to help us with plowing.
Salesperson: Welcome to town, Pete. Can I ask you a few questions to figure out how to best serve you?
Me: Yes, of course.
Salesperson: Great. Let's first get a scope on the job. What were you looking for us to do? Just the driveway, clean off the cars, the sidewalk? Anywhere else around the house? Do you want us to put down salt? [These were the questions they did ask.]
Me: I will take care of cleaning off the cars and putting down salt. But I would like you to do the driveway and the walkways.
Salesperson: Okay. Would you like us to use the plow or the snowblower for the driveway? I think the snowblower would be better given your pavement is uneven. [We didn't have this conversation until after the first time they plowed.]
Me: I'm not too worried about it. I can shovel what the plow misses. I just need someone to clear it when there is a big storm.
Salesperson: Okay. No problem. Our fee will be $60 per storm. Do you have any questions for me?
Me: I don't think so. Should I be asking any more questions?
Salesperson: I have a few more for you just to make sure this is the right fit. But before I ask them, assuming that we are a good mutual fit, are you prepared to make a decision and sign our contract today?
Me: Yes. I'd like to have this crossed off the list.
Salesperson: I understand that. Okay if I ask a few more questions to make sure we have all of the T's crossed and I's dotted? [Note: They didn't have any more questions. They stopped here and sent us a quote.]
Me: Yes. I appreciate thoroughness.
Salesperson: We prioritize emergencies and health-related issues first. For example, we had one client call us in the middle of the storm as an ambulance was heading to her house. If you have an emergency, you can call us at 555-5555.
Me: Thank you. That gives me peace of mind.
Salesperson: Then, we try our best to solve for other requests. For example, we have a doctor that needs to get out of her driveway every morning at 7 a.m. to get to the office. Will you need that level of service?
Me: No. We'll be fine. We can park at the end of the driveway, I can shovel if needed, and we have a four-wheel drive vehicle. Plus, I can work at home when there is a storm.
Salesperson: From there we try to optimize based on a route so that we're not driving back and forth across town. Unfortunately, you're probably going to be closer to the end of our route. Will that be an issue?
Me: Probably not. For most storms, I'll clean off the car and probably start shoveling the driveway anyways. I don't mind the exercise. I view this service as backup and something to help with bigger storms.
Salesperson: Well, we'll probably be here four to six hours after the storm is over. If the storm ends at night and you're sleeping, you’ll wake up to a clear driveway. But if it ends in the evening after you're done working, do you still going to want us to come or do you think you'll do it yourself?
Me: I'd still want you to come.
Salesperson: Okay. Well, we also have a cancellation policy that I should let you know about. If you don't need our service, we need you to notify us no later than three hours after the storm starts. When you give us warning, it avoids us driving over to your house, wasting gas and time. In these cases, we won't bill you. If you'd like us to come no matter what, but you cancel when we arrive, we will bill you only $50 for the lost time and materials. Is that okay?
Me: Yes. That seems fair. A bit steep of a cancellation fee, but I don't mind calling if I don't need your service.
Salesperson: One other option would be to call us when you need service. We can’t guarantee capacity and this fee would be higher given the extra cost of coordination.
Me: I’ll go with the $60 per storm plan and call you in time if we don’t need service.
Salesperson: Okay. Sounds great. Here's our agreement. Do you have any other questions before signing?

As you can see, this conversation covered all of the issues that arose. I still would have signed the contract. 

4) Gauge Customer Happiness

Lastly, the biggest mistake they made was failing to ask an adequate number of questions about what would make me happy and our relationship successful. From the start of the relationship to the end, it was all about them and their needs instead of my needs or my satisfaction. 

The email that triggered me to cancel the service should have never been sent. First of all, it should have been a phone call. Second, it should have started with, "Are you happy with our service when we are able to provide it? Is there anything you'd like us to do differently?" If they listened to me and then brought up their issues, I would have understood and I imagine we could have worked something out. Those two simple questions would have prevented the cancellation. If I was simply asked my thoughts before I was told about their problems, I would have reacted very differently.

Stop Losing Customers Because of This Simple Sales Mistake

Hopefully, whether you sell software, snow plowing services, or something else, these two stories can help you avoid losing customers. This four-step process will help you set better expectations leading to happier customers and successful long term relationships. 

Acquiring customers is expensive, but so is losing customers. Poorly setting expectations about what a successful relationship looks like is a simple mistake that costs you customers. Follow this four-step process to avoid it in your career and your business: define your personas, create a list of disqualifiers, discuss what a successful relationship looks like with your prospects, and always ask your customers how they are doing.

Happy, successful customers will not only stick with you for a long time, but they will also be your best source of best fit customers, as they know exactly how to spot and refer people just like themselves.

You’re an early-stage B2B company and you’ve had some success landing a few accounts. Well done! But, now you’re faced with a difficult question: “Should I hire more salespeople?”

If you hire your sales team before your company is ready, it could be an extremely costly mistake. Wait too long and your competition might swoop in and steal business that could have been yours. To paraphrase one of the great philosophers of 1989, Big Daddy Kane, “Scalin’ sales ain’t easy.” Of course, he didn’t use the word “scalin’” and he wasn’t actually talking about growing a business, but you get the point. Knowing when to scale your sales team is hard. Harder still is figuring out how to scale once you’re ready to do so.

I’ve helped several organizations scale and I’ve always found myself asking the same three basic questions before deciding to grow the team. Keep in mind, this isn’t an exact science, but these questions can provide an excellent starting point.

Who is your target customer?

Know who you’re targeting. Does this sounds insanely basic? That’s because it is. It is also one of the hardest things to figure out when you start to scale. Once you answer this question, you’re not finished — this is something you’re going to continue to refine as your organization grows and your product evolves.

So, why does this matter? Focus. As you start to add salespeople to your company, you’ll want to provide them with the focus they need to spend their time effectively. If they don’t know who a typical buyer is, they’ll waste time selling to people who aren’t qualified. There is no greater way to build a bloated, ineffective pipeline than to sell to people who aren’t truly qualified buyers.

Focus impacts everything you do from pricing, to value proposition, to the size of the actual sales team you build.

What is your value proposition?

Again, this seems simple. If you have a product, of course you must know its value proposition! When you’re scaling a sales team, you need to make sure that they too understand the basic benefit your product provides. What is the pain your solution resolves?

Your value proposition will come into focus after you’ve defined your target customer. I recommend speaking with 50 to 100 potential buyers. Never forget that a customer is just a person; we all know how much people love to talk about their problems. Developing the discipline to listen without bias or pre-formulated answers is the hard part.

You want to arm your sales team with as much information and direction as possible prior to having them sell. It is possible for them to figure out your value proposition on their own (and they will help refine it and improve it over time) but you don’t want them to spend their selling time doing that. You want them focused on selling!

How are you going to feed the beast? Have you thought about the top of funnel?

Let’s assume you’ve figured out who you’re selling to and what your value proposition is. Depending on how quickly you want to scale your sales team, you need to ask the question, “How will I feed my sales team?”

Earlier in my career, I helped scale the inside sales team for a cleantech company. As the team grew (we went from five inside salespeople to a team of twenty in less than a year) we ran into a common problem: not enough leads. There’s nothing sadder than a BDR with no one to call. We quickly created a lead generation team and started to feed the growing sales team.

If you’re going to scale your sales team, take a look at your sales funnel and determine which channels you can use in order to generate leads for your team to contact. This could involve list buys, inbound lead generation, trade shows, Google Adwords, Facebook, direct mail, content marketing…whatever. Just have a plan for how you’re going to make sure the top of the funnel is filled!

Hopefully, these three questions will help make a difficult process a bit easier. Just remember that your sales team is only as good as the leads you feed them. So if you’re spinning up sales without a clear marketing plan, you might want to rethink your plans for growth.

The post Scaling Your Sales Team: Determining the Right Time to Grow appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Smartphones. Marketing. Phone calls. Three separate elements, yet when combined together highlight a trend in the number of customer engagements marketers will have to optimize: BIA/Kelsey predicts that mobile marketing will drive 162 billion calls to US businesses by 2019.

That makes call tracking critical for the modern marketer. And these 10 benefits prove it.

10. No Change In What You’re Already Doing

Most marketers today already optimize their marketing. Whether it’s as simple as seeing how many sales come from a specific campaign, or as complex as bidding on different keywords and phrases in your paid search strategy – marketers get it. Optimization is an important factor in improving ROI.

So with call tracking there’s no change in what you’re already doing – you’re just doing more of it. Calls give you one more point of engagement you can use to optimize your marketing.

9. Track Calls Like You Do Clicks

So you already track click-through rate, content downloads, app downloads, and more. Great! Call tracking allows you to do the same thing to understand which marketing sources are generating calls for your business. Even better! (You can even integrate call data into tools like Google Universal Analytics so you can see calls right next to your clicks.)

8. Track Calls Back to Keyword Searches

In 2015, Google reported that more searches now occur on mobile devices than on desktop. Combined with an increase in calls from mobile marketing, it’s more important than ever for marketers to be able to understand which keywords are driving people to call (whether it’s made from a Google call extension, call-only ad, or search landing page). Call tracking helps you do this.

7. Receive Rich Caller Metadata

Session-level call tracking offers a treasure-trove of information for data-driven marketers (and what marketer is going to say “no” to more data?). You can see a caller’s phone number, geographic location, the content they viewed on your website, and more.

6. Measure Effectiveness of Web Content

By tracking a caller’s activity on your website you can better understand the path they took before calling you. What content did they view? How much time did they spend viewing it? What ultimately drove them to place a call? Get insight into how your web content converts visitors into phone leads.

5. Conduct More Robust A/B Tests

Here’s another area where call tracking helps you do more of what you’re already doing. Call tracking is essential to conducting more robust A/B tests. By including calls, you’re adding another variable (another customer engagement point) into the testing of your emails, ad copy, landing pages, etc. By not accounting for calls, you may not be choosing the best version.

4. Integrate With Existing Tools

Chances are you’re already using other platforms and tools to optimize your marketing – call tracking data integrates into them seamlessly. You can track phone leads through the sales cycle with CRM integration, use call data to optimize keyword bidding in bid management tools, see calls next to clicks and other engagement points in your web analytics platforms, and more.

3. Get Credit for Every Conversion

For industries with considered purchases, where calls are an important part of the customer journey, it’s critical to account for every conversion – especially calls. That way you can prove the true ROI of your marketing initiatives to your CEO.

And if you’re an agency, you already know how important it is to get credit for every conversion you generate for clients. With more inbound calls being driven from mobile marketing, it’s time to make call tracking a staple in your attribution mix.

2. Measure the Full Customer Lifecycle

Today’s consumer is engagement-agnostic – they will engage with a business on desktop, mobile devices, in person, and over the phone at any point in the customer lifecycle. Marketers need to be able to measure and attribute every one of these points of engagement, including the conversations they have with consumers over the phone. Call tracking plays a crucial role in helping marketers understand the complete path their customers take to purchase.

1. Accurately Optimize Marketing Campaigns

DialogTech Insights research found that marketers who fail to include calls could be missing half of their conversions. If you can’t measure call conversions, how can you confidently invest in your marketing campaigns? Only when you can account for every conversion in the customer lifecycle can you accurately optimize your marketing for what works – and eliminate what doesn’t.

CALGARY – The family farm is going high-tech.

From robotic milking machines to data-gathering drones, industry watchers say technology is making agriculture more precise and efficient as farmers push for increased profits and yields.

“There’s a whole confluence of technologies that are adding a lot of value on the farm quickly,” said Aki Georgacacos, co-founder of Calgary-based Avrio Capital.

The venture capital firm focuses on agriculture and food innovations, and Georgacacos says changes like fine-detailed mapping and sensors for everything from soil moisture to fuel use are just beginning.

“We’re not even scratching the surface,” he said, adding an older generation of farmers have been slow to adopt new techniques.

But that’s changing.

“Right now we’re at a bit of an inflection point, where we’ve moved beyond early adopters and we’re moving now into fast followers, and so we’re getting to a point where the rate at which some of this technology is accepted is accelerating.”

On Monday, Avrio Capital finished raising $110 million in late-stage venture capital that it plans to invest in the next wave of farm-tech companies.

One of them is Fredericton, N.B.-based Resson Aerospace, which has developed drone-based crop monitoring to know when fields need to be sprayed or watered.

Another is Winnipeg-based Farmers Edge, which 10 years ago was based out of Wade Barnes’s basement in rural Manitoba, where he and co-founder Curtis MacKinnon were pushing to make local farms more efficient.

Barnes started introducing farmers to technology that allowed them to apply varying amounts of fertilizer on their fields depending on where it was most needed.

“That was quite revolutionary back in 2005,” Barnes said in an interview.

Today, the company has evolved into what Barnes says is one of the biggest in the world working in farm data management, using cloud computing to crunch numbers from soil sensors, satellite imagery, weather stations and other inputs to make farms more efficient.

in January, Farmers Edge secured a $58 million investment from investors including Japanese conglomerate Mitsui & Co. and Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

“The next big revolution in agriculture is big data,” said Barnes from southern Russia, where he was setting up another satellite office for the company now operating on four continents.

Already, he said, farmers are seeing 30 per cent increases in productivity by using the data available, and the technology is only getting more accessible. A system that five years ago would have cost $15 to $25 an acre now costs under $5, said Barnes.

Cheaper technology and advancements in productivity are more important than ever as pressure mounts on the world’s food systems, says Viacheslav Adamchuk, an associate professor in McGill University’s bioresource engineering department.

“We are not going to see more arable land; land is all allocated. The population is growing, the climate is changing,” he said.

Adamchuk’s research has focused on sensor technology in farming, which he says has come down dramatically in price in recent years while at the same time growing in precision.

He estimates that farmers can shave off at least 10 per cent — and upwards of 40 per cent — of their input costs on things like fertilizer, seeds and water thanks to global positioning systems and sensors that allow them to use those resources only where needed.

“You can maintain the same yield with less inputs,” said Adamchuk.

Stan Blade, dean of the University of Alberta’s faculty of agricultural, life and environmental sciences, says innovation is key for the future of farming.

“The farmers who succeed are the ones who are going to incorporate new technologies,” he said.

“Auto-steered tractors, yield monitors on combines — I mean we’re all using those things now because it just makes us that much more efficient. They decrease labour, they make things more efficient, they make things safer, so it just presents a whole array of new opportunities for producers that are involved in generating these yields.”

The post Agriculture industry betting the farm on innovation to boost yields and profits appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Every salesperson has their own style. The techniques reps develop during their careers dictate whether or not they effectively prospect, connect with buyers, and reach quota.

However, some strategies are more effective than others. A handful of traditional sales techniques in use today are well past their prime, and losing efficacy fast.  So which tactics should you aim to master in 2016? And better yet, which techniques should be avoided?

Below are seven sales strategies that are losing their effectiveness with the modern day buyer.

1) Cold Calling

Cold calling is the process of calling prospects you don’t know anything about and have no reason to believe they’d be interested in what you’re selling, and pitching your product. Sales reps use this strategy because they believe the more calls they make, the more likely someone will return their call and show interest in their product. 

However, research has revealed it takes an average of eight cold attempts to connect with a prospect, while only 2% of cold calls result in a meeting. Although calling hundreds of people and taking a high-volume approach seems like it would work out in the long run, wasting valuable time dialing 100 people 800 times and securing only two meetings isn’t ideal.

Instead of cold calling, take a more targeted approach by limiting your outreach to prospects who closely match your ideal buyer persona or have demonstrated interest in your product. Through research, thorough discovery, online interactions, and mutual connections, your first call to a prospect should be warm, not cold. Remember: It’s okay to call a prospect you haven’t met in person, but you have to do it correctly. 

2) Buying Prospects

Instead of developing a pipeline of inbound leads and good fit buyers, some sales teams rely on purchasing lists of prospects from a third party. Proponents of this approach believe that sales is a numbers game -- the more calls you make to more people, the more deals you will close. Why not just buy a list and let salespeople hit the phones?

While this tactic provides you with a “full” pipeline, likely only a few -- if any -- of these prospects are actually interested in your offering. Buying a list provides you with leads fast, but often results in salespeople wasting their time with poor fit prospects. And while you’re chasing down ice cold leads, hot prospects visiting the company’s website are often ignored. 

In addition, modern salespeople need to be mindful of the prospect experience -- and being a name on a purchased list is pretty terrible.  When a salesperson cold calls a purchased lead, the buyer on the other end of the line now has to waste their valuable time hearing about a product of no interest.  For both the buyer and seller, this is a rotten experience. 

Filling your sales pipeline can be difficult, but purchasing a list and pulling cold leads to you isn’t the best answer. Instead, by creating and sharing content of interest to your potential buyers, engaging with thought leaders in your industry, and actively contributing on social media channels your buyers use, you can attract prospects. There are likely thousands of people talking about a problem your product can solve. Find them and start a dialogue. 

3) Qualifying Solely by LinkedIn Titles

LinkedIn is a tremendous platform for prospecting. The social network enables reps to search for specific prospects based on a range of criteria, such as title, location, company size, etc. However, some reps search for a given LinkedIn title, surface a number of profiles, and stop there. Instead of doing additional research, they assume all CEOs or VPs are interested in their product, and the very fact that a person has this title makes them qualified.

Instead of qualifying prospects based on their job title alone, sales reps should perform additional research in order to put together a lead list full of truly interested prospects. Priority should go to prospects who have actively demonstrated interest in your product through taking certain actions, such as requesting a trial or visiting a pricing page. Reaching out as effectively and efficiently as possible to these leads is critical. 

4) Mass Email Blasts 

Similar to cold calling, believers in this strategy think the more eyes they’re able get on their product, the more sales they will generate. Why sell to one person at a time when you can mass pitch to 500?

However, it’s nearly impossible to provide a personal experience and relevant value to each of your recipients with a mass email blast. Generically pitching your product to hundreds of people simultaneously doesn’t allow the individual prospect to see how it might benefit their business specifically. Without personalization, prospects just see another cold email. Using a mass email strategy results in lost credibility, and will likely end with your messages finding their way into a prospect’s trash folder.

Instead of aiming to move hundreds of people into your funnel at once, build meaningful relationships with individual prospects. Writing a warm, personalized email provides substantial value to a prospect; discover the five steps to writing a great warm email here. 

5) Not Knowing When to Quit

Just like you avoid texting a romantic interest 10 times in a row without a response, following up too frequently with a prospect is annoying, ineffective, and likely scaring them away -- quickly. 

Tom Atkinson and Ron Koprowski revealed in a study that 12% of buyers identified sales reps who come off as “pushy,” “aggressive,” or “disrespectful” as their biggest pet peeve. Constant emails and calls add up to an annoyed prospect, a tarnished brand reputation, and potentially, a lost deal. 

You will need to stay in touch with your prospects during their journey, but it’s important to provide value and education with every call and email. Educate and guide your prospects -- don’t bug them. To determine when it’s time to call it quits, send a breakup email and let the buyer’s response (or lack thereof) inform your next steps. 

6) Hard Sales Tactics

Scaring a buyer into thinking the deal currently available is going away -- and fast -- is a tactic reps use to close a deal sooner rather than later. Salespeople often rely on hard sales tactics such as offering a limited-time deal in order to hit their monthly number -- a totally meaningless metric for the buyer.

However, the modern buyer doesn’t take kindly to being pressured. In fact, resorting to a “limited time offer” might force your prospect into the arms of a competitor and a rep who’s willing to guide the potential buyer through their journey -- not force them through it.

Replace messaging that plays on buyers’ fear of missing out with language that creates a feeling of excitement about the future -- and never force a buyer through their process faster them they’re willing to go.

7) Trash Talking 

Trash-talking salespeople not only want to position their product as the best solution -- they also want to explain in detail why their competition’s product won’t work. They spend time breaking down other products in order to ensure the prospect won’t buy from a competitor. 

Unfortunately, this tactic can backfire. As Art Sobczak points out, bringing up other options can result in improved credibility for your competition. In addition, trash talking also presents the prospect with choices they might not be aware of. So while a trash talking salesperson’s goal is to position their product as the best solution, they may have actually helped the competition.

At some point during a sales conversation, someone will mention a competitor. By bypassing the opportunity to put them down, and focusing on your product’s benefits instead, you can provide valuable information and help the prospect make a decision. Remember: Your call with this prospect is about your product, not your competitor’s. 

While there’s no silver bullet sales strategy that guarantees success, some techniques have lost their effectiveness. If you’re using any of these seven tactics in your day-to-day, you might want to do yourself a favor and stop -- ASAP.