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Brand advocates are people or customers who represent or speak favorably about your brand online, and your office is full of potential advocates. Who? Your Millennial employees! This tech-savvy generation is already using social media, so why not have them use it for your benefit? Here’s how to turn Millennial employees into brand advocates:

Give and receive.

Did you notice a Millennial logging extra hours to meet a tight client deadline? Or even someone going out of their way to bring the team breakfast one morning? Highlight small acts of kindness or examples of dedication on your social media page. Millennials love praise and recognition, so putting it out there for all of the Twitter or Facebook world to see would be a huge accomplishment in the eyes of this generation. Treat them nicely on social media, and they’ll be sure to return the favor, sharing content and drawing attention to your brand on their pages.

Train them.

Make Milllenials feel comfortable being brand advocates by holding a training session with them. Obviously, Millennials won’t need to be trained on using different social media channels, but rather how you want them to professionally represent the company on these channels. They should be given guidelines on what’s appropriate and what’s not, so the boundaries are clear from the beginning. It’s important to take this step before moving forward with any social media campaigns to avoid employee-related disasters.

Have employees generate content.

The best way to get employees online and sharing the content? Have them create it! Identify employees from different departments that tend to stand out from the pack, and ask them if they would be interested in generating ideas for content. Someone from the graphic design team could be assigned to creating infographics or eye-catching images, while someone in marketing could be responsible for coming up with copy for the posts. When you get Millennials involved with the creation of your social media image, they’ll be more likely to share their own work on their pages!

Show collaboration.

Millennials love coming together and being part of team projects and achievements, so why not highlight these on social media? Showing teammates working together from within and outside of departments gives followers a peek into your company culture, and also makes Millennials feel proud to work with the company. This generation will be eager to sing your company’s praises on their own social media channels, showing off the collaborative efforts that take place within the office.

Highlight positive reviews.

Some businesses have a slight advantage in turning Millennials into brand advocates. The service industry has the power to use positive customer reviews about an employee and promote them via social media. Once it’s posted, find the Millennial’s personal social media pages and tag them in the post. Millennials will love being included in something on the company’s page and will more than likely share this content onto their own page, showing what a great company you are and how well you treat employees.

Have you tried to turn Millennial employees into brand advocates? Share your successes and failures in the comments below!

Marketing guru Seth Godin frequently talks about what he calls the TV-industrial complex: the glory time of television commercials when buying ads lead to more distribution for the product, allowing the company to sell more products, which in turn lead to the company making more profits, which then again allowed them to buy more ads. And so on.

The TV-industrial complex is no more. We can’t simply interrupt people whenever we want anymore – our time has become way too valuable; we now have to really interest people in buying stuff.

But every year, there’s one day when TV advertising still very much steals the spotlight: the day of the Super Bowl.

It’s the biggest sporting event of the year and also one of the biggest moments in the year for the advertising industry.

At the cost of up to $5 million for a 30 second ad, you’ll have over 100 million people (in the United States alone!) viewing your product. But of course only the major players – companies such as PepsiCo, Coca-Cola and General Motors – can afford Super Bowl advertising-time.

So what can marketers learn from the most expensive advertisements of the year?

Let’s take a look at a few cases.

Change the rules of the game

When the Super Bowl comes around, every company that wants to have their advertisement broadcasted on TV has to start outbidding their competitors. But most companies, especially the smaller ones, won’t be able to outbid their competitors in order to get their product promoted.

So instead of competing with your competitors, do what Volvo did: change the rules of the game.

In 2015, Volvo launched a social media effort to hijack every single car commercial during the Super Bowl – commercials that other similar companies had paid millions for.

How? By giving away a car. The rules were simple: in order to participate you only had to tweet #VolvoContest every time you saw ANY car commercial during the Super Bowl game, and you had to let in your tweet know who you thought should get a new car and why.

Quick math exercise: in 2015 the average company spend $4 million to have their advertisement displayed during the Super Bowl (that’s excluding the costs of actually producing the ad). But instead of spending $4 million, Volvo gave away 5 XC60’s at the price of $37,125 each.

Simply by being really creative, Volvo saved money, raised major awareness for their XC60 while at the same time hijacking the attention that their competitors received.

It you can’t outbid your competitors, outsmart them.

Know your target group

One of my personal favorites is “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign from Old Spice.

Now of course the ad is funny and it has a lot of impressive film effects, but the most genius part is how well the campaign understood the target group they were after: the campaign is about Old Spice Body Wash, a product oriented to men, but the campaign itself targeted women.

They targeted women because research of the company had shown that women are the ones making the purchasing decisions of hygiene products, even for male household members.

So instead of trying to show men how great Old Spice Body Wash is, the campaign focused on the target group who would actually buy the product: women.

That’s why the advertisement featured actor Isaiah Mustafa, on boats and on horses and most of the time without a t-shirt.

And the result? Sales increased with 55% in the first three months after the campaign was launched.

Now you don’t need Isaiah Mustafa to grow your brand, but you do need to understand your target group.

Showing the product, without focusing on the product

Like I said in the beginning: the TV-industrial complex is no more. We can’t simply interrupt people and tell them how great the product is that we have to offer – we have to really interest them in buying our product.

A fantastic example of that is ‘Volkswagen The Force’. The ad features a kid wandering around the house dressed as Star Wars’ Darth Vader. The kid continuously tries to use ‘The Force’ on everything around the house: a treadmill, the dog, the washing magazine and more, but nothing works.

Then at the end of the day, dad comes home and he parks his Volkswagen Passat on the driveway. While dad walks back into the house, the boy tries to give his powers one last shot and attempts to start his dad’s car. His dad, watching the scene from the kitchen, uses his car keys to start the car and leaves little Darth Vader completely astonished – his powers worked.

It’s a 1 minute advertisement and for more than half the time of the total ad, the car is not even displayed. And only in the last five seconds the text is displayed: “The all-new 2012 Passat, coming soon.”

The ad was cute, funny, and it had great potential to go viral. And it did. Even before the Super Bowl had started it had racked up 17 million views (64 million as of today) and it’s the most shared Super Bowl ad of all time and the second most shared TV commercial ever.

The lesson here? Stop trying to interrupt people with your message, but rather interest them in buying it.

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GUEST:

Amazon is making waves as usual, but this time its silence could turn out to be literally golden. The company could be readying to open up hundreds of brick and mortar stories, if you believe what General Growth Properties CEO, Sandeep Mathrani, said during his company’s earnings call this week, and the additional stores could even go beyond books. Mathrani later backtracked, but the fact that Amazon hasn’t countered the claim suggests it may indeed have big plans in place.

If Amazon is really increasing its bet on brick and mortars exponentially after its opening of a bookstore in Seattle last fall, then it must have seen a good payoff from that test store. As the site that 44% of shoppers head to before any other when considering a purchase, it wouldn’t be jumping into the brick and mortar mix for no reason.

Even if its stock dropped 10% overnight due to missed Q4 2015 expectations, Amazon is still the clear online retail winner when it comes to market share and revenue. Opening more stores would take many in the industry by surprise, as Walmart, Macy’s, and other prominent retailers permanently shut down numerous stores mere weeks ago. In this context, Amazon is catapulting its risk-taking to the next level, and this move could produce results that would appease investors. It is bucking all trends and showing that it is in a class of its own — if it pulls this off, that is.

The company has historically shrugged off criticism about its nonexistent or miniscule profits for the retail side of its business, but these stores could be a chance to increase margins quite a bit. One of the main downfalls in Amazon’s Q4 2015 results was much higher shipping overhead than expected. The company spent $1.85 billion for the quarter and over $5 billion for all of 2015 on shipping, but physical stores could cut down on that. Granted, the pilot store gives customers the option to have items sent to their home so they don’t have to carry everything out in bags, so shipping still presents a cost. But the opportunity to increase in-store sales through impulse buys and personalized, data-driven upselling could more than make up for that. Amazon has sacrificed short-term margins and built up impressive market share. Now it is in a prime position to capture the margin it has been losing out on.

And if books turn out to be the main products in the suspected stores, that’s interesting for two  reasons. First, it would mean Amazon is capitalizing on its roots. Second, it would mean Amazon knows it can do what fallen book behemoths couldn’t by offering a great shopping experience on multiple channels — known as omnichannel retail. Of course, with all of its one-time competitors either out of business or much reduced, Amazon would enjoy a less competitive market. This means meeting consumers on every channel they shop on and, if speculations are correct, even shoppers outside of the Seattle area will be able to chat with employees, browse products, and try out Amazon devices soon. This might even lead to fulfilling online orders in-store, further decreasing shipping costs.

Shoppers already want access to Amazon stores. TimeTrade found last year that over 70% of shoppers would rather shop at a physical Amazon store instead of online. Why wouldn’t Amazon give shoppers what they want? Adding stores simply makes sense because it would cancel out many of the costs that have historically kept profits slim.

From fulfillment to shipping costs to returns, brick and mortar could be the answer to some of the issues that eCommerce has introduced to the retail world. John Idol, CEO of Michael Kors, said this week that “e-commerce generates a lower operating profit for us than four-wall brick-and-mortar … when the consumer requires free delivery, free return, wonderful packaging.”

Taking it a step further, a report last month from L2 found that pure play (online only) retail shops simply aren’t as successful as multichannel retailers with stores. Numerous pure play retailers have had their valuations slashed, and experimentation with pop-up shops leading to the establishment of permanent retail locations is becoming more common.

At the very least, Amazon’s stores could be a lesson to pure-play retailers that brick and mortar is a profitable endeavor. Smaller retailers, like Warby Parker, have found success with physical stores. While a large company like Amazon has a lot to lose with aggressive expansion, it also has the most to win due to its strong price perception, brand awareness, and loyalty. Maybe online stores will prove to be a gateway to brick and mortar locations.

Angelica Valentine is the Content Marketing Manager at Wiser, a retail intelligence engine. You can follow her on Twitter.

It seems that today we have information sent to us from multiple sources in various formats. We have emails, alerts for things we have to do, 24 hour newsfeeds, social media updates……..

The list is endless. All of these information feeds are directed at us for both work and business functions.

In a business environment, it is not only the information being sent to us in itself or the sources, it is also that this information can be located in different systems that don’t interact with each other. In that scenario it is often the case that data then needs to be re-keyed from one system to another. This manual step is open to error and duplication and also slows down some key processes.

Data integrity is crucial for any business process. Integrated business systems ensure your staff have access to the right information, where and when required to increase profitability.

I have long advocated in this blog that marketing, sales and finance functions should all be integrated in one system that is accessible by all of those job functions. Accessing these systems on cloud solutions makes full integration of these function possible. However, there are other areas that would benefit from this level of integration. Take for example, two key areas of many businesses. One of which is capturing data from an e-commerce website and the other is tracking warranties, servicing and repairs. Let’s have a look at each of these.

E-Commerce Integration:

For an e-commerce website to work efficiently, there are certain details that need to be updated instantly, such as inventory, pricing, customer details and fulfilment information. How do you get that to link to your CRM and finance system? This could be processed manually and the information taken from your site and keyed into your other business systems. This is time consuming and sometimes leads to errors in the data entry. However, there is a way to speed up this process by integrating your system and website with a data exchange tool. This way information on orders placed on your website are automatically transferred to your CRM / Finance system with no manual intervention. Reducing errors of manual data entry and saving valuable time.

Warranty, Service & Repair Tracking:

Another scenario I can think that would benefit from further integration of systems is that of tracking warranties, servicing and repair. Often this information is tracked in a system. Integrating this with your CRM would be a major benefit. You can then easily track what products are under warranty and with whom. You can also then track when a particular product has been returned for repair and when a service contract renewal is due. Again, tracking all of this data for your customers in one location.

For a business to be successful, it is important to get the basics right. Accurate data is a good starting point and integrated systems facilitate accurate data.

Being clear on how you want to be known as a leader, how others want to describe you and the contribution you want to make to the world is a great starting point for your leadership journey. The ability to articulate this is what I call your leadership brand. It’s like any brand: how you want people around you to know you for. Some may want to be seen as a servant leader, others to be known for their achievements and still others for their ability to be a pillar of support for their community.

I’ve spent quite some time thinking about what I want to be known for and the impact I want to make on people around me. I started with half a page, capturing the answers to these questions and after trying to distill the most important elements I was able to come down to two words that capture the essence of my personal leadership brand:

“Pushing Boundaries”

I want to be known as a leader who constantly challenges the status quo, pushed himself and others beyond what they thought they were capable of and did things that had never done before.

In my leadership work I now help others define their own leadership brand and over the years have developed and fine-tuned a process that seems to work and assist leaders of all kinds and shapes to help articulate what they want to be known for. In this leadership discovery process I guide leaders through 4 stages and want them to:

1. reflect on their past,
2. capture where they stand to do
3. identify where they want to go and
4. imagine the contribution they would be able to make.

1. Your Track Record

Looking back I want leaders to identify moments, jobs, positions, projects where they were in, what Mihaly Csikszentimihaly calls:

“A Flow of a highly focused mental state in which they’re completely absorbed by the activity at hand“

For some great inspiration check out his Ted Talks on the concept of ‘flow’. I encourage leaders to go back to stages in which they performed in this stage of flow, where all their efforts seemed effortless and impact was beyond expectations. Most of us have experienced this only a couple of times in our lives and I encourage leaders to go back and identify what made them come into that state by answering:

• What was the environment that created this?
• What was the task at hand that inspired this?
• What did their bosses and organisation do to enable it?

It is important to understand and then articulate how going forward you can create the circumstances for yourself to re-enter this state.

2. Your Feedback

The next questions I ask leaders in their reflection of the past is to reflect on the feedback they have received. Either formally through 360 feedback processes, peer reviews, informal conversations with colleagues, bosses, mentors or family members. You need to know how you come across to them, what they value in how you work and act, and what are the things they obverse that could possibly have a negative impact? Reflect on what people say, take it in and use it to understand what you want to keep and what you would like to change.

3. Your Influencers

We all have people that we look up to, people who have shaped us into who we are today. Looking backwards it’s important to identify the people that have shaped your life, shaped your view of what success looks like and select the characteristics you admire and want to emulate in them. You have to know why you admire your mentors because deep down you want your leadership brand to be very much (at least for the part that you admire in them) to be like theirs. Pick up the elements from your mentors that you want to inculcate in your own leadership brand.

When I help leaders identify their shapers and influencers I often ask them whether the people they have identified know what kind of impact they’ve had on their lives. More often than not the answer is ‘not really….’. If the same applies to you, why not send your mentors a short note (a hard written card, email, LinkedIn or Facebook message) expressing your gratitude for the impact they’ve had and how you admire them for it? I promise you that by doing that you’ll not only make their day but yours as well. After all, displaying gratitude is a very powerful practice in making yourself happy!

Next week I’ll continue our joint leadership brand development journey by having you look into what elements of your current state of leadership branding you want to keep and build upon.

Like what you read? Subscribe to the Keijzer Community and get updates to your inbox. You’ll also get a free download which will help you take your leadership teams through a growth model which will help them mature on a personal and professional level.

(Image Credit: Japanexperterna.se via Flickr)

There are approximately three million apps in the Google Play Store and Apple App Store combined, and consumers are spending 84% of their time in only five of those apps. There’s a good chance most people who download your app won’t continue using it after the first week. If you’re an app developer or brand who is focused on app acquisition, this is alarming.

What do you do when you’re spending tons of money on acquiring new users but they’re not sticking around? Focus on retention.

Most marketers see increased acquisition as a sign of a growing app, but it’s user retention that will define your app’s success in the long run. Here’s why retention is more important than acquisition for mobile and one way you can effectively retain your users.

A retention-focused marketing strategy is better for your business.

If there’s any doubt that focusing on your existing customers is more important than acquiring new ones, consider this:

80% of your company’s future revenue will come from just 20% of your existing customers, according to Gartner. That means 80% of your revenue will come from a segment of customers that you may be overlooking. With many app developers pouring money into fancy advertising campaigns and marketing tactics to acquire users who will only contribute to a fifth of their revenue, it’s easy to lose touch with the power users who are engaging with your app the most and acquiring users for you through word of mouth.

The average app user has 36 apps installed on his or her smartphone, but spend most of their time in four to six apps on their phone, which means most of the users you’re spending money on acquiring are uninstalling your app pretty quickly or leaving it in the pile of apps they never use. That’s money down the drain.

On the other hand, a retention-focused marketing strategy can increase your company’s profitability. According to Bain and Co., a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%.

Bottom line, focusing on retention and fostering long-term relationships with your users is not only a good thing do from a customer service standpoint, it’s also good for your pockets.

What can you do to retain users? Engage early, engage often.

According to Appboy, 90% of the people who engage weekly for the first month after download are retained, compared to only 23% of people who don’t engage in the second, third, and fourth week. This is clearly a sign that you shouldn’t stop engaging with your users after the first week, something that too many app developers are finding out the hard way.

(Image Credit: Appboy)

So what can you do to keep users active weeks after they’ve downloaded your app? Consistently engage with users on multiple channels as early as possible.

With the rapid growth of digital consumption, people have become more nimble in the digital world, using multiple apps, sites, and devices to make their everyday lives easier and more entertaining. As a brand or app developer who’s trying to win the attention of users, a single-channel strategy that you deploy every so often just won’t work.

An effective multi-channel messaging strategy for apps consistently provides value to the user and encompasses push notifications, in-app messages, email, and web (including your own web properties and social). Here are some ways to use these channels:

1. Assuming users have push notifications enabled, you can drive users back to your app with time-sensitive promotions and alerts. They key here is to not annoy your users with endless push notifications. Use them when you have something important to communicate or when your users are becoming inactive.
2. 34% of users abandon an app because they lose interest. Use in-app messages to increase engagement among users who are already using your app with helpful updates, personalized greetings, and reminders. Keep users interested every time they open your app.
3. Use emails to reach users across mobile and web with dynamic and valuable content. For example, when a user signs up for your service through your app, you can send them a drip campaign with helpful content on how to get the most out of your service.
4. Although trends indicate that users are spending more time on their mobile devices than their desktops, the web is still an important place for you to engage with your users. Provide valuable content through social media and your website and use web notifications to make sure your users don’t miss important updates, even when they’re not using their mobile devices.

Of course, acquisition shouldn’t be completely ignored because you can’t retain what you don’t acquire. However, your app’s success will depend on how many users actually stick around. So the next time you think about splurging your marketing budget on acquiring new users, remember that you have loyal users and would-be loyal users who you probably haven’t been paying attention to. Retain them for as long as possible. You need them.

Today, a reader reminded me about something I said in an Openview Partners article about 18 months ago. The article, 20 Of The Best Interview Questions For New Sales Hires, has great ideas from some very thoughtful people.

I suggested the following: “Can you show me your plan for this interview?”

It’s something I ask all the time, too often, I’m disappointed–they don’t have a plan. Sure, they are answering the questions, usually telling me how great and qualified they are. But very few have a plan for what they want to achieve in the meeting.

Let me backtrack a moment. Why do I pose that question?

We know some things about high performance sales people:

• They rigorously execute a sales process that is aligned with the customer buying process. They the sales process represents the best practices in winning business. They know that sharp execution of the process improves their odds to win, reduces their sales cycle, and maximizes deal value/margin.
• They are obsessive about planning, preparation, and execution. They never wing it. They think about what they want to help their customers achieve, how to create value in every interaction, how to move themselves and the customer toward achieving the desired outcome. They document their plan, so they can free themselves up to engage in the discussion. They do this for their deal plans, account/territory strategies, and call plans.

Now if we go back to interviewing, it really is a sales opportunity strategy and call plans. The opportunity is for the candidate to get, possibly, a dream job. Interviews are calls or meetings that happen in the execution of that sales strategy.

The interviewers are the customers who already have a compelling need to buy. But candidates need to figure out, “What are they looking for, what are they trying to achieve, what is it they really value, how will they make a selection, who will be involved?” Ultimately, the candidate has to figure out, “How do I get them to select me?”

The interview(s) become the most important sales call a person can make. After all, they are selling themselves into a dream job.

Implicitly, they should leveraging their selling skills to the utmost in executing their sales plan. They’ll have a strategy, they should have a documented plan for the interview and what they want to achieve in the interview—after all, that’s what top performers do. As hiring managers, we want to make sure our people are doing the things top performers do, so we should ask for their call plan.

If they don’t take the time to do this for the most important deal and the most important call(s) of their career to date, then why would they ever do this in selling your products, solutions, and services?

What happens when I pose this question of candidates?

The top people always have a plan, with some notes. It may not look pretty, so they may be embarrassed in handing it over to me. But in looking at the scribbles, you see things they want to learn, things they want to make sure the interviewer understands, and objectives they have for the meetings. They even have suggestions for next steps. Regardless the format, they have a plan. They are prepared to engage me in a conversation about what I’m looking for and how they can contribute.

Everyone else, well they’ve come in to do one of two things:

1. They are in pitch mode. They brag about all their President’s clubs, their past record, and how great they are. They don’t spend a lot of time understanding what I’m looking for. We know how they will be when we turn them loose on customers.
2. They sit and wait, they answer questions, hoping to give the right answers and “get the order.” They don’t engage, challenge, provoke, they only respond. We, also, know how they will be when we turn them loose on customers.

If you are an interviewing manager, ask each candidate to review their plan for the “sales call” with you.

If you are a sales person, making the most important sales call of your career, make sure you have a plan. You never know, I might be sitting on the other side of the desk.

Dr. Ann Cavoukian is Executive Director of the Privacy and Big Data Institute at Ryerson University in Toronto. She also served three terms as the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. While there, she created Privacy by Design, a framework that seeks to proactively embed privacy into the design specifications of information technologies, networked infrastructure and business practices. PbD has been translated into 38 languages and has been promoted by the FTC, the European Commission and other major governing bodies.

UnboundID: How does Privacy by Design work in action?

Cavoukian: PbD is a prevention model whereby proactively embedding privacy measures into operations and technologies, companies can avoid data breaches and the damage they bring to a brand along with the financial penalties. You first identify the risks in your business, and then apply the appropriate measures. Following this model can also give a company competitive advantage, because you are building trust with customers.

The Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation runs casinos, and they have a self-excluded program where if you are a gambling addict, you can sign up to have a casino employee walk you out the door if you show up to play. Yet the casinos didn’t know who these people were when they walked in, so they came up with the idea to embed facial recognition technology in their security cameras to identify those people. Yet that kind of program would probably not be popular with all the other gamblers, from a privacy perspective. So they developed a solution based on biometric encryption, where if there’s no immediate match with the image database of people in the program, no facial data is captured. Even if a match is made, the facial data is erased after the person is identified and escorted off the property, all with their positive consent.

UnboundID: What are the most important steps that companies can take today to be better stewards of customer data?

Cavoukian: You’ve got to build trust with customers through transparency and respect for privacy. If you collect data on a customer to complete a transaction and then you want to use their information for a secondary purpose, you must go back and ask for permission. Explain the benefits of sharing to the customer. In a trusted relationship, the answer from the customer will very often be “yes.” I really think we will see positive changes in regard to corporate practices, now that the European Commission has approved a new and much stronger privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation. The GDPR will enforce significant financial penalties for companies that store or use personal data of EU citizens without permission. And for the first time, this new privacy law contains the actual language of Privacy by Design and Data Protection by Design.

UnboundID: Can you discuss how identity management tools and practices will evolve to help?

Cavoukian: Identity management is very important to handle consumer data. Companies should be implementing two-factor authentication. I think they also need to be very careful about sharing the personal information that they’ve collected. You may have the best tools but if you then share that information with unauthorized third parties, that’s where problems start. If you strongly de-identify the data, then you can use it and preserve its value without incurring risk to the individuals.

UnboundID: How do Canadians view consumer privacy differently, compared with Americans?

Cavoukian: I don’t know that there is a huge difference in attitudes, but in Canada we have a system of independent regulators both federally and in each province. This allows consumers to file complaints, and they have a resource for awareness and educational information. In the United States, there is the FTC, which is a great organization, but in a country with over 350 million people, the FTC can’t provide enough resources. We have a dozen commissioners for 35 million people in Canada. So the FTC has to focus on the really bad actors. Americans really value liberty, and you can’t have liberty without privacy. Ever since Edward Snowden’s revelations, the privacy culture has changed. Six out of 10 Americans distrust both private and public sector entities. Customers are asking a lot more questions and companies are becoming more sensitized to those concerns. By embedding privacy into design, you can get ahead of the problem and prevent the harms from arising. By doing so, your business will gain a competitive advantage.

Download the eBook to learn what the experts say about meeting customer expectations in the digital era.

So how do you convince a prospect to avail your cloud product?

We found this article and for the most part of it, it discussed how to persuade a customer in shifting into cloud accounting software. To start, one must lay down the benefits, cost effectiveness of the product as well as the whole experience. First hand experience is recommended.

The author, Sandi Smith Leyva, emphasized that it is compulsory to arm yourself with a list of benefits of cloud accounting. It will be best to explain the pros and cons in a way that you’ll be giving prospects more basis in weighing their decision before the purchase. More than just a marketing or sales person, you should be a trusted adviser.

Be sure not to commit these few cloud marketing mistakes.

Here’s a list of general benefits to get you started:

• Anywhere, anytime access
• Backed up on another machine (however, you still need to do backups)
• No need to install software upgrades
• No expensive server infrastructure or labor required
• More secure than files on most client’s desktop PCs
• No need for you to transfer files back and forth anymore between client and bookkeeper and CPA and QuickBooks consultant, including the related backups, restores, YouSendIt files or whatever you use. This benefit, alone, could be the deal-maker!
• The hosting and software license fee can be paid monthly, so there’s no large initial investment. If you’re hosting a desktop and already have a license, that license can be transferred to the cloud, so that piece has already been paid for.

Add the software-specific features the client get, as well as benefits you’ve experienced, so that you will have a complete list.

Exploratory Meeting

To better explain how cloud accounting is different from the way your clients are doing accounting now, you may want to create a diagram or find a piece of cloud marketing collateral.

Help the client make a good decision by listing the benefits and asking the client to put a dollar value on each one. This will get the client excited about what they will be gaining by making a change. Be sure to list tangible and intangible benefits, although it might be difficult for the client to put a number on the intangibles.

Present the costs and see if the value proposition is there. Do the benefits outweigh the costs? Let the client decide whether the move is right for them and give them an idea of the steps involved. Be sure to include everything they’ll need to do and the time it will take.

Training is an important step. Even if the accounting software stays the same, there are interface issues that will be different, such as taking a backup, emailing and printing from the application, and interfacing with other applications, including Microsoft Excel, Outlook and others.

Put your prospects’ shoes on. If you’re in the position of buying the product, what are things you want to consider before purchasing?

Effective case studies are one of the most important content pieces in a salesperson’s toolkit. Providing examples of current customers using your product or service helps demonstrate the value of your offering. It helps the buyer see—in a tangible way—how your product could drive business results in their own organization.

In a Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs study, 82% of B2B marketers indicated that they produce case studies, trailing just social media in terms of popularity as a content marketing tactic. In the same study, 65% said case studies are effective for their organization.

Clearly, when done right, case studies can provide your sales team with the ammunition they need to move the sales forward and close the deal.

If you’re looking to produce more effective case studies for your team, here are 3 tips to keep in mind.

1. Address your buyers’ questions.

It might be tempting to use your case studies to talk about your products and services only, but that’s not valuable for the buyers. Think about your case studies from the perspective of your prospects. Think about the buyer’s context and use your case studies to answer their questions.

Your buyers are probably wondering about ROI. They’re probably wondering about the criteria your current customers have used when evaluating you against the competition. They’re probably wondering about the post-sale experience as well. Address these questions in your case studies.

But don’t stop there. Don’t assume you know everything the buyers need to know. Look into getting a complete picture of the customer journey by talking to your current customers and collaborating with your colleagues from sales and customer success.

The old adage “show, don’t tell” applies here. Case studies that put the focus on your customers are much more effective than those that simply regurgitate the features of your offerings.

2. Tell a story.

Effective case studies are not just about facts and figures. They’re not just about answering the 5 Ws and the how.

The most impactful case studies are those that leverage an old-school but super effective tool: storytelling.

Why does storytelling work?

Because stories are more memorable. Because stories are more familiar to people. Because stories are an effective way of making an emotional connection with the buyer.

There are as many ways of telling a story. The classic hero’s journey is one effective approach. Pixar’s approach to storytelling, as Daniel Pink discussed at this year’s INBOUND conference, is another structure to possibly follow. At the very least, you need a protagonist (your customer, not you), a struggle and a happy ending.

3. Go “modular.”

In a 2015 study on B2B buying, research and advisory firm SiriusDecisions found that companies need case studies that cover a wide range of examples.

The company recommends preparing “multiple examples across industries” that are aligned to “both the buying cycle and internal sales process.”

Added the company, “Delivering these stories to the sales force in this modular way eliminates the sales guesswork involved in choosing the right stories to tell. That way, your reps spend more time focusing on delivering the sales presentation and less time finding and creating content for it.”

Conclusion

When it comes to accelerating sales, effective case studies are one of the best tools available to your sales team. Follow the tips above to make sure that you’re maximizing the value you get out of your case studies. It’s also critical to iterate and evolve your approach to storytelling in your case studies. That’s why it’s critical to gather data to determine the effectiveness of your case studies. Working on constantly improving the quality of your case studies is a necessary step to keeping them relevant and useful for your buyers.

If you’re a sales leader, it’s hard enough to find time in the day to read – let alone pick the right book. I’ve looked myself, and there are literally hundreds of sales books on Amazon! How do you choose? LiveHive is making it easier for you in a new blog series called “The Scribe – Sales Leadership Book of the Month,” that highlights the latest and greatest books for sales leaders.

February features renowned sales author and expert Jill Konrath talking about her new book Agile Selling. Learn more about Jill’s book in this QA – and sign up for a chance to win a free copy below!

Q: Why did you write Agile Selling?

Jill Konrath: Every salesperson I talked was struggling to keep up with today’s ever-evolving sales world. Buyers’ expectations were changing. They wanted to work with salespeople who were knowledgeable about their issues, industries, obstacles, initiatives, and more. Plus, decisions were increasingly more complex.

At the same time, salespeople needed to know more – fast. They were under intense pressure to deliver results in ungodly timeframes. They needed to master social media, sales acceleration technologies and new skill sets … all while trying to meet quota.

Since I write books to solve problems, I thought long and hard re: how I could help. The one thing I know intimately is rapid learning – how to achieve mastery in record time. So that’s what I wrote about!

Q: Did the idea behind the book change as you began to write it?

Jill Konrath: From the onset, Agile Selling was about shortening a person’s path to proficiency. That never changed. However its working title was Chewing Rock, based on a delightful story of my African safari you can read here: The Wisdom of the Elephants.

When I was almost done writing, my publisher decided change the title to Agile Selling. Because of that, I had to reframe the entire intro to the book. I’m glad I did.

Q: Would sales leaders be interested in Agile Selling?

Jill Konrath: Only if they wanted to shorten their rep’s ramp time!

Seriously. Since sales productivity is a huge issue today, it’s a must read for sales leaders AND salespeople.

Q: What are your one or two key takeaways from your book that you’d like to share with sales leaders?

Jill Konrath:

#1. Your onboarding process sucks. You’re trying too hard to cram everything you can into your new hire’s brain in just a few weeks. This only makes things worse for your rep – and ultimately you. Spread out learning over time, focusing on need-to-knows first.

#2. Hire agile learners. Your job will be a whole lot easier if you find people who are challenged by learning new things, who turn failures into valuable growth experiences, and are always working on the edge of their comfort zone.

Q: What message from your book do you think will be most shocking to sales leaders?

Jill Konrath: Most people have no concept about how to rapidly master new subjects or skills. They don’t even know it can be done.

Everything I share in the book is 100% research based by cognitive scientists, neuroscientists and psychologist. Plus, I personally used all these strategies when I was selling and consulting.

Q: What was the worst/best part about writing this book?

Jill Konrath: Writing books is hard work. Agony, really – for six months. As an author, I’m constantly asking myself how I can convey my message in a way that’s easy to understand AND enjoyable to read.

The best part is seeing it in print. It’s like giving birth to a baby. I want to show my beautiful child to everyone I see! Also, sometimes when I read my books, I’m amazed at how smart I sound.

Q: Can you describe your book’s style? How does it differ from other sales and business books?

Jill Konrath: People love to read my books because they’re focused on emerging sales challenges and filled with fresh sales strategies.

Agile Selling is the first and only book to talk about rapid learning for salespeople. It’s filled with practical advice that’s shared in short, easy-to-read chapters, with tons of examples.

Q: Did you learn anything about yourself through writing this?

Jill Konrath: Yes, surprisingly. Early in my sales career, I used a number of “silly” strategies to prevent me from failing. I never told anyone about them because they were embarrassing.

Yet while my researching my book, I discovered that I’d unwittingly bumped into approaches that scientists were just proving to be effective. For example, before cold calling, I’d sing a song with lyrics that literally told you to “hold your head erect and strike a careless pose so no one will suspect you’re afraid.” It helped me feel confident before I walked in. When I listened in on Amy Cuddy’s Ted Talk, I discovered the science behind my actions.

This happened to me repeatedly. I was amazed that I’d bumped into so many good approaches by myself.

###

Sign up now to get a chance to win a free copy of Agile Selling.

Original Post

Marketers have generally relegated static HTML pages to the past (though Berkshire Hathaway’s website is still going strong). Marketing content needs to be smart: it needs to know who you are, respond to your device, and even tell you where you should go next. Sales content, on the other hand, still has a way to go. Sales content intelligence often stems from how long the salesperson has to individualize sales content through creation or searching through a massive content library.

That time available can be summed up as “very little”; plus, do marketers want salespeople creating collateral in the first place? There are better methods of getting smarter about sales content, and they’re easier to implement than you might think.

1. Start with relevance

If you think that swapping out company names in the same slide deck that passes through hundreds of conference rooms every year constitutes “personalization,” think again. You can’t deny the power of using someone’s name, but spotting a generic document isn’t difficult, and looking at one isn’t useful for savvy buyers.

The shotgun approach might have worked for the old-school salesperson, but it won’t work for the consultative Content Concierges that many buyers now demand. With the amount of content that buyers consume, chances are they’ve seen some variation of that generic company material on your website.

Thus, it’s a matter of pulling together the most relevant content in a sales meeting. If salespeople are going to use PowerPoint slides, they won’t use the whole deck; they should pull the slides that are going to be relevant to your customer, and intersperse relevant customer testimonials with those, along with any videos or whatever other type of content that customer needs.

For marketers, that simply means making sure that salespeople have quick access to that content, and can find what they need (or put together collections) for individual customers just as quickly, without having to create their own content.

2. Fueling sales content intelligence with data

Finding what’s “relevant”

“All of this is nice,” you’re saying to yourself, “but how does a marketer know what’s relevant to salespeople?” The same way that Google Analytics or Crazy Egg tell you what’s relevant to your website visitors: data. Before, it was a matter of asking the salesperson what content they used and hoping they took notes or remembered. Or, more likely, waiting until the salesperson complained about not having the right content.

Good news, marketers: the insight for how content performs on your website and social media is now available in the form of sales meeting metrics. That is, the right sales meeting software provides data into content accessed, user behavior and flow, in addition to unaccessed content. That’s in addition to user segmentation–meaning that if you decide that something is relevant for some salespeople, you don’t have to force that content onto sales reps selling different products in a different region.

Discovering direct relevance

Once marketers get in email communication with a prospect, they can hone in on if content is working for a particular persona through email marketing tools like MailChimp, HubSpot or Marketo. With software that uses trackable links for content shared with customers, marketers have access to not only what salespeople perceive as relevant, but what late-stage prospects actually engage with on an individual basis. Sales reps then know if prospects are responding to content, and marketers can use that data to craft content prospects will engage with in the future.

3. Make sales content interactive

Interactive content is one way to achieve relevance that not only removes time spent by a salesperson preparing for meetings, but also helps add a connection between salesperson and customer. It’s also the closest way in a sales meeting you can replicate the experience of going through an intuitive website and finding exactly what you need without fluff or irrelevant material.

Marketing can frame that relevant content in a “Choose Your Own Adventure” way, so that rather than searching for content, sales can choose from the options that can take them down the right road for any customer. The personal connection happens when interactive content enables “story-selling”; marketers have created a blueprint, but salespeople, unburdened with additional admin time, can fully invest in providing personal examples and engaging in the moment. Rather than being told what their perceived problems are, buyers have the opportunity to discover problems (and more importantly, solutions) alongside their salesperson.

And data isn’t just useful for marketers on the back-end; it’s useful for customers, too. Here are a few ways that you can use data to power interactive content. Some ways of using hard data include using average industry figures to create an interactive insurance calculator or creating interactive charts based on potential ROI for a prospect’s inputs.

Digital marketers have a wealth of insight into who their prospects are, what interests those prospects and the types of customized experiences they’re looking for. Now marketers can meet those needs at every stage even after the lead gets passed off.

To learn more about how smarter sales content adds to sales productivity, click below to download the free eBook by John Burns, Maximizing Sales Productivity Throughout the Buying Cycle.

Brain by gnaphron | CC By 2.0

It’s a common lament among sales people, “I’m trying to close the customer, I can’t get them to move forward! They’re dragging their feet, they just won’t order!”

Last week, with several clients, I was doing pipeline reviews. Too many sales people were saying this, slipping their forecasts, slipping their target close dates another month (one becomes suspicious when you see 11 sequential monthly slips on a deal–but I’ll leave that for another post).

How do we get them to move forward?

Recently, I saw some horribly bad advice on this. Frankly, I thought these techniques had gone out with the old “foot in the door” trick. Apparently, it’s alive and kicking. The tips offered to move the customer forward were:

1. Shorten the time the offer is available.
2. Limit the quantity available.
3. Announce a price increase.
4. Offer a smaller amount to make the initial decision to buy less stressful.
5. Walk away.

In complex B2B sales, these tactics are both manipulative and foolish. They don’t get to the real issues of why customers drag their feet, instead focusing on the sales person’s needs.

Using these tactics is an indication of major sales errors far earlier in the buying cycle.

Why do customers drag their feet? Why do they delay a purchase decision?

Some of the reasons I’ve encountered:

1. They were never committed to changing in the first place! Too often, we engage the customer in a “selling cycle.” We go through all our pitches, the customer has an interest in learning, they may be thinking about changing. Just because we are going through our selling cycle doesn’t mean the customer is going through a buying cycle. Perhaps they are exploring, learning, trying to keep up to date with new solutions. Too often, we and customers focus on the future and “how wonderful things could be.” The very first thing we need to accomplish with customers, in qualifying them, is to get them to declare: “Our current state is absolutely unacceptable. We can no longer be doing things as we have, we must change!” Until the customer makes this commitment, inertia or the fear/hassle of change will probably overcome the vision of “how wonderful things can be.”
2. The customer hasn’t established a goal of when they want the change in place and when they want to start seeing results. This is closely tied to the previous point. Once the customer has committed to change, the next thing we need to work on is, “When do you want to start seeing the results from the change initiative.” There may be deadlines or compelling events that force customers to make changes by a certain deadline. There may be legal, compliance, or other issues. One of the most famous one’s from the distant past was Y2K. This caused every organization to re-look at their financial, accounting, ERP and related systems. There can be others, HIPAA drives changes for people in the healthcare segments. Environmental regulations may drive deadlines for energy, manufacturing, and other organizations. A product launch date may drive deadlines for decisions in design/development, manufacturing, and other areas. Sometimes, we need the customer just to set a date, a deadline when they want to see results. Often, we can leverage opportunity costs, lack of competitiveness, unacceptable spending, customer retention/acquisition threats to drive the sense of urgency and help them set the date by which they need to start seeing results. Without this target, things will slip and slip and slip—100% of the time. It’s our responsibility as sales people and to our customers to get them to understand this and commit to a “go-live.”
3. They haven’t finished their buying process! Too often, our selling process is not aligned with our customers’ buying processes. This is just bad salesmanship. Research indicates that for every stage of misalignment (say the customer is in their Problem Definition Stage and we are in our Proposal/Closing Stage), the probability of winning a deal declines by 15-20%. So if we are trying to close the order, thinking the customer is dragging their feet, but they still haven’t finished their buying process and are ready to make a decision, then they aren’t ready to order–and the more we manipulate them into trying to get an order, the less likely we’ll get it.
4. They haven’t finished their buying process! In previous articles, I’ve introduced the concepts of Project Management in the buying/selling process. Sometimes things will slip, the customer will get behind. This threatens slipping the “close date.” But more importantly it threatens to slip the “Go-Live” mentioned in 2 above. That’s why having that Go-Live is so critical. The customer doesn’t and shouldn’t care that you get the order when you need/want it. But they are really concerned about missing dates, opportunities critical to achieving the results they want. If the customer is slipping, and we are working in guiding them through their buying process, continuing to focus on the objective of when they want to produce results keeps both of us moving forward and minimizes the potential of dragging their feet.
5. They don’t know how to buy! By now, we all know the consensus decision and the 5.4. We also know the high likelihood of the group failing to align, resulting in no decision made. None of this has anything to do with vendor or solution selection, but with their own internal buying process and ability to collaborate as a buying group. If we can’t help them solve this challenge, then they will never buy–regardless of the enticement we might offer. Helping the customer with their buying process, helping recognize and align diverse interests, agendas, and priorities is critical to removing any roadblocks at the end or the process.
6. They have failed to develop a strategy to sell what they want to their management! Decisions and approvals are being forced higher in the organization. Too often we can get the customer to make a decision, choosing us. But when they go to management to get approval, they get turned down—even with fantastic business cases. Our customers have to “sell” what they want to do to management. For most of them, the concept of “selling” is the furthest thing in their minds and often very distasteful. But if they aren’t aligned with the priorities and goals of top management, if they can’t connect the dots to show how their initiative contributes to the strategies and priorities of the organization, they won’t get approval. Funding may get diverted into other unrelated areas. We need to help our customers do this–perhaps co-presenting with them, but in the least helping them build their “sales pitch” to their management teams.
7. We have failed to demonstrate our compelling value! This is related to many of the previous points. Customers may not go forward, simply because they don’t see the value in going forward—at least with us. If we’ve gotten to the end of the buying process with the customer not recognizing and owning the value we’ve created through the process, as well as the return they get through implementation, then we have failed. No artificial deadline, pricing manipulation, scarcity threat, or anything else will overcome that. We have to go back to basics, making sure we understand what the customer values, communicate how we deliver on that, and gaining their agreement on the value total value of what we are suggesting.

Finding ourselves in the closing stages of a buying process with the customer continuing to drag their feet means something has been missed much earlier in the buying/sales process. We may have made errors in execution, the customer may have missed some critical things in their buying process. We can’t ignore these things with manipulative closing tactics. We have to understand what’s happened, go back and address those root issues. Sometimes it means starting all over (we may decide it’s not worth it–and walk away–but think of the wasted opportunity!). Sometimes, it’s just identifying these things with the customer, quickly working to address them.

But the best way to avoid this happening is to do things right from the very start. Make sure there is a commitment to change! Make sure the customer has established a goal of when they want to see results! Help the customer with their buying process and keep your sales process in lockstep with them. Make sure they are selling to the needs and priorities of upper management. Make sure the customer values what you are doing with them and the outcomes they will achieve with your solution.

Will customers get stuck? Sure, but less frequently if you do things right from the start. And if they do, you don’t have to resort to shabby and self centered manipulations. All you have to do is remind them why they decided they must change (re-read 1), what they are missing by not moving forward (re-read 2), and revalidate your compelling value (re-read 7.) Leverage what’s important to them to get them moving forward.

If you find yourself having to resort the horrible tactics at the beginning of the article, something’s gone terribly wrong. B2B buyers are sophisticated, they recognize these manipulations. Save you and them the time. Perhaps, the only valid thing, if you can’t correct what’s been missed in the process is to walk away–making sure you don’t repeat the same mistakes in future deals.

Editor’s Note: The following is a transcription from OpenView’s recent webinar ‘How to Build a Customer Success Culture with Strong Sales Alignment’ featuring Dave Blake, founder and CEO of ClientSuccess, Mitch Macfarlane, SVP of Customer Experience at Instructure and Marc Maloy, Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales also at Instrucutre. The webinar was hosted by OpenView’s Market Strategy Manager, Brandon Hickie.

The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Brandon Hickie: Welcome to OpenView Venture Partners’ webinar series. I’m Brandon Hickie, Market Strategy Manager for OpenView Venture Partners’ portfolio companies, and I will be monitoring today’s discussion. Our discussion today will be on how to build a customer success culture with strong sales alignment and collaboration.

For today’s discussion I will be joined on the call by Dave Blake, founder and CEO of ClientSuccess, a customer success management platform that’s used by many of our portfolio companies as well as other employers in the B2B software space.

Prior to ClientSuccess, Dave was the VP of Global Account Management at Adobe, where he prioritized strong retention and growth for strategic and enterprise customers and launched the Customer Experience and Insights program there. Dave is one of the initial trailblazers in the customer success movement and brings a unique perspective to today’s conversation as a former operator and now vendor in the customer success space.

Our other two panelists are both from Instructure, an OpenView portfolio company that has revolutionized the learning management space and IPO’d last November. The first of those panelists is Mitch Macfarlane. Mitch is the SVP of Customer Experience at Instructure. Mitch has been with Instructure since 2011 when he joined the team to build out the client services practice which was later rebranded to customer success.

Mitch has overseen the evolution of his team and its mandate from the early expansion days through the IPO. In that time he’s seen the organization grow from 3 employees to more than 227 employees today. So he brings a very interesting perspective to the table and has spent a lot of time thinking about customer success and sales alignment. It’s important in a hyper growth business.

Marc is his counterpart and is on the opposite side of the house in sales. Marc Maloy comes as our third panelist. He’s the Executive Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Instructure. Marc has built out and led two sales organizations from early expansion stage through IPO, first with HireRight and now with Instructure, where he manages a sales team of just over 200 people. Marc offers a unique perspective on how to think about sales and success alignment from the sales perspective. He’s seen it both from the early days of expansion all the way through IPO as well.

I hope you all are as excited as I am to learn from these experiences. If you have any questions please send them via chat to the organizers and panelists in GoToWebinar. We will set aside some Q&A time at the end of this call to answer any of these questions that aren’t able to be answered during the discussion. Please send them as they arrive so we can’t attempt to incorporate them. Without further ado I’m going to go over and hand off the lead to Dave Blake to kick off our discussion around best practices and alignment. Dave?

Dave Blake: Thanks, Brandon. I appreciate the opportunity to be on this OpenView webinar. Thanks to the OpenView team for hosting it. I’m honored to share this discussion with two of the top sales leaders out there, Mitch Macfarlane and Marc Maloy. Both of these gentlemen are very experienced, as Brandon shared, in building and scaling sales and customer success teams in a world class company, in a world class organization.

Today we’re going to focus on some key things around sales and success collaboration alignment. In doing that, SaaS companies typically have a focus on revenue. Revenue is king for all SaaS companies. Most SaaS companies spend a tremendous amount of time and effort building sales and marketing engines. The most savvy SaaS companies also focus and invest heavily on the customer success side of their business as well as they know that the life blood of the SaaS business is really the existing customer base.

Today we’re going to talk about how aligning sales and success and driving deep collaboration across the entire organization will help you maximize your revenue across your SaaS business and also drive long term customer success and lifetime value to the customer. With that, we want to talk about four main pillars or foundations to driving this SaaS and success alignment. We call them the four Cs:

• Culture
• Communication
• Collaboration
• Compensation
• Let’s jump right into it and start with culture.

We have a saying at ClientSuccess that customer success is a culture, it’s not a department. Driving the culture of customer success throughout an entire organization is key to your long term success as a company, especially within SaaS. To do that, it has to start at the top of an organization. You need the buy-in from your CEO, your senior executive team, and ultimately your sales and customer success leaders.

I want to start by asking Marc and Mitch to talk a little bit about Instructure. I know that they have a very focused culture of customer success. I want to start by having them share a little bit about their culture, how that’s driven from the top, and specifically how they drive a culture of customer success in their organizations.

Mitch Macfarlane: Sounds great. Hey everyone, this is Mitch Macfarlane. I’m thrilled to be a part of this webinar today. As far as the culture at Instructure, very early on, in fact, one of the reasons why I took this job is because our CEO believes in providing a world class customer experience. That is pervasive throughout the organization. It doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with our finance team, our legal team, or our sales team. Everything that everyone does is aligned around the customer experience, essentially setting ourselves apart in the marketplace, differentiating ourselves on that customer experience.

We have seven core values at Instructure. One of those, and I will tell you it’s the real centerpiece, is customer experience. It’s something that we drive home hard to all of the employees. Anytime new employees are hired I have the opportunity to go and meet with those folks and tell them all about how we are aligned as an organization behind the customer experience.

It’s not just my job running the customer success organization, but it’s really everyone’s job. If you’re in marketing, product, or engineering, all of us have this goal of providing the world class customer experience.

Marc Maloy: This is Marc. To build upon what Mitch said, a little bit of the guts under this ethos around really taking care of your clients, Mitch in particular runs an unbelievably fantastic customer success organization. What that means to me is it’s all formulaic and it’s all trigger based. Picture what happens. Let’s say your business is growing from $50 million to $75 million in bookings or something like that. You intend to grow 50% year over year.

If everyone is looking around the table and thinking about, “Gee, when we grow that quickly, how are we going to support our clients? Is Mitch going to have to ask questions and fight battles with the CFO about hiring additional headcount to deploy against the success that you had in your sales organization?” If you have to have that conversation, you’re kind of not doing it the right way.

In other words, everything is based on quantity of salespeople. It’s backed in from a budgeting perspective. That allows Mitch and his team to really focus on onboarding people very effectively to deliver an outstanding experience to our clients.

Dave: Mitch, let me dive in a little bit in that. How would you describe the difference between customer experience and customer success?

Mitch: There is a difference. Essentially my job as SVP of customer experience is to look at the entire customer lifecycle even if the folks who are interfacing with customers don’t report to me in the hierarchy. As our lead gen team is interfacing with customers or our RFP writers, if they’re doing something that creates a less than world class customer experience, I get involved.

Customer success, the organization that I run, is really built around making sure that customers are successful. Whatever their vision is for the product that they’ve purchased, making sure that they achieve that and maximizing customer lifetime value. However, the customer experience title is broader than that and extends across the organization, across the hierarchy to ensure that all touch points are positive and world class.

Dave: That’s great. Thanks for sharing that. If we think about other aspects or profiles of world class companies that have a customer success culture, these bullet points share some of those attributes. They have senior customer success executives that are focused on this, that have the right titles around the executive table. You have significant focus on customers and customer success in board meetings. You have executive bonuses tied to customer success and cross-functional accountability. Do you guys have anything in your organization along these bullet points that you found is more successful than another as you’ve really tried to drive that culture there at Instructure?

Mitch: Sure. The second bullet that you’ve got here, Dave, I think is really important. It’s not just board meetings, it’s all executive meetings. It’s anytime you get a group of employees together, somebody always needs to ask the question, what is the resulting customer experience from decisions that we’re making today? That significant focus has to be pervasive throughout the organization. I think that’s key to our success here at Instructure.

Marc: I’ll build on that. I think for me it’s number four. Having everybody really rallying around the end outcome, an awesome outcome for a client is super important. The fact that our customer success organization shares very openly with every employee in the company their KPIs for what success looks like, retention rates, net promoter score, both logo retention and revenue retention.

Sharing that very transparently across the organization serves as a rallying cry to really get everybody behind the outcomes that our clients are seeking. For me personally, being able to look across the organization and see exactly what Mitch’s organization is doing on behalf of the entire business has been very good for the sales guys when they’re out in the field selling.

Dave: That’s great, Marc. I know we had a specific thing that worked well at Adobe where we really wanted to improve the overall customer experience and change the culture to be more deeply focused on customer success. We implemented this third bullet point. We added executive bonuses tied to the executives based on customer success, retention, and overall customer experience. That had a huge impact in evolving the culture to be more focused on the customer experience and one that I’d highly recommend to the organizations on the call today.

Marc: I was just saying that we do that as well here. It really does help.

Dave: Really quick before we move on, what other types of compensation or KPIs do you tie to the executives? Do you have one or two you could share really quick before we move on?

Mitch: I think the two that are applicable here are revenue, and the revenue goals are not possible without a very high revenue retention rate and in fact a net negative churn rate, so beyond 100% retention. The other one is NPS scores. Those two factors play into executive bonuses.

Marc: For those of you looking to take your company public one day or raise more money, the net negative retention rate absolutely warrants paying a higher forward looking revenue multiple.

Dave: That’s great. Those listening on the call today, think about your organization and your company. Which of these attributes are implemented at your company? If you don’t have those, then it’s definitely worth taking a step back and looking at how you can evolve your own organization to establish that culture of customer success. That’s the foundation for everything. Let’s move onto communication.

Communication is key in everything we do, in sales and customer success. When we talk about communication and alignment it’s not only internal, but it’s also external with customers, having transparency with customers, having a united voice of customers, and really understanding your customers’ needs.

One of the first places where communication is absolutely critical is in the handoff, the initial handoff from a prospect to a customer from sales to post-sales within an organization is critical. We just had an experience in our company. We started a relationship with a new service provider, had a very good sales experience, but the transition from sales to execution and go forward was a mess. As a result we had very little communication. We had no transparency. We had no vision of our journey from closing the deal to getting up and running and a real lack of attention to detail.

For us as the buyer it really broke down trust. We started questioning our decision. We had no excitement. We want to really talk about, in this section, the handoff. How do you orchestrate the handoff that builds trust, confidence, and excitement with your customers? We know that the long term success can really be determined in this window of opportunity. Mitch and Marc, I know you guys have really focused on nailing the handoff between your two teams. We’d love to have you guys share some of the best practices and keys that you’ve found in this stage of the customer journey.

Mitch: Sure. Ideally we would love to have the salesperson on the kickoff call with the customer facing operations folks, our customer success manager, our implementation consultant, our trainer, etc. With RDs who travel, and we want them out hunting new deals, it isn’t always possible.

We’ve had to adjust by creating essentially a question set that accompanies that customer from the very early beginnings of lead generation when they contact our market development representatives. Those folks ask questions, record the data. That data gets passed along to sales. Sales enhances that data set with the customer’s goals, vision, and what they want to accomplish, what their key points of interest were, what their challenges are.

All of that data gets transferred along to the customer success manager who now has essentially this history of the client and can really hit the ground running with them. Even though sometimes we’re not able to get that salesperson on the handoff call, all of the information has been transferred. That puts customers at ease very quickly when they know that we have an understanding of who they are and what they’re trying to accomplish.

I think one of the other things that we do because we have such a big org, especially in support, we use our own product. We have a corporate training platform called Bridge. We create Bridge courses that include details on specific clients for our support team. All of the support reps are required to pass off that they have knowledge on this new client that’s being added as a tier one support offering. That’s another way we make sure the knowledge transfer happens and that our folks are up to speed on the details of that client.

Marc: Let me build off that one as well. This is, I think, really important as you’re marching up the scale stage in your growth businesses. The way that Mitch and I think about it is our job is to earn our unfair share of the various markets that we serve. We do that through a variety of ways. One of the four key ways that I think about it is we have a really well understood and articulated demand gen process. When demand comes into house and that demand is converted we do a really good job of doing what Mitch just said, keeping track of who the client is, what’s important to them.

The second thing we do is we push that demand into a written sales process where we certify all of our sales reps on how a deal goes from cold call to close or start to finish, how it flows through qualified evaluation, short list, negotiation, and close. It’s not enough just to tell people and put it in a knowledge base. You have to certify them on the process so they all do it the same way. That then becomes a basis from which you can predictably forecast your revenue not only in the quarter but the next quarter.

Then we certify folks on their demo and the message that they delivered during their demo. It’s not like we want everybody to do it our way. We want reps to exercise judgment. There’s a foundation from which we really want to build upon. We call that our sales pick and roll.

The fourth thing we do is we certify the methodology. If you do those four things really well and you have that foundation, it really allows you to build a predictable cost-effective revenue engine where client data follows the client from cold call all the way through renewal and allows all of our teams to be much more successful. We train our teams using our product.

Dave: That’s great. Maybe give an idea of what the tools are that you use to capture that information. I know you use Salesforce. A lot of that information is captured there and then shared with the rest of the organization. Is that how you continue that knowledge transfer at the beginning and ongoing?

Mitch: That’s correct. In the beginning it’s Salesforce through our lead gen activities over to the sales team and then over to the CSMs. A little plug for Dave’s product here, essentially that data then gets fed out of Salesforce into the ClientSuccess app that we use. That’s how our CSMs consume it. That’s what they update, which feeds back into Salesforce. Say a regional director wants to follow up on their account. It’s all at their fingertips.

Marc: When they do that it kind of gets handed off to an install based salesperson at some point as well. We use Chatter pretty extensively to keep track of state of the union with the account.

Dave: That’s great. How often do you guys, you talked about understanding the client’s key objectives and sharing those. How often do you find you’re going back to update those? Marc, specifically what role does your team after the sale play in that continual conversation with the customer about their needs and their ongoing goals?

Marc: Frankly very little is the truth. Mitch’s organization handles all of that. He’ll describe this in a moment but he runs a very tight QVR type of process. If an existing account then becomes competitive again, whether it’s an RFP or the need to change significantly, maybe there’s some kind of shopping event, that’s when Mitch will hand it back to my team to go run that engagement.

Then there’s the reverse handoff, if you will, at that point where we do the reverse data dump from the client success organization to the sales organization. That’s really about it. We’re truly a hunting-farming organization, if you will.

Dave: Great. One of the things, we’ve talked about the handoff, but the collaboration that you two, you can feel it on the call. You two as leaders are speaking frequently. You’re collaborating. You’re on the same page. It goes onto this ongoing aligned communication between the success team and the sales team.

Tell us how often do you two meet? I’m sure it’s formal and informal, but how often do you formally meet? What do you encourage your teams to do as far as regular cadence of communication with your respective teams?

Mitch: Sure. Informally, daily. Marc and I see each other all the time. We’re very quick to address issues that come up. If there’s a misunderstanding or we want to know more details about a deal or Marc wants to know the status of a renewal, we just walk to each other’s desk and say, “Hey, what’s going on?” We reach out through Slack. We’re an organization that uses Slack.

We’re very in touch. That has reduced the need for formal meetings. We used to have a fairly regular cadence every couple of weeks. We’d get together with the sales leadership, talk about big deals that were coming. What we found is that the informal communication, while being reinforced through leadership, is really what’s making this ship sail well. We’ve eliminated the need for big, heavy meetings with the leadership teams. It’s really about the rank and file coordinating with each other.

For example, one of Marc’s salespeople will reach out to our head of higher ed customer success management, or a head of K12 customer success management. Let them know details about an upcoming deal, even assign a customer success manager early so that they can get involved in some of the late stage pre-sale process. It’s that tight collaboration. I think we’re jumping onto your third C here, Dave. It’s constant communication that leads to tight collaboration.

Marc: Yeah. Mitch, I think this is the critical piece. It starts before the sale. As we have a very large pipeline and deals progress through the sales process that I described, oftentimes for the larger type deals where it’s maybe 200 to 300 grand or more in ARR, you form a huddle and you do strategy review on the deal prior to it being sold. That’s when you generally would involve Mitch’s team, whether it be an implementation consultant or whether it be Mitch itself.

Mitch has diamond status so he does a lot of pre-customer deals with me and my team. It’s absolutely fantastic to have that level of support from the client success organization just to clearly articulate to a prospective client what they can expect post-sale. That’s just really good communication that actually goes to the client as well.

Dave: That’s great. I was able to benefit from a sales counterpart when I was leading a CS organization at Omniture. His name was Steven Freeder. Like you two, we had an incredible amount of communication together but then really encouraged that and fostered that throughout our entire teams. It really was a strategic advantage for us where we really got to the point where we knew each other well. We were tag teaming for our customers’ benefit and had this proactive and transparent communication. It was absolutely critical between these two organizations.

Let’s go onto the third one. We talked about collaboration. I love this principle that Disney often says. When you ask about who owns the customer, they say everybody does. Somebody always owns the moment. They collaborate and almost choreograph how they’re going to deliver this amazing customer experience throughout the entire journey of the customer. We want to talk a little bit about collaboration.

We believe that it first starts with having clearly defined roles and responsibilities across the teams. As we look out there today in the market, we see three models that are at play across different SaaS organizations. Model 1 is where the sales team owns all sales activity including expansion and renewals. The customer success team is really about driving value, usage, and adoption.

The second model is where the sales team focuses primarily on new logos. The customer success team takes expansion and renewals. The third model is where they introduce a third, sometimes called a renewal specialist that really focuses primarily on renewals and expansion. Mitch and Marc, which model do you guys use and why?

Mitch: It’s really been an evolution. We started out with Model 1. We moved to Model 2 because the CSMs were closer to the customer, understood the environment a little bit better for upsells and renewals. Frankly, we didn’t have to pay them as much as RDs. We wanted the RDs out hunting whales, not picking berries.

We really moved towards Model 3 there where we have an expansion team. We’re an install based sales team. We’re currently contemplating if we follow a similar path with renewals. There are pros and cons to that. We’re weighing that out as an organization to determine what would be the best path forward for the customer.

Marc: Exactly. We’re really at Model 2.5 right now where my team handles expansion but Mitch is still handling renewals. We’re contemplating going to Model 3.

Dave: Marc, the expansion team reports into you? That’s all they’re focused on is expansion and renewals?

Marc: Just expansion. It’s just renewals that’s handled by Mitch’s team. The expansion team is really in charge of trying to share additional value with the installed based on clients whether it be support services, statement of works, whatever. They actively prospect against the base.

Mitch: Yeah. A key piece of information here is as Marc and I looked at, and we weren’t really looking at these models, what the organization needed, as we looked at upsells we said we think we need a separate team. Where should it report? Ultimately Marc and I got together and said, “Hey, neither one of us really cares. It’s not about building a kingdom. How do we make these folks successful?”

We came to the conclusion that we want them living in the sales org and living, sleeping, breathing the sales mentality of being hunters rather than the empathetic, super compassionate culture that I breed down in my department.

Marc: Conversely, when you really think through that, my opinion, and I think Mitch’s as well, we’ve talked about this, is you don’t want your client success manager to feel pressure under a quota. You want them to be patient, gentle, thoughtful, help their clients avoid landmines, really help them navigate various alternatives as opposed to doing that but you actually have to hit a number or your job is in trouble. We’re really trying to separate those two things.

Dave: That’s great. You’ve clearly defined the roles and responsibilities within Instructure. It sounds like it’s a continued evolution. The next area of focus, and I know you guys have done a great job of this is really mapping out the customer journey and proactively managing to that. As Disney says, understanding who owns those moments, tell us a little bit about your experience and the process of Instructure really coming to your current customer journeys, how that’s been successful, and really proactively managing to those.

Mitch: Sure. It sort of goes back to the idea that egos really aren’t allowed at Instructure. It’s not about what’s best for me. It’s about what’s best for the customer and what’s best for the company. This has been, again, an evolution in terms of our understanding in how to best satisfy the customer’s needs and provide that world class customer experience.

In fact, right now we’re doing a deep dive, a customer journey map on all of the touch points customers have to evaluate whether or not our current model is working and providing the experience that we want to be known for. Dave, it’s really been an evolution. The journey where we are right now, the start of lead gen activities, hand off to sales, hand off to CSMs, punt back to sales, it becomes competitive. This is something that we have worked out over time and feel very comfortable with.

Marc: When you think about what clients like and what they don’t like, when you think about what the buyer journey looks like and then what the client journey looks like, the outcomes that we all talk about, think about, and strive to achieve are, we want the buyer journey and the client journey to be very simple.

Everything in our organization is really built around that overall goal from it’s really simple for someone to begin a shopping effort with our demand gen team. It’s really simple for them to not have to answer thousands of questions in a discovery session because that actually annoys people. We purposefully don’t do that.

It’s really simple for the salesperson to get the client data from the MDR SDR and have an effective conversation without having to re-ask the same questions. Once they get the contract, our contract is intentionally built in a very client-friendly way where we eat a lot of the risk. Frankly, it’s very short for a traditional MSSA. Clients look at it and they’re like, “Wow, that’s really simple.” Our pricing is very straightforward, no nickel and diming. No hidden surprises. Very simple. You build your organization around that ethos, you really get a good result.

Dave: I love that, Marc. I’m a big believer in keeping things simple as well. I definitely learned over the years that customers do not want to absorb the complexity of your business. They don’t care how things get done. They expect a simple, clear journey and be able to know that somebody is taking care of them throughout that journey. Last question on this topic, how often are you tweaking your buyer and customer journey maps?

Mitch: The map itself, this is the first time that we’ve really formally gone through the process. In terms of the interactions, it’s every three months or so we look at it, reevaluate, and say, “Hey, you know what? We’re noticing a trend here. We really need to adapt.”

Marc: One of the things on the pre-customer front that we changed that made a huge difference from my perspective is we pulled the SDR MDR team out of sales and put it into marketing. It was closer to where demand was generated. That’s where those folks sit. Interestingly, the sales folks here at Instructure rarely work leads now. They’re really working only opportunities. Those opportunities are very well [inaudible 00:35:36].

They’re real ones through budget authority and [inaudible 0:35:38] that have been identified. I say I’ve never even heard of a company doing that model where all of opportunity creation is actually handled in marketing. It really works well here because our brand is very tightly coupled with the experience that we want our clients to have.

Dave: Yeah, I like how you guys have given the vision that the customer journey isn’t just sales and customer success. It’s all the interactions with the company from initial marketing through every other function, whether it be the billing team, product, or others in the organization. Let’s move on to the last C, compensation.

This one, from my experience, can be an interesting conversation about how compensation plans between customer success and sales complement each other or not, whether customer success managers should be on a variable comp or not. I’m just curious where compensation drives action and behaviors, how do you guys look at compensation across your team driving the right behaviors across your team with compensation and KPIs?

Mitch: That’s sort of a broad question there. We believe in compensation. Yes, Dave, we feel like it should reinforce the right behaviors. On the CSM side of the house, we have two components of variable compensation for them. One is the NPS score that they get from their own clients, the clients they manage.

It’s an NPS CSAT survey that goes out three times a year. They have a bonus component that they get based on that. The other half of their bonus is based on market segment logo renewal rate. I want folks looking at individual accounts. Let’s not neglect an account because it’s got a small revenue figure.

Essentially, if we accept someone into the Instructure family and sign a contract with them, we’re going to take care of them. We focus on logo renewal rate. The entire department lives or dies by that number, which creates a very collaborative environment. They end up helping each other out with their renewals because they know even if they hit all of their renewal targets, if Sally doesn’t hit all of hers that they’re not going to get bonuses. We found that to be very effective on the CS side of the house.

Dave: That’s great. It’s a team target for the logo retention. There are some out there that say it’s okay to lose a customer and really chase a revenue number. Your philosophy is, no, we want to keep every logo that we can.

Mitch: Yeah. Me as CS leadership, I’m chasing the dollars. Let’s be honest. That’s what the company needs. I feel like for the culture within my team, I want them taking care of individual logos no matter how small. That really reinforces the empathy, the shared goals, the compassion, the interactions that I want my folks having. I don’t want them giving up on an account just because it’s a small number.

Dave: Yeah, that’s great. Marc, you were going to say something?

Marc: Yeah. Sales side, we have a traditional MRR or monthly recurring revenue comp plan. That gets kicked for longer term customer relations. If we sign something that’s three, four, or five year deal, the rate gets kicked. That’s in alignment with keeping customers for a very long time, number one.

We’ve got provisions, although we don’t exercise them very often at all, in our comp plan to claw back in the event of, say, one of my sales folks goes off kilter a little bit and sells someone something they shouldn’t have which then causes churn. We’ve got provisions to claw back. I’ve got to tell you though, we do a pretty good job, number one, although there are instances where we sell something we probably shouldn’t have. That’s about it from a sales standpoint.

Mitch: Dave, I think you’ve got another slide here. I took a sneak peek at it. I would love for sales leadership, not individual salespeople but sales leadership to be comped on retention. It’s something that I’ve advocated for within the company. Hopefully it’s a battle that one day I will win. I think that having sales leadership aligned behind lifetime customer value is a very powerful concept. It’s going to ensure that they’re selling the right kind of deals.

I think if we didn’t have the kind of alignment that Marc and I have that this would be more important. It’s really not necessary at this point because Marc’s team doesn’t sell stuff that we don’t have. We don’t have a churn problem. We’ve identified the customer segment that matches our identity as a company. We do very well selling into it.

Dave: That’s great. I think from my experience, when you talk about compensation plans that are complementary or that reward the right behavior, we had a senior customer success manager who was managing a Vodafone relationship, really worked hard the entire year, really led out that relationship to the point where when it renewed, it renewed at a multi-year deal and multi-million dollar contract. Afterwards the CSM called me up and said, “Hey, I was the lone wolf on this account. I got a $2000 bonus and my sales rep got a new yacht out of it.”

That was the first time we thought about, how do we start compensating the CSMs for their role in really driving retention and growth? This slide is just an example of how organizations might consider it, having this complementary where there’s clear, no-doubt focus on the primary goals of each function, growth for sales and retention for CSMs, but also reward each other for collaborating around their respective goals. Just an example of one of many types of comp plans that could be implemented to drive that collaboration.

Today we’ve really talked about the fundamentals, the foundation of driving sales and customer success alignment around the four Cs, culture, communication, collaboration, and compensation. Hopefully, I know that I’ve really enjoyed hearing Mitch and Marc share their experiences and what they do in their world class organizations and have been able to get some other best practices or pointers to take back to your teams. I’ll turn the time back over to Brandon and we’ll go into some Q&A.

Brandon: Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Mitch and Marc. I think that was a great discussion that we had. It’s obviously generated a number of questions from the audience that I’d like to put out there and see what you guys think and how you reflect on them. The first question we have is around KPIs with the organization. It’s from Nick Anderson. He asks, “Are customer success KPIs tied to each customer’s specific goals, or are they standardized? How do you translate that standardization?”

Mitch: Great question. Largely they are standardized. What the team is measured against are standard goals. Although in check-ins, when a manager is checking in with the CSM on his accounts, they are going over the individual details of that customer’s goals. For our product, being an education product, they may want x number of enrollments after one year.

We dig into that as the manager with the employee. In terms of measuring KPIs across the department, they’re standardized. It’s based on the CSAT, the NPS, the renewal rate. We also do upsell lead gen through that team. These are all things that we measure.

Dave: I’ll add to that. I agree. I think KPIs should be clear across the organization so that every individual in the organization understands how their performance contributes to the overall performance of the company. We’ve built out here at ClientSuccess what we call a KPI tree that shows our goals from a revenue perspective. It flows down through the organization so that everybody is aligned to these specific KPIs that we can clearly see and connect the dots of how it contributes to our overall goals.

Brandon: Okay. The next question is really around account planning. It’s from Depi Perdeep. I apologize if I mispronounced that. Are there specific accounts for which CS and sales conduct joint account planning? If so, what is the cadence and best practices around this?

Mitch: They’re rare. For example, last year we won the State of North Carolina. That required significant collaboration between the two teams and planning as we scaled up the customer success team to bring these folks on board and needing to understand their unique situation. Often it happens around really large accounts.

For the everyday deals, it’s much like what we discussed earlier where an individual sales rep may reach out to the head of higher ed, K12, or corporate CSM and do some handoff, share some information, get a CSM assigned if they feel it’s something that’s warranted. Otherwise it’s the standard process.

Dave: I’ll add my two cents there as well. This is Dave. In managing the strategic accounts team at Omniture, we definitely did account planning for those strategic accounts, as Mitch said as well. We try to keep it simple. There’s a lot of methodologies out there that are 11 page account plans.

We try to keep it to two pages because our philosophy is we’d rather keep it simple and execute than have a long plan that wasn’t executed. The frequency that we use to do it is to try to encourage sales and customer success to plan together once a quarter, but then obviously have those ongoing regular touch points as they are executing the plan throughout the quarter.

Brandon: Okay. The next question we have is from Brian Erwin. Is there a typical number of customers you see in a single CSM be aligned to? What are the factors that impact that variable?

Mitch: Sure. I think this is something that varies greatly with the type of company that you are and the size of deals that you sell. For us at Instructure, we’ve found the sweet spot to be about 40 customers per CSM of our standard deals. When we have very large deals, I’m talking seven figure deals, then those will be a much smaller ratio. We have maybe one or two or three to one. Then we have some very small accounts. We pass those to what we call our priority services team. Those folks are about 100 to 1 ratio.

It depends on the type of customer, the size of the deal, the nature of the interaction. I think it’s up to each company to find that sweet spot. I know there’s a rule of thumb out there that folks ought to have a $2 million or $3 million book of business per CSM. That might be a good guidepost. I don’t know that we stick to it religiously. We’re more focused on the customer experience than on the revenue piece of it.

Brandon: Anyone else on that one? Okay. Another question that’s related to this from Nicholas Bryant, “How do you guys segment your customers for this purpose, to determine what that ratio is? What are the key factors you’re using? Is it MRR, market segments, expansion or upsell opportunities? How do you think about that? What’s the model you use?”

Mitch: Those are all criteria that factor in. The primary criteria is just the size of the deal. If there is large upside potential in the deal, then we will keep it with our enterprise CSMs. If there is any sort of large upside in terms of additional products or additional licenses or if they’re a marquis client, it’s a name that we really want to take care of even if they don’t have the growth potential. It’s a name that we want to be able to tout around the marketplace. We’ll lead them with an enterprise rep rather than our priority services team.

Dave: This is Dave. I think the key thing here that I’ll add to what Mitch said, I agree on both of these points with everything he said. The key thing is to have a clear strategy of how you’re going to segment your customers when you get to the point that you can do so. There are different strategies based on how you’re going to engage with smaller customers and how you’re going to engage with your larger strategic customers.

Rather than try to build out a strategy that’s a one size fits all, make sure you segment your customers in those different segmentations. Really focus on the customer journey and how you’re going to deliver an excellent experience across all the segments.

Brandon: Perfect. We have another question around the sales handoff process. Andrea Carpentier asks, ‘The handoff, can sales transfer the client to the entire CSM team, or do you recommend always having a CSM specifically assigned to the client? Why?”

Mitch: We always recommend having a single CSM assigned to the client, at least for our enterprise clients. For priority services it’s sort of a pooled model, although they have a primary person responsible for the initial onboarding and implementation relationship. For us, we always assign a CSM so there is a single point of contact and the customer feels like they know the person’s name who is responsible for their wellbeing.

Brandon: Okay. The next question we have here is from Peggy Pavidis. She asks, “When measuring for incentives, do you compensate based on the retention rate, or the net retention, or a combo of those factors? For instance, if retention target is 95% but the individual has 90% retention with a 125% net retention, how would you compensate?” I think this is really thinking about what is the KPI structure by which you drive compensation. How much of that is at the individual level versus at the team level versus at the corporate level? How do those come together? I’ll hand it over to you guys.

Dave: This is Dave. I like to drive the behavior of growth. I know that it’s sometimes a controversial topic when you talk about CSMs driving growth. The way I look at it is if our CSMs are driving value and they’re aligned to the customer’s KPIs and their goals, then there’s naturally going to be growth within that account. I like, some call it negative churn, or I call it net growth number while still balancing that with logo retention as well.

Mitch: Yeah, I agree. You have to emphasize growth. One of the principles that we follow is that we’re all about enabling sales. We believe that given the stage of the company, we have to make sure that we’re doing everything possible to win new dollars. For me personally, we do logo retention in the CSM group.

In the example given, if somebody didn’t hit the logo retention target but upsold a whole bunch, yeah, considerations can be made. I don’t think there’s anything rigid especially here at Instructure. It prevents us from doing the right thing even if the specific parameters weren’t met. This is specifically why I’ve chosen to do a team based goal around logo retention. It may be that one CSM had a bad batch of renewals coming up that year.

Marc: Frankly the way we do it is if we churn a client, the client probably shouldn’t have been sold, right? That’s kind of how we think about it. To Mitch’s point, that actually happens sometimes where, I’ll just give a real example. Prior to our launching this Bridge platform which is focused on corporate learning, oftentimes we would have corporate clients buy our Canvas platform which is intended to be for the higher education in K12 market.

It’s very difficult for a salesperson to say, “Gosh, Boeing, you’re a company. Therefore, we’re not going to sell you Canvas because it’s intended for these markets, even though you really want it.” What oftentimes ends up happening is if you point the wrong people at the wrong product even though they really want it, as a sales executive you’ve got to have the courage to do the right thing and walk away from a deal.

Brandon: Perfect. I think that was a great way to think about the difference between integrating the customer success aspects into sales. Thanks for sharing that piece, Marc. We have two minutes left. I wanted to see if any of the three speakers had a closing point they wanted to make here before we close out the webinar.

Mitch: Hey Dave, Marc and I are looking at each other saying this is all you.

Dave: Thanks, guys. I think, like I said, I’ve been fortunate in my career to have sales counterparts that really collaborated with us where we shared a common vision, we had mutual respect, and we really worked for the benefit of the customer. Hopefully today, between the three of us we have been able to share some great best practices and pointers you can take back to your business and drive that kind of collaboration and alignment within your business. It’s been a pleasure to be on the call today. Thanks to Mitch and Marc and the OpenView team.

Brandon: Thank you so much for attending OpenView’s webinar on customer success with both ClientSuccess and Instructure. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Thanks.

 

The post How to Build a Customer Success Culture with Strong Sales Alignment appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Few things are worse than a leak in your sales and marketing funnel that is costing your company revenue, and slowing your growth by losing leads somewhere between creation and close. No matter where you get your leads, it is important to identify the leak and not only plug the hole, but repair it.

Finding the leak will require sales and marketing to work together. Both teams need to be aware of when there could be a potential leak. There are five areas to monitor for potential red flags:

• The rate of leads to closed deals is low;
• The rate of opportunities to closed deals is low;
• Pipeline coverage is too low for your sales team to meet quota;
• There is a high amount of stalled opportunities; and
• There is a high amount of leads that haven’t been followed up on.

Some sales funnel leaks are easily identifiable, while others may go unnoticed and take a while to discover. But regardless of where a leak occurs or its cause, the longer it takes to find a leak, the harder and likely the more money it will cost to fix the issue.

Because you cannot identify where there is a leak when trying to fix multiple stages at once, this process will take time: your team will have to walk through the entire funnel, testing each stage. Here are six ways to examine your funnel and make it stronger.

1. Storyboard your current process from lead to close

Before you begin, your team needs to understand what a lead needs to do business with you and how to optimize the buyer’s journey. Take time to write out each individual step from lead form to close.

When you build out the buyer’s journey, think too about potential flaws in your system that make it hard for a prospect to do business with you. Far too often, companies sacrifice customer experience for internal process. Make sure that you break down barriers and make it easy for prospects to engage with your team at every stage.

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Far too often, companies sacrifice customer experience for internal process. @phillkeene
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2. Time initial lead response time

According to InsideSales.com, 35-50 percent of sales go to the vendor that responds first. With the average lead response time over five minutes, the chance of turning a lead into a customer decreases quickly. Today’s buyers are changing, expecting a B-to-C experience from B-to-B companies. That means speed wins deals.

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Today’s buyers expect a B-to-C experience from B-to-B companies. @phillkeene
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The time it takes for your company to respond to leads once they hit their inbox may be the first source of a leak. Once you can respond at a healthy pace, review lead creation time from the lead form to the CRM and inbox. This is an important step because even if your team is responding immediately, it might take a long time for a lead get to them.

3. Track Attempts and Touches until initial conversion

Although starting with your initial response time is important, you must also understand your ongoing pursuit of a prospect and what it takes to convert those who don’t answer right away.

Various sources, including Topo, SalesLoft, and The Bridge Group, identify 6 to 13 as the optimal number of touches it takes to get a prospect to convert. Test out multiple cadences for yourself to discover what works best for your business.

Most people that I have spoken with typically settle on seven to nine touches, with a mix of email and calls over a two-to-three week period. They dig deeply into data, and make decisions based on evidence that it worked.

4. Identify why prospects are disqualified

As you begin to dive deeper into your process and ensure you are making the appropriate amount of effort to reach your leads, start to learn about the leads that aren’t working for you. Do they fit your Ideal Customer Profile? If they do, why did they not show interest in your company?

Take time to determine whether your messaging is not resonating with your target audience. It could be price, market immaturity, or a too-long product implementation schedule. Get on the phone, or listen to call recordings to hear it for yourself. It is the only way you can hear what is actually being said, and how your solution is being presented by your team.

5. Track the effectiveness of the handoff between BDR and AE

One of the easiest places for a lead to get lost in a sales funnel is during the transfer of ownership inside of your organization. Talk to your team and make sure they can talk you through the process of how they transfer ownership of the prospect, as well as ownership of their knowledge to the next person.

Work with every team to create a documented process from BDR to AE, and AE to Client Success to be certain that each prospect is set up to progress smoothly through the sales funnel. With documented handoffs, redundancy can create a bad customer experience, or cause prospects to get lost altogether.

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Redundancy can create a bad customer experience or cause prospects to get lost altogether….
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6. Track the effectiveness of each stage of opportunities

Even if a handoff is smooth, each stage of the process must be effective. Identify how long each opportunity remains in a sales stage, and why they stay there. The team needs to be able to understand how to introduce a compelling event to encourage a prospect to take the next step in the sales process.

By setting clear, action-oriented goals for each stage of the process, you begin to learn about why deals stall. You can then begin to track conversions from one stage to the next. As you optimize each stage, you will be able to slow down and teach your team how to push their deals through the finish line.

You should also work to discover when and why you lose opportunities. After each closed-lost deal, debrief the AE. Next, work with the AE to learn how and why the loss happened.

Finding leaks in your sales and marketing funnel will be challenging and time-consuming. It will take commitment from the entire team, breaking a large process into smaller projects that can be completed step-by-step and clearly documented.

Keeping the customer at the center of each change is key to a successful plugging of the sales funnel – and that requires knowledge of customer engagement. Use the data you already have to determine the way forward for your team. Every small fix will produce better results, and help you grow your pipeline as well as your revenue.

Editor’s note:

Whether it’s fixing leaks in your sales and marketing funnel or just about any other sales topic under the sun, you’ll want to be in the room–virtually, of course–for the upcoming Sales Kickoff Summit 2016, a virtual event with over 30 featured speakers covering Sales, Marketing, and Social.

The post 6 Ways to Fix a Leaky Sales Funnel appeared first on Sales Hacker.

A rose is a rose. And a sales call is either cold or hot. No exceptions. Hot calls yield a fantastic rate of return, but unless salespeople actually know their prospects, their sales strategy is ice cold.

That is, unless reps receive referrals—the secret to never making another cold call.

Let’s set the record straight. There’s no such thing as a warm email, a warm phone call, or even a warm knock on the door. (Yes, that still happens.) Without referral introductions from people their prospects know and trust, salespeople are just annoying strangers.

ICE COLD!

Digital Cold Calling

Thanks to the Internet and social media, there’s a new version of what I call the “warm call fantasy.” It goes like this: Sales reps research prospects on social media, identify trigger events, and gather information from social intelligence. Maybe they even have mutual connections with prospects on LinkedIn. So they send emails making the business case for why these prospects should talk to them. They really believe they’re not cold calling, because they know all about their prospects and even have a few “friends” in common. They’re sending “warm” emails, right?

Wrong! Unless they’ve secured referral introductions from their mutual connections, the leads are freezing cold. And that’s a doomed sales strategy.

Consider how many cold emails you get every day. I bet you do the same thing I do—hit delete. No wonder many sales managers say it takes eight to 12 touches before their reps actually speak to a prospect. Is that how you want your sales team spending their time?

Attempting to connect with cold prospects on social media is just as pointless. Social sites provide a great way to identify mutual contacts who could provide referrals. But before sales reps start name dropping, it’s important to reach out to potential referral sources, make sure they actually have relationships with the prospects, explain why they want to meet these prospects, and ask for referral introductions.

(Hint: Don’t use LinkedIn’s automated introduction request. They’re easy to ignore, and reps lose out on the chance to check in with referral sources and nurture those valuable relationships.)

Is a Referral Program Unconventional?

Sales managers and seasoned sales pros report that when they implement a referral program and learn how to get referrals, they:

• Score meetings with decision-makers in one call
• Reduce their prospecting time by at least 30 percent
• Ace out the competition
• Convert prospects into clients at least 50 percent of the time (usually more than 70 percent)

Referral selling is simple, but it’s not easy. If it were, every sales manager and sales rep would have a proactive, disciplined, measurable referral program in place right now. Referral selling is your primary outbound sales strategy, an actual step-by-step process you can implement immediately. Get in early and uncover problems, and your competition won’t know what hit them.

When reps receive referral introductions from people their prospects know and trust, their leads goes from ice cold to HOT, HOT, HOT. So, start thinking about how your sales team spends their time and the type of payoff you want. Do you really want your sales team cold calling?

Want to close more deals in 2016? Download the free e-book to find out how new sales tools are helping sales teams work smarter and more efficiently.

How can a small company make the most of LinkedIn?

Well, if you read and followed a recent Wall Street Journal article by Dr. Alexandrea Samuel, you’d get a few bits of good information. But you’d mainly learn several ways that I believe actually limit certain small businesses’ ability to really grow their companies by using LinkedIn and, by extension, Social Selling.

Enterprises that are business-to-business (B2B) focused can—and do!—really grow their efforts in lead generation, mindshare, referrals via networking and even to close business by using LinkedIn and Social Selling. We’ve seen it happen time and time again with our own clients.

What’s more, we see it with clients of all sizes; from the individual salesperson who is an independent contractor to entire sales divisions in Fortune 2000 firms, and all situations in between.

That’s why a piece like this really gets to me. LinkedIn is a great tool to use to grow one’s business, no matter how large or small it might be. It does need to be a part of a bigger plan that drives company growth, but it can be a large part of that plan (depending on a variety of factors).

And, yes, it can work very well for small businesses.

With that in mind, let’s examine some of Dr. Samuel’s advice.

What’s Very, Very Wrong

I won’t go into all of her points in this piece, but I do want to highlight three of the biggest problems I see with her advice.

Don’t focus on lead generation. Since lead generation is a big part of our training and coaching, I have an especially big problem with this one. In short, Dr. Samuel is looking at lead generation in the wrong way. She asserts that lead generation on LinkedIn is an inbound affair that comes from a business’s Company Page, and that companies—small ones, especially—should not depend on it for inbound leads.

Dr. Samuels is 100% correct about this. But she misses the much larger picture of the correct way to use LinkedIn for lead generation. It’s most definitely not about inbound leads into a Company Page. Lead generation comes from business owners, salespeople and so on using LinkedIn in very deliberate and proactive ways.

I’ve written so many articles on how to do just this, so I won’t go into details here. Visit my LinkedIn Pulse page to read those pieces.

Sell the business, not yourself. I’d flip this one a bit on its head and say “sell the business, and yourself.” I agree with Dr. Samuel’s assertion that brand matters more than a person’s title or position within a company. My reply to that, though, is I want to work with a person who I see is an expert at a company with a strong brand. I don’t want to deal with someone who is just a cog in an admittedly well-branded machine, which is how many LinkedIn Profiles read today. If you’re someone who really knows what you are doing in your field, you should be taking advantage of both your personal brand and your company brand. That occurs through what I call the “above the fold” strategy.

A great example of this is what I did with a recent LinkedIn Profile Makeover client. Long story short, we used the “above the fold” strategy to brand both his company and himself as experts in his field by effectively using all three of the main attention grabbers of his Profile: the banner background, the Profile photo, and the Headline. We created a simple, yet effective banner that promoted his company as the “expert” in his field; in this case, document management and security. We then used a photo of him that gives that all-important first impression that he is a true professional. His Headline is written in a WIIFM (“what’s in it for me,” with me referring to the person reading the Profile) way that promotes him as the knowledgeable authority in his profession. All three of these elements work together to brand both him and his company effectively.

Keep critical activity private. Dr. Samuel asserts that her readers may want to use a private-browsing window when viewing LinkedIn Profiles, because members can see who has viewed them and “it’s easy to end up overexposed when investigating a prospect or competitor.” While that may be true to a certain degree, it overlooks the main benefit of not going “stealth.”

This point actually comes from a first-degree connection of mine who commented earlier this week on my share of this article. Aaron Schmookler said:

I like what I do. I know it’s valuable. I know basically who it could be valuable to. If I’m checking you out on LinkedIn, it’s because I think there could be mutual benefit in a relationship between us. If I’m right, you might see the potential for a mutually beneficial relationship as well. If you don’t see that I’ve checked you out, you’re less likely to know anything about me, less likely to see the potential, and we’re both more likely to miss out on that benefit.

At the same time, Dr. Samuel tells her readers they should look at who has viewed their Profiles, because “it may provide useful insights into their own business.” Don’t get me wrong; that’s great advice. In fact, I recommend going one step further. I just find it interesting that someone who suggests hiding their own activity also take advantage of a (valuable) LinkedIn tool. Aaron is right in his quote and proves that going stealth is not the right way to use LinkedIn.

But Wait…

To be fair, the one tip of hers I like (and already use myself) is to tap your network while you’re traveling. “Once salespeople book the meetings and events that constitute the primary purpose of a trip, they should use LinkedIn to fill the calendar with more meetings.” She even details how to use LinkedIn search to filter by geography, connections—look for first- and second-degree connections—job titles and so on. Dr. Samuel then points out that such trips can be used to ask for connections and referrals to others in the market in which you’re traveling.

I like this very solid tip. I’m in Louisville a couple of times a month, and I use this technique to fill my own calendar. Trust me, it works.

Here’s The Thing

As I’ve asserted, LinkedIn works best in B2B. I have seen it work as well with what I call “big-decision, big-ticket” companies that are business-to-consumer (B2C) focused; including real estate and financial services (banking, financial planners, insurance and so on). For firms that fall outside of those areas, she’s right about not using LinkedIn for a direct Social-Selling plan. As Dr. Samuel asserts, those types of enterprises should use tools like Facebook, Pinterest or Instagram.

But even for those businesspeople, LinkedIn should be a part of a networking effort to expand connections, network and potentially gain referrals. One big reason behind this is something Dr. Samuel points out in her piece: Asking for help. Most anyone can tap into the individual and collective wisdom that one’s LinkedIn network provides for assistance in responding to an RFP (request for proposal), shopping for a supply-chain management tool and so on. She has some good tips on how to do it, too.

Overall, I’d say while there are some good tips for companies overall, the main thrust of her article limits the effective use of LinkedIn, especially for B2B companies. That’s why I’d steer clear of about 70% of what she recommends.

This article was also published on LinkedIn.

When it comes to B2B buyers, you may think that a more calculated, technical approach to content marketing should be used.

Is that true?

In this post, we’ll check out why you need emotion in your B2B marketing, what types of emotional responses to elicit, and how to make your content more emotionally appealing.

Why B2B Buyers Need Emotional Content Marketing Techniques

The truth is, if ever there was an occasion to use emotion in content marketing, it’s with B2B buyers. Why?

Because the sales process for B2B buyers takes 22% longer than it did seven years ago.

Is this because today’s buyers are more indecisive? Not at all.

In fact, 82% of B2B buyers think that everyone is pretty much selling the same item. The competition is huge.

To not put too fine a point on it, all B2B suppliers look the same. At least that is the perception of buyers. To further complicate matters, buyers know that when they make a purchase decision it will be a long-term commitment.

What’s the best way to cut through the clutter so that your brand stands out? Appeal to emotion.

This is the ultimate dilemma for many B2B marketers:

How do you make an emotional connection with buyers so that they will become and stay brand loyal, all the while providing the technical factoids that are necessary to the sales process?

The best way to do this is by providing relevant, informational content that strikes an emotional cord with your audience.

Four Emotions and How to Use Them to Create Emotional Content

A couple of years ago, Buffer presented the article, The Science of Emotion in Marketing: How Our Brains Decide What to Share and Who to Trust. In the post, author Courtney Seiter, relates how different emotions affect our habits, as related to marketing.

We’ll examine the same four emotions she mentioned, but also add how you can use them in your content marketing.

1. Happiness

Think of what happens when you see a baby let out a hearty laugh. Your immediate reaction is to smile and laugh, too.

Happiness is contagious. In marketing terms, happiness makes us want to share.

So, if your marketing goal is to increase shares and followers, think (and post) happy thoughts and images.

“By the time the reader has experienced the initial emotional attraction, and logic is “kicking in” a bit, it is time to present the useful and practical aspects of your content.” ~Jeff Bullas

2. Sadness

We can hardly say that there are any “bad” emotions in marketing. Although most of us don’t want to be sad, when we see something that makes us sad, empathy often wells up in us.

Not only that, but this kind of sadness results in an increase in a chemical called oxytocin, something that motivates us to be more trusting.

Therefore, if your goal is to create a positive, humanitarian persona for your company, create case studies that showcase how your brand has improved the lives (not the company as an entity) of your clients.

Did you help provide capital for a struggling business owner who is a single parent? Have you created a program to benefit the victims of poverty? Share this with your readers.

Of course, you always want your effort to be genuine, and not a publicity stunt. Tread carefully when trying to use sadness as a marketing emotion.

3. Fear

Why does watching a horror movie when you’re all alone seem so much scarier than when you’re with a friend? The main reason is that we are hard-wired to look to each other for emotional support.

Some studies have shown that in the absence of an actual person, audiences will look to a brand or object to alleviate their fears.

How does this work in B2B content marketing? Well, certainly you don’t want to terrify your audience. However, you can present a fear-inducing problem your audience faces and show how you can help.

For example, are your prospects worried about their product becoming irrelevant? Share that fear and then show how you’ll alleviate their stress.

4. Anger

While anger may not be the healthiest of emotions on which to bind a strong relationship, it does have its place.

For example, you may think that a blog post that presents an extreme view would alienate some of your audience. However, one study showed that comments in a blog post that were expressed as extreme and arrogant made readers dig in their heels to fight for what they already held to be true.

The point is that a piece of content that might seem strongly expressive is not necessarily bad. It may help to firm up relationships with those that share your view, as well as get a dialogue going, even with those who disagree.

Therefore, if your goal is to increase brand loyalty, go ahead and start a pointed discussion and see where it leads.

Best Platforms On Which to Create Emotional Connections

While new social platforms are born seemingly every other day, there are a few mainstays for B2B Marketers. Here are a few of my favorites (not in order of efficacy).

1. Twitter

Twitter remains the go-to place for information sharing. Use this platform to direct the attention of your audience towards your owned content, as well as to inspire brand confidence by sharing industry-relevant content.

2. Facebook

Although Facebook algorithms change frequently, this platform remains a front-runner, especially for engaging with industry leaders and customers alike.

Facebook is a great place to share emotional content, especially content that elicits compassion or humor.

3. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is perhaps one of the most important platforms for B2B marketers, yet one of the most under-utilized.

According to Oktopost, 80% of B2B leads are generated through LinkedIn!

Want to get more leads? It starts with a stellar LinkedIn company page. If you’re not sure how to get one started, check out my recent ebook, How to Create the Perfect LinkedIn Company Page.

Inside, you’ll learn all about how to use images in the right place, how to write a killer description, and you’ll get some pro tips from the big dogs.

Click below to get your FREE copy!

An email list is gold these days. Getting the permission slip to go into someone’s email inbox is one of the best ways to stay top-of-mind to a highly targeted audience.

Yet driving email subscriber signups isn’t as easy as it should be. People hold onto their email addresses as closely as they do their passwords and private lives. To get someone to give you their email address, you need to make sure the person knows you have a list to sign up to in the first place.

Here are 10 of the best plugins ways to attract email addresses and build subscribers.

1. PopUp Domination

For years businesses have shied away from using pop-ups because of how it influences the customer’s experience. There was (and still is) worry that these pop-ups are more of a nuisance for website visitors.

Yet pop-ups are one of the best conversion drivers. Why? Because 97% of online purchases are not completed the first time someone visits your website, according to Hybris. And pop-ups are shown to be one of the best ways to capture website visitors contact information.

PopUp Domination offers a unique style of pop-up window. Instead of pushing your sales message on the reader, it poses a simple two-answer question. Your visitor can either say yes to being on your list, or decline.

Here’s an example of what the pop-up looks like on PopUp Domination’s website:

The plug-in gives you access to analytics, A/B testing, and several unique designs. It’s available as a WordPress plug-in or as stand alone software. Pricing is available on their website.

2. List Builder

List Builder is a free pop-up plugin from the team at AppSumo.

It works by having a simple, attractive lightbox pop up at just the right time – when someone’s leaving your website. You can customize the design of the lightbox and the copy presented to your visitors. Try their A/B testing to see what converts the best.

Here’s what theirs looks like:

This type of pop-up doesn’t ruin a customer’s experience with your content or on your site. Instead, it waits until the person is on their way out to make one last attempt at capturing their details. According to the site, you can expect to “easily” get 20 – 50% more email subscribers every day using List Builder

3. Drip

If you’re not on board with the pop-up strategy, Drip might be a better solution – especially if you’re just starting your email list.

This WordPress plugin does it all. First, it lets you choose a simple form that pops up in the right corner of your visitors screen. It’s unobtrusive but still animated enough to capture the attention of the person on your site. Here’s what the Drip pop-up looks like:

There are several formats you can choose from. Once you have the contact list set up, Drip goes the extra step beyond most email subscription plugins to let you to create an email sequence. Use this to welcome visitors and nurture leads so you turn more visitors into customers.

4. Slide In

Slide In is similar to Drip, except the plugin slides in from the side of the screen. It’s timed just right (similar to List Builder) so you capture your audience when they’re leaving instead of interrupting them when they’re arriving on your page.

Here’s an example from the Slide In website.

5. Interrupt

This is another plugin from AppSumo. Instead of having a pop-up on your website, you can greet your visitors with an instant call-to-action. The entire page fills with an invitation to sign up for your email list, interrupting what they thought they were going to get when they clicked to your page. Once they scroll down (no email address required) they’re met with the content and cannot sign up again.

This is the AppSumo Interrupt plugin in action on their site.

6. Hello Bar

Hello Bar is one of the most popular plugins for driving email subscribers. It’s free and it’s non-invasive.

It works as a slim, attractive bar that sits on the top of your website with an invitation to sign up for your email list. It’s noticeable but not in-your-face, making it ideal for websites who need a stellar customer experience to convert.

Here’s an example of the HelloBar from their website.

Customize your bar with your colors and call-to-action.

7. Subscribe to Download

If you’re offering a lead magnet to encourage subscribers, deliver it with ease by installing the Subscribe to Download WordPress plugin.

This plugin gives you an attractive, yet simple lightbox to put on your website. Add some copy and you’ll have a simple giveaway added to your website.

This is a live demo from their website:

8. LeadBoxes

If you’ve ever used LeadPages to create and design your landing pages, you’ve probably heard about LeadBoxes.

LeadBoxes are simple opt-in boxes you can place anywhere on your website. These are ideal for the ends of your blog posts or on pages where you want to convert more visitors. It’s a two box plugin. First, the visitor must say that they’re interested in what you’re offering. Then a pop-up will appear asking for their email address. It’s simple yet highly effective.

Here’s an example of the second box on a website:

9. Rafflecopter

Marketing psychology shows that reciprocity is one of the best ways to get website visitors invested in your business. Hosting a giveaway is a good way to do this.

Rafflecopter is a plugin that makes it simple to host giveaways and encourage email subscribers in the process. A person will get an entry into your giveaway whenever he provides his email address. With Rafflecopter, you can also encourage social media followers at the same time by offering more entries for liking your Facebook page or following you on Twitter.

When the contest is over a person is randomly drawn by the Rafflecopter plugin and you get to notify the winner. It’s a fun way to encourage more email signups.

Here’s what it looks like:

10. OptimizePress

One of the easiest ways to drive email subscribers is to create an entire campaign around your email list. To do this, OptimizePress allows you to create a stunning landing page and drive people to sign up through your website. This is a slightly more robust plan than adding a simple plugin to your website but it works. If growing an email list is your primary business goal, this is the best solution for you.

It is equally ideal for anyone creating a membership website.

Which Plugin Will You Try?

Are you planning on trying any of these plugins? Or do you already use a plugin you’re fond of that’s not listed here? Let us know in the comments below.

Marketing has much of its roots in pricing. What you charge sends a direct message to the market about what your product is worth. Often, this message is louder and clearer than any amount of copy you write.

As you try to find buyers online, your price is an important consideration. Although it’s not the first thing most buyers will notice about your company, it plays a major role in your conversions. Will she click the offer and make a purchase from you? Could you have enticed the buyer to spend more with your company? The pricing strategy you choose determines the answer to those questions and more.

Here are my five favorite pricing strategies and how you can use them to get found and get paid.

1. Display Your Best Offers Up Front

I like to travel. When I do, it’s important to me that I have a nice hotel room at a reasonable price. That’s not too much to ask, is it?

I’m often price shopping online to find the best deal. My favorite website to use is Hotels.com.

Hotels.com recently made me happily pay 19% more by using a simple, yet powerful pricing strategy. It’s called choice architecture. Here are the details about how Hotels.com used choice architecture to get me pay more.

Choice architecture is simply the way you display your prices on your website and present the choices your customers have when deciding what to buy. When you offer the best choices up front, your customer has less fluff to sift through and can make her decision faster. Often, this decision means paying a little bit extra but feeling great about what she bought from you.
The more you do this, the more you’ll earn trust with your audience. Your efforts to find buyers online will pay off because you’ll have repeat, loyal customers going back to your business to buy time and time again, much like I’ve done with Hotels.com.

2. Place a Premium on Your Products

Have you seen the latest Jennifer Aniston commercial for Emirates Airlines? It’s been dubbed one of the “snobbiest ads ever” because of how much luxury she’s bathed in while traveling overseas.

In the commercial, you see Jennifer Aniston living in what she calls a “nightmare.” For most travelers, it’s standard operating procedure for overseas flights. On her plane, there isn’t a bar. There isn’t a shower. And, there aren’t decent snacks. The staff is mocking her until she jolts out of the dream and finds herself on Emirates Air.

The ad is clearly targeting a specific crowd. The company wants to attract the type of people who can afford to pay for these luxurious trips around the world – the ones who wouldn’t dream of flying in coach.

Although some might see the ad as snooty, Emirates Air is using a smart strategy. They’ve placed a premium on their service and now, they can sell it at a higher price. The consumers who are willing to pay will do so gladly to know that they’re getting the best service possible when they fly.

Placing premium pricing on your products isn’t something to shy away from. In fact, it can bring you more money from a core group of consumers who are eager to pay for what you offer.

By having a premium priced product or service, you attract a different demographic of buyers online and offline.

3. Increase Your Prices

One of the best ways to get a buyer’s attention is to create a sense of urgency. It’s a popular pricing strategy because it works.

Many businesses take the traditional route of offering, “limited time offers.” Still, there’s a different way to find buyers online and capture their interest with an urgent offer – increase your prices.

Increasing your prices might sound scary. You might worry about frightening consumers and losing customers who can’t or aren’t willing to pay the higher price.

But, as with any strategy, it’s all in how you position it.

Chris Brogan does an excellent job of this when selling his online courses. He offers them for a discounted price up front and then increases the price after a limited introductory period.

Create your sense of urgency by running a sale before your price goes up. Here’s why it works so well:

• You turn lurking leads into buyers who want to get in before your prices increase;
• You show your customers that the product is popular enough to increase the price;
• You make your product more appealing by pricing it higher, while also making your customer feel like she got a good deal by offering it for a lower price.

It’s a similar strategy to the standard sales and limited time deals, but it’s way more powerful because you’re reverse engineering it to create urgency and spark sales.

4. Price Low, Then Upsell

Vistaprint is known as a low-cost printer. Businesses on a budget can go to Vistaprint to order business cards, flyers and other marketing materials at a reasonable price. It all seems very cost effective, until you reach the shopping cart.

Every purchase ends with a customer getting fed plenty of opportunities to buy even more marketing materials – often materials she didn’t know they needed. A simple business card refill purchase could turn into the customer getting a new stamp for her business, a banner to hang outside and magnets to hand out.

The upsell works. Vistaprint capitalizes on its low prices by continuing to add products to the person’s shopping cart throughout the checkout process.

This can help you find new buyers online too.

Sometimes, more options are better. If you sell several low priced products, you can increase the likelihood that someone will buy by making extra offers. Because the pricing isn’t extraordinary, it’s easier for the customer to say “yes” to your offer and add more to her shopping cart.

5. Don’t Be Afraid to Downsell (Which Could Lead to a Cross Sell)

We have an office in London, home of Wimbledon. Each summer, people flock from around the world to watch tennis stars face off on the courts. While they do, many people indulge in the well-known Wimbledon treat – strawberries and cream.

I recently read a story about an Irish shop owner who sold strawberries and cream out of his small grocery store. You can see why I am partial to this example.

The store was closed on Sundays so every Saturday afternoon, he’d mark down the strawberries to sell. They wouldn’t make any money from the sale, but they’d break even.

Every Saturday, they sold out. The people who wouldn’t buy the strawberries for full price would come in and buy them at half price. The store owner used a downsell strategy to get the product off the shelves by targeting consumers who wouldn’t have otherwise made the purchase. This also boosted sales.

You see, the customers who came in weren’t just buying strawberries. They would also buy the cream, which was not marked down. The store made more money because of a downsell and a cross sell mutually beneficial strategy.

Do you have products or services in your arsenal that could work in the same way?

Online, it’s easy to setup your store to downsell as soon as you see a customer leaving. You can make your offer more tempting by lowering the price. Then, you can cross sell another complementary product boosting your sales and making your customer feel as if she walked away with a win.

The Lesson Here

The lesson is this: Your prices matter. They impact your sales. They steer customers in the right direction. And, they’re what encourage buyers to buy. If you’re not employing a smart pricing strategy, you’re losing out.

Know someone who loves pricing strategies? Share this article with them using the sharing buttons at the top of the page.

A guide for planning and running a moderated remote user test

There are plenty of ways you can run a usability test. Most people would advise you to do them in person; others may advise you to use a service that will automate the test. This may not always be an option for your project, so running a moderated remote usability test is the next best thing!

Remote testing can lead to incredibly helpful insights. You get to experience user’s reactions on the fly; and access your own customer base—not a panel of professional user testers. Just like in-person testing, you need to prepare ahead of time, and that prep work is a little more difficult since technology is involved.

This article is meant to help you prepare for a remote user test by highlighting the key actions to consider:

• Recruiting your own participants
• Technical check-Ins
• Scheduling
• Managing incentives
• Getting to know the user

There will be moments where participants may back out at the last minute, you’ll run behind schedule, or your software won’t work they way you hoped it would. That’s okay! Because this guide will prepare you for anything that gets thrown your way.

Recruiting Your Own Participants

Before you can run a usability test you need to find qualified participants. There are several ways to find the right candidates for your test: use a professional recruiter; recruit from your email subscribers; asking your Twitter and Facebook followers; or recruiting customers directly from your website.

For a recent user test on a client project we chose to use Ethnio, a remote recruiting tool,because they had a very specific user base and loyal customers that we needed to target. Ethnio allowed us to place a screener on the client’s website and ask questions that would help us rule them in or out.

When determining whether or not a participant is qualified for the test, ask yourself the following questions when evaluating their responses.

• Does the participant have anything to do with the development or design of what you are testing?
• Do they represent your personas that you developed or a target audience you are trying to reach?
• Are they already familiar with the website and subject matter?

Once you have your participants ready you should plan to conduct a technical check-in.

Preparing for Technical Check-Ins

Before you run the usability test I recommend conducting a technical check-in prior to the big day. Asking a participant for an extra phone call prior to the session can be seen as a waste of time. It’s important to remind the user why they signed up and give some details so they know what to expect during their testing session.

In order to make the testing event successful we know we need to do a 15 minute dry run a few days before the test to check the technology. We adjusted the language of our email to let the participant know what we expected of them. Here is an example email template we used for a recent test:

Hello [Name],

Thank you for signing up to participate in our research for X website! We can’t wait to hear your thoughts about what we’re working on.

We will reach out separately to schedule your 60 minute research session on Tuesday 12/8. During this session you will explore our site and get a $100 Visa gift card for your feedback.

But first, we wanted to do a quick technical check-in with you in order to test the software we’ll be using for the session. Are you available for a 15 minute technical check-in on Friday, 12/4 between the hours of 9:00am EST – 4:00pm EST?

There are a few things you will need to prepare for this tech check in.

1. We’d like to make sure that you have access to a web browser like Google Chrome. If you don’t have access to it already, please download it before our call here: https://www.google.com/chrome/.
2. Once you have Google Chrome installed, please download the following extension so [moderator’s name] can view your screen: We will be using GoToMeeting to share screens. You can go to this link and click “Add to Chrome” to install the extension.

Thank you for your time and feel free to ask any questions.

Best,

[Moderator’s Name]

Conducting the Technical Check-Ins

For this testing session we used GoToMeeting to share and record screens. Many of the users weren’t familiar with GoToMeeting. We needed to make sure they had the proper plug-in installed and knew how to share their screen. Taking 15–20 minutes to do this saves time and decreases the chances of things going wrong during the actual testing session.

For those who didn’t end up doing a technical check in, we spent a lot of time trying to make sure the audio and screen sharing was working properly. There were times GoToMeeting just kept freezing or the user couldn’t hear me. During another session, a user didn’t realize that they needed to be on their computer in order to walk through the prototype. Running a technical check-in helps avoid these issues.

If you plan on using GoToMeeting (GTM) for user testing, you can follow these steps during your technical check in.

1. A few minutes before the scheduled technical check-in time, open the GTM desktop app and log in to the meeting. You have to manually enter the meeting number.
2. Dial into the audio via the phone then put it on speakerphone and mute the phone to dial-in your audio code. Remember to un-mute when your user gets on the line.
3. You can see when your user enters the meeting as their name will appear in the participant list in the GTM app. You can also see whether they are connected to the phone or computer audio by the icon next to their name in the app.
4. After thanking the participant, walk them through the screen share setup if they haven’t connected already.
5. Press “Change Presenter” in the GTM desktop app. Normally, this will prompt them to download the desktop app, but if they have the Chrome extension installed, they won’t have to. Remind them to share their entire screen, not just the GTM screen.
6. If you want to also see their face and they’ve agreed to using a webcam, direct them to the camera icon in the GTM in-browser view.
7. Make sure their web cam feed and their screen are visible on your desktop.
8. Send them a URL via the chat function (something neutral like google.com) to make sure they can find and use chat. This way you’ll be able to send them links.

Now that you’ve done your technical check-ins, you can focus on scheduling the actual user testing sessions.

Scheduling

You should dedicate entire work days to user testing. That way you get in the flow of testing and won’t get interrupted by other tasks. For one of our projects, I dedicated two days to user testing with four sessions each day. Each session was an hour and I added time in between each session. When scheduling tests it’s helpful to give yourself 15–30 minutes in between sessions for you to debrief with your team. Take this moment to review your notes and figure out if there are any questions you would like to ask differently or explore different task during the next round of testing.

Since you are using an hour of someone’s time to conduct research, it’s important to provide an incentive to show your appreciation for agreeing to participate in your study.

Managing Incentives

Ethnio allowed us to use their site to deliver Visa gift card codes to the participants. When it comes to determining the value of the incentive, consider the value of the insights they will give you and how hard it was to recruit participants. If you know that the project you are working on has a very specific and unique user set, you may want to give them a larger incentive. Typically, we like to provide an $50 incentive for 30 minutes; $100 for 60 minutes. Don’t forget to include that incentive in the screener to attract participants.

Get to Know the Participants

The participant is going to be nervous. They have to speak to a complete stranger, answer non-stop questions and be recorded for an hour. In order for them to be comfortable and truly say what’s on their mind, the moderator needs to move the conversation past the typical “good morning” and “how’s your day going?”

Have a pre-interview script ready and ask them about their experiences with the site. Get to know why they were on the site in the first place. Some questions we like to ask are:

1. Name
2. Age
3. Occupation, if relevant
4. How they discovered the site?
5. What were they trying to do on the site? Read an article or purchase an item?
6. What is their level of knowledge of what the site provides?
7. How often do they go to the site?

Then ask them questions based on their answers. If they mention they were purchasing a specific item, ask them why or for whom. Following up based on their answers can help you figure out what experience the user was having on the site. From there on it becomes easier to walk through the prototype, make a few jokes and really hear about their experience with the design.

Once you follow these steps, and get through the first hurdle of getting to know a participant, you should be ready for testing. Following all of these steps will make your remote user test go smoothly. Now all you have to focus on is developing your script to facilitate the conversation. Good luck and get to testing!

US bank stocks have plummeted this year and everyone wants to know why.

Morgan Stanley is down 30% from a year ago, while Goldman Sachs is down 13%. Wells Fargo is down 11%.

Deutsche Bank analyst Matt O'Connor took a stab at why that is in a recent note.

He says it's a combination of factors, ranging from a weakening economy to tightening monetary policy and credit concerns.

Here's the logic:

1. The slowing economy

O'Connor pointed out that nominal GDP only rose 3% year-on-year in the second half of 2015.

"One could argue we are already in or near a recession-- or at least are in a recession like environment (not all recessions 'feel' like a recession after all)," O'Connor writes.

2. Tightening monetary policy

Tightening monetary policy — that is, higher interest rates — might actually not be a good thing for banks. O'Connor writes that banks may have benefited from quantitative easing and low interest rates.

"During periods of QE, bank stocks rose 2.8% on average per month (vs. just +0.2% during non QE periods). In aggregate, gains during QE accounted for 91% of all gains in the BKX since Mar 2009," he says.

3. Before the sell off, bank stocks were not cheap

Before bank stocks peaked in July, they were trading above the historical long term average "based on expectations that the overall economy was improving" and that "bank earnings would benefit disproportionately vs. the market as the economic growth accelerated."

So you could argue they had a lot further to fall. 

4. Banks aren't expected to earn as much this year

Earnings expectations for 2016 have dropped 10% in the past six months for market-sensitive banks, according to O'Connor.

The outlook could get even worse if we see weaker macroeconomic conditions — O'Connor says it could mean a 20%-25% earnings per share (EPS) risk if we see a slight downturn or mild recession. If we see a severe recession, which is unlikely, it could mean a 40-50% potential downturn.

5. Credit worries

In the fourth quarter, lending standards for banks tightened for the second consecutive quarter. Meanwhile, credit spreads are widening.

But O'Connor is not too bothered by credit quality concerns.

"Within consumer lending, we've held the long time view that standards for mortgage and credit cards at the banks have been tight since the crisis," he writes. "As a result, we don't expect further tightening and wouldn't expect consumer credit to deteriorate much if there's a mild recession or near like recession in the US."

He does, however, see potential pressure in commercial and industrial (C&I) loans, even outside of energy.

6. It's normal for bank stocks to underperform the market at times like these

The whole market has seen a lot of volatility. And O'Connor's colleague, David Bianco, calculates that right now bank stocks have a beta — which is a measure of the volatility of stock in comparison to the market as a whole — of 2.3x. That is line with many other recent corrections.

SEE ALSO: CREDIT SUISSE CEO: 'The doomsday scenarios are not justified'

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Disgraced pharma CEO Martin Shkreli dissed a Wu-Tang Clan member in a hostile video

We know from research (and common sense) that people who understand and manage their own and others’ emotions make better leaders. They are able to deal with stress, overcome obstacles, and inspire others to work toward collective goals. They manage conflict with less fallout and build stronger teams. And they are generally happier at work, too. But far too many managers lack basic self-awareness and social skills. They don’t recognize the impact of their own feelings and moods. They are less adaptable than they need to be in today’s fast-paced world. And they don’t demonstrate basic empathy for others: they don’t understand people’s needs, which means they are unable to meet those needs or inspire people to act.

One of the reasons we see far too little emotional intelligence in the workplace is that we don’t hire for it. We hire for pedigree. We look for where someone went to school, high grades and test scores, technical skills, and certifications, not whether they build great teams or get along with others. And how smart we think someone is matters a lot, so we hire for intellect.

You and Your Team

Obviously we need smart, experienced people in our companies, but we also need people who are adept at dealing with change, understand and motivate others, and manage both positive and negative emotions to create an environment where everyone can be at their best. The problem is that we struggle to assess EI when hiring (even when we spend a fortune on personality tests and search firms) and we’re never taught how. But you actually can hire for emotional intelligence — and it doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg. If you want to begin, start with these dos and don’ts.

Don’t:

• Use personality tests as a proxy for EI. Most of these tests attempt to measure what they say they do: personality. They do not measure specific competencies of emotional intelligence such as self-awareness, positive outlook, achievement orientation, empathy, or inspirational leadership.
• Use a self-report test. There are two reasons these don’t work. First, if a person is not self-aware, how can he possibly assess his own emotional intelligence? And if he is self-aware, and knows what he’s missing, is he really going to tell the truth when trying to get a job?
• Use a 360-degree feedback instrument, even if it is valid and even if it measures EI competencies, like the Emotional and Social Competency Inventory (ESCI) does. A tool like 360-degree feedback ought to be used for development, not evaluation. When these instruments are used to evaluate, people game them by carefully selecting the respondents, and even prepping them on how to score.

Do:

• Get references and talk to them. Letters of reference simply aren’t good enough when it comes to understanding your candidate’s EI. When you actually talk with a reference, you can ask specific and pointed questions about how the candidate demonstrated various EI competencies. Get lots of examples, with lots of detail. Specifically, ask for examples of how your candidate treats other people.
• Interview for emotional intelligence. This sounds easy and many people think they are already interviewing for EI. But we aren’t, much of the time. That’s because we allow people to be vague in their responses and fail to ask good follow-up questions. Even when we ask candidates directly about EI or EI-related competencies, they talk about an idealized notion of themselves and what they’d like to be, rather than how they really behave. To overcome this obstacle, you can use behavioral event interviewing.

Behavioral event interviewing is a powerful way to learn about people’s competencies and to see how they demonstrate those competencies on the job. Here’s what you do:

Start the interview by making the candidate as comfortable as possible. The goal here is to make the interview feel conversational, informal, and warm. This tone will help to ensure that you get the truth. Then, ask a couple of traditional questions about the person’s background and experience.

Now you’re ready to start the behavioral event portion of the interview. Ask the person to think about a recent situation at work that included a difficult challenge that she and others had to solve. Encourage your candidate to pick a situation where she’s the “protagonist.” And, ask her to choose a situation that was ultimately successful — one that made her feel proud. Encourage her to tell the story briefly at first. Then, go over the entire story, asking very specific questions about what she thought, felt, and did throughout.

Now, ask for a story about an unsuccessful situation, one that felt like a failure and that your candidate learned something from. Again, ask for a brief overview and then get a lot of detail.

Finally, you want to leave your candidate feeling good about you and the interview so seek yet another positive, successful story.

This interview technique allows you to ask for and hear details about how the candidate thinks in situations that involve stress, challenges, and other people. You also get information about how they felt during the situation. At the very least this tells you if the person is aware of his own feelings. You are also likely to hear how the person managed these feelings, and the extent to which he was aware of his impact on others (all of which adds up to EI). And importantly, make sure you get the person to tell you what they actually did and how they behaved. This is where you will hear about the overt demonstration of EI.

Behavioral event interviewing is not magic, and it takes practice to get enough detail in each story. Don’t worry about asking the person to go back over portions of the story a time or two. Rather, try to get them to tell you the story from a couple of vantage points — what he thought, what he felt, and then what he actually did. Take your time: this is not the kind of interview you can do in half an hour. But the time is well spent.

If you’re able to “see” your candidate’s EI in action, you’ll make a better hire. Or you’ll pass. Either way you’re doing yourself and your organization a big favor.

Are you excited for the big game, or maybe just the food and fun of a Super Bowl party? Either way, here are six apps that can help you make the most of the big day, whether you’re there in person, or watching from the comfort of home.

Super Bowl Stadium App (Free on iOS, Android) – NFL’s official Super Bowl Stadium App serves as a companion to the big game, allowing users to browse information about the Super Bowl and Levi’s Stadium (including details on where to park), as well as receive info during the game itself (like game stats and play by play information).

Carolina Panthers (Free on iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry) and Denver Broncos (Free on iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry) Team Apps – These team apps allow users to learn more about the two teams in the big game, and include player statistics, photo galleries, news and more.

MyFitnessPal (Free on iOS, Android, Windows) – If you’re afraid of over-indulging on pizza and wings during your Super Bowl party, this calorie counting app can help you keep track of the calories you consume during the game. For iOS users, the app’s step tracker will also let you know how many calories you’ve burned.

Blocky Football (Free on iOS, Android) – If you need a break from the big game, you can still keep the football theme going by trying this runner from Full Fat. The game challenges players to score touchdowns by swiping on the screen to help their football player move down the field.

Shazam (Free on iOS, Android, Windows, Amazon) – Many companies (such as Coca-Cola) include a Shazam call-to-action in their commercials. By downloading the Shazam app and allowing the app to listen to these ads, users can receive more information about products. Also be sure to check out Adweek’s Super Bowl Ad Tracker to keep track of all of the commercials from this year’s game.

If you’re anything like me, your to-do list might look something like:

• call 100 prospects
• schedule 50 demos
• send 100 follow up emails
• generate 200 new prospects

... and so on.

So, when my boss mentioned I should read the book he just bought, it sort of went in one ear and out the other.

My top priority is to hit my quota, so reading a sales book just didn’t seem worthwhile. I went on with my days forgetting about this book, until I learned that one of my co-workers read the book and it was actually helping him hit his quota faster.

By not reading the book, I knew I was letting my boss down, but what I didn’t realize is that I was also missing out on valuable sales insights. Like the story of how Aaron Ross transformed the Salesforce.com sales team without any traditional cold calling and scaled the business into a $100 million sales machine. Or the enlightening findings from one of the largest studies ever done in sales.

Determined to see the same results as my co-worker, I dedicated 10 hours to read the sales book my boss recommended and two other books I heard had proven results:

• SNAP Selling by Jill Konrath
• Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
• The Challenger Sale by Brent Adamson and Matthew Dixon

It took me 10 hours to read these books, but it turns out the 740 pages can be summarized into three 15-page sections.

To save you time I created a summary of these three top sales books, which include:

• Three lists of key terms every reader should know
• Shareable quotes to strut your sales smarts
• Three actionable frameworks to try

Not only did reading these three books impress my boss, but I started hitting my quota quicker. I hope this summary brings you the same -- if not better -- results.

Chinese New Year is on February 8th, to celebrate the year of the Monkey.

Growing up in a Chinese household, my family dedicates over two weeks to Chinese New Year: the cleaning, cooking, decorating, and celebrating. There is a very specific way for things to be done — from the decor to the food, everything has its superstition.

Though I can't make any promises that they're effective, these traditions have been passed on through generations and are still being followed.

Might as well give them a try:

SEE ALSO: I've lived in New York City for 22 years, and here are my favorite places to eat for less than $20

We clean our house before New Year's Eve. 

As much as Chinese people believe in good luck, we also believe that there are bad spirits keeping us from it.

About a week before Chinese New Year, there is a lot of dusting, sweeping, and mopping going on in my home. Houses are cleaned to their entirety to sweep away bad luck and "inauspicious breaths," according to History.com.

Any cleaning after the eve of Chinese New Year is considered bad, because you're potentially sweeping away any fortune coming your way. 

 

Red is our lucky color. 

Red is not my favorite color, but it doesn't matter when I go shopping for Chinese New Year. This color is traditionally believed to bring wealth by warding off the spirits of bad fortune.

It doesn't matter what it is you're buying — if it comes in red, get it! 

It is also advised to pay attention to your zodiac year. This comes every 12 years, one for each animal in the zodiac. When it lands on the animal of your birth year again, it is known as your benming nian, which is supposed to full of bad luck, according to China travel expert Sara Nauman. So beware: If it is your zodiac year, you are advised to wear red underwear for maximum luck.

 

We adorn our home with decorations. 

Every year, all the rooms in my house are decorated with red envelopes, banners with messages of good luck, pairs of door couplets, and lanterns. Many of the decorations feature the animal of the zodiac year as well.  

SF Gate reports that many of these decorations are supposed to represent the talismans from the Han Dynasty that helped protect people from misfortune, bad omens, and disasters. 

Once again, all decorations should be on red paper or include red. It's really no surprise
— since everyone is wearing red for Chinese New Year, your home should, too. 

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Zero Motorcycles’ Z-Force® motor and power pack, the Zero S pulls hard to speeds above 90 mph and offers a city range of up to 197 miles with the optional Power Tank accessory. Or, take advantage of public charging stations and get back on the road three times faster with the new Charge Tank accessory.

The Zero SR shares the same DNA as the Zero S but is built for riders who simply want to go faster and accelerate harder. Featuring a larger 660 amp motor controller, the Zero SR delivers 25% more power (67 hp) and 56% more torque (106 ft-lb). To accommodate the increased output, its motor uses higher temperature magnets to ensure better performance during extended periods at higher speeds.

With more torque than most 1000cc sport bikes, the Zero SR pulls hard off the line…and just keeps pulling. Launching from 0-60 mph in 3.3 seconds en route to a top speed over 100 mph, the Zero SR offers spirited riders an edge in competitive riding. From lap times at the local track day to sweeping the podium at the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb, the Zero SR is fundamentally changing the way electric motorcycles are perceived.


2016 Zero S or DS, with the 9.8kWh battery pack: $10,995

2016 Zero S or DS, with the 13kWh battery pack: $13,995

2016 Zero SR or DSR, with the 13kWh battery pack: $15,995

2016 Zero FX or FXS, with the 3.3 kWh battery module: $8,495

2016 Zero FX or FXS, with the 6.5 kWh battery module: $10,990

Charge tanks for the S-series bikes cost $1,988, and power tank additional batteries cost $2,674.

In the United States, the E-motorcycle Federal Tax Credit covers 10% of the purchase price of a street legal electric motorcycle up to a maximum of $2,500. Motorcycle accessories may also be eligible for a 10% federal tax credit when purchased on the same invoice as your motorcycle. Some states and cities offer additional incentives.

Charging accessories may be eligible for a 30% federal tax credit when billed on a separate invoice. Both incentives are scheduled to end December 31, 2016.

The 2016 Zero SR, with the additional range batteries can cost $16801 with the 10% tax credits instead of $18669.



Read more »

The execution of Sheik Nimr al-Nimr and 46 other people in Saudi Arabia’s capital of Riyadh last month was a curious bit of cruelty, even by Saudi standards. Nimr, a political activist and leading figure in the Shia reformist community, opposed the Iranian regime and considered the Assads in Syria “oppressors,” sentiments shared by the Saudi government.

His killing seemed to serve no purpose at a time when regional rivals Saudi Arabia, a Sunni power, and Shia Iran are locked in one of their worst cold-war flare-ups. The fallout was predictable, too: Iranian protesters took to the streets, storming the Saudi embassy and other consulates throughout Iran. Diplomatic relations, already on a knife’s-edge, all but collapsed.

“With the recent execution of Sheik Nimr, it looks like the door to a more cordial diplomatic resolution may have been all but closed by Saudi Arabia,” says Payam Mohseni, Iran project director and a fellow for Iran studies at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. “The risk is now that tit-for-tat retaliations between the two countries may further raise the stakes and escalate conflict.”

So why did Saudi Arabia invite this trouble? The answer can partly be found in the fast-falling price of oil. With oil prices down 70 per cent in the past year and a half, and Iran on the verge of breaking out on the international stage after a nuclear limitation deal that led to a lifting of international sanctions, Saudi Arabia suddenly finds itself on the losing end of Middle Eastern petro-politics.

Related from Maclean’s:

• Mohammed al-Nimr on his father’s execution in Saudi Arabia
• Why would Saudi Arabia execute a Shia cleric? It’s all about America.

With some experts predicting oil prices could remain low for the foreseeable future—prices are currently around $30 a barrel (all prices in US$) and falling this week—Saudi Arabia faces the challenge of maintaining an expensive economic system based on patronage and almost entirely reliant on oil revenues.

An October 2015 report published by the International Monetary Fund warned that the Saudis face a five-year limit on their ability to buy their way out of economic crisis with oil at an average of $50 a barrel. Last year, the kingdom posted a soaring deficit of US$98 billion. Next year, the report said, will be nearly as bad, if not worse. Massive reserves, estimated to be nearly US$700 billion, are depleting fast.

Economic reforms are clearly needed, but it’s doubtful the Saudis can implement them fast enough to stop the slide. Meeting defence spending alone, now estimated at 11 per cent of GDP and rising, will mean making cuts elsewhere. Implementing personal taxes (Saudis currently pay none) to generate revenue risks destabilizing the monarchy, which relies on the goodwill earned by offering free education, free health care and cheap energy.

King Salman bin Abdulaziz, who acceded the throne a year ago, is considered an aggressive hardliner, eager to shore up power by any means necessary. Reform movements in the kingdom have struggled to gain momentum despite a growing chorus for change, including demonstrations by women for more rights.

Instead of meeting those calls, King Salman has opted to use a trusted tactic: promote fear and instability to justify the status quo. Executing Nimr plays directly into that strategy. But it might also mark the beginning of the end of the Saudi monarchy.

What the Saudi monarchy needs most is for oil to rebound, and fast. The best-case scenario, according to former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia Robert Jordan, is if oil prices recover to $70 dollars a barrel by 2017. “If that happens and the Saudis reform their economy by cutting subsidies and imposing income taxes, for instance, their economy could recover,” he says.

But that doesn’t look likely to happen. Forecasts suggest low oil prices are here to stay, at least well beyond the five-year limit set by the IMF. OPEC, the oil-producing cartel that has manipulated oil prices since 1960, is, according to most analysts, virtually dead, undermined by internal rifts and the emergence of major new sources of oil in North America.

In the face of falling oil prices, Saudi Arabia has flooded the market with oil. “Maintaining record production levels despite the low prices is not only a way to hurt Iran but also a means for the Saudis to take back market share from the U.S.,” says Jordan. “Low prices will eventually drive out high-cost producers.” But the tactic has its limits. Even if supply dwindles as U.S. producers drop out of the market, once demand rises again, those players will be back.

On the other side of the equation is Iran. According to the IMF report, at $50 a barrel, the Iranians could manage their economy for another decade. “Iran’s economy is resilient to low oil prices over the medium and long terms due to its experience with sanctions, increasing tax base, the gradual slashing of subsidies and the investments that will occur as a result of the lifting of economic sanctions,” says Mohseni. “Oil prices are more important for Saudi Arabia’s political and social stability than for Iran’s.”

Indeed, one of the positive outcomes of the years Iran spent under economic sanctions was the effect it had on its domestic industries, Jordan adds. “The Iranians were forced to diversify their economy away from reliance on oil revenues,” he says. “It also has significant human capital in terms of a young, educated population. The Saudis have failed to keep up.”

Since 2009, Iran has been actively reforming its economy to pave the way for a transition to something approaching a free-market system. Reforms to energy subsidies, which used to be among the highest in the world, have taken some pressure off the national coffers, as have higher income taxes.

The net result is two very different societies. Whereas Iran has a reputation for hard work and resilience to lean times, Saudis are famous for their reliance on the monarchy to maintain their comparatively luxurious lifestyles.

Saudi Arabia is now a “wild card,” according to Kenneth M. Pollack, an expert on Middle Eastern political-military affairs at the Brookings Institution. In the wake of the nuclear deal between Iran and Western powers, “the Saudis may choose to ramp up their support to various Sunni groups fighting Iran’s allies and proxies around the region,” he told the U.S. Senate committee on foreign relations in August last year.

His prediction is proving accurate. And Russia’s entrance into the Syrian theatre has shifted the tide further in Iran’s favour. Regime forces, supported by Russian jets, have begun to reverse their losses and now stand poised to take back significant territory.

The Saudis have reacted by undermining Syrian peace negotiations. The latest round, held in Geneva on Jan. 25, were stripped of any meaningful outcome after the Saudi-backed opposition refused to attend. The Syrians, backed by Russia and Iran, widened the divide by insisting that they would only negotiate with an opposition of their own choosing. “Terrorists,” they said, meaning anyone supported by Saudi Arabia, would not be welcome at the table.

The standoff took another turn four days later when the Saudi-backed higher negotiation committee sent a delegation to the conference, but with the caveat that it would only discuss humanitarian needs and demand an end to the targeting of civilians by the regime and its supporters.

The longer negotiations drag on without an agreement, the more money Saudi Arabia will have to sink into its proxies—not only in Syria, but also its expensive intervention on the side of the Sunni government in Yemen.

Saudi Arabia would not be the first country to fall to a combination of war and cheap oil. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union, embroiled in a costly conflict in Afghanistan and facing an increasingly discontented population at home, was on its last legs. An oil crash, which saw prices fall from just over $100 per barrel (in today’s dollars) at the start of the decade to just over $20 by 1986, contributed in large part to the Soviet collapse three years later. Saudi Arabia is, in many ways, even more exposed to low oil prices than the Soviets were. And $20 a barrel no longer seems outrageous in the current climate. However, compared to the Soviets, there is obviously more interest among Western nations to ensure the Saudi monarchy doesn’t collapse. One positive outcome may be that the Saudis will be forced to institute the democratic and economic reforms they have been promising for years.

“The oil crisis could also present an important opportunity for the Saudis and the Iranians to sit down together and solve some of their disagreements in a diplomatic manner,” says Mohseni. “Iran is still a pragmatic actor and would be willing to negotiate if the Saudis turn around. But that looks unlikely given their current regional posturing.”

Instead, King Salman and his hardline cohorts appear to be playing all-or-nothing politics, and in the process are becoming increasingly estranged from their allies. For the Saudis, the rapprochement with Iran signals an end to U.S. engagement in the Middle East, Pollock pointed out to the Senate committee in August. “In the absence of American engagement, leadership and military involvement in the region, the [Gulf Co-operation Council] state—led, as always, by the Saudis—gets frightened,” he warned, “and their tendency when frightened is to lash out and overextend themselves.” Without U.S. support to maintain balance in the region, “things could get very ugly,” he concluded.

It’s not hard to imagine how: a Saudi collapse, or a significant weakening of the regime, would inevitably lead to more conflict. Bahrain, for instance, a Shia-majority nation ruled by a Sunni monarchy, depends on the Saudis for protection. In 2011, protests sparked by the broader democratic uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa led to a Saudi military intervention. Roughly a thousand troops remain stationed there to prop up the Bahraini monarchy.

More worrying is the threat of radical jihadis. While Saudi Arabia is blamed for being the world’s leading source of violent radicals, not to mention being the ideological brain trust for extremists, the monarchy itself has actively, and violently, crushed radical movements on its home turf that it considers a threat to its legitimacy. Without the iron fist of the royals, the heart of Sunni Islam would explode, with grave consequences.

As ugly as the Saudi regime can be, the world needs it. And the royals know it.

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Demand Gen Report just published “Top B2B Marketers Measure Lead Nurturing Effectiveness to Boost Performance,” a special report in which they address the whys, whats, and how tos of measuring lead nurturing’s true impact. You can download a free copy of the report here.

According to Demand Gen Report’s own demand generation benchmark study, roughly 40 percent of B2B marketers aren’t sure how their lead nurturing programs are performing. This new report shares insights, ideas, best practices, and real-life examples of how to measure lead nurturing performance beyond basic email metrics like open and click rates. It’s a useful reference for any marketer tasked with measuring the impact, and therefore the ROI, from lead nurturing and enabling technology like marketing automation.

I was flattered to be asked to contribute to the report, and my contribution is reproduced below, reposted here with permission:

First of all, let’s define lead nurturing success. In our firm’s marketing automation practice, we define success not as email clicks, response rate, or even overall engagement, but instead: clear, demonstrated, and attributable movement of leads through the lead lifecycle – for example, inquiry to MQL, MQL to SAL, and so on. That, ultimately, is what lead nurturing is designed to do – move leads towards opportunity and close.

A first step is typically benchmarking a client’s current metrics. Most of our clients follow the SiriusDecisions waterfall model (MQL, SQL, etc.), and when we first engage we like to know their current conversion metrics, for example:

• percentage of raw inquiries that convert to MQL
• percentage of MQLs that convert to SQL

… and so on. This exercise does two things: it allows us to 1) compare those metrics to accepted industry standards, and 2) identify any specific issues or bottlenecks. For example, if a company’s Lead-to-MQL rate is lower than it should be, that could mean several things:

1. the company is generating the wrong type of leads
2. the company is doing a poor job nurturing and following up with raw inquiries
3. the company’s definition for MQL is too stringent

#1 is a top-of-the-funnel, lead generation problem. #2 is something that can easily be addressed via more systematic, structured nurturing of new leads. (Coincidentally, it’s at this very early stage where we see automated lead nurturing have the most positive impact.)

#3 is an example of a common challenge in measuring lead nurturing, namely that the precise definition for each stage can vary from one company to the next. The closer those definitions map to industry standards the better, because that makes it easier to gauge where the lead journey may be breaking down.

But, more important is having clear, precise definitions for each stage – whatever those definitions are – that both marketing and sales buy into. If leads are being converted to MQLs, for example, without much regard to status or qualification simply because someone in Inside Sales feels that’s his/her job (i.e. to convert leads), then the underlying data will be suspect from Day One.

Recently, we were engaged by a large IT services company to address what they felt was the low rate at which raw leads were converting to qualified leads, opportunities and deals. We audited their lead management process from end-to-end and recommended a few key changes:

• revamping email creative to better adhere to best practice standards
• implementing a lead nurturing campaign at the very front end of the qualification process, to complement telemarketing follow-up by inside sales
• developing a nurture campaign specifically designed for “mid-stage” leads; and lastly
• creating segmented nurturing tracks tailored to the client’s key buying personas

The results were dramatic. Email open rates increased more than 260 percent, click rates more than doubled, and the Lead to MQL conversion rate for online programs such as content syndication, banner ads, SEM, Webinars, etc. increased a massive 75 percent.